of rejecting culturalist essentialism and the commodification of racial identity into its most visible and ‘colourful’ aspects. In the Canadian context, Himani Bannerji has written powerfully about the co-optation of anti-racist organising into a liberal multiculturalism which reified static notions of culture and promoted diversity at the expense of social justice and economic equality. There are indeed stark differences between liberal notions of cultural diversity and those initially articulated by anti-racist feminisms, which ultimately aim to challenge institutionalised racism and dismantle structural oppression.
This is not to say that the diverse bodies of critical race feminist work have not been subjected to critiques, particularly with a notable shift in the 1990s to more identity-driven and individualistic tendencies. Julia Sudbury, for instance, charts a movement away from the emphasis on collective organising by Black women and towards engagements with race and racism that seemed to reify racial identity in ways that worked against collective action across differences:
By the 1990s black women intellectuals who were at the forefront of national black women’s organising in the 1980s were beginning to feel a sense of disillusionment with the methods of that very movement. Experience of the more excessive and essentialising forms of identity politics, ‘guilt tripping’ of white women, aggressive comparisons of oppression in a hierarchy of ‘isms’ all led to a questioning of the assumptions underlying black women’s organisations.50
It is notable, therefore, that reissues of texts foundational to Black and critical race feminisms have become increasingly prevalent, and that many of these centre questions of solidarity and collective action. Importantly, their modes of praxis (discussed in more detail below) are rooted in critiques of individual leadership (a structure that often glorifies male leaders). The focus is on democratic grassroots organising that empowers every member to be able to do their part in movements, building from the ground up. As Angela Y. Davis notes in this volume, it has been heartening to see the reemergence, in the Black Lives Matter movement and contemporary Indigenous resistance to the intensification of dispossession through resource extraction, different models of collective organising that are not focused on the singular charisma of an individual (male) leader and that are coalitional in nature.
Indigenous Methodologies
It would be impossible to make generalisations about Indigenous methodologies of research, teaching and political activism, whether in the context of the Americas, Asia or more globally. We wish to briefly introduce two dimensions of Indigenous feminist methodologies emanating from Indigenous scholaractivists in what is now known as North America, and more specifically, Canada. The first is the notion of what some Indigenous scholars have termed ‘land-based pedagogy’.51 The second is the importance of language in recovering and centring Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies.
Indigenous feminists – including Patricia Monture-Angus, Lee Maracle, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Audra Simpson, Bonita Lawrence, Theresa Nahanee, Emma LaRocque and, in Australia, Irene Watson and Aileen Moreton-Robinson, among many others – have emphasised the centrality of their relationship to land to the ontologies and epistemologies, and the survival, of First Nations. Indeed, land is their basis for learning about law, kinship, economy and social relations. In the words of Glen Coulthard, First Nations territories have ‘associated forms of knowledge’;52 reflecting upon this idea, it becomes clear that colonisation is not only about settler states’ desire for the land itself as a resource (or territory, in the sense of the Westphalian state form), but that the colonial dispossession of Indigenous land was and remains central to attempts to destroy First Nations communities. The genocidal intentions of settler states lie not only in the wide range of measures used to diminish, contain and destroy First Nations people, but in the suppression of Indigenous knowledge, ontologies and ways of living that are carried through and in the land. We understand this way of knowing to be radically relational, not simply with other human beings but with nonhuman life and land. This is a radically embodied practice of knowledge formation, for one needs to be on the land to learn.
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson offers a crucial point about children and parenting. In the Dechinta Bush University, which takes place on land of the Yellowknives Dene First Nation, children are welcome and included in the programme. This goes beyond recognition of the socially reproductive labour that many Indigenous and other parents (mainly women) undertake: here, ‘children are co-learners and co-instructors’.53 The collective nature of parenting at Dechinta Bush University, as in many non-Anglo and non-bourgeois communities, is an antidote to the poverty of the nuclear family form and also creates a richer and more dynamic learning environment for all present. There is a contact point here with the direction taken by scholar-activists, such as Federici, who see the health and well-being of children and the elderly as key aspects of the challenges of social reproduction under capitalism.
As mentioned above, an emphasis on learning, reviving and using Indigenous languages has long been central to anti- and de-colonial movements, and this remains the case in contemporary First Nations scholarship and activism. Political scientist Noenoe K. Silva offers exemplary research on how the use of native language – in her case, Hawai’ian – can challenge imperial historiographies of dispossession.54 Taking up long-standing critiques of the colonial archive, as formulated by Gayatri Spivak and others, Silva’s commitment to completely reframing the history of Indigenous Hawai’ian political formations and resistance to colonisation is subtended by a close reading and analysis of sources in Hawai’ian. It becomes clear in her scholarship that the work of making native agency visible in the historical record, the work of recentring Indigenous Hawai’ian worldviews with a view to supporting Indigenous sovereignty movements, is intimately connected to, perhaps even dependent upon, her excavation and use of political concepts in Hawai’ian.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s 1986 essay collection, Decolonising the Mind, written from the locus of postcolonial East Africa, begins with a reflection on the issues facing African writers at the time of independence. At the forefront of his concerns was the primary place of language in the enunciation of an anti-colonial politics, and in the continuation of the epistemic violence of colonisation into the postcolonial moment:
Berlin of 1884 was effected through the sword and the bullet. But the night of the sword and the bullet was followed by the morning of the chalk and the blackboard. The physical violence of the battlefield was followed by the psychological violence of the classroom … In my view language was the most important vehicle through which that power fascinated and held the soul prisoner.55
We can consider, on the one hand, how the question of language was and remains central in its relation to culture and cultural practices – and intimately bound to the way we see the world, and our shared priorities about how to live. On the other hand, as African and Caribbean writers have long argued, it is also true that people have made the language of their former colonial masters their own, bending, reshaping and appropriating it in ways that produce new dialects and alternate lexicons pertinent to their particular locations and lifeways.
Whatever one’s position, it is clear that First Nations are engaged in a long-standing and continuous struggle to revive and use Indigenous languages as a part of a larger, global, anti-colonial struggle that has no clear end in sight.
Radical Imaginaries and Praxis
While there has been a general taming of the mainstream feminist movement, through its professionalisation and institutionalisation at UN conferences and within nongovernmental organisations, along with forms of glass ceiling feminism, a common thread among those interviewed in this book is a commitment to a transformative feminist praxis and collective action that aims for systemic and radical change. The term ‘praxis’ itself implies an organic interconnectedness of theory and practice in challenging ongoing inequalities and confronting histories of colonial and imperial domination. In this sense, radical knowledge production, the development of new methodologies and political activism
