Article

Thesis Eleven
1–20
Decolonising (critical) ª The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/07255136221104265

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Sara C. Motta
The University of Newcastle, Australia

Abstract
Decolonial/anti-colonial Black, Indigenous and Mestiza feminist movements and
scholar-activists foreground how the oft-touted apocalypse that the Covid-19 pandemic
heralds is not new, nor does it signify the great rupture into chaos that those from within
modernity-coloniality often claim it to be. Rather Covid-19 is preceded by and will be
out-lived by the apocalyptic anti-life onto-epistemological logics that are foundational to
the (re)production of hetero-patriarchal capitalist-(settler) coloniality. However, one
would commit the violence of reproduction of the epistemological logics and (ir)ra-
tionalities constitutive of the current system if the story ended there. We have survived
(despite our losses) and our survival points to the urgent necessity and responsibility of
(critical) social theory to listen to the story of the pandemic from a Black/Indigenous
genealogy and to begin the sense-making of the Covid-19 pandemic, from prior to this
particular virus, outside, against and beyond the politics of knowledge of critical social
theory itself. Thus, I invite you to journey to an affirmative re-enfleshment of reason and
theory-making in relation to and dialogue with Black, Indigenous, and subaltern Mestiza
feminist movements in southwest Colombia and in southeast so-called Australia in the
unceded lands of the Awabakal and the Worimi. I explore this through the metaphor, the
materiality, the cosmology and the herstory of the mangrove swamps a knowing-being
otherwise (in)visible to the dehumanising gave of Whiteness and bring to thought three
stories of a politics of knowledge of/as the Black/racialised and feminised body/flesh. To
do this is to suggest that the co-creation of pathways which are life affirming and life
making beyond and out of the post-Covid 19 conjuncture involves an epistemological-
political project which decolonises and feminises the containments of reason and
knowing (non)being of coloniality/modernity.

Corresponding author:
Sara C. Motta, Newcastle Business School, The University of Newcastle City Campus Callaghan, AU-NSW
New South Wales 2308, Australia.
Email: sara.c.motta@newcastle.edu.au
2 Thesis Eleven XX(X)

Keywords
Black flesh, decolonial/anticolonial feminisms, decolonising critique, futurities otherwise

Decolonial/anti-colonial Black, Indigenous and Mestiza feminist movements and

scholar-activists foreground how the oft-touted apocalypse that the Covid-19 pandemic
heralds is not new, nor does it signify the great rupture into chaos that those from within
modernity-coloniality often claim it to be. Rather Covid-19 is preceded by and will be
out-lived by the apocalyptic anti-life onto-epistemological logics that are foundational to
the (re)production of hetero-patriarchal capitalist-(settler) coloniality (Indigenous
Action, 2020; Motta, 2022). Feminised and racialised territories of land and body, of
lifeworlds and pluridiverse onto-epistemologies within this are subject to logics and
(i)rationalities of annihilation and destruction. We can read the virus then from an other
place and genealogy: foregrounding the current organisation of social relationships,
social life, and (non)being and the underlying onto-epistemologies which justify and
rationalise a hierarchy of ordering of the human and humanity in which Black and
Indigenous life is relegated to the less-than-human and non-human, and in which Madre
Tierra/Country/Land is relegated to terra nullius and commodification.
However, one would commit the violence of reproduction of the epistemological
logics and (ir)rationalities constitutive of the current system if the story of racialised and
feminised (non)being and ongoing violations remained here as this would assume that, as
Maria Lugones argues: ‘the global capitalist colonial system is in every way successful
in its destruction of people’s, knowledges, relations, and economies’ (2010: 748).
Rather, we have survived. We resisted and continue to resist practices of assimilation,
denial, and annihilation. This affirms Lugones’s reminder that the racialised subaltern
feminised subject:

[is] a being who begins to inhabit a fractured locus constructed doubly, who perceives
doubly, where the sides of the locus are in tension, and the conflict itself actively informs the
subjectivity of the colonized self in multiple relation. (Lugones, 2010: 748)

Our survival is at the root of the current revival and resurgence of decolonial and anti-
colonial feminist movements, struggles and other sovereignties. Our survival points to
the urgent necessity and responsibility of (critical) social theory to listen to the story of
the pandemic and of (critical) social theory itself otherwise. It necessitates beginning the
genealogy of sense-making and praxis of decolonising and healing justice-making from
prior to this particular virus, and outside, and against and beyond the politics of knowl-
edge of critical social theory which itself has often been bound to the onto-
epistemological coordinates of modernity-coloniality premised as it is on the relegation
to non-being-knowing of Black and Indigenous life-making social practices of reproduc-
tion and kinship relationships (Motta, 2016b, 2017a, 2018).
Beginning otherwise, and foregrounding the stories, voices and wisdoms of survival of
subaltern racialised and feminised subjects and communities re-situates and provincialises
the Covid-19 pandemic to within a long line of apocalyptic viruses, helps understand why
racialised and feminised communities were both relegated to disposability or criminalised
Motta 3

as part of government management of the pandemic strategies (Knight et al., 2021; Val-
dovinos et al., 2020; NoiseCat, 2021: Ramos, 2020), and why we were able to survive and
continue to politicise throughout this period (NoiseCat, 2021; Valdovinos et al., 2020;
Motta et al., forthcoming). Our politics (of knowledge) and/as our life making practices of
kinship, reproduction and care arguably offer ways to sentipensar and to root decolonial
and feminised wisdoms at the base (as seed and root) of our visionings, desires, yearnings
and practices of post-Covid, anti/decolonial feminised pathways beyond the current anti-
life system. We must therefore begin our journey at an other place, from an other site of
enunciation, and from an other genealogy of the pandemic.
We (re)begin from how feminist scholar-curanderas of (de)coloniality (amongst
many other critical traditions of thought/practice) critique the geopolitics of knowledge
of heteropatriarchal modernity/coloniality, demonstrating how the hierarchically
ordered binaries upon which modernity/coloniality are premised reproduce the negation
and violent disavowal of the knowing-being and lifeworlds of raced and feminised
communities across the South. This piece builds on this negative critique of epistemicide
within decoloniality to extend its coordinates to an affirmative re-enfleshment of reason
and theory-making in relation to and dialogue with Black, Indigenous and Mestiza
feminist movements in southwest Colombia and in southeast so-called Australia in the
unceded lands of the Awabakal and the Worimi. It explores this through the metaphor,
the materiality, the cosmology and the herstory of the mangrove swamps a knowing-
being otherwise (in)visible to the dehumanising gave of Whiteness. It brings to thought
three stories of a politics of knowledge of/as the Black/racialised and feminised body/
flesh. In so doing it mounts an affirmative decolonising feminist critique of the terms of
the debate of critical social theory which often reproduce these violent dualisms and
hierarchically paired orderings between theory and practice, mind and body, reason and
Black flesh and which therefore are often bound by a reading from coloniality of the
pandemic and post-Covid futurities. To do this is to suggest that the co-creation of
pathways which are life affirming and life making beyond and out of the post-Covid-19
conjuncture involves an epistemological-political project which decolonises and fem-
inises the containments of reason and knowing (non)being of coloniality/modernity and
in so doing foregrounds other stories, wisdoms, herstories and genealogies of apocalypse
and of collective liberation.

Entering the roots: Onto-epistemological negation

and survivance in the mangrove swamps
We as feminist scholars-curanderas of (de)coloniality visibilise as a means of survi-
vance how the foundational and ongoing onto-epistemological logics and (ir)rationalities
of hetero-patriarchal modernity/coloniality are ones built upon the violence of colonial
dispossessions of lands, bodies and epistemological lifeworlds. Colonisation and its
ongoing realities of modernity/coloniality are made material through the (re)production
of social relationships and subjectivities premised upon hierarchical binaries and vio-
lently separating borders in which the racialised and feminised other is often found at the
bottom (Anzaldúa, 2012). Apocalypse is not new. It is foundational, ongoing, multiple.
4 Thesis Eleven XX(X)

The organising virus is hetero-patriarchal capitalist coloniality. As Anzaldúa describes

(1987: 20)

The world is not a safe place to live in. We shiver in separate cells in enclosed cities,
shoulders hunched, barely keeping the panic below the surface of the skin, daily drinking
shock along with our morning coffee, fearing the torches being set to our buildings, the
attacks on the streets. Shutting down. Woman does not feel safe when . . . white culture [is]
critical of her; when [she is] hunt[ed] as prey.

In particular the Black and Indigenous mother becomes a target for these logics of
elision, violent denial and dispossession. For she often held/holds in collective and in-
relation the possibilities of the reproduction of her lineages, knowledges, wisdoms and
kinship relationships, including responsibilities to Land, each other and the more-than-
human and non-human that are constitutive of Indigenous and Black political difference
(Motta, forthcoming; Simpson, 2016). Thus, the Indigenous, Black and racialised
woman and feminised subject suffer the ongoing genocidal attacks of the modern/colo-
nial (settler) state through logics of child removal, incarceration, assimilation, sover-
eignty denial, the rendering of the Black mother as bad, absent, and neglectful, and the
acts of bodily and sexual harm against Indigenous, Black and racialised women, girls and
feminised subjects. Thus carceral logics of policing and criminalisation which were
meted out to our communities during the pandemic in both so-called Australia and
Colombia are a continuum, not a novelty or exception to state modern/colonial biopo-
litical governance, law and reason (Morgensen, 2011; Motta, 2018; Bond, 2021). Fol-
lowing from Black feminist Saidyia Hartman (2007), the bodies of Black women are
thought of as the naturalised site of gratuitous punishment and violence and strategies of
annihilation and submission/assimilation.
Modernity/coloniality is thus constituted and systematically re-constituted through a
series of heridas abiertas (open wounds) which are the (in)visible(d) markings and
unhealed scars of these social, material, geographical, embodied and psychic onto-
epistemological violences and sustos we continually face. Raced and feminised
women and communities become inhabitants of the borders and margins, othered and
thus subject to misnaming, denial and direct and systematic onto-epistemological vio-
lations (Motta, 2018; Anzaldúa, 2009, 2002). Here lands and peoples that are associated
with the borderlands and margins becomes subject to violent othering and dispossession.
The mangrove swamps as a materialisation of such margins on the colonial/modern
frontier offer(ed) a rich ecology of intimacy for the peoples of the Awabakal and Worimi
from where I write this piece. Yet they were named in the invader’s imagination, as
Penelope Edmonds (2010: 143) describes, ‘as dystopian spaces, not picturesque, or
useful, but wasteland . . . black waters . . . horrific places, associated with death and dis-
ease’. The Black, Indigenous and racialised mother who inhabits(ed) such territories
become/es associated with the horrific, the absent as wasteland; epistemological terra-
nullias (Motta, 2022).
Crucially, the drawing of these hierarchical binaries and colonial/modern borders
place the gendered and racialised as synonymous with emotionality as opposed to rea-
son, flesh as opposed to modern subjecthood, and nature and conversative tradition as
Motta 5

opposed to science and forward-moving progress. The former of the binaries is asso-
ciated with the irrational, the unruly and the shameful – to be controlled and tamed with
the building of the urban frontier and the lettered city to avoid disruption to the ‘normal’
and ‘rational’ social and physical order (Anzaldúa, 2007: 38–40; Lorde, 2000: 1–4;
Motta, 2018, 2021). As Anzaldúa (2002: 541) explains:

This system and its hierarchies impact people’s lives in concrete and devasting ways and
justify a sliding scale of human worth used to keep humankind divided. It condones the
mind theft, spirit murder, exploitation and genocide de los otros.

It is essential therefore that we recognise how ways of inhabiting and creating the
world/subject are also ways of knowing the world/subject. To eradicate lifeworlds and
subjects also enacts epistemological denial of being-knowing ‘otherwise’. Coloniality/
modernity is thus an onto-epistemological project of anti-life and dispossession which is
premised upon the attempted destruction of the relational worlds of ecologies of inti-
macy (Simpson, 2017) of raced and feminised subjects. As Lugones (2010: 745)
describes:

The civilizing transformation justified the colonization of memory and thus of people’s
sense of self, of intersubjective relation, of their relation to the spirit world, to land, to the
very fabric of their conception of reality, identity and social, ecological and cosmological
organization . . . the normativity that connected gender and civilization became intent on
erasing community ecological practices, knowledge of planting, of weaving, of the cosmos.

Modernity/coloniality thus enacts a monological violent onto-epistemological closure

and silencing of all ‘others’ as its conditions of possibility, not as exceptions to the rule of
reason and progress. Emotional, embodied, oral, popular and spiritual knowledges are
delegitimised, invisibilised and denied. Other ways of relating to the earth, each other,
the cosmos and our selves are annihilated. These epistemological logics are not external
to the formation and epistemological ground of critical social theory. As I have demon-
strated in a body of work over the last decade, these hierarchical divisions and modern/
colonial renditions of reason and the knowing-subject in relation to the negation of the
epistemological being of Black and feminised territories of flesh and lands are co-
constitutive of many practices of critique (Motta, 2011, 2013, 2018, 2019, 2020). It is
thus imperative to decolonise critique and critical social theory as a means of moving
towards post-Covid futurities that do not reproduce these coordinates of onto-
epistemological denial and violence of modernity/coloniality in its genealogy of the
pandemic, reading of theory itself, and visioning of post-Covid futurities.
Perhaps most centrally and most powerfully these logics of epistemological terra
nullius become constitutive of parts of the racialised and feminised other(ed) herself. The
long process of subjectification of her to the internalisation of the hierarchical and
alienating dichotomies of being, knowing and relating of modernity/coloniality creates
what Anzaldúa names rajadura(s) (1987, 2015: 1–2). As Hartley (2010: 134) describes,
‘one is then rajada; sliced right down the middle by the inner conflict resulting from such
internalisation. This slice or cut – la rajadura – manifests as the individual’s incor-
poration of the herida abierta (open wound) of the border.’
6 Thesis Eleven XX(X)

Yet the mangrove swamps and those majorities rendered to the margins of modernity
have never been and continue to not be captured and fully contained by the logics and
(ir)rationalities of systemic misrepresentation and attempted onto-epistemological genocide.

Mangroves

how to write these violent, veiled yet mundane stories?

how to find words for the disappointment that slices a slither of my heart?
how to make fathomable in a way that undoes the harm,
and captures her completeness?

how to keep together in the same frame

this beautiful waterscape, with the damp, dark lounges
upon lounges of pipes, cracked windowpanes,
dirty blankets, discarded, forgettable things?

I noticed out of the corner of my eye, the Mangroves

reminders of the capacity to survive in salt and fresh waters
beneath the eye-line, a world of webbed connections
visible to those with intention, heart, and a dose of redemption

maybe they are the sense makers

of messaging strangers, wandering walking
in derelict lanes, car parks, abandoned houses
elves swinging innocently on window frames

maybe they are the guides, the help

to read between the lines
reach the out of sight
not as shadows of despair, perhaps even places of delight

I’m standing in the rain, shouting your name

just in case you hear me
I wait some more in a stranger’s door
perhaps, too, it is the Grey Gums

standing at ease along the derelict lane

through storm and harsh sun, humidity and rain
holding out their branches to catch my lostness
when I cannot find you.

the sandwich and apple I devoutly carried in my bag

a small offering to your ravenous hunger
accompany me home
a soothing friend, to half-fill the void of your absence
Motta 7

I try not to think too much of the black crows

focus on the kookaburra, and that white bird
whose name I do not know
meet with tenderness the dread
weave with unconditional devotion that red, golden thread.
(Sara C. Motta, 15 December 2020)

Thus, it is not enough, never enough, and nor is it sequential and linear, to make
visible and bring to thought the senseless normality of the onto-epistemological vio-
lences constitutive of the geopolitics of hetero-patriarchal modernity/coloniality and
reproduced through the differential governmental and territorial logics of the biopolitical
management of the Covid-19 pandemic. To remain within this move in representation is
to reinscribe the colonised into the coloniser’s logics of anti-representation and to
assume that as Lugones (2010: 748) describes, ‘global capitalist colonial system is in
every way successful in its destruction of people’s, knowledges, relations and econo-
mies’. It is a move that tends to occur from those enacting the gaze upon and about the
absence of the feminised and radicalised other; a gaze that can only see us as victim,
criminal, exotic object but never as dignified knower. It does not come from us. Rather
we re-member in the flesh and blood and bones how:

For 300 years she was invisible, she was not heard. Many times she wished to speak, to act,
to protest, to challenge . . . She hid her feelings; she hid her truths; she concealed her fire-
but she kept stoking her inner flame . . . a light shone through her veil of silence . . . the spirit
of the fire spurs her to fight for her own skin and piece of ground to stand on, a ground from
which to view the world – a perspective, a home ground where she can plumb the rich
ancestral roots into her own ample mestiza heart. (Anzaldúa, 1987: 45)

Indeed, for the dignity and possibilities of self-liberation and healing of the episte-
mological and ontological wounds/rajaduras of the gendered and racialised subjects of
the margins and swamplands of modernity/coloniality ‘challenging the old self’s ortho-
doxy is never enough; you [we] must submit a sketch of an alternative self’ (Anzaldúa,
2002: 559).
Such a process of affirmative feminised/ist decolonial epistemological praxis is by
necessity constituted through a stepping-inwards to the experience of the flesh of living
between ‘los intersticios’ in the borderlands of non-being in which trauma is systemic and
systematic but also where survivance courses through the healing hands of the grand-
mothers and her running waters below the concrete containments (Motta, 2018). This
involves a healing of the rajadura and herida abierta of the border that attempts to slice us
from within and without. Healing critique cannot be enacted, as Anzaldúa argues, through
‘your tenets and your laws . . . your lukewarm gods’ (1987: 22). Rather ‘What I want
is . . . the freedom to carve and chisel my own face, to staunch the bleeding with aches, to
fashion my own gods out of my entrails. And if going home is denied me then I will have to
stand and claim my space, making a new culture – una cultura mestiza – with my own
lumber, my own bricks and mortar and my own feminist architecture’ (1987: 22).
The freedom to carve and chisel our own faces ruptures the coordinates and con-
tainments of knowing-being and reason/rationality of coloniality/modernity and which
8 Thesis Eleven XX(X)

criss-cross many traditions of critique and critical social theory. It is through these
threads and wisdoms, however fragmented, invisibilised and hunted down that we have
and continue to survive despite ongoing apocalyptic logics. Here the territories of the
land/ancestors, the territories of the body and the knowledges of deep time and culture
become key enfleshed sites of a process of conocimiento and liberatory knowing
(Anzaldúa, 2002, 2015). As Anzaldúa states: ‘let’s stop importing . . . the Western Car-
tesian split point of view and root ourselves in the mythological soil and soul of this
continent’ (1987: 68). Such as descent and stepping inwards involves forms of self/other
knowledge making and knowledges that are thus necessarily embodied, emotional,
spiritual and ancestral (Anzaldúa, 1987: 26–8, 45–8; 2002, 2009; Paccacerqua, 2016;
Pitts, 2016; Motta, 2017a, 2017b, 2018). Here that which has been rendered flesh and
less-than-human relegated to non-being and epistemological terra nullius becomes a
site/sites of knowing-being, relating and weaving the world otherwise. Re-connection to
embodied memories of violation and suvivance when kneaded together through peda-
gogical praxis of popular and Indigenous education can create narratives which disrupt
hegemonic discourses (as representations and material practise) that seek to name,
shame, individualise and disarticulate (see Motta, 2018, 2021, for further discussion).
Such reconnection and decolonising/feminised pedagogical praxis arguably offer med-
icinal epistemological-political practices across the body politic as the logics of dis-
posability and anti-life survival of the fittest generalise across and fracture the certainties
of knowing-being of the territories and bodies of the (anti)life of Whiteness.
Such praxis can be transformative in process in the shifting of somatic and affective
blocks to feeling and connection to deep time and re-membering and result in meaning
making which provides knowledges and tools with which to enact change in everyday
life, cultivate infrastructures of care and nurture ecologies of intimacy. It can rupture the
numbness of alienation, hyper-fragmentation and collective unrecognised grief that has
been intensified and generalised across the body politics during Covid-19 and offer ways
to re-connect to our knowing-being otherwise. Ceremony to re-connect to Country/
Madre Tierra and the more than human and non-human kin through which we are in
relation open doorways to walking with such kin, to engaging with the cycles of life,
death and rebirth, to embodying the erotic power of deep embodied connection of which
Audrey Lorde (1985) speaks and re-enchanting the world, the word and our relationship
to both.
Next, therefore, I invite you to journey through an other genealogy and storying of the
apocalypse, to southwest Colombia to listen to some of decolonising critique and the
epistemological politics from the Black/racialised and feminised flesh-body so as to
explore with greater depth and to offer as epistemological-political ethics of gift towards
post-Covid embodied visioning what such enfleshment of reason and knowledges of the
body feels-looks like.

Trunk and leaves: Journeying inwards and otherwise

to southwest Colombia
Colombia and the region of the Valle del Cauca have been the site of ongoing hetero-
patriarchal modern/colonial violences in which a logic of ‘politics as war’ and ‘war as
Motta 9

politics’ has been dominant in both the visible internal conflict between armed guerrillas
and the Colombian state (in its formal and paramilitary forms) and crisscrossing the
everyday interstices of community life. A long-standing coalition of power between the
US, Colombian political and economic elites and paramilitary forces has shaped a
political-economic terrain characterised by dispossession in which Indigenous, Afro and
poor Mestiza communities are rendered disposable and as epistemologically terra nul-
lius/wasteland (Hernández Reyes, 2019; Bermúdez, 2013) and in which attempts at
popular resistance have been and continue to be actively criminalised and associated
with incivility and nondemocracy.
Yet, within this context in Cali, Buenaventura, two key cities in the region powerful
lineages and practices of inter-cultural feminist and decolonial praxis in numerous
intersectional feminist movements, feminist political schools and the women’s social
movement in Cali that emerged as part of the 2021 popular uprisings and general strikes
are emergent. These experiences embody the kind of onto-epistemological survivance
and liberatory healing suggested above. They arguably offer gifts for thinking, feeling,
and enfleshing as a political-epistemological project otherwise that honours, centres and
enters into respectful relation with Black sovereignty struggles and wisdoms against and
beyond the current conjuncture of Covid-19 we find ourselves in differentially in these
lands of so-called Australia. They exist, re-exist and flourish, prior to, during and beyond
Covid-19 in complexly violent contexts; enfleshing an adaptability to such complex
terrains through building ecologies of intimacies and infrastructures of care and nour-
ishment which protect against these violences and foster an other epistemological pol-
itics of liberation. In many ways they/we are like a mangrove swamp with (in)visible
network of roots that rupture borders and containments and embody a capacity of sur-
vivance, and emergent Black joy despite and with the toxins and viruses that surrounds
us/them. We are the antidote. Below I offer two stories to bring to written thought some
of these epistemological-political gifts.

Wild woman/Mujer salvaje

We invoke the ancestors, abuelas and four elements before beginning the first of our
dialogos de saberes. We then sit in circle, Mestiza, Black, Indigenous-Mestiza mothers
and daughters and Black and Mestiza men all participants in different and sometimes
overlapping intersectional feminist and decolonial movements and political experiences.
We read in turns from the story of finding the wild woman/la mujer salvaje. There are
moments of silence as we pause to take in some of the depth of the words and wisdoms
being spoken. Someone notices that a colibri (humming bird) comes to hover next to us.
A sacred animal spirit and animal totem of the city of Cali. We come to a close and move
to follow through with the suggested activity of making our wild woman archetype with
cloth and string and other craft elements that had been shared between us. As we stitch,
sow and stick ‘her’ together we begin to dialogue about a thematic that has been
emergent in our own practise and work in relation to movements and communities
deepening the threads of past conversations and dialogues. We discuss the use and
exhaustion of occupying the figure of the survivor. Yes we had all in different ways
suffered and continued to suffer systemic violences and yes we had moved away from
10 Thesis Eleven XX(X)

being ‘victims’ spoken about and for in our combined rich political heritages and hi/
herstories. But we were tired, tired of constant struggle and being in relation to the Power
and Processes that had caused us (in the plural both of those present and those in which
we were in relation) harm. We talked, bringing in examples and noting down our
reflections onto the white board beside us themes that were emergent. We laughed as we
pieced together our creations and we told stories of being the survivor and feeling stuck
in that binary subjectivity. We worked towards the insights of the story of the wild
woman determining her sovereignty and knowing-being not in relation to Power; not
exhausted by the (im)possibility of recognition but as free in relation in the mangrove
swamps and margins of our own communities and relating. Of what this might mean and
involve to embody together and despite the violences the power of Black joy and the
power of weaving together other modes of living, defending, caring for land and each
other. As the time of the workshop moved near to its end someone suggested ending with
a meditation to go to meet our wild woman and listen to her talk to us and offer gifts we
might carry with us outside of this sacred time and space.
This wild woman archetype doll has stayed with us, now three years later with many
of the participants still in Cali, and others such as myself in different lands and territories.
We talk of them not as things but as living archetypal energies and wisdom holders in
relation offering us ongoing threads and seeds of a becoming otherwise in thought and
practice. This is a re-weaving with deep time and the knowledge of the more than human
flesh/body ancestor-archetype in which forms of political subjectivity and knowing
subjectivity are co-created that rupture the possessive individual and individualising
modern/colonial subject (Moreton-Robinson, 2015; Motta, 2022). Here we see the
deeply pedagogical process of meaning-making and of constructing liberatory theory as
an enfleshed knowing in relation through the mapping collectively of other narratives
and possibility of self in relation and the carrying of that more than human relation with
us across territories and times. This is a moment of our coming into being otherwise, as
an element in our healing of the rajadura of the herida abierta. We recognise how being
in the binary relationship of survivor keeps us trapped in a relationship with Power; we
feel-know or senti-pensar with the wisdoms and messages of the ancestors and the wild
woman archetype what it is to live in this third space that does not seek recognition from
Power but mutual collective recognition from those of us who have been relegated to the
borders of knowing-being and politics; relegated to social death. This is a thread in our
weaving of other relationalities with which to tejer and trensar other modes of social
reproduction and politics of life within the multiple territories that hold us and which we
honour, protect and nurture. It is a thread of our weaving that nurtures our mutual aid
networks and relationships and responsibilities of care and keeps many of us alive and
held in our grief at state orchestrated death prior to and during the Covid-19 pandemic
and/as our governments’ ongoing criminalisation and strategic abandonment. These
kinds of epistemological-political processes do not reduce reason to cognition or
merely cognitive (individualised) objects and processes, rather there are multiple
languages and literacies of which re-connection to the territories of the body with the
territories of Madre Tierra and the Ancestors is key. In these ecologies of critical
intimacy (Motta, 2019) – as opposed to critical distance that marks so much critical
theory traditions of modernity/coloniality – we bring together story, ceremony, music,
Motta 11

dance, sacred crafting, affective connection with our capacity to re-enflesh ourselves in
the world and word.
I foreground this moment and process because it signifies a shift from attempting to
only speak to Power and scream until our voices are hoarse so that Power might hear and
recognise us, towards an epistemological-political-pedagogical project which seeks to
nurture territories otherwise that embody and enflesh relationships of critical intimacy,
mutual recognition and tender accountability within our complex feminist/feminised
Blackness and racialisation.
Onto-epistemological practices such as these thus foster the conditions of possibility to
appear on the register of political visibility as knowing-subjects on our own terms. They
are the space and place of an other politics (of knowledge) which make it possible for raced
and feminised subaltern subjects to see our/themselves and each/one another as fully
human when we have been relegated as external to modern/colonial renditions of humanity
and humanness (Motta, 2016b, 2017a, 2018). This is so important because racialised and
feminised subjects and communities can come to believe in parts of our being – as Frantz
Fanon (2002 [1961]) and Bell, 2001 so forcefully demonstrated – that we/they have
nothing to offer, that our/their lives and experiences lack value, that we/they are unlovable
and are indeed epistemological terra nullius. It thus becomes essential for survivance and
the possibilities of flourishing prior to, during and post-Covid-19 to not only resist the
palimpsest of power as an external force, but to decolonise the internal territories of
knowledge and social life and create other decolonised and feminised ways of knowing-
being.

The Escuela de Mariposas de Alas Nuevas

The second story I would like to share comes from the feminist and decolonising praxis
of the Escuela de Mariposas de Alas Nuevas (The School of Butterflies with New
Wings). This is a feminist political school based in Buenaventura, an urban centre which
has been subject to ongoing para/military violences and assassinations of militants,
organisers of Afro-Colombian and Indigenous lineages as well as dispossession of rural
lands for monocultural exports. The school emerged as an inter-cultural women’s space
which sought to make sense of and transform these multi-dimensional systemic vio-
lences of negation and disposability through practices of radical education inspired
within traditions of Black, Indigenous and intersectional feminist lineages. As Carmen
Ines, a co-founder of the school, describes:

Our organisation began about 6 years ago. We were called to do this. We began bare foot so
to speak but we decided that we didn’t want more of this life for our women, for ourselves,
our children and grandchildren . . . We wanted to leave behind these complex violences and
so we decided to begin step by step. We met and formed a group of women and began to
plan, to voice what it was we didn’t want any more for ourselves, and what we wanted; we
wanted to be free like butterflies . . . We looked at each other and we saw each other and saw
our reflections as butterflies. Butterflies are free, true? And that is what we want for our-
selves, to be free. We began in the school, training and learning together, first, to then take
the butterfly affect to our communities . . .
12 Thesis Eleven XX(X)

The majority both facilitators and participants (who then often go on to become
facilitators) are racialised mothers at the centre of kinship groups, social economies and
forms of life that the logics and (ir)rationalities of anti-life of modernity/coloniality seek
to destroy and disarticulate. Such violent structural and everyday experiences, continued
and reproduced during the management of the Covid-19 pandemic and ongoing strategic
state abandonment often become internalised through individualising anti-Black dis-
courses which re-present these traumatic conditions as their individual fault or as due
to their individual pathologies, and lack of education. They too weave multiple lan-
guages of enfleshed reason into their pedagogical processes that unlearn such patholo-
gising discourses and centre liberatory healing; not as a therapeutic depoliticised
biomedical practise but as a deeply collective process of self-determination and re-
gaining of inner and outer sovereignty. Their work and the genealogy of their survivance
precedes Covid-19 and continued throughout where the force of Afro and Indigenous
women weaved itself deeply into the popular rebellions of 2021 and ongoing politicisa-
tion of 2022 (Motta et al., forthcoming). Feliza participant in the escuela shares an
example of this praxis:

For our processes of healing, or healing action (san acción) we practice with the form of the
Mandala to represent the different elements of our selves: our physical, our emotional, our
mental and our spiritual being, with the ancestral and Mother Earth often in the middle. We
use lots of different modalities that connect us back to our bodies by bringing them love,
filling the woman who has been impacted by all these brutal violences with love. How do
we do this? We use plants, we use massage techniques, we use ritual, we use dance and
storytelling . . . This raises the energy and self-worth of the person . . . It reconnects us back
to the energies of the earth and our ancestors. So, when I am able to love myself in this way,
when I eventually arrive to the moment of self-love, I feel the necessity, and am able, to give
this love to others.

Building agency, dignity and inner sovereignty as Feliza and Carmen reflect means to
re-connect ancestrally and centre beliefs and practices which honour the right to be loved
and love as a practice of doing and mending the herida abierta not a thing as possession, and
their value as wisdom-keepers. This is another form of enfleshed knowing in which the
body of the ancestors and the elementals as more than human and non-human kin become
actors and fonts of wisdom with which to guide a deeply political process of healing which
enables collective action and defence of territories of land and body. An example of this
kind of life and love affirming praxis is a workshop related to recovering ancestral con-
nection in which the women trace their stories of wisdom and strength through recovering
connection to their foremothers with the use of sacred chants and meditation. As part of this,
they develop a practice in which they retrace and re-narrate their own lives with a focus on
moments of survival, resilience and wisdom as opposed to lack, failure and victimhood.
They do this through paper leaves upon which the women write of these moments and then
place down the leaves ritually moving from the outside of the room to the centre of the
mandala where candles are placed which represent the flame of life and resilience.
Practice such as this enables (re)connection to the ancestors ‘as an active source of
meaning and struggle’ (Vázquez, 2012: 248) which nurtures return to self, and inner
Motta 13

sovereignty. This is, an inter-cultural pluridiverse feminist politics of healing liberation,

a sister praxis to the rich traditions of Indigenous and Black feminisms which pieces back
together the fragments of self and other, lost and forgotten due to the complex and
violent logics of modernity/coloniality (Dillard, 2016; Motta, 2018). As Feliza expres-
ses, ‘unless we work to heal ourselves, we cannot create a healed society’. Such healing
is deeply epistemological and embraces multiple literacies and wisdoms of the flesh
including territory as land, territory as body and memory, more than human and non-
human kin, ceremony, oral storytelling and which thus foregrounds new knowledges,
renders present new subjects of knowing, and co-creates new forms of liberatory politics
of decolonising love that mend the herida abierta (Alexander, 2005; Levins Morales,
1998; Motta, 2018: Motta and Bermúdez, 2019).
This experience cultivates ecologies of intimacies that honour and re-centre Black
and Indigenous motherhood and mothering as a collective practice and ethics of care and
politics of life. This is referred to by participants and coordinators as co-madreando (to
co-mother) and develops into infrastructures of care and other forms of social repro-
duction. Attributes of emotional, practical, mental and intellectual-political labour are
shared in the communities to which participants belong through the formation of
women’s groups. Participants thus pass through a process in which they recognise their
role as knowers, honour their distinct linages of knowledge and wisdoms and learn the
pedagogical-practices of sharing their knowledges with other women, and in this way
expand the reach and co-laborative feminist praxis of the School. Inner and outer
sovereignty are theorised and spoken of in relation to healing, recuperation and defence
of homeplace, tierra and family. This involves defence of their territories from
encroachment in which the women literally place their bodies on the line (Sutton, 2007),
the making of demands on the state to protect their right to life and integrity or ensure the
life of their communities, and forms of collectivising and thinking together the condi-
tions and practices of social reproduction.
These two stories as Cruz (2001) talks of in relation to Afro-American women and
eminently translatable here, enflesh a genealogy and an onto-epistemology of the Black/
racialised feminised body in resistance and re-existencias despite, against and beyond
the virus of the current system. It is an onto-epistemological politics which disrupts and
decolonises the hierarchical borders of thought and practice, mind and body, reason and
spirit, and critique and flesh and an articulation of the question of what is to be done that
reproduces a dualism between social theory and social reality, that are constitutive of the
geopolitics of knowledge of hetero-patriarchal modernity/coloniality and which often re-
emerge as the co-constitutive underside of critical social theory prior to and as its
readings and genealogy of Covid-19 (Motta, 2017a, 2018, 2020).

Fruit: (Re)turning to Mulumbimba, the unceded lands

of the Awabakal and Worimi
The mangrove fruits move away from their original trees and enable the mangrove
groves to migrate to new territories. We as inhabitants of these misnamed margins of
modernity/coloniality and its lettered city which has been complicit in ongoing geno-
cidal logics of our attempted epistemicide often find ourselves split across territories
14 Thesis Eleven XX(X)

through logics and flows of both dispossession and desire for survivance. As we move/
are moved, we navigate having our limbs spread across lands. Yet we are accompanied
by our ancestors, co-madres and the wisdoms re-membered and gifted from our epis-
temological politics of the Black/racialised feminised body-in-relation. This (politics of)
epistemology of the flesh moves across multiple temporalities and spatialities cultivating
political subjects in relation that actively refuse the material, psychic, and epistemolo-
gical apocalyptic borders and bio-political orderings co-constitutive of hetero-
patriarchal capitalist-coloniality.
Honouring and centring the struggle for Indigenous sovereignty on this land I come
into inter-cultural intentional connection in which we sit in deep listening to re-member
and recover our foremothers’ wisdoms and grandmothers’ stories. I commit to weaving
an epistemological politics of homecoming, healing of the rajaduras and sanctuary
space-place of kinship (m)otherwise. This is an ancient herstory and an ongoing struggle
against and beyond the onto-epistemological violences of the colony. Here I move to the
final story.
A group of inter-cultural women in Mulumbimba and beyond are fostering flour-
ishing and a reclaiming of inner and outer territories of being and knowing, relationships
of care and the safety of belonging through re-membering plant wisdoms and ancestral
medicinal practices (Edwards, 2020). This is consciously and intentionally committed to
in a way that ruptures heteropatriarchal relationships of care and rather braids together
forms of co-mothering across home, place, language and culture (Motta et. al., 2022). It
also requires that we dwell in layers of enfleshed reason through relating and right
relationship with non-human plant allies and guides and the wisdoms that they gift us
(Kimmerer, 2020). Such circles of reclaiming and revival of kinship (m)otherwise
sustain us to survive and refuse intensified logics of criminalisation, fragmentation and
isolation during Covid-19 and to hold us through our losses and our grief due to ongoing
state genocidal strategies.
Some of us are far away from our ancestral lands and so we must root into a belonging
in these lands and learn of the plants (both native and non-native) which inhabit the
Country that holds us. Following Levins Morales (1998) and her call for a politics of
integrity and healing wholeness, ‘[this] means reconnecting with all our grandmothers,
black and white, to tell their stories and connect with their wisdoms across time’. We
learn together and from many sources, lineages and from raced and feminised medicine-
women and curanderas about the properties and medicines of plants and herbs; how to
develop plant communication; how to meet with the ancestors in deep time and receive
messages of guidance and support; how to grow and tend urban rebellious gardens in the
small balconies, re-occupied lands, shared living spaces that we inhabit, and how to
nurture and tend to our networks of mutual aid and transformative justice.
I sit here in mid-Covid-19 pandemic, as a I write with a cup of skull cap, oat straw and
lavender infused tea; a tea for trauma, a medicine drink that calms nervous system
overdrive and adrenal fatigue caused by the ongoing systemic trauma, that eases the
aching body and muscles in shoulder and hips so that they might open to joy and
pleasure; otherwise parts of the body that carry too much weight; loosening the weight of
surviving to the lightness and fluidity of wildness. Vinegars for blood and fatigue;
tinctures for healing hearts wracked with grief shared with open hands and listening
Motta 15

hearts across borders and separations. Here the plants guide and gift knowledges of the
flesh with which to weave collective well-being and self-determination.
There is recovery in these enfleshed learnings and re-memberings; a recovery of self-
worth and a mutual recognition of our capacity to be the wild-women authors of our own
lives, wisdom-keepers and weavers of other political infrastructures dedicated to life,
care and well-being. There is a healing too in the intergenerational coming together of
raced and feminised women who share diverse and divergent stories and come to
reconciliation in their sharing and mutual caring and loving that breaks the tight con-
straints of White kinship structures of (dis)possession. There is a strengthening of our
minds, bodies and hearts, a readiness for the ongoing realities of attempting to (not be
killed by) and live and breathe deeply and freely in the liminal spaces of at once
appearing as racialised and feminised non-being and at the same time be-coming into be-
ing knowing otherwise. There is a trusting that we are indeed, together, in common, the
ones that we have been waiting for. Like this we rupture the borders that have wounded
us; the epistemological containments that have kept us exiled from ourselves, and the
logics which have sought to turn us against each other.

Seeds: Emergent post-Covid futurities

We re-turn to the now and this not-yet post-Covid conjuncture. We re-turn to the original
question of how social theory can contribute to our current conjuncture; to make shared
sense and to plant seeds of transformation. What are the learnings and the gifts from this
other site of enunciation, of telling a genealogy otherwise, from the stories of the
epistemological politics of the Black/racialised feminised body-in-relation that can
nurture and birth post-Covid futurities dedicated to life, our lives well lived? The wild
woman doll archetype comes to presence, for the threads that she gifts are that we must
wild the political-epistemological and step inwards towards an epistemological-politics
of the wild.
At the heart of this is a re-turn to the territories of knowing-being that have been
rendered abject, irrational and dangerous as the grounds of possibility for decolonising
reason and/as defence of the territories of land and life with which to reproduce the
conditions of community liberation and healing. This involves recognition that our
experiences, when collectively worked with, can be kneaded into the metaphorical and
material bread with which to nurture existence, survival, and flourishing. Such a return
involves grounding into the herstories of our grandmothers, re-connecting with their
wisdoms and centring ancestrality and spiritual knowledges/knowings. Such a re-turn
offers both gifts in relation to visioning and enfleshing post-Covid futurities as well as
sustains us to survive Covid-19 and the systematic apocalyptic conditions constitutive of
our current anti-life social system.
This is fundamentally a deeply epistemological-pedagogical re-turn, and it asks that
‘we’ centre the knowledges of Black and Indigenous flesh disrupting the current hier-
archies of thought, knowing and critique in which they/we are relegated to the margins of
political power and theoretical production. It does not stop there though, for it suggests
that this is not just a switching of who is in power or who is an expert or a prophet of
revolutionary truth but rather pushes towards a decolonising of the very coordinates of
16 Thesis Eleven XX(X)

what we imagine politics and the role of the epistemological-ontological and the
knowing-subject within liberatory politics and critique. It asks that ‘we’ refuse a
monological and violently separating onto-epistemological modern/colonial logic of
reason and (non)being in which there are some that know and some that are known and in
which reason is relegated to abstraction and dis-embodiment, and rather requires deep
listening and be receptivity to dwell in new-ancient territories of knowing-being,
relating, political subjectivity, kinship and social reproduction.
The Afro and Indigenous women of the School of New Butterfly Wings share with us
elements of what this might look like including a re-rooting into lived and ancestral
wisdoms, in which we can become subjects through which a politics of wholeness,
integrity and homecoming that centres the racialised maternal might be enfleshed.
Homeplace becomes a key place of survival, culture and resistance and a space of
political organisation and solidarity and Black and Indigenous mothering becomes an
onto-epistemological praxis of defending and nurturing other social-economics and
infrastructures of care. Homeplaces such as these sustain us through viruses and pan-
demics, and these systemic anti-life logics and (i)rationalities. They allow us to continue
to resist, re-existir and to flourish. Homeplace in this way offers an enfleshed vision for
the protocols, processes and onto-epistemological relationalities and pedagogical prac-
tices that can sustain and support us in weaving such a pluridiverse praxis of post-Covid
futurities
Like this we can cultivate an epistemological birthing power that is ‘neither white nor
surface; [but] dark . . . ancient . . . deep’ (Lorde, 1985: 37). In these lands of the unceded
Awabakal and Wormi from where I write this asks of us to centre Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander sovereignty, listen and follow the lead of the Blak matriarchs on these
lands, stand on the frontlines against all logics and interventions of the carceral het-
eropatriarchal modern/colonial (settler) state upon Blak life, refuse and resist its apoc-
alyptic anti-life biopolitical governmentality, and learn in inter-cultural relation to weave
such a politics of healing liberations.
The women of the plant circle remind us of the importance of placing and planting our
praxis of political-epistemological wilding and that this does not mean a return to bor-
dered essentialism but rather an honouring of our foremothers and forefathers of First
Nation’s peoples of these lands, their ongoing sovereignty and their/our survivance in the
mangrove swamps, for the mangrove swamps are ‘nervous spaces not yet property’ and
‘gaps in the grid’ (Edmonds, 2010: 134) of hetero-patriarchal modernity/coloniality.
They remind us that together we can co-weave pluridiverse communities of care
embedded in insurgent and decolonising re-membering and presence of other herstories
of survivance and existence/re-existencias. They remind us to tend to our spaces and
relations of critical intimacy in which we (re)learn how to dwell with, listen to and learn
from each other’s stories.
As the wild Bla(c)k and Indigenous woman becomes visible in her own terms, she
forges the conditions of possibility of a politics otherwise and/as an enfleshment of
reason with which to weave our healing liberations. This epistemological politics of the
Black/racialised and feminised body-in-relation cannot be contained by the logics and
(ir)rationalities of knowing-non-being of hetero-patriarchal modernity/coloniality (and
many traditions of critique and critical social theory) with their hierarchical orderings of
Motta 17

reason/flesh, mind/spirit, theory/practice, cognition/emotion and science/nature. Nor can

they be contained by or by their provincialising renditions and readings of the Covid-19
pandemic that attempt to re-taim and maim us of the Covid-19 pandemic by reinforcing
and reproducing the gaze of Whiteness and its anti-life systems. It by necessity must
re-begin from our storytelling, apocalyptic and survivance genealogies otherwise, re-
membering of our herstories, reclaiming of lineages of radical education and other lit-
eracies of un/relearning and co-theorising. It is not embodied in the figure of the valiant
lone intellectual or the charismatic prophet from above nor from their gaze that prides
itself on critical distance and separation from the messiness of Black/Indigenous and
feminised life. Rather it is embodied by the storytellers, medicine-women, guardian-
gardeners and curanderas (Motta, 2018) sharing their knowledges, co-weaving spaces of
epistemological home-coming and mutual recognition, and nurturing before, during and
beyond Covid-19 the ecologies of intimacy, joy and sovereignty of/as the mangrove
swamps.
I invite you, then, to join us in the mangrove swamps, to unlearn logics and (ir)ra-
tionalities of possessive White individualism in thought, practice and body, and to co-
weave Indigenous/Black and feminised led onto-epistemological politics of liberatory
healing with which to birth pluridiverse lifeworlds beyond the virus that is hetero-
patriarchal capitalist-coloniality.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

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Author biography
Sara C. Motta is a proud Mestiza-salvaje currently living, loving and re-existiendo on the
unceded lands of the Awabakal and Worimi peoples, NSW, so-called Australia. She is mother
curandera, poet, bare-breasted philosopher, popular educator, and Associate Professor at the
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University of Newcastle, NSW. Sara has worked for over two decades with raced and feminised
kin in resistance/re-existencias in, against and beyond heteronormative capitalist-coloniality in
Europe, Latin America and Australia and has published widely in academic and activist-
community outlets. Her latest book, Liminal Subjects: Weaving (Our) Liberation (Rowman and
Littlefield), was winner of the 2020 Best Feminist Book, International Studies Associate (ISA).