The Case / The Course
We were a group of twenty-four women in which two were instructors coming from the city, and the rest were quilombola women. We gathered for a technical training course in confectionery. However, in addition to the practical lessons, the course plan included lectures on women's rights, women's health, and entrepreneurship, totaling fifty class hours.
We left the state capital and headed for the quilombo early in the evening, and later that night, after an eight-hour bus ride, we arrived at the confectionery instructor's house in a neighboring town. We slept for a while and then took a taxi to the quilombo, which was a two-hour drive away. At six in the morning, we arrived. The dirt road that stretched along the quilombo was reddish, and the women walked that path to get around. When all participants arrived, we gathered under a roof next to the home of one of the participants. During the course, we sheltered ourselves on the earthen floor where the community children's classes were held.
The theme will be detailed later, however, it is important to explain that, in Brazil, quilombo is conceived as a place of refuge created by slaves during the colonial period in the country. A place of difficult access and incorporated into nature, the quilombo constitutes a territory of collective freedom and also of identification with the land. Even today, it is a place of resistance to the colonization process.
We were in charge of giving the lectures on human and labor rights, but we arrived there without being introduced and with no prior knowledge about the participants’ backgrounds. To make matters worse, the women were not aware that they were supposed to attend these workshops. A four-day immersion with us followed, with theoretical classes in the morning and practical cooking lessons in the afternoon.
This article shares the experience of an encounter between city women who supposedly bore knowledge legitimized and certified by urban-scientific power-knowledge, colonial and modern, and quilombola women who had enrolled in a technical training course in confectionery to learn how to make sweets and jams. It also shares the epistemic violence (Spivak Reference Spivak2010) that became evident in this encounter between the urban and the rural.
The initiative was taken by a training program for socially vulnerable women, more specifically, in this case, women living at a quilombo in rural Brazil. This article does not address or evaluate the program or its objectives, results, and efficiency; instead, it discusses the situations in which we perceived ourselves as subjects colonized by Western knowledge, on the one hand, and as colonizers of other subjects, in this case, Brazilian rural quilombola women, on the other. Therefore, we question the imbrication of our ambiguous position as colonized/colonizers in the scope of our relationship with the rural quilombola women, as we bore an urban, academic, white, and European form of knowledge.
This article challenges the contradictions we face as researchers (from the perspective of knowledge as a place of power) and as women (that is, the self in its dimensions of race, gender, and class): the way in which we act simultaneously as colonized and colonizers in our research practices and as women. We were colonized because we adopted a parameter of knowledge that was not local and, much less, historicized. And we were also colonizers, for we sought to replicate the patterns that we had been taught. According to Catherine Walsh, María Lugones, and Martina Low, the production of knowledge and gender is also determined by the space, which is, in turn, permeated by the formative characteristics of a given locus of enunciation (Low Reference Low2006; Walsh Reference Walsh2007; Lugones Reference Lugones2014). The way of being a city or country woman lies between urban and rural, which is represented herein by the quilombo. Likewise, in this context the urban becomes a representation of the fifteenth-century metropolis, and quilombola rurality becomes the space to be civilized. This shows a scarcely questioned intersectional factor in decolonial research, which is the asymmetric relationship between the urban and the rural in the countries of the global South.
Therefore, our goal is to show that the European knowledge framework continues to operate as the zero-point hubris of knowledge in the Brazilian context (Castro-Goméz Reference Castro-Goméz2005), still established as neutral and therefore universal, and thus obfuscating other possibilities of producing new ideas. This form of unbiased knowledge functions as an invisible thread that interweaves knowledge, subjects, and spaces regarded as legitimate, thus constituting a true entanglement that shapes scientific rationality. It is this very form of legitimized knowledge that supervenes in the production of spaces, what is regarded as urban or rural, and what the relationship between them is, thus highlighting the coloniality of rurality, or more specifically, quilombola rurality.
The data and the facts presented herein were collected on site by the researchers, then recorded in their field diaries and organized based on the discussions and debates held before, during, and after the activities. The oral reports derived from the work experience developed over five days in 2016, as well as in informal and open conversations with the quilombola women during breaks in the confectionery classes, in which we also interacted. It was an intense stay and presence, for we not only gave the scheduled classes but also lived, slept, and shared meals at the home of one of the course participants.
The Brazilian Context of the Urban and Quilombola Rurality
We must emphasize that to deal with the notions of urban and rural in Brazil, it is necessary to delve into the complexities of this relationship. We are not talking about any given form of the urban or rural. Instead, we are talking about a country that has been a receptacle of the actions and conceptions brought by its colonizers; a supplier of natural resources that forged the wealth of those in the old world from a country situated in the global South, and colonized for more than 300 years by Europeans, during which time the slave order remained as an organizing force of the Brazilian economy and social relations.
The coloniality of power, knowledge, and being is based on the notion of race developed by European settlers during the colonial period (Mignolo Reference Mignolo2013; Lugones Reference Lugones2014; Quijano Reference Quijano and Clímaco2014). In this context, the racialization of subjects and spaces determined the social division of labor (Quijano Reference Quijano and Clímaco2014), and black or indigenous individuals were not regarded as subjects. Racially inferior, they had no subjectivity or autonomy, and the tasks requiring outstanding physical capacity were assigned to them.
Along with the racialization of bodies, the separation and hierarchy of mental work over physical work justified the legitimation of the slave system for more than three centuries. The colonial period was enough for the colonial forms of domination and oppression to be developed and engendered in Brazilian social organization, thus fostering the binary division of society. Today we continue to witness its effects, and the triad of coloniality/modernity/capitalism consolidated the “European/capitalist/military/Christian/patriarchal/white/heterosexual/male, who established in time and space several entangled global hierarchies” (Grosfoguel Reference Grosfoguel2008, 122). A Eurocentric standard began to operate as a benchmark for the organization of society and the establishment of social hierarchies.
As a result, European colonizers have advocated the universality of knowledge, as well as a form of modern/colonial scientific rationality resulting from its very locus of enunciation and disregarding any forms of knowledge other than those established by them as the modern and colonial ways of life (Dussel Reference Dussel1994; Mignolo Reference Mignolo2013). The hierarchization of knowledge as the externalization of this power-knowledge pattern has regulated social structures in the country since colonial times, relying on “an ideology, whose death was proclaimed but remains alive, with its power to opacify reality and make us myopic” regarding knowledge and subjective diversity (Freire Reference Freire2014, 89).
Added to that, this hierarchical pattern also operates on making women inferior, by depriving them of autonomy over their bodies and subjectivities and forcing them to submit to the tutelage and interdiction of colonial standards, “which brought their burden of misogynist beliefs and restructured the economy and political power in favor of men” (Federici Reference Federici2017, 401).
As for spaces, the dichotomy of coloniality was established between the global and the local, the center and the periphery, the urban and the rural, in which the second element of each pair was objectified or rendered invisible by the first. In the case of Brazil, thinking about the global refers to the urban as a model for developing colonial modes of existence, as opposed to rural forms, because the “rurality of rurality” in which the quilombola communities are situated is addressed here as part of the rural category. According to João Guimarães Rosa, ruralities in Brazil are many (Guimarães Rosa Reference Guimarães Rosa1957). Whatever is rural can only be so in its relation to what is urban, that is, as a starting point in the configuration of spaces. This takes place according to what is established by the rationality of the coloniality of power, which determines the production of territories to be exploited, on the one hand, and the patterns of progress to be followed, on the other hand, manipulating meanings according to the purpose to be achieved.
Therefore, coloniality determines that knowledge, genders, and spaces are formed in an internal and interdependent relationship in which one permeates the other in a binary constitution between what is valued or devalued, superior or inferior. This dichotomy is still experienced in contemporary Brazil, as this article demonstrates.
This article is organized into four sections. After this introduction, which contextualizes the problem, the second section contextualizes quilombola rurality in Brazil. We explain its formation, its complexity, and the dimensions of the “rurality of rurality,” given that we can regard Brazil as a rural country when compared to the global North. Nonetheless, it reproduces this dichotomy internally, determining other forms of rurality within its spaces, as spaces that fall short of rurality and are ready to be colonized.
Based on the propositions of the case in question, the third section discusses how the construction of this form of rurality implies and reinforces the coloniality of knowledge. Intertwined with the estrangements that occurred during the sexuality workshops, we address how coloniality interferes in gender relations and dimensions, outlining the asymmetries among women. The many layers of coloniality reinforce one another.
Finally, the conclusion presents final remarks on the three dimensions of coloniality (space, knowledge, and gender), while inquiring about the coherence of the researchers’ role in confronting these contradictions, both as subjects and scholars, during our encounter with others in our research practices. It would be necessary to decolonize the researcher, who often does not know how to speak in a nonauthoritarian way (Freire Reference Freire2014), much less listen, so as to establish a dialogic praxis.
This work contributes to decolonial theory by addressing “the rurality of rurality” in Brazil, demonstrating that the zero-point of knowledge-power-being-space in the country remains urban, as a metropolis that mirrors northern European references inspired by the zero-point of coloniality. Just as the different forms of coloniality intertwine, we, as researchers, placed ourselves at the intersection of domination during the course, sometimes as the colonized, sometimes as the colonizers.
The “Rurality of Rurality” in Brazil: The Coloniality of Quilombola Rurality
It is necessary to highlight the inherent complexity of urban and rural categories in Brazil, for there are various urban and rural contexts. However, this article addresses the metropolitan urban in a southern country that seeks to replicate the models of the global North and a form of rurality that can be regarded as “the rurality of rurality.” This takes place because quilombola territories specifically are still struggling to be legitimized in their specificities and to avoid the incorporation of the economic power of the monoculture and exportation practices of the Brazilian lands. According to the Brazilian Confederation of Agriculture and Livestock (CNA), the country is the third-largest exporter of agricultural products in the world.Footnote 1 In this context, we highlight the contradictions we found. The quilombo, a historical locus of black resistance with specific local knowledge, receives technical training courses according to the norms and standards of northern European scientific rationality, which constitutes a benchmark of “good knowledge” and “good behavior,” a model defended and replicated by urban institutions situated more than 500 km away from the state capital. We can identify the coloniality of the colonized herein.
For Milton Santos, the significance of space in its geographical location is not determined by itself. Spatial meanings are produced by a conjugation of actions, objects, and intentionalities constituting the content-forms that “bring together the process and the result, the function and the form, the past and the future, the object and the subject, the natural and the social” (Santos Reference Santos2006, 66). Therefore, spaces can consist of various layers of interdependent meanings, according to the logic of politics, civic consciousness, and the social space itself that is ascribed to a given place. These are the characteristics that add value to spaces.
What we have come to know as rural originated in the colonial period, with all its complexities. The “casa grande e senzala” (Freyre Reference Freyre2006) relationship has led to the intensification of the oppression of subaltern subjects, going beyond forced labor and reaching the bodies and subjectivities of the senzala inhabitants. Brazilian rurality derives from the relationship between colonizers and natives, the dominating and the dominated, with their permeable and malleable borders. These power relations define, in turn, who and what will be exploited. And although much of the abolition of slavery took place more than 130 years ago, Brazilian society still experiences the effects of this logic, including the organization of localities and the distribution of land. Agrarian reform has not happened in the country. Large portions of land are still owned by a few, keeping rural areas as “spaces for the large farms inserted in the agro-export model and the subsistence space of the excluded, the non-owners, the jecas-tatus” (Monte-Mor Reference Monte-Mor2004, 11). In that sense, land inequality in Brazil reinforces gender inequality. According to Oxfam Brasil,Footnote 2 94.5% of Brazilian rural areas are registered under male names, yet women are the majority working in rural establishments smaller than five hectares. That is, large properties remain under male dominance, and small family properties are cared for by females.
Given the interaction of dimensions of coloniality in the production of spaces in the country, the urban operates as a benchmark constituted by knowledge, space, and subject patterns similar to those found in the global North. The urban is taken as a model to be followed and pursued, as embodying the excellence of knowledge and ways of life, thus strengthening, in an intersectional way, the coloniality of the jecas-tatus,Footnote 3 that is, the female, poor, and uneducated subjects living in rural areas.
The concept of content-form coined by Santos affirms that spaces accumulate layers of meanings, actions, and intentionalities socially produced by the subjects (Santos Reference Santos2006). Therefore, it reinforces our epistemological choice of attributing the condition of “rurality of rurality” to the quilombo, for if the quilombo is indeed a historically marked space, it is also a place of reference and safety for former slaves who escaped their owners during colonial times; a result of the process of resistance to the slave order; a “naturalized” space for jeca tatu women; and currently a devalued space and a place of residence for those who are “socially disqualified” by coloniality (Souza Reference Souza2006).
Another angle from which to gaze at the coloniality of rurality is the direct relationship between coloniality and the modern urban project. Modernity is fulfilled in the urban domain, and it is through the construction of the everyday urban domain that the bourgeois way of life becomes possible. Therefore, everything that remains rural is fated to underdevelopment and ignorance. Walter Benjamin, Henri Lefebvre, and Milton Santos have explored this relationship extensively (Lefebvre Reference Lefebvre1969; Santos Reference Santos2006; Benjamin Reference Benjamin2009), but what is surprising is the existence of a certain hierarchical scale in the continuum of coloniality. The cities of the global South, which still retain a certain level of rurality, colonize areas that are “more rural” than themselves.
The Quilombo
According to data provided by the federal government, there are 3,311 quilombola communities in the country, as certified by Fundação Cultural Palmares (FCP 2019). This is an agency linked to the Ministry of Culture, responsible for “carrying out and articulating actions to protect, preserve, and promote the cultural heritage of remaining quilombo communities” (Guia de políticas públicas 2013, 20). This certification is the instrument that formalizes the existence of the quilombola community as such, facilitating access to the public policies targeted at these communities. However, as much as this certification identifies, it also limits. The process is long and bureaucratic and requires technical structure or urban technical knowledge to render the certification of such territories viable.
Self-identification and self-definition are formal criteria for the regions occupied by the quilombolas to be recognized as remaining quilombo communities. FCP defines quilombola individuals as the “descendants of enslaved Africans who have maintained cultural, subsistence and religious traditions throughout the centuries” (FCP 2017). This definition values the transmission of ways of life and cultural manifestations cultivated by black slaves as an inheritance of their survival and resistance against the oppression derived from colonial domination.
The identification with the land, the community, and collective life are also characteristics of the remaining quilombo communities. In addition to this notion, according to Beatriz Nascimento, quilombos can be perceived as “territories of freedom” that go beyond mere geographical spaces (Nascimento Reference Nascimento1989). That is, they are spaces for reconstructing the consciousness and meanings of what it is to be a quilombola individual in a country marked by the oppression of the coloniality of power-knowledge-being.
In the popular imagination, quilombos are spaces of isolation and resistance. In traditional schools, we learned over the years that quilombos were hidden and remote communities established by fugitive slaves, who, having freed themselves from the senhores de engenho, established their own communities. In other words, we have been taught that those subjects were fugitive, not enslaved individuals who sought to reclaim their freedoms. Therefore, there is a significant inversion between subjects and objects in the context of slavery. We learned that slavery was an inherent condition of black subjects.
When we arrived at the quilombo, we came across small farms, houses, and buildings, all remarkably similar to those we were accustomed to in urban spaces. The families we met were heterogeneous and consisted of black and nonblack individuals, who made a living in a manner consistent with the rules provided for by the current economic system. The quilombo dwellers share a past of struggle against slavery and are historically marked by such while acknowledging that ownership of the land is crucial for their survival. Contrary to what we had previously thought, the quilombola people have not remained isolated. We had imagined a sort of quilombola ghetto, whose solely black members were kin only to one another, but that is not what we found. During the course, that is, the period when we lived close to the quilombola women, some of them reported having migrated to urban centers to work, but at some point, they chose to return to the quilombola community to work with the land.
We emphasize that this was our first impression of what a quilombo would be like, as we had idealized its characteristics, regarding both its physical organization and the quilombola subjects themselves, and we admit that we had internalized such idealization (or even folklorization), but it did not correspond to the reality we found. We had constructed symbolic representations from the unifying gaze of the colonizer, which highlights differences and perceives others as inferior. Until we arrived, we had imagined the quilombo as a place difficult to access, hidden among the vegetation, and, above all, inhabited exclusively by blacks descended from slaves who lived in the colonial period. However, the quilombo we came across was different from our preconceived notions.
We shared the collective imaginary shaped by the colonial pattern of power and its hierarchical ideal of subject, space, and knowledge. Departing from our experience of urban Brazil, we reproduced the asymmetries and subjectification of quilombola rurality. We incorporated the zero-point of the urban with an alleged neutrality that cannot visualize the other end of the continuum of rurality, represented in this case by the quilombo. The performance of the coloniality of power-knowledge delimits what is relevant to be learned while discarding and rendering invisible other forms of knowledge developed from loci of enunciation other than the modern and colonizing ones. We idealized quilombola rurality, imbuing it with premodern attributes as if it were still frozen in the old days before the invasion.
However, being close to the quilombola women was a demystifying experience that led us to question our roles as researchers and urban women, so as to approach other women without overwhelming them. From our encounter with the course participants, we began to remove the veil of ignorance about the power-knowledge relations that also permeate and pervade our ways of doing research and working in the field. This, in turn, raised the question of how to construct a researcher's self that does not subjectify others, regard them as inferior, nor reject the sociocultural patrimony they bear. Ultimately, we asked ourselves how we could reduce the epistemic violence inherent in the process of catechization (Spivak Reference Spivak2010).
Finding the Various Dimensions of Coloniality
Reproducing the Coloniality of Knowledge: The Course
The workshop classes were held on two consecutive weekdays, and each lasted ten hours—from five in the morning to five in the afternoon. This format was designed by the confectionery instructor along with the quilombola women on the first day. The participants were not able to attend daily classes over a long period of time, preferring to concentrate and minimize the duration of the course, and adjusting it to their domestic needs and responsibilities. At first, this format may seem strenuous, but it brought more dynamism to the meetings. It enabled us to adapt the classes to the reality of the participants and prevented their absence, especially as they reported some resistance and boredom regarding the lectures and theoretical discussions.
The confectionery instructor's participation in the design of the course demonstrates that she was more accustomed to the reality of quilombola women than we were. She lived in a neighboring town in a social context that did not differ much from life at the quilombo, although it held the status of urban space. The quilombo was a continuum that came close to that form of a state, inland, urban space. The instructor also adapted the classes to the quilombola women's reality in the practical lessons. The organizers had not sent the participants the necessary materials and ingredients to make the recipes, so she suggested that each student bring whatever fruit was available in their yards. As it was the season of acerolas and mangoes, most of the sweets they created contained these ingredients.
The initial format contributed to the progress of the course, in addition to being an exception compared to others held in the state. The women would not have been able to attend the course if it had lasted for the whole semester, spread over weekdays, as had been initially planned. This was one more factor pointing to peculiar characteristics concerning that place, the rural space, and female life and labor. Their life pace was dictated by the natural conditions of the geographic space. Time in that rural space, dedicated to family livelihood, is rhythmic and always synchronized with the cycles of life, represented by planting, waiting, and anti-immediacy (Acosta Reference Acosta2016). In contrast, time in large urban centers tends to be different, mechanistic, as Maurizio Lazaratto highlights, for it is dictated by watches and machines and indifferent to circadian cycles (Lazaratto Reference Lazzarato2014).
Among all the courses offered by the program, this was the only one held in the rural space, at a quilombola community. The model initially planned proved impractical for the women's routine. In the countryside, just as with housework, there is no distinction between weekdays and weekends. Every day is a working day, both at home and in the fields. For instance, it requires the synchronization of activities such as handling gardens with the cycle and rhythm of solar light and heat. It also requires adjusting the presence of women in class based on the work of their spouses, so as to minimize their absence from their daily chores.
This class format later proved to be workable, given the specificities of the participants’ reality. Nonetheless, the women showed discomfort, weariness, and somnolence during the classes. They found the lectures, however brief, boring and challenging. Sitting and listening, they would soon fall asleep. They also asked about the duration of the lectures and the time remaining for the completion of the central module before the actual cooking lessons. We took note of statements such as “if it were only for this, I wouldn't have come.”
In the case of the lectures on human rights, their lack of interest was reinforced because we were the strangers there, dealing with matters that they didn't ask to learn about and that did not interest them. Our discourse was embedded with a theoretical and practical ideal that did not fit the local reality and the women's wishes. That is, our global, homogeneous, and universalizing knowledge, provided with a categorical logic (Lugones Reference Lugones2014), did not fit the local reality or the knowledge and wishes pertaining to the specific time and space of the quilombola women. In addition to the poor course-planning that did not include the women, their lack of interest revealed the distance between the rural pedagogical ideal and the urban one. It is the urban that determines what is important to be taught to rural subjects, particularly the civilizing, modern, and colonizing ideal.
During the lectures, we arranged the chairs in a circle in the backyard of the house where we gathered. The circle was sometimes under a marquee, sometimes amid the mango trees, without direct exposure to the sun, but always unwalled, open to the elements and those who wanted to listen to the conversations. The participants were frequently uninvolved with the topics discussed during the lessons during our time at the quilombo. They found the subjects discussed in the theoretical module strange, as strange as keeping their bodies in an unusual and idle position, which led to excessive fatigue and drowsiness.
Our interaction with the participants reproduced the grammar of coloniality, that is, the binarism between body and mind (Quijano Reference Quijano and Clímaco2014); the valuation of modern scientific knowledge in the face of traditional knowledge; the valuation of concepts and reason, instead of body perceptions and sensations (Cunha Reference Cunha2007). We assumed our truth as universal and hence believed that it should be their truth as well. We failed to contextualize knowledge, its production, and the subjects who produced it (Alcoff Reference Alcoff2016). We realized our colonization when we arrived there as instructors, bearing legitimized knowledge in opposition to their own, which was local, rural, and feminine. Interestingly, we also identified our own colonization, as the debtors to a dichotomous logic of domination, a game between what has more or less value that is not open to a diversity of subjectivities and knowledge-forms.
However, this did not only demonstrate poor lesson-planning. It also declared the imposition of our urban standard of conduct and knowledge about what we idealize as rurality, evidenced by the colonization inherent in didactic materials produced in cities and sent to rural spaces, such as the ones we used. This revealed how academic knowledge and practices function as the zero-point of power-knowledge, and the coloniality of rurality intrinsic to the way of speaking, thinking, and imposing what must be seen and learned. In this article, we defend the existence of a form of entanglement among the coloniality of knowledge, gender, and rurality, since rurality represents what is less “modern,” less valuable, and feminine.
The Coloniality of Gender: The Module on Women's Health
On the one hand is legitimate knowledge, empowered in teaching, dominating, or exterminating. On the other hand is the feminine subject deprived of a valid sociocultural framework, ready to be “catechized.” Beyond the dichotomization between the dominator and the oppressed, we call attention to the significance of the intersectionality of race, gender, and class (Davis Reference Davis2016; Crenshaw Reference Crenshaw2002), which makes the power dynamics more complex. In this case, we add the factor of space/place as the reading key that determines the other intersectional categories.
The analysis of technical and professional knowledge targeted at quilombola women requires a theory that addresses all three dimensions in an integrated way, as a network in which each category reinforces the other ones. It is a multiple network across differences, not isolated or massified. The female self is inseparable from the categories of race, class, and space. The gender issue is inherent in the project of colonization of the self, which in this case is inferior in value and categorized as nonhuman, nonmale, and as bearers of a nonrational and nonscientific knowledge (Walsh Reference Walsh2007).
The classes on women's health were divided over two days. We had planned the lessons according to our previous experience at an urban location. The classes we gave there on women's health were dynamic and had the broad participation of the women of the community. At times we even had to limit the amount of time devoted to their participation, so that all of them could participate and the program content was completed. They were deeply involved and manifested their interest in sharing their life experiences concerning the class topics.
The success of the urban classes encouraged us to reproduce the same planning and didactics in the quilombo workshop. While planning the lessons, we believed that the classes would not be significantly different, for the participants shared certain characteristics, such as social vulnerability, alienation from public health and sanitation policies, low or lack of schooling, and direct contact with the land. The women in the urban neighborhoods lived in shacks with earthen floors, and many had small vegetable gardens for immediate consumption.
Therefore, we thought that the categories “female” and “socially vulnerable” would suffice to bring these women closer together, but we were wrong. We disregarded the fact that being a woman in a big urban center is quite different from being a woman in a rural quilombola space. The direct relation with circular time, the time of plants and animals, lack of access to public services, ways of sharing and perpetuating knowledge, and detachment from institutional means of communication all stand out as determining factors in the epistemic and enunciated localization of the country women.
On the first day, we arrived early and waited for all the participants. They arrived one by one, and when the last of them appeared in the yard, we started the day's activities. We had planned to begin with an active relaxation session to sensitize and prepare the women for the topics to be discussed next. But right at the beginning, we noticed some resistance and discomfort about what we had proposed. They seemed suspicious about what we were doing. Some did not give in, refused to close their eyes, and did not follow the interiorization and relaxation instructions. What sense did that relaxation session make? What kind of relaxation were we talking about? Which kind of stressful situation could they relieve? We came to realize that their tiredness is not the same tiredness we identified in our urban lives.
Afterward, we addressed the issues concerning sexual health, the importance of using prevention methods, and sexually transmitted infections (STIs). We spent some time addressing the issue of sexuality in view of the huge mobilization by the women who had participated in the workshop held at the urban location. We believed that something similar would occur with the quilombo participants. However, after an initial moment of relaxation, a widespread, embarrassed silence took over as we started talking about the importance of knowing one's body. We could hear their embarrassed laughter and giggling. As we addressed STI-prevention methods, the women became more and more withdrawn and refused to express any opinion or doubt. The impression at that moment was that we were working with something that went beyond what they wanted. The awkwardness surrounding the theme was widespread, and their facial expressions and body language proved that they did not like what they were hearing. Their only engagement was when we asked them if any of them knew or had already used a female condom. A single participant confirmed that she knew of it. However, after this timid participation, silence took over.
As they became silent, we decided to address the topic of prevention and talk about the syphilis epidemic that was spreading in the country, stressing the need to use condoms to ensure women's health. At that moment, one of them told us that in the public health center that serves the quilombo, condoms were seldom available. If they wanted them, they had to buy them at the local pharmacies. In some larger cities, public health centers are even decorated with condoms, given the abundance of the product. That is, what is lacking in one place may be surplus in another; availability is also a differentiating factor.
We sought to standardize the women's body care and sexual health, based on our academic-professional education and our previous experiences with women living in urban areas. We neglected the fact that “health reflects the social, economic, political and cultural context.” Health is not the same thing for all individuals and will depend on time, space, and social class, as well as on individual values and scientific, religious, and philosophical conceptions (Freitas et al. Reference Freitas, Antônio Caballero, Hernández and Antunes2011, 939).
Looking back, we now realize that we did not listen to them, but not out of mere insensitivity. The distancing of training repertoires and the colonial structure of knowledge implies a form of epistemic violence difficult to deconstruct (Spivak Reference Spivak2010). Paulo Freire proposes the possibility of overcoming this condition, which he named “progressive practice,” that is, the practice of listening, dialoguing, and building educational praxis horizontally, together with others (Freire Reference Freire2014). However, even if the teaching process were restructured collaboratively, scientific knowledge will be hierarchically imposed, establishing itself as superior, neutral, and universal, in order to distinguish itself from other forms of knowledge.
Despite feeling disturbed, the women sat there listening. The strength of scientific knowledge is shown when it does not authorize gaps of enunciation so that subjects who do not agree with their forms and forces can speak, hence the assertion of decolonial writers such as Catherine Walsh, Walter Mignolo, and Ramón Grosfoguel regarding the imbrication of the coloniality of knowledge in the coloniality of being (and of both of them in the coloniality of power). These three dimensions constitute an entanglement of oppressions and dominations of others, brought about by the colonial matrix of power (Grosfoguel Reference Grosfoguel2008).
When we started talking about sexual health, prevention, and STIs, we noticed estrangement and discomfort among the participants, expressed by the almost total lack of participation. In an attempt to adjust our speech to their unspoken longings, we cut short the time we talked and decided to take a break, which would enable us to rework and adapt the programmatic content to their reality and disposition. The frontiers between the knowledge-forms situated at the quilombo were becoming more and more evident. They did not want to talk about their bodies or sexuality as the women in the urban neighborhood did. Would that “no-speaking” attitude be another interdiction of coloniality in feminine subjectivity, which prevents women from addressing aspects of their own body and sexuality amorally, and devoid of religious guilt?
We identified issues related to the coloniality of gender in this refusal to speak (Lugones Reference Lugones2014). Controlling the female body and sexuality and disciplining the way we perceive and deal with our sexuality in terms of affection, pleasure, and reproduction are mechanisms of domination instituted by coloniality and by its inherent patriarchal system (Vieira et al. Reference Vieira, Nóbrega, Arruda and Veiga2016). The colonial normativity in the scope of women's sexuality implies sin, erasure, and subjection to male domination, for the constituent elements of the coloniality of gender operate to dehumanize female subjects more and more (Lugones Reference Lugones2014).
We came back from the break with the lesson plan reworked and proposed a hand-massage exercise designed to awaken the women's interest in self-care. We asked the participants to massage their own hands before moving on to the hands of the woman next to them, as a way to reaffirm the importance of group work and mutual care, or perceiving the group as a place of support and as a shelter for all of them. This dynamic activity made it easier to approach the themes that followed, and the conversation flowed well. We talked about the importance of knowing oneself, about self-care, and the need to identify one's limits. We indirectly talked about women's sexual health, reminding them that loving oneself is caring for oneself, as well as preventing and protecting oneself at all times, including during sexual acts. At that moment, some women participated in the activity by narrating their life experiences.
Before the lunch break, the region's community leader came outside to talk to the women about the importance of taking the course and its repercussions in the other quilombola communities of the region. Her speech shifted our attention to the position we were occupying during our time with the quilombolas. Along with that, the difficulties and the silence we had faced earlier led us to ponder the power-knowledge we embodied before those women and what we represented for them, other than the figure of the European colonizer. However, this glimpse of our performance at the quilombo only happened later, when we returned to our daily research activity.
The next day, feeling slightly more familiar with the rural environment and with the participants, we inverted what had been initially planned. We started the activity by talking about healthy eating and obesity prevention. At that moment, participation increased, and the women began to talk about their eating habits. Then, another moment of unfamiliarity occurred. As we defended the need to consume other types of foods, such as fruits and dairy products between meals (lunch and dinner), one of the women told us what their everyday was really like. She said: “Look, when we go out to the fields, we only eat between meals if we find any fruit along the way. If we don't find it, we don't eat it. In that case, we only eat lunch or dinner.” In short, we were reproducing our typical urban food model, and by doing so, we disregarded the local reality.
Although the houses were in the countryside, there was a clear separation between the area dedicated to the residences, which were distant from one another, and the farming and livestock area. The women had to walk from their houses to the fields to work. Due to carelessness or lack of awareness, before and during the course, it did not cross our minds to ask them about such distances. However, according to their descriptions, they did not work in their backyards or nearby places. They also helped the other families in their farming activities, taking turns according to the type of crop, which required them to walk a long way from one property to another. Indeed, some of them walked from one to three hours each way, but such details had been invisible to us.
We emphasize the differences and impositions of global thinking in relation to places as a way of constituting a single universalist and classificatory discourse (Castro-Goméz Reference Castro-Goméz2005; Mignolo Reference Mignolo2013). The universalizing perspective of colonizing thought forbids access to the particularities of the place, which give meaning to the life of its inhabitants. The idea of shifting one's thinking from the center to the periphery, from the dominating urban space to the content-form of rurality, integrates the multiple possibilities of existence and contact between the exteriority of the world-system, enabling the transversality of invisible cultures (Dussel Reference Dussel1994; Santos Reference Santos2006; Mignolo Reference Mignolo2013).
In the second part of the day's class, the participants became more relaxed and open to our presence there, so we decided to get back to the topic of condom use. We had a female condom to display, and it was a good opportunity to discuss the advantages of its use, both for the women's autonomy and for men as well. We relied on institutional videos made by the Ministry of Health and made the condom available so that they could see and touch it, as most of them were unaware of its existence. One of them did not want to touch the condom and expressed revulsion. However, contrary to this specific participant's behavior, most of them were interested and wanted to know if the product was distributed at public health centers.
Karina Gomes and her colleagues help us understand that the quilombola population “still live in a situation of vulnerability, as a result of the historical process of enslavement, which has led to social and health inequalities, less access to goods and services, which can also cause greater difficulty in the use of health services.” The reduced access to health services by quilombolas is “associated with less availability of services, greater distances to be traveled, transportation difficulties and low income.” Added to that is the “precarious infrastructure for the provision of care assistance, the prejudice and the dehumanized care by health professionals, which can constitute barriers to the access and use of health services by this population group” (Gomes et al. Reference Gomes, Reis, Guimarães and Cherchiglia2013, 1830, 1837). Health is an important aspect of human quality of life and well-being. However, this quilombo community does not have the necessary conditions for this to be fulfilled. The colonial logic continues to produce its effects, marginalizing the subjects regarded as inferior and marking their differences, thus perpetuating inequality and social exclusion.
Finally, to conclude the class, we proposed a group activity to reinforce what we had been talking about; that is, the need to know and care for oneself, as well as the importance of the group as a space for mutual support and solidarity. In the last few minutes, one of the women spontaneously asked us to finish that module with a musical round, and we all sang a traditional tune that she taught us. The chant was an ode to women's power and autonomy.
As we left the quilombo, our worries grew. Our reference point was as urban women living in the state capital, who spoke very fluently about our sexual and individual experiences; the differences between us and them became visible. We felt the discomfort of having borne knowledge that renders those women inferior and invisible, through the logic of scientific/modern/colonial rationality. We realized how coloniality is also present in our own subjectivities and bodies, normalizing our knowledge-forms and everyday affective and sexual practices so that we become “docile” to the hierarchical axes that marginalize and subjectify us.
Scientific knowledge is produced through the lens of rationality that establishes itself as universal and hegemonic and disregards and disqualifies other types of knowledge. This happens because other types have an origin that does not emanate from the Eurocentric locus of enunciation. “Since the seventeenth century, when modern science was established, it was deliberately constructed as a single unit, through research protocols agreed upon by a community” (Cunha Reference Cunha2007, 78). This led other knowledge-forms to be labeled as “traditional knowledge,” so as to identify and differentiate them from rational and hegemonic scientific knowledge. These are the effects of the coloniality of power-knowledge-being “that places Western scientific knowledge as central, denying or relegating the status of non-knowledge to all knowledge-forms derived from places and produced from distinct social and cultural rationalities” (Walsh Reference Walsh2007, 103).
Now, as we write this article, we have come to question the authority and oppression that permeated our encounter with those women. As researchers who went to the quilombo to teach classes as bearers of valid and legitimate knowledge, we also could not escape colonial/modern logic. We shared the ambiguous condition of colonized/colonizers as we reproduced modern hegemonic knowledge in our encounter with the quilombola women, regardless of their prior interest and knowledge. Simultaneously, we colonized ourselves by reproducing the knowledge we acknowledge as truth, scientific knowledge, as the only one and the best of all.
The Coloniality of Knowledge and the Self in Our Scientific Activity
The coloniality of power-knowledge is rooted primarily in the social organization of colonized nations, and as we have seen, this reality applies to Brazil. The power axes that constitute the pattern of domination continue to operate, thus establishing hierarchies of race, gender, and class (Grosfoguel Reference Grosfoguel2008) and rendering invisible the subjects perceived as inferior and subaltern.
These hierarchies are so powerful that in addition to regulating social structures, they also act on the subjectivities, languages, and knowledge of social subjects, establishing gradations of importance based on the Eurocentric power pattern. This happens in such a way that whatever differs from this standard is judged as irrelevant and therefore unworthy of scientific recognition. This, in turn, is reflected in dominant educational practices, in not listening, in imposition, in the education of but not with students, in order to preserve the place of power-knowledge of the dominator-educator, contrary to the education model prescribed by Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire Reference Freire2017).
The coloniality of knowledge influences the dichotomous classification of knowledge and its practices. Devalued knowledge-forms are those practiced by subjects who are also inferiorized, that is, blacks, natives, and women. Colonial knowledge-forms are actually superimposed by modern/colonial rationality, which “repositions itself as the main framework of theoretical interpretation” (Walsh Reference Walsh2007, 103). Moreover, the “assassination” of traditional knowledge has also been used as a tool for colonizing and rendering invisible the subjectivities of subaltern subjects, facilitating their domination.
Therefore, the global North is conceived as the only valid, legitimate, and scientific locus of enunciation. northern/European scientific/modern rationality should prevail, and therefore all knowledge-production should derive from such a place. This knowledge framework, modern and universalizing, is intertwined with urban standards of human conduct. Coloniality, modernity, and urbanities feed one another. In the Brazilian case, the urban pattern of knowledge was based on the northern European colonial school. To speak of urban knowledge in Brazil is to speak of a northern European knowledge pattern that ignores and erases the diversity of local knowledge of rural subjects. This is a form of knowledge that prescribes imposing practices on the inferior side of the dichotomy, and as they assume “the oppressors’ agenda,” they are led to dehumanizing themselves (Freire Reference Freire2017, 46).
All this leads to the removal of all forms of traditional knowledge from scientific/modern rationality, as they are not visible. They do not exist because they are produced by the others, the subalterns. This results in the placement of these knowledge-forms on the margins of the modern/colonial world system. The knowledge produced by the others is frontier precisely because it originates from a locus of enunciation despised and devalued by coloniality, from the exteriority of the modern/colonial world system (Dussel Reference Dussel1994; Mignolo Reference Mignolo2013).
As Walsh explains, the coloniality of knowledge (which we define in this article as urban knowledge), “established Eurocentrism as the sole perspective of knowledge, at the same time as it completely ruled out indigenous and African intellectual production as ‘knowledge’ and, consequently, their intellectual capacity” (Walsh Reference Walsh2007, 104). Therefore, the condition for scientific validity is restricted to those who reproduce northern European rationality, and in the view of colonial/modern logic, subaltern subjects are not bearers of relevant knowledge, for they have no subjectivities.
The coloniality of knowledge relates to places, subjectivity, and rationality, as well as the hierarchies of the colonial matrix of power, to distinguish other types of knowledge, detaching them from colonial/modern logic to render them invisible—as they come from nonhumans—and place them on the margins of hegemonic rationality. Coloniality “propagated the idea of a racial and epistemic hierarchy, in this case, around black people, justifying their social, cultural, political and economic exclusion, as well as their silencing within the theoretical and discursive construction of modernity” (Walsh Reference Walsh2007, 105). There is a sort of dehumanization of others, that is, the inferiorized individuals (Lugones Reference Lugones2014).
This logic of coloniality permeates academic practices, delimiting the ways of conducting science whose rationality excludes what is different, thus not tolerating the forms of knowledge that originated outside the academic scope. It is taught and transmitted as the acceptable way of conducting science, while not admitting any dispute that does not come from its legitimized peers. And we, as researchers, reproduced this modus operandi without questioning it, because it had always been so, and there seems to be no other ways of doing and being in academia. We accept the exclusivity of knowledge and objectify others in order to extract our research from them, discarding them as soon as we reach our goal.
As researchers based in the state capital, coming from renowned universities, we saw ourselves not only as reproducers of the coloniality of knowledge but as reproducers of urban, chauvinistic, white knowledge. We perceived the intersectionality of possible colonization forms in the continent in which we live and went to the quilombo immersed in this colonizing and dominating pattern.
During the course, we carried out a form of authoritarian education (Freire Reference Freire2014; Reference Freire2017), which was unwilling to listen and find out what those women knew about the world and the topics we had planned to address in the workshop. We disregarded the historical-cultural processes that formed the subjectivities of the quilombola women who would attend our classes. We carried ways of doing that were appropriate for urban, academic, colonial/modern reality. A priori, we perceived them as subjects who needed to be shaped and civilized and committed the errors of those who bear universal knowledge and cannot see the plurality of beings, places, and knowledge-forms. We believed that the fact that we were all women would suffice. Therefore, we inhabited the ambiguous condition of the colonizer and the colonized by ignoring that our practices and knowledge-forms are also rooted in the power pattern of the coloniality of power-knowledge-being.
For the Decolonization of the Researcher's Self
After describing and reflecting on our experiences at the quilombo, we began to put our research practices and the researcher's self at stake. Would we continue to colonize others, that is, the subjects who figure in our academic texts as objects, sources of information, and research fields? Would it be possible to promote the encounter of cultures situated in various places, races, and loci of enunciation, without one colonizing the other? Perhaps there is no epistemic violence in the encounter with the other, this “en-cubierto” subject who bears alterity inferiorized by the colonial matrix of power (Dussel Reference Dussel1994).
These reflections have pushed us out of our comfort zone, out of this place already established and legitimized by scientific power-knowledge. Questioning derives from awakening so that we can see others—or those we refer to as others—as equal or similar to us, the subject-researchers, that is, as subjects who share equality of being, bear valid knowledge, and live according to their precepts, in opposition to the determinations of something or someone.
Meeting the quilombola women was instrumental for us to perceive and question the researcher's place of power and ways of doing. That is, a researcher's self is forged and hardened by years of graduate and postgraduate study, formatted and structured from colonial/modern scientific rationality. This experience served, as Benjamin pointed out, as a glimmer that illuminated the darkness brought about by coloniality in our ways of conducting research (Benjamin Reference Benjamin2009). We woke up from the deep sleep of the coloniality of power-knowledge in the face of the epistemic violence we had been committing in academic research.
From that moment onwards, we began to wish for encounters that led to no subtraction or colonization of others. And we realized that for this to be possible, it is necessary to carry out the decolonization of the researcher's self, or even the decoloniality of a form of intellectuality established from a cognition pattern based on conquest (Mignolo Reference Mignolo2013). It is necessary to deconstruct the superior–inferior binarism that polarizes subjects, places, and forms of knowledge so as to consider the duality and the multiple possibilities of being and knowing, seeking complementarity and a continuum instead of hierarchization (Segato Reference Segato2012; Celentani Reference Celentani2014).
We have resorted to Freire to help us think about the cognitive decoloniality of the researcher we propose herein (Freire Reference Freire2014). We have concluded that there is a need for the self to move away from the conditioning of the colonial/modern dichotomy, which makes us perceive others as research objects, not subjects, for this latter condition would be exclusive to the researcher who embodies and represents valid rationality, that is, legitimate knowledge. He highlights the dangers of universalizing this homogenizing gaze, which disregards the framework of students’ previous experiences, as well as the production of knowledge-forms by subjects who express and occupy positions of enunciation different from those prescribed by coloniality.
This would require detachment from the points of view and practices of the Euro-North locus of enunciation and the production of theories and methodologies according to local realities, instead of the subjects surveyed (Mignolo Reference Mignolo2013). By validating the possibilities of building local knowledge, the distances and differences between objects and subjects tend to decrease. We must find other languages, reinvent and open communication to other forms of apprehending the world, to enable the emergence of different epistemologies that may converse without overlapping one another, in other words, the dialogue of exteriority and the transversality of knowledge inferiorized by the scientific rationality of coloniality (Dussel Reference Dussel1994).
Following this theoretical and epistemological path, we believe there is no other way of doing it than starting the process of decoloniality from ourselves, from our own researcher's self, and questioning the daily practices, relationships, and processes of academic activity. We must bring knowledge to the fore, along with the subjects and places that have been rendered invisible and devalued by coloniality, thus contributing to the formation of “another project of education that assumes as a point of departure a logic rooted in the renewed understanding and use of the cosmovision and philosophical theory of Abya Yala.” That is, we must adopt and perfect theories originating from other types of knowledge and places, such as Latin America, “assuming an epistemic and sociocultural perspective that accounts for unity in diversity, complementary duality, and reciprocity” (Walsh Reference Walsh2007, 109).
In this sense, according to Freire, the formation of this “other project” of education requires the revelation of the truths established by the dominant system, which has done so to control and maintain the status quo of the coloniality of power-knowledge (Freire Reference Freire2014). And by doing so, we shall unfold what is understood as the researcher's attempt to overcome the “premise that there is only a single epistemic tradition from which truth and universality can be achieved” (Grosfoguel Reference Grosfoguel2008, 117). In other words, we can enable the coexistence of knowledge, beings, and subjectivities in one's daily teaching and research practices, as a form of positive action by the researcher, who will contribute to the “pluriversality” (Dussel Reference Dussel1994) of knowledge and subjects in academia.
The decolonization of the self would replace ego conquiro and ego cogito (Mignolo Reference Mignolo2013), which are rooted in Western culture, with another form of intersubjectivity, open to multiple life possibilities. Lives shall intersect without overlapping one another. We shall emphasize dialogue and listen to others, without holding the monopoly on speech for those who reserve for themselves the legitimacy of telling the truth.
That being said, instead of speaking, we must listen and pay attention to what is alien to us. We must sincerely listen to what is different from us. Similarly, we would add the question “can the dominator listen?” to Gayatri Spivak's question, “can the subaltern speak?” (Spivak Reference Spivak2010).
Therefore, to contribute to this “other project” of listening and epistemic re-elaboration, we share here our concerns resulting from the encounter between urban women and quilombola women. We do not intend to reaffirm the dichotomies; instead, we share the possibilities, reflecting on what we now identify as unrealized and invested with powers aimed at the decolonization of the researcher's self.
Writing this article has made us realize that as researchers, professors, or workshop instructors, we are prone to listen too little. Therefore, we contribute to the continuity of a logic of domination that colonizes ourselves and helps to maintain a form of rationality that disregards other subjects and knowledge-forms. It is necessary to deconstruct the researchers, professors, and workshop instructors who know and transmit knowledge to others and replace them with the joint creation of a subject in constant interaction and infinite self-construction, by listening to others.
The gigantic challenge before us is to think about the ways to put this “other project” in practice; that is, to expand listening and deconstruct/reconstruct research practices. If we create a list of “how-tos,” would we not be fostering the same colonial-modern modus operandi of scientific rationality by determining how others should proceed? We explicitly defend listening and constructing along with others, that is, with the subjects of our studies and research practices. It is about opening oneself to the dialogue, to progressively develop an educational praxis, as Freire has defended and taught us (Freire Reference Freire2014; Reference Freire2017), without disregarding the agency of the interlocutor and behaving like the “zero-point” of knowledge (Castro-Gomez Reference Castro-Goméz2005), or imposing knowledge-forms on those who experience distinct realities.
Therefore, assuming the decolonization of the researcher's self is “trying to look for loopholes in a territory totalized by the binary scheme, which possibly consists of the most efficient instrument of power” (Segato Reference Segato2012, 126). Moreover, according to Linda Alcoff, in order to create an “epistemology for the next revolution,” one must be open to what is diverse, ordinary, and everyday, to the subjects objectified by colonial/modern/scientific rationality and their knowledge-forms (Alcoff Reference Alcoff2016). This revolution requires that we decolonize our scientific and writing practices so that rationality ceases to be universalized and becomes plural, diversified, and inclusive of the knowledge-forms produced by others.
We have concluded that in the case analyzed herein, our mistake did not derive merely from the individual inefficiency or insensibility of the instructors who went to the quilombo. What happened was a consequence of the perverse structure that instills in the eyes of researchers practices that are intended to be universal and have prevented them from visualizing the quilombola women in their specificities and the historical processes that constituted them as subjects coming from quilombola rural communities. This performance does not derive from the individual, but from a collective mass that overlaps and conceals anything that intends to be distinct and alien to colonial/modern scientific rationality, which is powerful and endowed with an alleged “naturalness.” For this reason, we had not previously questioned the knowledge and care practices we were transmitting to the quilombola women. Throughout the course, “we walked the high line carrying an umbrella,”Footnote 4 trying to balance the binary poles between the colonizers and the colonized.
Acknowledgments
We are grateful for the financial support of CAPES—Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel—in carrying out this work. The Brazilian ethics committee determined that the research in question did not require supervision by the ethics committee.
Fernanda Rocha da Silva is a Master's student in organizational studies and society at the Center for Postgraduate Studies and Research in Administration at the Federal University of Minas Gerais/UFMG. She has a law degree from Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais/PUC Minas. fernandarrochas@gmail.com
Paula Gontijo Martins is a PhD student in organizational studies and society at the Center for Postgraduate Studies and Research in Administration at the Federal University of Minas Gerais/UFMG. She has a Master's degree in theory of law from Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais/PUC Minas, and a business administration degree from the University of São Paulo/USP. pgontijomartins@gmail.com
Alexandre de Pádua Carrieri is a Full Professor at the Federal University of Minas Gerais/UFMG, with a PhD in administration from UFMG. He has been a Professor at the UFMG/Face/Cad/Cepead since 2002 and is the coordinator of NEOS—Center for Organizational Studies and Society. alexandre@face.ufmg.br
