Since the early twentieth century, various strands of “anticolonial” scholarship have been and are concerned with how colonial encounters and practices constitute differences. In recent years, this scholarship maps the uneven implications of “coloniality” for subjects and bodies marked as different, for example, “feminine,” “raced,” “queer,” or trans. Along with feminism, anticolonial scholarship's analytical goals—to link the body with body politics—are closely tied to its political ones: to correct the wrongs of colonial encounters and practices. The current avatars of anticolonial scholarship include postcolonial, decolonial, and settler-colonial variants.Footnote ¹

Postcolonial and decolonial scholarship, and the feminisms associated with them, are marked by diverse genealogies and histories and emerge from multiple locations. None of them can be spoken of in the singular. What they have in common is that they are “anticolonial” in at least two ways: they foreground how raced and gendered colonial practices constitute “Eurocentric” forms of knowledge-production, which marginalize other forms of knowing and being in the world. Second, they concur that the political task of working toward liberation, decolonization, and social justice must accompany scholarly and academic tasks of analysis. Despite their differences, then, both approaches have long informed and animated feminist scholarship and activism, though often not at once nor in the same spaces. They have much to offer and learn from the other. However, the possibilities for such exchanges are often foreclosed by problematic assumptions about decolonial and postcolonial feminisms, which are hard to discuss.

In this musing, we risk discussing them because we believe it is important to shake them. Our reflections emerge from a series of round tables on this theme beginning with one at the 2016 annual meeting of the National Women's Studies Association (NWSA), where the co-authors first met. The round table, organized by the journal Feminist Studies, was in keeping with the meeting's theme of “Decoloniality,” and its purpose was to stage a dialogue between decolonial and postcolonial feminisms. However, this important dialogue was stymied by several assumptions about postcolonial and decolonial feminisms that emerged in the presentations and in the Q and A following them. These assumptions were at play at other events, which suggests that they are symptomatic of larger trends in the US academy. We offer our remarks in the hopes of disrupting these problematic trends and fostering transnational solidarity by rethinking what we heuristically call “anticolonial” feminisms.

The seemingly unshakeable ground of “regions” frames and stifles decolonial/postcolonial debates. At the 2016 NWSA panel, this was evident in how “South Asia” was produced in multiple registers. Postcolonial feminism was firmly placed in South Asia and critiqued as an intellectual formation of Anglo-European elite theorizing. Postcolonial feminism was assumed to and accused of continuing to enact colonial epistemologies and could not claim, for example, US woman of color approaches in its intellectual genealogy.Footnote ²

“South Asia” was also starkly embodied in the scholars who were presenting, regardless of where our research was located, the topics we engaged with, or how we took up decolonial/postcolonial feminisms. In fact, each of the three panel presentations by the South Asians embodied as such was about how feminist research could be decolonizing in practice. Banu Subramaniam did so in feminist science studies by tracking colonial notions of science and race in genetically profiling “Indians” and “Indians.” Based on collaborative research, Subramaniam discussed new attempts at full genetic mappings of South Asian diasporic communities in the US and in indigenous communities in Puerto Rico. Her presentation problematized these mappings, noting that the focus on specifically these communities was because access to native American and indigenous groups in the US is more fraught than in the communities she discussed.Footnote ³ Kiran Asher juxtaposed readings of Gayatri Spivak's work (commonly read as “postcolonial”) and that of Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (commonly read as “decolonial”). She highlighted how both scholars flag the dilemmas of representing third-world, subaltern, and indigenous women and locate these attempts at representation (by Western and diasporic scholars) within the political economy of knowledge-production and international development (Asher Reference Asher2017). Priti Ramamurthy shared two instances: one to highlight the importance of race in India for understanding how the anticolonial movement erased the memory of mixed-race female movie stars to construct a hegemonic nationalism in the 1930s, and the second, stories of workers in informal rural and urban economies that defy preconceived notions of victimhood by claiming subaltern dignity through everyday practices of “modern” comportment and personal commodity-consumption. In short, all three presentations set up a dialogue between postcolonial feminisms and decolonial feminisms. Yet they were read back as “South Asian,” always already “postcolonial,” and thus incapable of being decolonializing knowledge-practices.

Our bodies, our names, and the physical arrangement of the panel (with three South Asians on one side, and two Latin Americans along with the South Asian moderator on the other) contributed to this categorization and separation of scholars by region. In our short presentations, we started autobiographically and moved on to discursively map our arguments. Perhaps it was through that very form that we “proved” to our critics that we were indeed South Asian postcolonial scholars, incapable of understanding the value of embodied knowledge and unambiguously defined political projects. The two “decolonial” scholars on the panel—María Lugones and Breny Mendoza—embodied “Latin America,” albeit differently, and repeatedly invoked their alliance to it. During the Q and A they embraced being from the region and explained how their personal and professional experiences of it made them particularly inclined to decolonial praxis.Footnote ⁴

These overdetermined “interpretations” of our identities and bodies repeatedly come into play. We give a few other examples to illustrate. At a later panel at NWSA 2016, this time at one related to the South Asian Caucus, one young scholar berated Ramamurthy for talking about the value of postcolonial feminist scholarship when decolonial feminist activists were struggling over matters of “life and death.” The problematic assumptions here are not only that feminist postcolonial scholars are necessarily South Asian in origin or area of study, but also that such scholars are capable of producing only elite accounts, ones deemed less vital than those that focus on bodies on the precipitous line between life and death.

Asher, who was born and raised in India, has been doing research on and in Latin America since the 1980s, and on black social movements in Colombia since 1992. Within the context of global geopolitics in the 1990s, black activists often assumed that she had a “natural” solidarity with black struggles—which she did and continues to do. Over the decades, the shifts in radical, racial, and cultural politics have led to a different reading of her body and politics among metropolitan black activists and scholars with decolonial leanings. Today she is automatically associated with postcolonialism. “South Asia” becomes a metonym for postcolonial feminism, and the body as autobiography stops thinking at its borders. The assumption that postcolonial approaches have little or no understanding of any but the South Asian context occludes and precludes solidarity with “Latin American” decolonial politics.

Over the past few years, we have repeatedly heard certain simplistic (mis)readings of postcolonial and decolonial approaches, which are at risk of becoming entrenched. For example, those claiming a decolonial feminist position often posit that the “post” in postcolonialism and postcolonial feminism refers to after colonialism. Echoing past debates, the “postcolonial” condition is understood as a temporal anachronism, which does not adequately account for actually existing power geometries today. The critique here goes, “how can we be thinking about an after of colonialism when we still very much live with colonialism?” Furthermore, postcolonial feminism is spatially restricted to areas that were European imperial colonies but, after struggles for independence, have achieved sovereignty. Consequently, the salience of ongoing fights for sovereignty and freedom from state violence by indigenous and minoritized communities, and the debilitating consequences of white settler racism and racial capitalism, are ostensibly insufficiently acknowledged by postcolonial feminist scholarship (see also Ramamurthy and Tambe Reference Ramamurthy and Tambe2017).

From postcolonial feminists’ viewpoint, it is presumed that decolonial feminism, in its embrace of alternate forms of knowing and valorization of embodied experience, does not contend with the problematic of representation: representing the subaltern is both portrait—a representation of—and proxy—a speaking for. Representation, postcolonial feminists posit, is an aporia impossible to “solve” but one that we nevertheless need to navigate and to do so ethically (Spivak Reference Spivak, Nelson and Grossberg1988). Decolonial feminism with its commitment to change the world, not just to interpret it, presumes access to a radical alterity as the basis for social movements and struggles. For postcolonial feminists, politics is always messy and “without guarantees” (Hall Reference Hall1986).

Put schematically, postcolonial and decolonial approaches are framed in binary terms:

Such binaries do little to explain the complex relations by which colonial differences endure and bind us. First, postcolonialism has robustly critiqued European systems of knowledge and the epistemic practices that continue to code difference and reproduce power in contemporary relations, from the global to the intimate. Second, simplistic readings that set up postcolonial and decolonial in stark opposition are troubling because they do not account for the political economy of knowledge-production. That radical, antiracist, and decolonial politics is being produced in the heart of the US academy must surely make us pause about our own contradictions and complicities with global geopolitics. Third, activists are often more savvy than academics and scholars about the institutional context of their struggles. They constantly position themselves in relation to the state and other institutions to win legal and policy accommodations while negotiating for broader political gains. In short, much work needs to be done to flesh out how both postcolonial and decolonial feminisms are anticolonial.

Both are also anticapitalist but differ in their assessment of “outsides” to capitalism. For example, work under the rubric of decolonial feminist is seen as more hopeful and praxis-driven, whereas that under the sign of postcolonial feminisms is seen to be working through capitalist articulations at this historical juncture. More detailed attention to historical and contemporary global connections within and across regions might offer some interesting ways beyond current impasses. For instance, foregrounding the analytical and intellectual place of areas such as the Caribbean and Africa in these debates would help guard against the tendency for moments of thought and heuristic devices to become territorialized, essentialized, and static. Readers may also want to see how Regina Cochrane brings indigenous, feminist, and negative dialectical critiques of modernity to bear upon climate-justice debates (Cochrane Reference Cochrane2014). Her side note on the pitfalls of identity politics among Bolivian activists has important insights for this discussion.

Constructed binaries between postcolonial and decolonial feminisms, however, are not inevitable. Indeed, at a panel entitled “Afterlives of Colonialism: Theorizing the Postcolonial and Decolonial” held prior to the 2016 NWSA at the Five College Women's Studies Research Center in South Hadley, Massachusetts, panelists engaged in intense exchanges about the parallels, disjunctions, convergences, and divergences between these two different but related modes of thought. Believing that there is much at stake in having more conversations about “anticolonial” feminisms, we organized two more roundtables in 2017: at the Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers meetings in London and at the NWSA in Baltimore. We asked panelists and participants to rethink “regions” as theoretical sources and reflect on what post- and decolonial feminisms have brought to their own scholarship and activism. We drafted a series of questions to facilitate critical dialogues across differences:

The discussions reasserted the imperative to deepen and historicize our analyses of race and indigeneity over the longue durée and globally; to continue to grapple with knotty questions of representation; to develop a conceptual vocabulary for the contradictory relationship of subalterns to the state; and to develop ethical practices as scholars “learning to learn from below” (Spivak Reference Spivak2012).

Postcolonial and decolonial feminisms have much to learn from each other. As variants of “anticolonial” scholarship, their attention to the specificities of difference—of regions, bodies, and more—holds the key to disrupting the unequal and hierarchical politics of knowledge-production. But for the key to work, we need to remind ourselves that these differences are also colonial constructs, and we must grapple with the double bind of undoing them.