Hypatia (2020), 1–6

doi:10.1017/hyp.2020.16

MUSING

Rethinking Decolonial and Postcolonial

Knowledges beyond Regions to Imagine
Transnational Solidarity
Kiran Asher1 and Priti Ramamurthy2
1
Department of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies, University of Massachusetts, Amherst MA 01003 and
2
Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, 98195
Corresponding authors. Email: kasher@umass.edu and priti@uw.edu

(Received 27 November 2018; accepted 12 September 2019)

Since the early twentieth century, various strands of “anticolonial” scholarship have
been and are concerned with how colonial encounters and practices constitute differ-
ences. In recent years, this scholarship maps the uneven implications of “coloniality”
for subjects and bodies marked as different, for example, “feminine,” “raced,”
“queer,” or trans. Along with feminism, anticolonial scholarship’s analytical goals—to
link the body with body politics—are closely tied to its political ones: to correct the
wrongs of colonial encounters and practices. The current avatars of anticolonial schol-
arship include postcolonial, decolonial, and settler-colonial variants.1
Postcolonial and decolonial scholarship, and the feminisms associated with them,
are marked by diverse genealogies and histories and emerge from multiple locations.
None of them can be spoken of in the singular. What they have in common is that
they are “anticolonial” in at least two ways: they foreground how raced and gendered
colonial practices constitute “Eurocentric” forms of knowledge-production, which mar-
ginalize other forms of knowing and being in the world. Second, they concur that the
political task of working toward liberation, decolonization, and social justice must
accompany scholarly and academic tasks of analysis. Despite their differences, then,
both approaches have long informed and animated feminist scholarship and activism,
though often not at once nor in the same spaces. They have much to offer and learn
from the other. However, the possibilities for such exchanges are often foreclosed by
problematic assumptions about decolonial and postcolonial feminisms, which are
hard to discuss.
In this musing, we risk discussing them because we believe it is important to shake
them. Our reflections emerge from a series of round tables on this theme beginning
with one at the 2016 annual meeting of the National Women’s Studies Association
(NWSA), where the co-authors first met. The round table, organized by the journal
Feminist Studies, was in keeping with the meeting’s theme of “Decoloniality,” and its
purpose was to stage a dialogue between decolonial and postcolonial feminisms.
However, this important dialogue was stymied by several assumptions about postcolo-
nial and decolonial feminisms that emerged in the presentations and in the Q and A
following them. These assumptions were at play at other events, which suggests that

© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Hypatia, a Nonprofit Corporation
2 Kiran Asher and Priti Ramamurthy

they are symptomatic of larger trends in the US academy. We offer our remarks in the
hopes of disrupting these problematic trends and fostering transnational solidarity by
rethinking what we heuristically call “anticolonial” feminisms.
The seemingly unshakeable ground of “regions” frames and stifles decolonial/post-
colonial debates. At the 2016 NWSA panel, this was evident in how “South Asia”
was produced in multiple registers. Postcolonial feminism was firmly placed in South
Asia and critiqued as an intellectual formation of Anglo-European elite theorizing.
Postcolonial feminism was assumed to and accused of continuing to enact colonial epis-
temologies and could not claim, for example, US woman of color approaches in its
intellectual genealogy.2
“South Asia” was also starkly embodied in the scholars who were presenting, regard-
less of where our research was located, the topics we engaged with, or how we took up
decolonial/postcolonial feminisms. In fact, each of the three panel presentations by the
South Asians embodied as such was about how feminist research could be decolonizing
in practice. Banu Subramaniam did so in feminist science studies by tracking colonial
notions of science and race in genetically profiling “Indians” and “Indians.” Based on
collaborative research, Subramaniam discussed new attempts at full genetic mappings
of South Asian diasporic communities in the US and in indigenous communities in
Puerto Rico. Her presentation problematized these mappings, noting that the focus
on specifically these communities was because access to native American and indige-
nous groups in the US is more fraught than in the communities she discussed.3
Kiran Asher juxtaposed readings of Gayatri Spivak’s work (commonly read as “postco-
lonial”) and that of Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (commonly read as “decolonial”). She
highlighted how both scholars flag the dilemmas of representing third-world, subaltern,
and indigenous women and locate these attempts at representation (by Western and
diasporic scholars) within the political economy of knowledge-production and interna-
tional development (Asher 2017). Priti Ramamurthy shared two instances: one to high-
light the importance of race in India for understanding how the anticolonial movement
erased the memory of mixed-race female movie stars to construct a hegemonic nation-
alism in the 1930s, and the second, stories of workers in informal rural and urban econ-
omies that defy preconceived notions of victimhood by claiming subaltern dignity
through everyday practices of “modern” comportment and personal commodity-
consumption. In short, all three presentations set up a dialogue between postcolonial
feminisms and decolonial feminisms. Yet they were read back as “South Asian,” always
already “postcolonial,” and thus incapable of being decolonializing knowledge-practices.
Our bodies, our names, and the physical arrangement of the panel (with three South
Asians on one side, and two Latin Americans along with the South Asian moderator on
the other) contributed to this categorization and separation of scholars by region. In
our short presentations, we started autobiographically and moved on to discursively
map our arguments. Perhaps it was through that very form that we “proved” to our critics
that we were indeed South Asian postcolonial scholars, incapable of understanding the
value of embodied knowledge and unambiguously defined political projects. The two
“decolonial” scholars on the panel—María Lugones and Breny Mendoza—embodied
“Latin America,” albeit differently, and repeatedly invoked their alliance to it. During
the Q and A they embraced being from the region and explained how their personal
and professional experiences of it made them particularly inclined to decolonial praxis.4
These overdetermined “interpretations” of our identities and bodies repeatedly come
into play. We give a few other examples to illustrate. At a later panel at NWSA 2016, this
time at one related to the South Asian Caucus, one young scholar berated Ramamurthy
 Hypatia 3

for talking about the value of postcolonial feminist scholarship when decolonial femi-
nist activists were struggling over matters of “life and death.” The problematic assump-
tions here are not only that feminist postcolonial scholars are necessarily South Asian in
origin or area of study, but also that such scholars are capable of producing only elite
accounts, ones deemed less vital than those that focus on bodies on the precipitous line
between life and death.
Asher, who was born and raised in India, has been doing research on and in Latin
America since the 1980s, and on black social movements in Colombia since 1992.
Within the context of global geopolitics in the 1990s, black activists often assumed
that she had a “natural” solidarity with black struggles—which she did and continues
to do. Over the decades, the shifts in radical, racial, and cultural politics have led to
a different reading of her body and politics among metropolitan black activists and
scholars with decolonial leanings. Today she is automatically associated with postcolo-
nialism. “South Asia” becomes a metonym for postcolonial feminism, and the body as
autobiography stops thinking at its borders. The assumption that postcolonial
approaches have little or no understanding of any but the South Asian context occludes
and precludes solidarity with “Latin American” decolonial politics.
Over the past few years, we have repeatedly heard certain simplistic (mis)readings of
postcolonial and decolonial approaches, which are at risk of becoming entrenched. For
example, those claiming a decolonial feminist position often posit that the “post” in
postcolonialism and postcolonial feminism refers to after colonialism. Echoing past
debates, the “postcolonial” condition is understood as a temporal anachronism,
which does not adequately account for actually existing power geometries today. The
critique here goes, “how can we be thinking about an after of colonialism when we
still very much live with colonialism?” Furthermore, postcolonial feminism is spatially
restricted to areas that were European imperial colonies but, after struggles for indepen-
dence, have achieved sovereignty. Consequently, the salience of ongoing fights for sov-
ereignty and freedom from state violence by indigenous and minoritized communities,
and the debilitating consequences of white settler racism and racial capitalism, are
ostensibly insufficiently acknowledged by postcolonial feminist scholarship (see also
Ramamurthy and Tambe 2017).
From postcolonial feminists’ viewpoint, it is presumed that decolonial feminism, in
its embrace of alternate forms of knowing and valorization of embodied experience,
does not contend with the problematic of representation: representing the subaltern is
both portrait—a representation of—and proxy—a speaking for. Representation, postco-
lonial feminists posit, is an aporia impossible to “solve” but one that we nevertheless
need to navigate and to do so ethically (Spivak 1988). Decolonial feminism with its
commitment to change the world, not just to interpret it, presumes access to a radical
alterity as the basis for social movements and struggles. For postcolonial feminists, pol-
itics is always messy and “without guarantees” (Hall 1986).
Put schematically, postcolonial and decolonial approaches are framed in binary terms:

Postcolonial approaches are understood to be “deconstructive” and academic,

whereas decolonial ones are commonly thought to be “constructive/political”
and solution-oriented.

Postcolonial approaches emerge from and are relevant only to Asia/the Middle
East, whereas decolonial approaches are associated with South America, and
more recently, with indigenous scholars of the Americas.
4 Kiran Asher and Priti Ramamurthy

Postcolonial suggests that colonialism is over; decolonial is about grappling with

colonialism’s continued forms and signals a future.

Decolonial feminism is represented as privileging questions of race in white settler

colonies. Postcolonial feminism is represented as ignoring this in the longer his-
tory of settler colonialism in Latin America, which enabled the later European
imperial colonialization of Asia and Africa.

Postcolonial feminism is seen as being uncritically grounded in Western philoso-

phy and Eurocentrism, whereas decolonial feminism is based on non-Eurocentric/
indigenous ideas/practices radically different from Enlightenment and modernity.

Decolonial feminism is the possibility of overturning the “coloniality of gender”

(Lugones 2010)—the inseparability of racism, capitalism, and gender oppression
in the logic of colonial modernity. Postcolonial feminist scholarship is represented
as focusing on migration, diaspora, and hybridity and on the paradoxical and
ambiguous relationship of postcoloniality, as a condition, to modernity.

Such binaries do little to explain the complex relations by which colonial differences
endure and bind us. First, postcolonialism has robustly critiqued European systems
of knowledge and the epistemic practices that continue to code difference and repro-
duce power in contemporary relations, from the global to the intimate. Second, simplis-
tic readings that set up postcolonial and decolonial in stark opposition are troubling
because they do not account for the political economy of knowledge-production.
That radical, antiracist, and decolonial politics is being produced in the heart of the
US academy must surely make us pause about our own contradictions and complicities
with global geopolitics. Third, activists are often more savvy than academics and schol-
ars about the institutional context of their struggles. They constantly position them-
selves in relation to the state and other institutions to win legal and policy
accommodations while negotiating for broader political gains. In short, much work
needs to be done to flesh out how both postcolonial and decolonial feminisms are
anticolonial.
Both are also anticapitalist but differ in their assessment of “outsides” to capitalism.
For example, work under the rubric of decolonial feminist is seen as more hopeful
and praxis-driven, whereas that under the sign of postcolonial feminisms is seen to
be working through capitalist articulations at this historical juncture. More detailed
attention to historical and contemporary global connections within and across regions
might offer some interesting ways beyond current impasses. For instance, foregrounding
the analytical and intellectual place of areas such as the Caribbean and Africa in these
debates would help guard against the tendency for moments of thought and heuristic
devices to become territorialized, essentialized, and static. Readers may also want to
see how Regina Cochrane brings indigenous, feminist, and negative dialectical critiques
of modernity to bear upon climate-justice debates (Cochrane 2014). Her side note on
the pitfalls of identity politics among Bolivian activists has important insights for
this discussion.
Constructed binaries between postcolonial and decolonial feminisms, however, are
not inevitable. Indeed, at a panel entitled “Afterlives of Colonialism: Theorizing the
Postcolonial and Decolonial” held prior to the 2016 NWSA at the Five College
Women’s Studies Research Center in South Hadley, Massachusetts, panelists engaged
 Hypatia 5

in intense exchanges about the parallels, disjunctions, convergences, and divergences

between these two different but related modes of thought. Believing that there is
much at stake in having more conversations about “anticolonial” feminisms, we orga-
nized two more roundtables in 2017: at the Royal Geographical Society-Institute of
British Geographers meetings in London and at the NWSA in Baltimore. We asked
panelists and participants to rethink “regions” as theoretical sources and reflect on
what post- and decolonial feminisms have brought to their own scholarship and activ-
ism. We drafted a series of questions to facilitate critical dialogues across differences:

What are the multiple genealogies of anticolonial feminist approaches and how do
they appear and disappear in contemporary discussions?

What are the political and analytical convergences and divergences between fem-
inist approaches considered postcolonial versus decolonial?

How do critiques of representation of indigenous peoples and “third-world

women” commonly associated with postcolonial and transnational feminisms
appear in decolonial and settler scholarship?

How do we engage/challenge an intersectional analysis of indigeneity, race, sexual-

ity, caste, religion, and gender associated with indigenous, “women of color,”
“queer of color” feminisms, and other varied feminisms around the globe?

How can our scholarship interrogate/disrupt the stability of the body as

autobiography?

How can feminist scholarship engage an anticapitalist critique? How do we con-

ceive of capitalism’s insides and outsides? Do we valorize utopian or vernacular
imaginaries of leisure, abundance, degrowth, and antiwork? Situated knowledges,
embodied practices, radical care? Nonviolent human–nonhuman relations?

How do our scholarship and activism engage with social- and environmental-
justice movements?

The discussions reasserted the imperative to deepen and historicize our analyses of race
and indigeneity over the longue durée and globally; to continue to grapple with knotty
questions of representation; to develop a conceptual vocabulary for the contradictory
relationship of subalterns to the state; and to develop ethical practices as scholars
“learning to learn from below” (Spivak 2012).
Postcolonial and decolonial feminisms have much to learn from each other. As var-
iants of “anticolonial” scholarship, their attention to the specificities of difference—of
regions, bodies, and more—holds the key to disrupting the unequal and hierarchical
politics of knowledge-production. But for the key to work, we need to remind ourselves
that these differences are also colonial constructs, and we must grapple with the double
bind of undoing them.
6 Kiran Asher and Priti Ramamurthy

Notes
1 This is not the place to list the vast and growing literature on these fields, including key essays in Hypatia
such as Lugones 2010. It is also beyond the scope of this musing to flesh out the multiple genealogies of
settler-colonial studies and its connections to the other variants. For example, settler-colonialism focuses on
Anglo-American contexts such as the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Their connections to and
what they can learn from non-Anglo, especially Latin American, indigenous studies is something yet to be
pursued.
2 See Nash 2019 for discussion of comparisons and alliances between transnational feminism and
intersectionality.
3 Subramaniam was presenting a co-authored essay, subsequently published as Hamilton, Subramaniam,
and Willey 2017.
4 In her published piece, however, Mendoza attempts to look for interconnections across colonial contexts
and their relevance for anticolonial thought and praxis (Mendoza 2017).

References
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Kiran Asher is a Professor in the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University
of Massachusetts, Amherst. She has done over three decades of field-based research on social and environ-
mental justice in Latin America and South Asia. In addition to Black and Green: Afro-Colombians,
Development, and Nature in the Pacific Lowlands (Duke University Press, 2009), her scholarly work appears
in Feminist Studies, Feminist Review, Antipode, GeoForum, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a
book entitled “Fieldwork: Nature, Culture, and Gender in the Age of Climate Change,” which foregrounds
the complex and contradictory intertwining of natural-cultural worlds. (kasher@umass.edu)
Priti Ramamurthy is a Professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington,
Seattle. An ethnographer, her scholarship on gender, agrarian transformations, and feminist commodity
chains has been published in Cultural Anthropology, Environment and Planning A, Feminist Studies, Signs,
and World Development. She is a co-editor and co-author of The Modern Girl around the World:
Modernity, Consumption, Globalization (Duke University Press, 2008). Based on oral histories, essays on
the life-worlds of informal economy workers in India, co-authored with Vinay Gidwani, appear in the
Journal of Peasant Studies (2018) and in Doreen Massey: Critical Dialogues (Agenda, 2018). (priti@uw.edu)

Cite this article: Asher K, Ramamurthy P (2020). Rethinking Decolonial and Postcolonial Knowledges
beyond Regions to Imagine Transnational Solidarity. Hypatia 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1017/hyp.2020.16