What happens when, instead of constantly appealing to white allies, we build constellations of co-resistance locally and internationally with those communities actively building ethical, principled and radical futures in the present, by animating and embodying those ethical systems as the intervention?
~Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
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For these readings, we will sit at the crossroads of three movements:
1) decolonial refusal, 2) abolition, and 3) Black and Indigenous feminist activism. |
In keeping with the syllabus’s opening commitment to building a relationship with the land in explicit recognition of what Indigenous communities have taught us, we will spend this week unpacking the overlaps and differences between decolonization and abolition as “constellations of co-resistance” as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson theorizes this (for more about Simpson, click here).
We start with “Idle No More and Black Lives Matter: An Exchange” by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Rinaldo Walcott, and Glen Coulthard. You will notice that these eminent scholar-activists are often specifically describing the Canadian context. Use this as a moment to see and better understand how a hopelessly white narrative of democracy and equality has completely (and deliberately) obscured the historical and current experiences of Indigeneity and Blackness in Canada to such an extent that for many of us, these scholars represent an entirely new language about what Canada is and has been. In that way, let it serve as a lesson on and/or another window into U.S. democracy. What do you see as the work of decolonization/decolonial refusal+abolition? How is this work related to Black feminist rhetoric/ literacies/ pedagogies?
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Click on box above for a suggested background reading
Here are more readings:
- “Abolition as a Praxis of Human Being” by Dylan Rodríguez in Harvard Law Review (2019)
- "Introduction" to Abolition. Feminism. Now. by Angela Davis, Gina Dent, Erica Meiners, and Beth Richie (2022)
- “Beginning and Ending with Black Suffering: A Meditation on and against Racial Justice in Education” by Michael Dumas in Toward What Justice? (2018)
- “Black and Native Visions of Self-Determination” by Manu Karuka in Critical Ethnic Studies (2017)
- "Black Feminist Ecological Thought: A Manifesto" by Chelsea Frazier (2020)
- "The Countdown Remix: Why Two Native Feminists Ride with Queen Bey" by Jenell Navarro and Kimberly Robertson in Otherwise Worlds (2020)
- “Decolonial Hip Hop: Indigenous Hip Hop and the Disruption of Settler Colonialism” by Kyle Mays in Cultural Studies (2019)
- “Decolonizing Higher Education: Black Feminism and the Intersectionality of Race and Gender” by Heidi Mirza in Journal of Feminist Scholarship (2014/2015)
- “Fractal Education Inquiry” by Ligia (Licho) López López in Discourse (2021)
- “Geotheorizing Black/Land: Contestations and Contingent Collaborations” by Eve Tuck, Mistinguette Smith, Allison M. Guess, Tavia Benjamin, and Brian K. Jones in Departures in Critical Qualitative Research (2013)
- "Humans Involved: Lurking in the Lines of Posthumanist Flight" by Tiffany King in Critical Ethnic Studies (2017)
- “‘I Don’t Think You're Going to Have Any Aborigines in Your World:’ Minecrafting Terra Nullius” by Ligia (Licho) López López in British Journal of Sociology of Education (2019)
- “'If you don’t want us there, you don’t get us': A Statement on Indigenous Visibility and Reconciliation" by Andrea Riley Mukavetz and Cindy Tekobbe
- “Indigenous Resurgence and Co-resistance” by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson in Critical Ethnic Studies (2016)
- “New World Grammars: The ʻUnthoughtʼ Black Discourses of Conquest” by Tiffany King in Theory & Event (2016)
- “Not Just (Any) Body Can Be a Citizen: The Politics of Law, Sexuality and Postcoloniality in Trinidad and Tobago and the Bahamas” by M. Jacqui Alexander in Feminist Review (1994)
- "On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, ‘Voice,’ and Colonial Citizenship” by Audra Simpson in Junctures: The Journal for Thematic Dialogue (2007)
- “Pedagogies of Refusal: What It Means to (Un)teach a Student Like Me” by Yanira Rodríguez in Radical Teacher (2019)
- “Plantation Futures” by Katherine McKittrick in Small Axe (2013)
- “Racial/Colonial Genocide and the "Neoliberal Academy": In Excess of a Problematic” by Dylan Rodríguez in American Quarterly (2012)
- "R-Words: Refusing Research" by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang
- “Refusing the University” by Sandy Grande in Toward What Justice? (2018)
- “Slavery is a Metaphor: A Critical Commentary on Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s ‘Decolonization is Not a Metaphor’” by Tapji Garba and Sara-Maria Sorentino in Antipode (2020)
- "Staying Ready for Black Study: A Conversation" by Frank Wilderson and Tiffany King in Otherwise Worlds (2020)
- “When Difference Comes with School: In these AntiBrown Times” by Ligia (Licho) López López in Curriculum Inquiry (2020)
- “Whitestream Feminism and the Colonialist Project: A Review of Contemporary Feminist Pedagogy and Praxis” by Sandy Grande in Educational Theory (2003)
To Cite This Page:
Kynard, Carmen and Eric Darnell Pritchard. "Black and Native Feminist Co-resistance." Tracing the Stream, August 2022, https://www.tracingthestream.com/black-and-native-feminist-co-resistance.html.
Kynard, Carmen and Eric Darnell Pritchard. "Black and Native Feminist Co-resistance." Tracing the Stream, August 2022, https://www.tracingthestream.com/black-and-native-feminist-co-resistance.html.
