Browsing by Subject "Decoloniality"
Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item Decoloniality and The Politics of Living Haiti: Writing Haiti With Haitian Women(2021-04) Pierre, BeaudelaineThe Lakou is traditionally viewed as a movement of resistance by former slaves in response to pressures to return to the plantation in post-slavery Haiti. This dissertation engages with the Haitian Lakou as a creolized-decolonial feminist praxis that acknowledges first-hand the embedded, multilayered, and historical dimension of violence of contemporary and historical projects of colonialism on Haitian women’s lives. From Haitian women's storied lives, Haitian lifeworlds hold differentiated, oppositional, and intersectional world-making technologies and praxis of survival that stand as alternative ecologies in the transnational landscape of today. Working at the intersection of postcolonial literature, Indigenous studies, Afro-Caribbean philosophy and literature, and transnational decolonial feminist scholarship, this dissertation postulates that the way to write against and ultimately undo long-standing colonial dynamics and processes in Haitian lives is to uphold Haitian women’s storied lives from their own ecologies, aesthetics, imaginaries, and lifeworlds. To that end, grappling with how Haitian women negotiate the nation engages a phenomenological and onto-epistemological decolonial labor that rethinks the nature of subjectivity, politics, and worlds in uneven and unjust geographies. Ultimately, how Haitian women re-write the nation is a decolonial labor that bridges the gap between the known and the unknown, the seen and the unseen, the metaphysical and the material, the human and the non-human. What emerges is a vision of the decolonial project worked across a shared transnational, intergenerational, multitemporal, human and non-human worlds in relation.Item Terrorist Threats: Dreaming Beyond the Violence of Anti-Muslim Racism(2020-07) Patel, SohamMy dissertation draws on cultural and political theory as well as visual arts, literature, and music to examine how Western empire is constructed through Orientalist knowledge and also contested through decolonial, feminist, and anti-racist aesthetics. “Terrorist Threats” relies on a multidimensional approach to studying the Global War on Terror and its attendant figure targeted for death and destruction: the Muslim. Following the scholarship of Sherene H. Razack, Sohail Daulatzai, and Junaid Rana, I examine how the colonial construction of the Muslim as a racialized object within modernity, in particular, has been deployed to taxonomically classify a broad range of intersectional categories: Black, Brown, indigenous, immigrant, Latinx, Arab, Sikh, Hindu, and Islam. That is, the “Muslim” in the context of white supremacy and global imperialism exceeds the rigidity of a faith-based category. In fact, my project contends that the figure of the Muslim becomes a fungible category to signify a racialized object that philosophically and/or phenotypically embodies a political position other than liberal secular humanism. Thus, throughout my project, I explore how several South Asian and Muslim diasporic artists engage in insurgent cultural production to combat white supremacy. This allows me to interrogate how colonial knowledge, on the one hand, propagates anti-Muslim racism and, on the other hand, disciplines, controls, and compels the diaspora to internalize this knowledge as a way to perform the role of the good/desirable immigrant. Throughout “Terrorist Threats,” I highlight how South Asian and Muslim diasporic artists rethink and reshape Orientalist knowledge production and the role of Western secular ideas of self-determination, sovereignty, citizenship, and the Human within colonial modernity. The analysis offers a praxis of reading, seeing, and listening to visual and sonic archives that articulate decolonial knowledge and aesthetics, which becomes what I call “terrorist threats.” My project’s transnational focus seeks to produce decolonial imaginaries whereby different political solidarities and praxes can be forged — beyond and across geopolitical and biopolitical borders.