Home on the border in Ana Castillo's "The Guardians": the colonial matrix of power, epistemic disobedience, and decolonial love

After 9/11, more than ever in the history of the United States of America, security and domesticity have become paradoxical antonyms in racially and ethnically mixed areas, like that of the US-Mexican border. The borderland‘s history is further complicated by the issue of illegal immigration and its corollaries, such as strict border control and mass deportations of ―aliens,‖ as well as the rising crime rate. Even though it is protected by a fence and monitored by heavily armed border patrols, the area‘s notoriety for narcosmuggling, human trafficking and femicide keeps growing. Paradoxically, the more drastic the security measures used, the more dangerous the borderland becomes. In her 2007 novel The Guardians, Ana Castillo suggests that tighter control itself is responsible for criminalizing the border. Focusing on a Mexican American woman‘s search for her brother lost during an illegal crossing, the novel presents a complex dynamic between security and domesticity. The following article attempts to trace this dynamic through the epistemic lens of decolonial methodology.Después del 11-S, más que nunca antes en la historia de los Estados Unidos de América, la seguridad y la domesticidad se han convertido en antónimos paradójicos en zonas de abundante mezcla racial y étnica como la frontera entre México y EE. UU. La historia de la zona fronteriza se ve complicada, además, por la cuestión de la inmigración ilegal y sus distintos corolarios, como por ejemplo el estricto control aduanero existente, las deportaciones en masa de ―extranjeros‖ o el aumento de los índices de criminalidad. Incluso aunque se halle protegida por una valla y aunque esté monitorizada por patrullas fronterizas fuertemente armadas, la ya notoria reputación del área por el contrabando de drogas y personas, así como por el feminicidio, sigue empeorando. Paradójicamente, cuanto más drásticas son las medidas de seguridad empleadas, más peligrosa se vuelve la frontera. En su novela de 2007, Guardianes de la frontera, Ana Castillo sugiere que el recrudecimiento del control fronterizo es en sí responsable de la criminalización de la zona fronteriza. Centrándose en la historia de una mujer mexicano-estadounidense que busca a su hermano perdido durante un cruce ilegal de la frontera, la novela presenta una compleja dinámica entre seguridad y domesticidad. El presente artículo tiene como objeto explorar esta dinámica a través de la lente epistémica que ofrece la aplicación de una metodología decolonial

Deep transformation toward decoloniality in social work: themes for change in a social work higher education program.

This article describes thematic outcomes of a process of engagement around deep transformation toward Decoloniality in a university social work education program. Given the gravity of working toward Decoloniality for social work education in South Africa, it was critical to theorize about this process. Current South African realities evidence ongoing structures of Coloniality and Apartheid which permeate all spheres, not least the domains of knowledge, power, and relationships in higher education. However, a narrow interpretation of Decoloniality relating only to ‘curriculum’ or ‘indigeneity’ as potential for change, is problematic. Ignoring material realities of ongoing Coloniality perpetuates the very oppressive structures it seeks to overcome and so depth transformation which engages with all levels of a social work education program is required. This article engages with thematic areas that emerged and which shaped work toward Decoloniality, among social work educators at one higher education department. These included domains for engagement with Decoloniality (theorists; pedagogy; educators; learners; content; research and discourse; context) and principles for such work (Afrika as the center; attention to power dynamics; race, class, and gender; acknowledgment of structural issues; critical conscientization and voice; Ubuntu). These thematic areas now form the basis of the new social work program at the University

Decoloniality and Tropicality: Part Two

The papers collected together in this special issue on the theme ‘decoloniality and tropicality’ discuss and demonstrate how we can move towards disentangling ourselves from persistent colonial epistemologies and ontologies. Engaging theories of decoloniality and postcolonialism with tropicality, the articles explore the material poetics of philosophical reverie; the \u27tropical natureculture\u27 imaginaries of sex tourism, ecotourism, and militourism; deep readings of an anthropophagic movement, ecocritical literature, and the ecoGothic; the spaces of a tropical flâneuseand diasporic vernacular architecture; and in the decoloniality of education, a historical analysis of colonial female education and a film analysis for contemporary educational praxis

Practicing decoloniality 1/3: Decolonial discomforts

On Wednesday 22nd February 2017, PhD students at the Gender Institute organised a roundtable discussion and interactive workshop titled Practicing Decoloniality in Gender Studies. This short series of posts presents the transcripts of the three speakers’ discussion papers, kicking off with Priya Raghavan’s reflections on her encounters with decoloniality in the neoliberal academy during her first year of PhD studies

Izwe Lethu!: Visions of decoloniality through the re-imagining of electrical services

Includes bibliographical references.This dissertation concerns itself with the land question in South Africa. Izwe Lethu is the title of an apartheid struggle song, still sung today in the many social uprisings and moments of civil disobedience. The title translates to ‘Our Land’ in the Nguni languages. My response to the question of land is explained through the design and reconfiguration of three electrical sub-station buildings. The project seeks to uncover alternate understandings of the built environment by exploring it through the fact of blackness. It tries to demonstrate that the problem of coloniality as complex and systemic, and spans many dimensions-psychological, social, and political. Each site is used to explore a different method of unravelling these dimensions, bringing a certain aspect of decoloniality into focus on each site. Addressing these complex questions in architectural discourse is part of a strategy to realise, envision, and inspire actualising decoloniality. The underpinning ideas of the project are that land is central to decolonisation and the Fanonian idea of decolonisation as self-creation or Becoming

Giving and receiving, or denying knowledge? Aspects of knowledge production in development studies seen through a perspective of decoloniality.

This essay is a critique of modern/colonial knowledge production, with particular reference to development studies, based on thinking about decoloniality, and illustrated by experiences from a bachelor's programme in development studies at Lund university and a field study done in South- Western Benin as a part of those studies. The purpose of this essay is more to discuss issues that I have come to see as problems with knowledge production in development studies, through the experience of doing the field study and reading on decoloniality. The purpose of this essay is less to convince anybody of solutions to the problems I have discussed, but rather to show what decoloniality as a project might be seen as working towards

Psychology and Society in Dialogue with Decolonial Feminisms: Perspectives from the global south, Volume 1

In the call for this special issue we, incoming editors of PINS, expressed the desire to build on the fast-growing legacy and genesis of decoloniality through encouraging and amplifying the most marginalised perspectives and approaches within contemporary decolonial trends. There are a range of reasons why this current moment of decoloniality has energetically re-emerged and taken hold in knowledge production and activist efforts globally. Foremost amongst these reasons is the fact that global inequalities that are racialized, gendered, spatial and classed are rising; and past injustices, and historical and collective traumas, are either completely erased or silenced. Calls for decoloniality have taken hold in the context of ongoing racialized, patriarchal, heterosexist and structural violence

Epistemic ethnonationalism: identity policing in neo-Traditionalism and Decoloniality theory

Traditionalism’s most influential contemporary revival, Dugin’s Eurasianism, is routinely characterised as being of the radical Right. The Decoloniality theory of Quijano, Mignolo and Ndlovu-Gatsheni, on the other hand, with its intellectual roots in Marxist dependency theory, presents itself as on the progressive Left. Yet, despite their different intellectual genealogies and drastically different reputations, both theoretical approaches have converged on a position with troubling practical consequences: epistemic ethnonationalism, the doctrine that which beliefs one should adopt and which concepts one should employ are determined by which ethnos/ethnie one belongs to. Both approaches deplore acceptance of Western beliefs and employment of Western concepts outside the West, both turn to existential phenomenology to ground their ethnorelativism, and both have influenced contemporary politics. I assess the theoretical underpinnings of both approaches, and argue that if neo-Traditionalism is to be classified as a Rightist body of thought, then Decoloniality theory ought also to be

Sleep Faster We Need the Pillows

I would like to begin by defining what I mean by the term decolonisation. Decolonisation itself means different things to different people, including within the Decolonising Design (DD) research group, of which I am a founding member. Moreover, what is meant by decolonisation changes based on context. Decoloniality is a subversion and transformation of Eurocentric thinking and knowledge; a knowledge produced with and.from rather than about. Decoloniality shatters the familiar; it makes people question; and calls for creating something new rather than an additive inclusion into a certain field. Particularly, I see decoloniality here as coupled with intersectionality-whereas Patricia Collins1 states, 'race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nation, ability, and age operate ... as reciprocally constructing phenomena that in turn shape complex social inequalities'