Decolonial Imaginings

A transdisciplinary study of the ways in which mobilities assume social forms and result in multiple belongings. In Decolonial Imaginings, Avtar Brah offers a transdisciplinary study of the ways in which mobilities assume social forms and result in multiple belongings. Situated within the confluence of decolonial feminist theory, border theory, and diaspora studies, the book explores borders and boundaries and how politics of connectivity are produced in and through struggles over “difference.” Brah examines multiple formations of power embedded in the intersections between gender, race, class, ethnicity, and sexuality. She analyzes this intersectionality in relation to diaspora; theorizes the relationship between diaspora, law, and literature; and between affect, memory, and cultural politics. Discussing the crossings of impervious borders, Brah foregrounds the economies of abandonment, particularly the plight of people in boats in the Mediterranean, a number of whom perished because of a catalogue of failures by NATO warships and European coast guards. She revisits Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s notion of “nomad thought” and Braidotti’s feminist reworking of it, and it seeks to assess this framework’s value today. She analyzes the politics of “Black” in Britain with a focus on feminism constituted by women of African Caribbean and South Asian background, explores stereotypic representation of Muslim women in the context of Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism, and considers the complexities of the #MeToo movement and how whiteness is configured in these contestations.

This edited volume in the Community Psychology Book Series emphasizes applications of community psychology for disrupting dominant and hegemonic power relations. The book explores domains of work that are located within critical community psychology, as well as work that is conventionally not self-defined as community psychology but which draws on and contributes to the foundations and enactments of critical and liberatory community psychology. Specifically, the book advances conceptions and praxes for community psychology grounded within a decolonial framework. The volume heeds the call for a generation of approaches to community psychology that link local struggles to broader questions of power, identity, and knowledge production, bringing together examples of praxes from different contexts as a political project of highlighting indigenous struggles toward self-determination. Collectively, the chapters in this book embody a decolonial agenda for community psychology that foregrounds social justice; the lives and knowledges of the marginalized and oppressed; epistemic disobedience and transdisciplinarity; and decolonial aesthetics. The book is divided into two parts - Part I: Conceptions of Engagement for Community Psychology delves into the conceptual framework for a decolonial community psychology, and Part II: Modes of Enactments and Praxes for Community Psychology builds on these theoretical advancements through examples of praxis in different contexts. The audience for the book includes scholars, researchers, practitioners, activists, and students located within community psychology specifically, as well as disciplines within the health and social sciences, and arts and humanities more broadly.

This study explores two categories—empire and citizenship—that historians usually study separately. It does so with a unifying focus on racialization in the lives of outstanding women whose careers crossed national borders between 1880 and 1965. It puts an individual, intellectual, and female face on transnational phenomena.

Examining the historical context of healthcare whilst focusing on building a more just, equitable world, this book proposes a radical imagination for nursing and presents possibilities for speculative futures embracing queer, feminist, posthuman, and abolitionist frames. Bringing together radical and emancipatory perspectives from an international selection of authors, this book reflects on the realities created by the COVID-19 pandemic, recognizing that our situation is not new but the result of ongoing hegemonies and injustices. The authors attend to the history of nursing and related institutions, examining the assumptions, ideologies, and discourses that shape the discipline and its place within healthcare. They explore the impact of this context on contemporary nursing and look at alternative visions for the future. The final section specifically focuses on ways that we can move forward. Envisioning new possibilities for nursing, this innovative volume is a vital resource for practitioners, scholars and students keen to promote social justice within and without nursing. It is an important contribution to nursing theory, philosophy and history.

Mapping literature from Spanish-speaking sub-Saharan African and Afro-Latinx Caribbean diasporas, Decolonizing Diasporas argues that the works of diasporic writers and artists from Equatorial Guinea, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba offer new worldviews that unsettle and dismantle the logics of colonial modernity. With women of color feminisms and decolonial theory as frameworks, Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez juxtaposes Afro-Latinx and Afro-Hispanic diasporic artists, analyzing work by Nelly Rosario, Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel, Trifonia Melibea Obono, Donato Ndongo, Junot Díaz, Aracelis Girmay, Loida Maritza Pérez, Ernesto Quiñonez, Christina Olivares, Joaquín Mbomio Bacheng, Ibeyi, Daniel José Older, and María Magdalena Campos-Pons. Figueroa-Vásquez’s study reveals the thematic, conceptual, and liberatory tools these artists offer when read in relation to one another. Decolonizing Diasporas examines how themes of intimacy, witnessing, dispossession, reparations, and futurities are remapped in these works by tracing interlocking structures of oppression, including public and intimate forms of domination, sexual and structural violence, sociopolitical and racial exclusion, and the haunting remnants of colonial intervention. Figueroa-Vásquez contends that these diasporic literatures reveal violence but also forms of resistance and the radical potential of Afro-futurities. This study centers the cultural productions of peoples of African descent as Afro-diasporic imaginaries that subvert coloniality and offer new ways to approach questions of home, location, belonging, and justice.

In The Center Cannot Hold Jenna N. Hanchey examines the decolonial potential emerging from processes of ruination and collapse. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in rural Tanzania at an internationally funded NGO as it underwent dissolution, Hanchey traces the conflicts between local leadership and Western paternalism as well as the unstable subjectivity of Western volunteers—including the author—who are unable to withstand the contradictions of playing the dual roles of decolonializing ally and white savior. She argues that Western institutional and mental structures must be allowed to fall apart to make possible the emergence of decolonial justice. Hanchey shows how, through ruination, privileged subjects come to critical awareness through repeated encounters with their own complicity, providing an opportunity to delink from and oppose epistemologies of coloniality. After things fall apart, Hanchey posits, the creation of decolonial futures depends on the labor required to imagine impossible futures into being.

Roads to Decolonisation: An Introduction to Thought from the Global South is an accessible new textbook that provides undergraduate students with a vital introduction to theory from the Global South and key issues of social justice, arming them with the tools to theorise and explain the social world away from dominant Global North perspectives. Arranged in four parts, it examines key thinkers, activists and theory-work from the Global South; theoretical concepts and socio-historical conditions associated with 'race' and racism, gender and sexuality, identity and (un)belonging in a globalised world and decolonisation and education; challenges to dominant Euro-American perspectives on key social justice issues, linking decolonial discourses to contemporary case studies. Each chapter offers an overview of key thinkers and activists whose work engages with social justice issues, many of whom are under-represented or left out of undergraduate humanities and social sciences textbooks in the North. This is essential reading for students of the humanities and social sciences worldwide, as well as scholars keen to embed Southern thought in their curricula and pedagogical practice.

This book looks at how citizenship has been imagined and transformed in Latin America through the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries from different disciplinary perspectives including anthropology, history, urban planning, geography and political studies. It looks beyond citizenship as a formal legal status to explore how ideas about citizenship have shaped political and historical landscapes in different ways through the region. It shows how conceptions of citizenship are intertwined with understandings of natural spaces and environments, how indigenous politics are ‘de-colonizing’ western liberal conceptions of citizenship, and how citizenship is being transformed through local level politics and projects for development. In addition to showcasing some of the novel, emerging forms of citizenship in the region, the book also traces the ways in which historical narratives of citizenship and national belonging persist within present day politics. Collectively, the chapters show that citizenship remains an important entry point for understanding politics, projects of reform, and struggles for transformation in Latin America. This book was published as a special issue of Citizenship Studies.