“What we are suffering from is an absolute despot duality that says we are able to be one or the other”

Anzaldúa, describes the tendency to force people to fit into one category or the other based on nature, culture or identity. This cartesian duality of mind and body, represented as culture and nature, man and woman, white rationality and indigenous savagery and in other various forms carries with it the reduction of possibility of other ways of being. It deems all that is not “natural” as deviant. Anzaldúa mentioned how women themselves have limited possibilities because there is no room for different ways of being. Those who don’t fit into these binaries are those who are on the borderlands, they are those that are considered subhuman, inhuman and nonhuman.

These borderlands are created not only physically, but also sexually, psychologically and spiritually. Those who belong to the half and half, and those who do not align with these binaries are in the struggle of mitigating their duality. Of having to live with the fear of not belonging and the trauma of being silenced and the immobility associated with that. There is a turmoil that this process of violence causes, where language and identity continues to change.

There are ways that those on the borderlands come to terms with their situation and location. Anzaldúa referred to the use of Chicano Spanish that is born out of the need to have a distinct language. Those on the borderlands make ways for the alien to become familiar but it stays uncomfortable at the same time. The history of conquest, imperialism, displacement, genocide, and war have led to the production of borderlands, it has allowed for the borderlands to be separated from identity and history. The discomfort and the pain due to living on the borderlands is expressed by Anzaldúa:

“staking fence rods in my flesh,

splits me splits me”

Her own experiences as a Chicana, lesbian woman of colour placed her in a vulnerable position where she faced rejection. She described the possibility within the borderlands of finding home, where there is room for her and those who are half and half: “this is my home, this thin edge of barbwire.”

Anzaldúa, in her life seems to strike that balance between the universal and the particular. While holding onto her Chicana identity, she is able to distinguish between the injurious aspects of her culture but at the same time not does not immerse into whiteness. She is called a sell out, a betrayer by her own, but they are also those who silenced her. It is this silence that Audre Lorde refers to:

“What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?”

The transformation of this silence to language is important and through her writing Anzaldúa breaks this silence and  her beautiful instructive wisdom is encapsulated in her words:

“And if going home is denied me then I will have to stand and claim my space, making a new culture – una cultura mestiza – with my own lumber, my own bricks and mortar and my own feminist architecture”

Kimberle Crenshaw argues that a single axis framework marginalises those who face the brunt of multiple oppressions. She argues that feminist theory and antiracist policies are limiting and fail to take this into account. She advocates for a rethinking of framework that is not equal to the sum of sexism and racism but rather takes into account their interaction. Crenshaw illustrates her argument by pointing towards courtroom proceedings that did not take seriously the plight of black women. The law does not cater to their experiences and tries to fit them within either discrimination against women or black people but not both, together. Court cases would give importance to discrimination based on existing categories; but those were based on either white women or black men, and there was no room for black women and their experiences.  Crenshaw emphasises how the multiple oppressions places the burden on those who have been marginalised doubly to bring their struggle to the forefront.

bell hooks, too argued that the feminist movement in the United States did not represent the experiences of black women nor it make space for black women to voice their concerns. It is important to recognise the multidimensionality of experience and to think about multiple interlocking sets of powers. At the same time it is important to be wary of essentialising the subject.

Judith Butler argues against naturalising experiences and using categories to fight for justice because they are exclusionary. Hers is an important insight because a liberation that is revolutionary and can overthrow power completely can only be all inclusive if it based on a common thread that is not based on experience born out of nature. Perhaps, a humanity that is not based on an established universal experience can unite the marginalised and allow for a liberation that frees all from the violence inflicted upon them. I question if such a universal humanity can be established since experience and identity do increasingly drive people towards liberation struggles. Perhaps for such a struggle to even be possible, there has to be a larger recognition of the existence of multiple dimensions of violence and for radical empathy to drive people’s political agendas.

The politics of intersectionality is important because experience holds significance but it is important to understand the limits of an intersectional approach and to challenge it when it becomes limiting. Butler also leaves us with the question of what to make of experience if we remove it as the basis for our politics? Whether an overthrow of the oppressive power relations can be based on shared humanity? Where does that leave us as organisers and as political agents? How would such a movement be organised? How will it function and how will play out in reality rather than ideas? Is it being too optimistic about the world and the possibilities that exist? Or can it be a source of direction, hope and alignment that does not prioritise one experience over the other? Does Butler’s subject and its liberation leave no space for experiences to be valued? 

Nina Simone grew up in an environment where she did not have opportunities to sing except at church. She was economically disadvantaged and had to bear the brunt of racism in America. She had witnessed inequality and was denied opportunities like admission into an institute for music. Nina Simone channeled her anger and contributed to the civil rights movement. Mississippi Goddamn was a song that described the context she was living is and how the lives of black people are shaped by brutality and injustice.

Medgar Evers, a civil rights activist was murdered in Mississippi and 4 girls were murdered in Birmingham, is what pushed her to write the song. The song was banned in several places and she received a lot of backlash for the song. She used the medium of music to protest against the injustices. She also performed at the Selma-to-Montgomery march that took place.

She started off the song with the words, “I mean every word of it”.When she herself spoke of the song and what it meant, she described that it ‘erupted’ out of her and it took her only 2 hours to write the song because the song described her lived realities. “Governor Wallace has made me lose my rest” She refers to the governor because he had refused to protect the marchers by refusing them police protection. Amidst all this, Nina Simone rose and sang Mississippi Goddamn which was an act of bravo because the Alabama National Guard was present at the March and it posed anger and courage as the lyrics were representative of the reality and white people were reminded of their culpability. Simone, as a child too was isolated because of the skin of her colour.

When she refers to how black people were told to “go slow” when they wanted to protest against the injustice that they faced, she expresses her dissatisfaction with being told to wait by leaders for they always had other issues to take care of, as their lives exacerbated. Nina Simone, before the bombing was not actively taking part in politics. After it, however she sang the song at multiple occasions, it became revolutionary and was banned. Nina Simone was courageous as she had a white audience and she chose to first perform her song in front of the white audience, and not only got backlash from it.

“My skin is black

My arms are long

My hair is woolly

My back is strong

Strong enough to take the pain

inflicted again and again”

The lyrics above are from another song by Nina Simone called Four women. They  encapsulates the pain of black people and how their bodies were inflicted by this pain. She wrote a number of other songs that were representative of this pain, ‘Strange Fruit’ being one of them, the song is about lynchings in the South and how they became increasingly common. Nina Simone was legendary and her music was revolutionary and brought light to the plight of black people.

The way CLR James  Malcolm X address the histories of black people marks a turning of the tide as they both move away from the linear white man’s story about discovering the new world. They shed light onto resilience, resistance and revolt in the African American diaspora and the West Indies.The purpose it serves is that it changes where history is located and situated.

By choosing a point of origin for history and telling it from an angle that isn’t told is in itself revolutionary. In addition, telling the history of a revolution with its intricacies is what is present in  both Malcolm X’s speeches as well as CLR James account of the slave ship. His account over turns the way white history has been written. It attempts to heal the damage done by the histories already written. It does so by beginning history with an event that tells the history that has been erased, of the Haitian revolution. It challenges the notion of european time in this way. It also holds the French, Spanish and British culpable of their acts of brutality.  CLR James referred to their mission of conquering and civilising as “the other requirements of higher civilisation” which brought doom to the black people.

One of the major themes that ran across both texts was the idea of those who were better off than the other slaves, the house slaves and the field slaves, and how the house slaves were obedient and there identification with the masters whereas on the other hand the field slaves had to bear the brunt of the perfected measures of coercion by the masters. They were the first to run and death became a means of escape for them be it jumping off the slave ship or poisoning their children. They both referred to how “Uncle Toms” were created who were given some of the privileges and how these Uncle Toms becomes the spokesmen for them.

The purpose of Malcolm’s speech is to inspire and to incite resistance and to warn against these leaders who don’t represent the masses. His speeches too served as an alternate form of history that is located in the experiences of the African Americans. He narrates different incidents and refers to different figures within the political struggle and refers to how blackness was weakened because whiteness was inserted into it. Malcolm X, is very direct and criticises the politics of the politicians that were sellouts. CLR James, on the other hand by tracing the revolution in Haiti and then addressing the Cuban revolution seeks to trace a history of the slaves that were forced to migrate and their loss which goes uncaptured by deeming them barbarous and backward in the narratives and accounts of missionaries and other archives from the time.   

 

Both in their own forms, and in different ways seek to challenge the linear telos of a “European” history and how it is usually told, where it is situated, and who tells the story.

 

 

My project is based on the way food was used as a form of decolonisation amongst African Americans. Soul Food originated in the South and incorporated a diet and cooking techniques that were born out of the slave experience and the reconstruction era. Soul food includes: cornbread, fried chicken, sofkee, black eyed peas, biscuits, watermelon, collard greens etc. Amiri Baraka was one of the proponents who advocated the concept of Soul Food and through his work and others’, I will attempt to understand food as a site of decolonial struggle and repair.

It is important because it signified the shared racial and class oppression that caused this form of cooking and food to emerge. It was criticised by the African American community itself for contributing to unhealthy eating and Muslims amongst the community for the consumption of pork. More importantly, it was re-appropriated by the Black Power Movement and it marked food as a part of African American identity in the 1960’s. The Black arts movement was about redefining what the black body meant and tied to it were food consumption and cooking techniques. Deep fat frying was one of these techniques that was a part of soul food cooking. It represented the conditions of African American diaspora as there is an element of intuition and spontaneity when it comes to cooking depending on the availability of ingredients.

I anticipate it taking the form of a a pictorial essay explaining the context of particular food and how food was a part of the de-colonial struggle or a cookbook with a commentary, for cookbooks were also the way African Americans started passing on the recipes for soul food.

Chandra Mohanty’s article is a response to feminist scholarship in the west  that is complicit in what Gayatri Spivak terms ‘epistemic violence’. This epistemic violence is rooted in the discourses about the third world women in the works of many feminist academics. This discourse enables viewing third world women as a static category that is ahistorical and treats them as a coherent unified group with no differences amongst them. The production of knowledge is immersed in the power relations that exist between the first and the third world. Mohanty’s article is an attempt at decolonising that knowledge production by calling it into question and highlighting the power imbalance.

These discourses have implications in real life affecting the way third world women see themselves and how they view other women who are different than them within their own society. This formulation of the third world women who are in need of being saved from the veil amongst other rituals, from the family, from Islam who are oppressing them. It has allowed for the west to justify invading Iraq and other places. Laura Bush publicly declared that they are intervening to save the women of these areas. This reflects how this reductionist singular view can be harmful and ethnocentric. 

Such saviour complexes also manifest themselves within third world feminists when they want to save the rural or working class woman. In the case of the third world, these binaries are reproduced in the way elite women view themselves as empowered, as opposed to the working class women who are oppressed. Such a binary does little to help the cause of women but rather supports a similar binary as the western feminists construct. The elite women then define themselves on the basis of what they are not and what the working class or rural  women are: uneducated, not having decision making power, traditional, backward.

Mohanty refers to the process of framing the third world women as a unified oppressed category as colonisation and as a postcolonial thinker, her article raises important questions about how there is a need of coalitions across race, class and ethnicity, and nations but those can only happen when there is an understanding of differences and historicity. Viewing women as lacking in agency reduces them to objects which are acted upon by patriarchy, family structure, religion, colonisation, male violence, etc.

Mohanty is careful to not engage in the same practice in her critique as she points out that she does not speak of the western feminism as a monolithic category, and thus avoids implying the same sort of heterogeneity in warning us how third world women might themselves engage in the production of these static categories.

I argue that empowerment is viewed as a destination rather than a journey in these western feminist texts, and that it can be injurious as it allows for the western woman to be posited as on the end of progress and the third world woman as not yet evolved enough. I question that if a transnational feminism is even possible if women are located or exist in very different contexts with different needs, interests and priorities differ.  

The Road to El Dorado is a disney film written by two white men and was released in 2000. Film is a mode of representation and this film, like other forms of discourse constructs an image of the indigenous. This indigenous other is set apart from the rational, humane, scientific, white man, as opposed to an irrational, emotional, ritualistic, backward, animal like, savage. Accounts of explorers and missionaries that “discovered” the new world have portrayed indigenous people as exotic beings. These tropes are well alive and perpetuated further through various means. Anthropology as a discipline is guilty of contributing to them. Edward Said argues that these depictions of the Occident are exoticised and serve the interests of the Orient. Underlying these representations are racist ideals and an agenda that posits them as superior, and allows them to valorise themselves as saviours.

The film’s protagonists, Tulio and Miguel are from Spain and are mistaken for gods in El Dorado.Since they are the protagonists, El Dorado is depicted through their eyes. It is a magical, mysterious exotic land where there is endless wealth that they seem to be entitled to. They can go in and collect hoards of gold and escape, without being portrayed as being greedy or having misguided intentions. The inhabitants of El Dorado are indigenous population who welcome Tulio and Miguel as their gods by bowing down to them, therefore driving in the idea that the indigenous are ritualistic as opposed to rational white men. Tulio and Miguel also go on to fool the indigenous in numerous instances by pretending to prevent a volcanic eruption and by defeating the trained men at ball, as if the indigenous are gullible and foolish.

There is acknowledgement of Cortez as the villain but his wickedness is overshadowed by the native negative character, high priest Tzekel-Kan who possesses certain powers. He also advocates sacrificing other indigenous as a tribute to the “gods” and predictably, Tulio and Miguel step in to save the indigenous from committing the brutal act. This scene is supposed to reflect the ‘backwardness’ of the indigenous and their savagery and hence, establishes the moral superiority of the white man. Numerous eyewitness accounts of the colonisers claim the existence of cannibalism in indigenous societies such as the Aztecs, however there has been no evidence and the likelihood that the numbers are exaggerated is high. These moralistic humane representations of themselves and brutal representations of the other further their agenda. These representations are linked to power since they commit epistemic violence against the other. Who the indigenous are, their culture, the values they espouse and their voices are all thus silenced through these representations. They also do not acknowledge the violence, the histories of exploitation, the extraction of wealth that colonialism brought with it. The long lasting damages of these representations are such that also seep into the minds of those who are colonised, the intergenerational trauma that the indigenous people carry forward goes unaddressed.

This tyranny of representation also normalises violence and racism against indigenous people to this day. In January 2019, at an Indigenous people’s march, a number of high school students harassed an indigenous man by chanting “build that wall” amongst other insulting remarks. These representations  allow people like Donald Trump to get away with calling Elizabeth Warren Pocahontas and mocking the Wounded Knee massacre.

The idea that that it is the white man’s burden to save humanity  is further driven in by scene where the indigenous are chasing Chel, a native woman with spears. It is emblematic of this white man’s saviour complex that he, the white man must save the native woman from native men. The native man is portrayed as being cruel as opposed to the good hearted white man. A common trope in films such as Pocahontas where the native woman falls in love with the white man was also present in The Road to El Dorado.

There are a few scenes where there seems to be an erasure of difference where Miguel and Tulio collaborate with the indigenous to defeat Cortes and when Miguel plays ball with the natives but these representations do not undo the harm caused by the non divergent representations that are predicated on this very difference. The problem of the indigenous being represented as a mass without much difference is what allows myths regarding the indigenous to persist. These dominant representations that portray the other as a depersonalised static person do not allow changing or challenging the way the past is conceived.

Other implications of these representations are that they allowed the evolutionary theory to have a strong hold over academia, and apart from justification of colonisation and the extraction of wealth, there was other kinds of violence inflicted on people based on these ideas such as sterilisation of black people. Ideas of social darwinism were used to deny people rights for not being as civilised as the white man. These representations normalised a discourse where what constitutes the other remains unchallenged and the white man has the authority to comment on the other.

An alternate representation such as Obseyesekere’s or Rigoberta’s is crucial because it challenges the stereotypes associated with a group of people, but also one that recognises their history, their voices, and deconstructs this other. It overturns the frameworks that have shaped reality for people and thus is necessary.