- My key texts and my theoretical framework(s) are: decolonial feminism as defined by Maria Lugones, and Black feminist epistemology as discussed by Patricia Hill Collins.
- Lugones presents decolonial feminism as a method for challenging the hierarchical, dichotomous categorisations produced by the colonial project rooted in theft, extractivism, racial capitalism and white supremacy. Lugones suggests that the move toward a decolonial feminism as a practice, is a coalitionist project of resistance. “It is movement toward coalition that impels us to know each other as selves that are thick, in relation, in alternative socialites, and grounded in tense, creative inhabitations of colonial difference.” This informs the way I hope to design & execute the blog, or public journal, w’am gyal, which will solicit submissions from folx within the geographical region and geopolitical entity that is the Caribbean, and its diasporas.
- Patricia Hill Collins discusses two types of knowing: knowledge and wisdom and says that the distinction between the two is experience. Borrowing/ trying to embody “lived experience as a criterion of meaning”, w’am gyal aims to create a record of experience, which collectively transforms colonial hierarchies of knowledge production, centring more experienced-based storytelling practices or testimony as valid/worthy forms of knowledge production and reproduction.
- Prior to ever reading Lugones or Hill Collins, one of the first theoretical groundings for w’am gyal was from reading bell on writing during college. In Remembered Rapture, bell said, “No black woman writer in this culture can write “too much.” Indeed, no woman writer can write “too much.” It was at once an affirmation, a justification. So, why not write?
- My position as a researcher is: (past work, subjectivity, etc.) a Guyanese woman navigating the material and non-material borders of her homeland, her diasporas and beyond. Living within and across multiple identities, which are all affected by the legacies of colonialism, I feel like I’m constantly trying to unpack a history that created me, dispossession, genocide, enslavement, indentureship, resistance, etc. I don’t want to be the author of the posts because I’m just me having my little human experience in my privileged – upper middle class by Guyanese National standards—life. Personally interested in exploring the “self-among-others in resistance from and at the extreme tension of the colonial difference.” (Lugones)
- This project matters to me and may matter to some others because: multiple oppressions are real. Colonial subjectivity will continue to be reproduced as long coloniality is reproduced through our societies’ occidental legal, social, etc. all other pathways.
- My research question is: The blog in its call and response style, asking w’am gyal, & posting the response, will attend to a variety of prompts/themes/topics, kind of research questions. Can we (indigenous, black womxn/femmes of colour in the Caribbean diaspora) storytell or experience-share our way to a coalitionist decolonial feminist liberatory productions of knowledge?
