A special Feral Feminisms issue on settler colonialism: Shaista Patel, Ghaida Moussa, Nishant Upadhyay (eds), Complicities, Connection, and Struggles: Critical Transnational Feminist Analysis of Settler Colonialism, 2015 | settler colonial studies blog

A special Feral Feminisms issue on settler colonialism: Shaista Patel, Ghaida Moussa, Nishant Upadhyay (eds), Complicities, Connection, and Struggles: Critical Transnational Feminist Analysis of Settler Colonialism, 2015

30Aug15

From the introduction: As we set out to write our Call for Papers for this issue, we, the editors, were not certain about where to begin or head. We knew that we wanted Issue 4 of Feral Feminisms to engage with questions of the anti-colonial and/or decolonial and anti-racist scholarship of diasporic people of colour living in white settler-colonial nation-states. However, we wanted to engage with these questions in a language that did not homogenize all bodies of colour, that was careful about respecting the different histories and presents of Black bodies, and that showed a critical understanding of the different histories and presents and different bodies and different power relations that organize our bodies here along multiple axes of race, gender, sexuality, class, ability, religion, citizenship, language, and countries of birth. This was a difficult task and one at which we very successfully failed. The failure was not just ours, though. It was the failure of our political imaginations and theoretical conceptualizations, which are not that of any one individual. This was the failure of language, of the terms and bodies from which we began. It was the failure of our anti-racist and anti-colonial politics. One thing we learned through writing the Call for Papers is that what we learn in graduate school is less about our research in terms of content or how we learn to frame our questions. It is more important to begin to engage with the limits of our knowledge and of learning how to live within those limits. Our failure and recognition of power and limits were many. There was a lot we did or did not do in in terms of ethical or critical engagements with violent erasures.

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