The Ground Beneath Her Feet: “Third World Feminisms

This paper advances the argument that third world feminism calls for a re-orienting of our critical energies from merely taking sides in a debate, to questioning the material and ideological lens that interpolates the debate, i.e., the habitus from which we make our stand. Constituted by the tension between “finding the ground on which we make our stand” and the struggle with whether “we are mostly given that territory,” third world feminisms pursue political agendas interpolated by the cracks and fissures of post-colonial nationhood and internationalized feminisms. The ground of struggle is varied – working conditions and economic self-determination, family and ideology, ethnic conflict and pluralism, sexuality and subversion, disciplinarity and the production of academic knowledge, religion and secularism, human rights and supra-liberalism. This paper pursues a somewhat non-systematic encounter with these different yet intersecting thematics in relation to discrepant third world feminist debates on the plurality of discourses and practices regarding veiling and unveiling

A Double Take on Debt: Reparations Claims and Regimes of Visibility in a Politics of Refusal

This article proposes that the concept of “odious debt” provides an especially fruitful legal framework for the Haitian and Caribbean Community (CARICOM) demands for reparations and debt severance. The concept renders visible different dimensions of the background economic order that have been constitutive of postcolonial sovereignty, and the histories of trade and aid that have engendered debt. In analyzing the work of different regimes of visibility, I have found it useful to think with Abderrahmane Sissako’s 2006 film Bamako, and the world of Wakanda in Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther (2018)—two films that work through the stakes of visibility, recognition, and refusal in the society of nations. Visibility—both as a metaphor for what is explicit and an account of what is before our eyes—is central to the politics of reparations. In this context, the doctrine of “odious debt” and the cinematic considerations that frame, advance, and interrupt the narrative worlds of Bamako and Wakanda provide an interpretive lens through which to make visible the background structural arrangements linking globalisation’s winners and losers, and concomitantly, to contribute to situating reparations in a politics of refusal. The reparation claims of Haiti and CARICOM can be understood as stories entailing law and economics, visibility, and witnessing of the world—stories with a performative function where the telling itself seeks to interrupt how the world functions

The Spirit of Bandung

30 page