Dr Rosalba Icaza, Associate Professor in Global Politics, Gender, and Diversity, gave this presentation at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies KITLV/Leiden University in the symposium 'Talking out loud: Towards an interdisciplinary approach on postcolonial and decolonial thoughts'.
In her presentation, Rosalba offered what she called an unfinished set of open-ended proposals for a feminist decolonial understanding of positionality. In so doing, she started by asking the audience what would it mean to acknowledge that extraction, expropriation and erasures sustain our present possibilities for critical thinking within academia?
Thereafter, Rosalba reflected on the epistemic silences produced by established feminist stories around notions of bodies and place, to then reflect with understandings of the body originating within ‘academic-activist’ debates across Abya Yala.
She argued that the notion of coloniality of gender, on the one hand, sheds light on the limits of critical feminist anti-essentialist understandings of the body as place-assemblage that is performative; and on the other, and more importantly, opens the possibility of de-silencing and unearthing knowledges produced as unintelligible. In so doing, she invited participants to defy dominant frameworks of political intelligibility centered on the authoritative 'I', and to consider acts of resistance that speak as yosotridades (weus) and in this sense, pluralize the places from where thinking with/from becomes political.
About the symposium
This one-day interdisciplinary symposium discussed Caribbean responses to the global debates on decolonization of academic research.
The symposium explored the concepts of ‘postcoloniality’ and ‘decoloniality’ in the context of research in the social sciences and humanities. Through keynote lectures, presentations, and panel group discussions, participants were invited to explore current perspectives and approaches related to this topic in Caribbean research contexts. The symposium discussed practices in heritage studies, political science, sociology, archaeology and history and aimed to develop decolonial research perspectives that can be useful on a global scale.
- Associate professor