We Belong To The Earth

Omarjee Nadira

Description

This book illustrates the ways in which the personal is political in the advancement of decolonising scholarship. It explores the intimacies of coloniality entrenched in the narcissism of coloniality, enabling the system through extraction, subjugation and violence. Pushing back against the narcissism of coloniality, which is framed by the ma/ster/slave dialectic or internalised oppression, requires uhuru and ubuntu which are agentic strategies employed in reclaiming ontology and epistemology. Uhuru insists on a decolonisation of self; whereas ubuntu is determined by African radical communitarianism, demanding new ways of knowing and seeing whilst re-examining epistemicides of the enslaved, indentured and colonised. Fanonian theory is used as a framework for understanding the colonial authority�s management of the colonised, determining the unhappiness quintessential in the colonial condition. Freirian concepts of conscientisation and criticality are used as a form of resistance, disrupting the system of racial capitalism and the coloniality of gender. Subsequently, flipping the classroom to resist the coloniality of knowledge allows scholars to connect with community, encouraging engaged scholarship from the personal/political perspective, making the classroom a radical space for addressing trauma and healing whilst bridging art, activism and scholarship. Therefore, the classroom is situated against the blind spots of the banking model with male dominated decolonial work silencing the feminist perspective. Consequently, uhuru and ubuntu promote voice, agency and resistance as a pedagogical praxis paramount for the development of a decolonial feminist pedagogy.

Sujets

• African Studies
• Gender Studies
• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique

Informations

• Publié par: Langaa RPCIG
• Date de parution: 31 mai 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9789956553761
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

of racial capitalism and the coloniality of gender. Subsequently, flipping the classroom

t n o i w d a t e r d y r o o s a o g d e o o n i a l f e m i n i s t p e d c l a g

— uhuru

AND

ubuntu —

Nadira Omarjee

We Belong To The Earth: towards a decolonial feminist pedagogy rooted in uhuru and ubuntu Nadira Omarjee L a ng a a R esea rch & P u blishing CIG Mankon, Bamenda

Publisher: LangaaRPCIG Langaa Research & Publishing Common Initiative Group P.O. Box 902 Mankon Bamenda North West Region Cameroon [e-mail] www.langaa-rpcig.net Distributed in and outside N. America by African Books Collective [e-mail] www.africanbookscollective.com

ISBN-10: 9956-553-52-2

ISBN-13: 978-9956-553-52-5 ©Nadira Omarjee 2023 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical or electronic, including photocopying and recording, or be stored in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher

This book is dedicated to Nokuthula and Caroline, my lifesavers

Acknowledgments This book is written very much with the love and support of numerous people who have held me through one of my saddest moments in life. The cliché reads, ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.’ In my case, I was kept alive through the sheer force of love. In my experience, love is the baseline for life. I was on the brink of suicide. I had what felt like a trip to hell and those who had been by my side caught me and gently nudged me back. To them, I am eternally grateful. As a decolonial feminist scholar, my previous work has been on 1 self-love which I now define as uhuru. Uhuru means freedom of being or independence in Kiswahili. I did not fully comprehend what uhuru meant until I had to birth myself through the abyss (individuation) and find meaning in living. This led me to my biggest 2 lesson in life: the virtue of ubuntu (African radical communitarianism) (Ramose 1999). Through ubuntu (my community) I was able to heal my deepest wound – a disavowal of self; and achieve uhuru. Like many, my childhood was fractured. I carried a wound that festered and went unchecked for most of my life. I had lots of healing or emotional labour to do to reclaim my uhuru. In truth, my research on decolonising the self (psychic death) is an exploration and a return to uhuru. Uhuru manifests through the making of the subject (hooks 1992); the continuous cyclical incarnations of a psychic death and rebirth. In reality, it was through extensive self-reflection that I was able to fully understand what this cycle meant and what uhuru actually feels like. We think of uhuru as a responsibility to the self, stemming from the self. But that is only one way of looking at it. When I was sinking and spinning, it was through ubuntu (my community that held space for me) that I rediscovered my uhuru. Therefore, uhuru is borne through ubuntu or social solidarity or intersubjectivity.Furthermore, uhuru is the love that binds our being, extending into ubuntu (the bonds of love). Another way of understanding uhuru and ubuntu is through mutual recognition: the interdependence between the self and other. Thus, uhuru and ubuntu are about a practice of love:

1 Languages such as Urdu, Arabic and Farsi have a similar term called ‘Azad’ which also means freedom and a lightness of being. 2 Ubuntu is a Bantu word for humanity, referring to ‘I am because we are’, a process of mutual recognition (Benjamin 1988).

decolonial love – the reclamation of being hu/man (the spelling is a critique of the ways in which hierarchies have been inferred through the coloniality of gender (Lugones 2007 2016) and modernity) against multiple forms of oppression. This decolonial love that is uhuru and ubuntu connects us to the feeling of love that is all around us. (Hence, the title of the book). When love is disavowed, we feel a void, an indifference. Throughout some of the most hurtful events in my life, I was always able to find my uhuru (my sense of being: ontological and epistemological) because ubuntu was present in my life. And, love formed through pain is radical and transformative (see Hannah Arendt onThe Banality of Evil). Through my latest incarnation (psychic death and rebirth), my uhuru disrupted the notion of the self and other divide. By unlearning a lot of my feminist psychoanalytical teachings, I understood that jouissanceorla petite mort, the loss of self with the other in the moment of pleasure (Nagera et al. 1990) is not restricted to sexual pleasure. Insteadjouissanceis ubuntu or the practice of mutual recognition or 3 what I refer to as the oneness of being. It is how we as Blacks survive multiple systems of domination and resist the stripping away of our feeling of being hu/man. Consequently, as Blacks, the system (white supremacist heteropatriarchal ableist racial capitalism) is constantly working against us, unlike whites who are the recipients of the system. Therefore, as Blacks, we need ubuntu as a lifeline to survive, thrive and bolster our resolve and agency (confidence) to pushback against the system. Thus, as a Black womxn, ubuntu is the cement that binds my being. And, it is through ubuntu that I find meaning for my existence. In this way, the book is a tribute to the many ways that marginalised people survive the system. I want to thank the scholars in all the classes that I facilitated in 2017, 2018 and 2019: the coffee chats at UWC and seminars at UCT, including the lecture theatres on those campuses. I have learnt immensely from you all. Special mention is necessary for the donations of poetry from Sarah Godsell (2019) and Simon Rakei, artwork from Natasha Vally and Niel Overy’s photograph of the artwork on the cover. I have taken photographs of Thandiwe Msebenzi, Alex Hotz and Yaliwe Clarke and appreciate their permission to use those images. I want to

3 Black is an apartheid term referring to a political distinction for people who were not categorised as white. It is an inclusive term that in different contexts refers to black, indigenous, people of colour (BIPOC). It is thus shorthand for BIPOC and/or marginalised. I specifically use it because I am referring to the apartheid legacy of white supremacy. And, in colonial terms, this legacy is still applicable.

also mention my reviewer who provided the first critical reading of this manuscript and directed much of the later edits. Your reading was invaluable and helped me to sharpen some of the key concepts. I am listing names below because these are the friends that held space for me. Some of these friends read the first drafts of this book and gave much needed feedback. In part, this book is where it is because of their feedback. Nokuthula Shabalala, Caroline Suransky, Guno Jones, Halleh Ghorashi, Rezvan Moghaddam, Simon Rakei, Jolanda Jansen, Reiko Matsuyama, Joe Ross, Shose Kessi, Marina de Regt, Wandile Dlamini, Zubeida Cassoo Choonara, Naseem (Barbie) Desai, Caroline Heaton-Nicholls, Edward Shalala, Suruchi Thapar-Bjökert, the Karanikas family in Uppsala, Jesper Bjarnesen, Cristiano Lanzano, Cecillia Navarro, Jörgen Levin, Danai Mupotsa, Polo Moji, Eva-Lena Svensson, Sonya Suransky, Leonard Suransky, Ulrika Dahl, Asynja Gray, John-Paul Zaccarini, Lila Fal, Tania Berger, Henning and Sue Melber, Sarah Godsell, Howard Varney, Vivian Matias Dos Santos, Laure Poinsot, Olivier Nour Noël, Aden Noël, Martine Flipse, Jeremy Bierbach, Mpho Tlali, Camalita Naicker, Anthea Lesch, Senait Mekonnen, Rayana Rassool, Geraldine Reymenants, Sean O’Connor, Farouk Omarjee, Bernadine Bachar, Gladys Mirugi- Mukundi and my IDI family at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, including Kathy Davis and Sawitri Saharto. The Africa Scholar Programme at The Nordic Africa Institute at Uppsala University gave me the opportunity to sit in Sweden and think about decolonial feminist pedagogy through autobiography/ autoethnography. I wrote much in this time – not just for this book but also about the pandemic and the implications it had for higher education institutions. Uppsala is also famous for Carl Linneaus, the father of the race sciences. Writing in Uppsala, knowing the significance of the place, the affect ofbad science (2020) and philosophies of supremacy, weighed heavily on me. Most especially because racisms are normalised as an everyday occurrence which made me more determined to critically examine the ways in which we are complicit in reproducing these discourses. Coronavirus also affected me in the ways in which Blacks are more susceptible to contracting diseases, not from predisposed comorbidities, but from the social arrangement in society that places Blacks on the frontlines of combatting this pandemic. In the midst of trying to understand the impact that this microbe had in bringing the world to a standstill, I had the opportunity to pause and reflect on the world we are living in and, how some people are more

vulnerable than others, in particular Black womxn (womxn spelled with an x is an inclusive term referring to gender/sexuality fluidity). It highlighted incongruencies and fault lines, showing us how provincial we are when we focus our attention on our little corners of the world. It has brought the nanoglocal into reality with remote digitalised everything, whilst distancing us from the ways of being (uhuru) that foster ubuntu. But the pandemic also fostered ubuntu in new ways; for example, in Sweden where social distancing is the norm, people started becoming concerned about their neighbours by creating community social media apps offering help like grocery shopping, etc. In South Africa, community action networks (CAN) were mobilised in redistributing resources from wealthier communities to less- resourced and impoverished communities, filling the gap where the state had failed. These forms of ubuntu show us the potential of living in a more caring world. Nonetheless, privilege highlighted how some of us were able to fare better during the pandemic whilst making our lives at once large and glocal and, on the other hand, small and restricted. Our connection to touch had been suspended and the challenge of staying in our feelings ran rampant with existential anxieties exacerbated by the pandemic. Yet, Uppsala gave me some peace and quiet that was much needed for healing and writing. And, for that, I am grateful to have had the opportunity to sit still in the dark, cold months or observe the long languid endless summer days, thinking about how our traumas and healing journeys can lead us to finding pedagogies that are equipped for futures as yet to be determined and nothing short of imagination.

Table of Contents Acknowledgments.........................................................................v Introduction ..................................................................................1 Prologue ........................................................................................21 Chapter 1: Intimacies of Coloniality .............................................23 Chapter 2: Considering Language, Power/ Knowledge Nexus and Ubuntu ...............................................57 Chapter 3: Pedagogy for Justice: Connecting the Classroom to the Community ............................................85 Chapter 4: Classroom Lessons on Uhuru and Ubuntu.................117 Chapter 5: Conclusion...................................................................145 Epilogue........................................................................................151 References.....................................................................................155 Index .............................................................................................169

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