Coloniality and Feminist Collusion: Breaking Free, Thinking Anew

Feminist studies remains mired in coloniality. While the formal transfer from European empires to independent nation states appeared to mark a transition away from direct domination, rule and subjugation, continuities exist in the contemporary that have been strikingly reproduced through feminist alliances and loyalties with the new/old world order in line with the directives of capitalism, neoliberalism and nationalism. By positing that feminist studies has been both implicit and complicit in coloniality over time, this themed issue contests the notion of ‘post’colonial as ‘past’colonial, and instead recognises coloniality as the colonial past and present (Gregory, 2004). Thus, coloniality reflects a longue durée that requires a recognition not only of continuity but of epistemic violence and the ongoing hegemony of the coloniality of power (Quijano, 2000, 2007). Sylvia Wynter (2003, p. 262) reminds us that the empirical outcomes of ‘the rise of Europe’ and its centring of itself within world civilisational narratives enabled and justified African enslavement, Latin American and other settler colonial projects of conquest and Asian subjugation. This is what Wynter (2003, p. 263) identifies as ‘the master code of symbolic life and death’, hinged on the notion of differential/hierarchical degrees of rationality based on distance or proximity to the apex of Western knowledge and power. Feminist studies, in its proximate positionality, like other academic fields, has been implicit and complicit with the modern episteme of coloniality by envisaging a feminism that can operate within the coloniality of power rather than viewing the dismantling of its tools and edifice as a necessary step for epistemic change. As Audre Lorde so resoundingly warns:

… survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support. (Lorde, 2007 [1984], p. 105)

We extend Lorde’s argument by posing that feminist tools developed within the coloniality of power will never be able to bring about epistemic change. Some of the concepts embraced or critiqued by different trajectories within Western feminist scholarship, such as ‘the family’, ‘patriarchy’, ‘equality’, ‘empowerment’ and ‘rights’ deemed to be universal, require an excavation of a long and layered history of erasure, denial and silence in order to highlight the exclusionary foundations of Western feminist thought (Carby, 1982). The most blatant examples can be drawn from the annals and archives of Western feminist thought’s own struggles to gain recognition through the coloniality of power during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a time when the European civilisational mission of capitalism fully utilised the arsenal of the master’s tools through the creation of hierarchies of being and the exercise of racial terror through systems of slavery, other forms of unfree labour and subjugation.