What is the “New?”

The “new,” like any characterized group, is manifold, diverse, and ever-changing (St. Pierre, Jackson, and Mazzei Reference St. Pierre, Jackson and Mazzei2016). Here we will define it according to trends we see in dominant characterizations by scholars who have taken it up and claim to situate their work in the “new.” Often influenced by the works of Gilles Deleuze, the “new” is frequently described as an ontological turn away from the privileging of epistemology, a breaking of hierarchical binaries of all kinds, including mind/body, nature/culture, and discourse/material, and as a reaction to the post-modern foregrounding of language (Alaimo and Hekman Reference Alaimo and Hekman2008; Barad Reference Barad2010; St. Pierre, Jackson, and Mazzei Reference St. Pierre, Jackson and Mazzei2016). In a move toward theorizations of reality, the “new” attempts to flatten the hierarchy between epistemology and ontology traced back to Descartes's cogito, ergo sum, or, as we interpret it, “I think before I am”—a shibboleth that privileged thinking over being and became a dominant theme in Euro-Western philosophy and logic (Descartes Reference Descartes and Maclean1637/1998; Reference Descartes1644/1998). In this turn toward ontology, the focus of inquiry shifts to the material rather than the discursive, and attempts non-anthropocentric orientation. For example, DeLanda, in his “neo-materialist interpretation,” positioned living creatures as “in no way ‘better’ than rocks” and pronounced that “the same basic processes of self-organization take place in the mineral, organic and cultural spheres” (DeLanda Reference DeLanda1996). In relating the mineral, organic, and cultural on a horizontal plane, DeLanda addresses a logic of materiality and flattens the biotic/abiotic hierarchy. Attributing minerals with the agency and intelligence to exhibit patterns of organization similar to those of the organic, the living/nonliving binary crumbles, and with it, hierarchical constructions of power operations.

In additional works claiming new materialisms, a common narrative is that the post-modern era focused too much on language, culture, and social constructivism. Karen Barad, Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, and Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre, for example, all recount that post-modern scholarship, from a stance of rejecting discourses of essentialism, left scant to no theorizing of the body or matter (Barad Reference Barad2003; Alaimo and Hekman Reference Alaimo and Hekman2008; Coole and Frost Reference Coole, Frost, Coole and Frost2010; Dolphijn and van der Tuin Reference Dolphijn and van der Tuin2012; St. Pierre Reference St. Pierre2016). Instead, post-modern theories had foregrounded the ways in which language and culture construct subjectivity. The new materialist scholarship, then, is positioned as a re-turn to theorizing the material, or in Braidotti's words, “‘neo-materialism’ emerges as a method, a conceptual frame and a political stand, which refuses the linguistic paradigm, stressing instead the concrete yet complex materiality of bodies immersed in social relations of power” (Dolphijn and van der Tuin Reference Dolphijn and van der Tuin2012, 21). Braidotti describes new materialism as both a position and a procedure that dismisses attributing agency solely to language, instead emphasizing that it foregrounds the relation of the corporeal within social power structures. Barad also summed up this depiction:

Barad argues that poststructuralists attributed too much power to language and neglected the material. This narrative of the “forgotten material” (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2008) is frequently invoked by new materialist scholars who position their work as freshly merging social constructivism with science studies, or what Donna Haraway terms naturecultures (Haraway Reference Haraway2003).

In addition to referring to this recent philosophical arrangement as the “new materialisms,” scholars of the “new” tout its originality and advanced contributions to academia and to life itself. Braidotti in her interview with Dolphijn and van der Tuin claimed neo-materialism worked “in a complex and groundbreaking manner” (Dolphijn and van der Tuin Reference Dolphijn and van der Tuin2012, 21, emphasis added). Coole and Frost called new materialisms “new paradigms for which no overall orthodoxy has yet been established” (Coole and Frost Reference Coole, Frost, Coole and Frost2010, 4). The New Materialism European COST (Cooperation in Science and Technology) group of seventy-nine international scholars, chaired by Iris van der Tuin, portrayed new materialist scholarship as “young,” “burgeoning,” and “innovative.” Their website proclaims: “The innovativeness of new materialist approaches lies in that they provide ways for signification to be simultaneously material and semiotic; the scholarship is ‘material-semiotic’ or ‘material-discursive’” (Haraway Reference Haraway1998; Barad Reference Barad2007; New materialism)”. Here again new materialisms are presented as pioneeringly theorizing entangled matter–culture–meaning relations.

Since Ahmed's publication asking scholars to see how feminist theories have already engaged the body and the material (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2008), some feminist scholars have also included a thread that does locate new materialist scholarship within the legacy of feminisms (for example, Braidotti in Dolphijn and van der Tuin Reference Dolphijn and van der Tuin2012, and St. Pierre, Jackson, and Mazzei Reference St. Pierre, Jackson and Mazzei2016). For instance, Braidotti attributed new materialisms as linked to the “brand of materialism that was pioneered in the last century by Simone de Beauvoir,” and connects it to situated and standpoint epistemologies as well as post-modernist feminisms (Dolphijn and van der Tuin Reference Dolphijn and van der Tuin2012, 21). But, along with the approach that we might call “add some feminist history and stir” to their descriptions of new materialisms, many characterizations insisting on the importance of “the new” restate the argument that previous feminist scholarship has not paid enough attention to the material or to matter itself. They continue to posit that concepts such as the lack of a central subject, entanglement (Barad Reference Barad2007), and assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari Reference Deleuze, Guattari and Massumi1980/1987) are ideas that the “new” offers that feminist scholarship had not theorized.

It's Just Not New: Coloniality through New Materialisms

We find it useful here to link Lugones's analysis of the coloniality of gender to Ahmed's assessment that the “new” is just not new in order to come to a deeper understanding of how coloniality operates in the dominant presentation of the new materialisms. Writing with Anibal Quijano, Lugones defines coloniality as the racialized and capitalist exploitation central to oppressive power (Quijano Reference Quijano1991). She adds, “In using the term coloniality I mean . . . the process of active reduction of people, the dehumanization that fits them for the classification, the process of subjectification, the attempt to turn the colonized into less than human beings” (Lugones Reference Lugones2010, 745). Lugones thus begins her analysis by identifying the hierarchy human/non-human as core to colonial modernity because during acts of colonization of the Americas and Africa, this binary positioned the colonized as non-human to the profit of the human colonizer. In other words, the binary categorical logic of human/non-human was the rationalization utilized by the oppressor in order to justify its abuse. Human became a mark of civilization reserved for the white man colonizer and his white woman, who reinforced the dominance of whiteness whereas Indigenous Americans and enslaved Africans were relegated to the non-human. Lugones makes it clear that this dichotomy and classification is central to the act of colonization: “turning the colonized into human beings was not a colonial goal” (744). In other words, colonization necessitated the dehumanization, the delegitimation, the attempted erasure, of the different ways of being and knowing of the colonized in its processes of stealing homelands, committing genocides, and developing institutions of slavery. Lugones then writes of this refusal on the part of the dominant to see the humanity of the colonized and to see their systems of knowing as equal to their own as central to the functioning of coloniality:

From the human/non-human binary, the modern/non-modern binary also becomes essential to the system of colonization. Lugones, thinking with Juan Ricardo Aparicio and Mario Blaser (Aparicio and Blaser Reference Aparicio and Blaserunpublished), uses the term modern to refer to white Euro-Western society and philosophical beliefs, whereas the non-modern is the non-Euro-West, onto-epistemological difference that modernity has colonized, delegitimized, attempted to erase, and as Lugones states, “damned” (743). Lugones defines non-modern as ways of arranging the social, cosmological, ecological, economic, and spiritual that refuse the human/non-human dichotomy foundational to the “modern.” We like her use of non-modern because, as she writes, it specifically expresses that it is not pre-modern or pre-colonial. Rather, it is co-existent with the colonial modern and always already dominant in certain contexts and worlds. We find this characterization to be especially important because it refuses the logic of linear time on which the colonial modern operates: a new/old, or modern/pre-modern hierarchy of “progress” used to delegitimize onto-epistemologies outside of the colonial modern. Isn't that what capitalist coloniality does: bulldoze ground in order to take up residence and establish dominance? Seize a domain for one's own use? As Todd points out, part of this act of colonization is a refusal to acknowledge, unintentionally or not, the continuity of non-modern thought-practices-realities (Todd Reference Todd2016). We see the new materialisms, both in the way they characterize themselves and in their scholarly practices, to be bulldozing the ground of non-modern knowledges in order to seize the domain for their own “innovative” use.

One example of non-modern onto-epistemology is Lugones's mestizaje as “a central name for an impure resistance to interlocked, intermeshed oppressions” (Lugones Reference Lugones1994, 330). Mestizaje is difference within a colonized body that the colonizers refuse to see. It “asserts the impure, curdled multiple state and reject[s] fragmentation into pure parts” (330). It is “complex, heterogeneous and each person is multiple, nonfragmented, embodied” (332). The mestizaje and her practice of curdling is an onto-epistemological act of resistance that rejects all separation. Rather, she is in production: “always in the middle and you will never see the end” (331). That is, the curdling she constantly generates are acts of creativity and plurality as resistance to the colonized logic-practice of homogeneity, fragmentation, and control. Lugones likens curdling to the process of making mayonesa, where the egg yolk, water, and oil coalesce in emulsion—its ingredients distinct but not separate—just varying by degrees toward merging or toward individuation but without ever intending to fully homogenize, or fully pull apart, as in her contrasting metaphor, the case of trying to cleanly remove a yolk from an egg white—a practice she calls “an exercise in purity” (329). In attempting not to get any yolk in the white—even though, of course, as anyone who has attempted this process knows, the yolk and the white are not so cleanly divisible—even if you manage not to break the yolk, there is still no distinct point where the egg white stops dripping off it. Such an exercise in attempted purity, separation, unity, or fragmentation, however, is the logic-practice of the colonizer. The colonizer fabricates dichotomies: categories assignable to “clean-cut” parts. This is the colonizers’ “love of purity,” as Lugones calls it. This love of purity becomes an oppressive way to dismiss the heterogeneity inherent in the colonized—in seeing them as unambiguous not-human-not-males and not-human-not-females (Lugones Reference Lugones2010). In fact, Lugones continues, it is the logic of the colonizer—his reason—that “reduc[es] multiplicity to unity through abstraction and categorization, from a particular vantage point” (Lugones Reference Lugones1994, 333). The colonizer, deeming himself the subject, “must himself be pure, unified, and simple so as to occupy the vantage point and perceive unity amid multiplicity” (333). The colonizer's epistemology of “objective reason,” then, works to homogenize the subject and fragment the colonized as abstract non-human, lacking specificity. In contrast, “a subject who in multiplicity perceives, understands, grasps its worlds as multiple sensuously, passionately as well as rationally without the splitting separation between sense/emotion/reason lacks the unidimensionality and the simplicity required to occupy the privileged vantage point” (333) of the colonizer. Could it be that the “new” preserves this colonizing logic that Lugones critiques?

We see the deletion of the multiple ways in which the material has been addressed by non-modern scholars acting as a homogenizing and demolishing force, thus a continuation of colonization as described by Lugones (Lugones Reference Lugones1994; Reference Lugones2010). The characterizations of the “new” act as a sort of “mega-category” (Todd Reference Todd2016), repositioning a white Euro-Western knower and his logic as modern and pure, and simultaneously acting as a systematic negation and devaluation of the heterogeneous philosophies, intelligences, logics, and ways of being of non-modern scholars and knowledges. Although probably not intentionally, as Todd demonstrates, it acts as an oppression, a continuation of Euro-Western-centric white supremacy in the academy.

For example, we identified with Lugones's critique of the modern when we read works of new materialist scholarship and were reminded of our experiences with non-modern philosopher Thích Nhất Hạnh's resonance with, but absence from, the published works of the “new” (Nhất Hạnh Reference Nhất Hạnh1988; Reference Nhất Hạnh1997; Reference Nhất Hạnh, Kohn and McLeod2001/2009) Then we read Schaeffer's and Todd's analyses of the silencing of Indigenous philosophers from the conversations of the “new” (in some academic fields also called the ontological turn) (Todd Reference Todd2016; Schaeffer Reference Schaeffer2018). And so it seems, not originating in modernity, the land of “progress,” “improvement,” and “advanced civilizations,” these multiple, varied and context-specific non-modern knowledges, and the ways in which they influence the conversations of the “new,” were (and are) delegitimized, silenced, and marginalized under the “new,” “modern,” Euro-Western philosophy.

Didn't Buddha Say That? Non-modern Knowledges

We find it helpful to think with Lugones's use of the concept non-modern in order to name philosophies always already in existence during the onslaughts of colonization and the systematic delegitimizations of the worldviews of the colonized for the benefit of colonial oppressors. To do this, we engage in discussion with Thích Nhất Hạnh and Zoe Todd (Nhất Hạnh Reference Nhất Hạnh1988; Todd Reference Todd2016).

Why Nhất Hạnh's philosophy? Nhất Hạnh, in his prolific scholarship—in some sources it is estimated he has published over 100 books (Paddock Reference Paddock2019)—engages regularly and intimately, in his own way, and of course, in interconnection with over two millennia of larger bodies of Zen Buddhist philosophy, in conversations about interdependence, matter as a dynamic process, and the entanglement of ontology and epistemology. We see it as one non-modern philosophy continuing to be delegitimized in the academy when its onto-epistemological concepts would enhance our conversations in which the “new” engages around ideas such as the flattening of binaries, a non-anthropocentric self, and interdependence. We feel angered by the perpetuation of the narrative of the “new” we described above and by what we see as a lack of meaningful engagement with the non-modern (such as Nhất Hạnh's Vietnamese Zen Buddhist philosophy) even though it is clear to us that the conversation the new materialists tout as fresh and innovative is happening in its own way in Nhất Hạnh's philosophy! As we identify as white, Euro-Western, feminist, cis-women scholars in the field of social science, we recognize both the dangers of writing about Nhất Hạnh's philosophy from our very limited knowledge about it and the potential to do so in a way that oversimplifies and caricatures it (Todd Reference Todd2016). But it is not our intention to be an intermediary, filtering nonmodern knowledges through our Euro-Western lens against which Todd rightfully cautions. Rather, we see it as important to include what little we feel we understand about Nhất Hạnh's philosophy in order to join Todd in critiquing the structures and practices that continue to (re)privilege Euro-Western whiteness and to silence non-modern philosophers by excluding them from the conversation and instead repositioning new materialisms as a “new” “ontological turn” coming out of white Euro-Western scholarship. As Todd says of her commitment to reference works that problematize the field of anthropology as “white public space,” she frequently cites them because “it bears repeating until anthropology takes its whiteness of praxis seriously” (Todd Reference Todd2016, 11). So we also want to repeat her argument, until the fields of education, social science, and the larger Euro-Western academy also take their whiteness seriously and begin in earnest to systematically decolonize policies and practices—as we are attempting to do here in one small way.

In new materialisms, scholars theorize concepts of “arising with” in various ways including (but not limited to) “entanglement” and “intra-action” (Barad Reference Barad2007) or “sympoiesis” (Haraway Reference Haraway2016). Dolphijn and van der Tuin cite Haraway, “Beings do not pre-exist their relations” (Dolphijn and van der Tuin Reference Dolphijn and van der Tuin2012, 30), thus indicating that they become through their relations. Barad says of her notion “intra-action”: “[it] gets us to shift from interaction, where we start with separate entities and they interact, to intra-action, where there are interactions through which subject and object emerge, [it is] . . . a new understanding of causality itself” (in Dolphijn and van der Tuin Reference Dolphijn and van der Tuin2012, 56). Barad suggests intra-action helps us understand the mutually constitutive arising to create what we would consider material forms in a new way. But to us this was reminiscent of Nhất Hạnh's philosophy of interbeing, emptiness, and the five skandhas (Nhất Hạnh Reference Nhất Hạnh1988; Reference Nhất Hạnh1997; Reference Nhất Hạnh, Kohn and McLeod2001/2009). He writes, “to be is to inter-be. You cannot just be by yourself alone. You have to inter-be with every other thing” (Nhất Hạnh Reference Nhất Hạnh1988, 4). He explains how in a sheet of paper there is a cloud, a logger, sunshine, a mill, wheat, and the logger's mother and father, among other sentient and nonsentient beings, including our own minds and perceptions as we gaze at the paper. We, too, are in the paper and by seeing it, we construct it and it constructs us. He explains that without the constitutive forces within each of these elements, it would be impossible to have a piece of paper: “suppose we try to return one of the elements to its source. Suppose we return the sunshine to the sun. Do you think that this sheet of paper would be possible? No, without sunshine nothing can be” (Nhất Hạnh 4). He goes on to say that in this way, in seeing all of the different entities that contribute to this piece of paper, we could say that the paper is actually composed of nonpaper parts—its ingredients are the sun, a raincloud, a leaf, an earthworm, a logger's circulatory system, and more. In fact, Nhất Hạnh says, “You cannot point out one thing that is not here . . . everything coexists with this sheet of paper . . . the sheet of paper is, because everything else is” (Nhất Hạnh 4). This is what Nhất Hạnh calls emptiness, explaining the relationship between the material and the immaterial: emptiness is form and form is emptiness. By this he means that everything is “empty of a separate, independent existence. It cannot just be by itself. It has to inter-be with . . . everything else” (Nhất Hạnh 7). He also stresses that an essential question when we talk about emptiness is empty of what? He provides the example of a cup, explaining that when a cup is empty of water, it is full of air. Again, he is using his analysis to point to interconnection, arguing that if we look deeply enough, nothing can be without everything else. He delves further into these processes with the concept the five skandhas.

Skandha is a Sanskrit word that is often translated into “heaps” or “aggregates” and names the different forces that comprise our sense of “I” as human beings (and it would be interesting to analyze the skandhas that make up other “beings”). Nhất Hạnh describes the skandhas as five rivers continuously flowing and comprising us (Nhất Hạnh Reference Nhất Hạnh1988; Reference Nhất Hạnh, Kohn and McLeod2001/2009). They are the rivers of physical form, feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness. He repeats that none of these rivers has an independent existence: each has to inter-be with each of the others. The ontology of the river is important, meaning that neither of these components is static or stable, even if it appears to be. Rather, each is constantly differing: arising, seeming to stay for a while, and then disappearing. Even in our physical body, birth and death are happening in each moment: birth and death of cells, of micro-organisms on our skin, of this current in-breath.

Not wanting to make a co-eval argument here, our point in including Nhất Hạnh's philosophy is, one, to show that Barad and other new materialist scholars are not “the first” to theorize the concept of mutually interdependent forces arising in the creation of forms, and, two, we wonder what becomes possible when we bring Nhất Hạnh into the conversation? First, we are disrupting a narrative that erases philosophies and philosophers to the benefit of upholding the Euro-Western canon. Second, we can see the difference in Nhất Hạnh's and Barad's concepts. Barad's intra-action arises from her studies of quantum physics, and Nhất Hạnh's from his studies of Zen Buddhist philosophy and meditations. When we put both into conversation, we have a richer picture of forces, materiality, ethics, and realities. Barad's description in her interview with Dolphijn and van der Tuin helps us to know that our causality is always emerging through ongoing, multiple, and varied relational forces (Dolphijn and van der Tuin Reference Dolphijn and van der Tuin2012). Nhất Hạnh's explanation of skandhas provides insight into one way we might think of impermanent forces constructing our ideas and experiences of ourselves. Particularly, his notion of interbeing helps us to think of our ethical responsibility in being yoked to brother cloud and sister logger. If, as Nhất Hạnh says, we have no separate independent existence, then the paper on which we have printed this manuscript, along with the cloud, tree, logger, logger's ancestors, and the logger's food, sun, earth, bees, saw, and more, are also us. As such, we have an ethical responsibility to treat them with care and respect, just as we intend to treat the skandhas, or rivers, we call our bodies, ourselves. Nhất Hạnh's interbeing helps us to want to ensure that the logger's salary, health benefits, and other working conditions are fair, safe, and satisfactory and that the tree's conditions are as well—that the tree is seen with reverence, and its health and vitality are cared for along with consideration of how much paper we print and what happens to the sheets after they leave our hands. Also, it encourages us to treat our bodies well out of deep respect, knowing that everything nourishes us with the energy to be responsible to our cloud, tree, and logger components and to create this paper with integrity.

Both Barad's and Nhất Hạnh's philosophies are needed. As Nhất Hạnh would say, they inter-are (Nhất Hạnh Reference Nhất Hạnh and Kotler1991). Barad cannot be without Nhất Hạnh and Nhất Hạnh cannot be without Barad. In ignoring Nhất Hạnh's inherent embeddedness in the “new,” we erase an alterity that matters. That's what colonization does, as we showed through our engagement with Lugones (Lugones Reference Lugones2010): it wipes out heterogeneous differences in order to make the category of the white man the only human and thus the only “civilized” being, therefore attempting to delete the different ways of knowing-being of the colonized.

More Than Semantics, or Semantics Matters

The significance of this, we contend, is not merely a question of semantics. As Barad affirms, “Language matters” (Barad Reference Barad2003, 801). That is, language materializes the world—it affects. According to Lugones's logic, the modern/non-modern, or in this case, the new/old binary, operates on the suppression of the ontological and epistemological practices of those forced into the category of non-modern or non-human. Lugones points out that the logic of the modern acts as if it were a totalizing, universal, and linear force. By invoking the word “new,” and by their practices of the universalizing story of this philosophical orientation of “turning back to matter,” we see the new materialisms as conserving a totalizing and linear logic. Coloniality functions on the erasure of difference. As Lugones analyzes, “the normativity that connected gender and civilization became intent on erasing community, ecological practices, knowledge of planting, of weaving, of the cosmos . . .” (Lugones Reference Lugones2010, 745). Erase multiple onto-epistemologies, and colonization moves in. We cannot help but see that continuing to refer to these strands of thought as “new” reinforces harmful and violent discourses of white, neoliberal, colonial capitalism, thereby perpetuating white supremacy in the academy (Todd Reference Todd2016).

We acknowledge that some scholars recognize non-modern philosophies in connection with the “new,” but we contend it is not enough. For example, Coole and Frost recognize that while they use the word “new,” these philosophies have roots in both previous Western materialist scholarship (for example, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud) and in delegitimized philosophies:

But in the next breath, they insist upon using the term “new” because, they assert, “unprecedented things are currently being done with and to matter, nature, life, production, and reproduction” (4; emphasis added). The notion that these philosophies enact “unprecedented things” privileges the colonizing philosophies of the Euro-Western “new” and have no interest in substantially engaging the aforementioned historically disenfranchised philosophies in their conversations, thus perpetuating the new/old dichotomy!

This new/old dichotomy is a categorical and hierarchical arrangement in which the new is intended to promote or advertise something as the better, updated version—the tinge of capitalism is alive in this marketing, or what Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre, Alecia Youngblood Jackson, and Lisa A. Mazzei call the use of new as an alert (St. Pierre, Jackson, and Mazzei Reference St. Pierre2016)—something shiny vying for attention, much like the irresistible chime of a cellphone notification or the bright lights of a capitalist advertisement for the new and improved formula. It creates and reinforces a system of competition as if we were all separable so as to compete against one another. In addition, the idea of the “new” positions the past as inferior to the present, just as Lugones suggested that the terms modern and pre-modern do. Even if Euro-Western scholars insert a line or two stating that this philosophy is not new, we believe privileging the “new,” operates just as the term “New World” as operated: it denies the existence of millions of people and hundreds of cultures that thrived, and continue to thrive, in the lands that Europeans thirsty for power invaded and devastated. We can no longer use the word new to describe these lines of thought, nor can we use the binary new/old to describe the materiality or spirituality of the world (not that we think these are separate from each other), we can't use the term new at all without feeling that we are erasing the interconnectedness of existence. When we buy a shirt, for example, we are reminded that it is not new. To think that it is new is a self-centered view of the world: that shirt had an existence long before our encounter with it. By rejecting its newness, we acknowledge this life. We acknowledge the store employees who placed it out for us to buy. We acknowledge the truck driver who transported it and the natural resources used to do so. We acknowledge the factory workers who labored to make it and the agricultural workers who labored to produce the cotton. We acknowledge the sun and the soil and the rain that nourished the plant. This shirt, like us, like theories and novels and inventions, are not new. They are always in processes of mutual co-becomings.

But the scholarship of the “new,” through the new/old binary, rather than acting in interdependencies of difference, continues to position white, Euro-Western scholars as experts, which we see as a continuation of the same logic Lugones critiqued in her analysis of the human/non-human binary as central to coloniality (Lugones Reference Lugones2010). Semantics matters. Not acknowledging the many components of the shirt, or in this case, the many ways in which non-modern philosophers theorize topics of interest similar to what the new materialist scholars posit (Todd Reference Todd2016), creates a situation in which “minority discourses seemingly cannot inhabit the space of proper theoretical reflection” (Weheliye Reference Weheliye2014, 9). Thus the new materialisms reify the Western philosophical tradition, privileging its version of logic and rationality, categorization and hierarchization (Schaeffer Reference Schaeffer2018). Determine the boundaries of “legitimized philosophical thought” to exclude marginal subjects, Dwight A. McBride contends, and only then can you imagine something to be “new” (McBride Reference McBride, Hsu, Franklin and Kosanke2000, quoted in Weheliye Reference Weheliye2014, 139–40). The caricature of the new is unethical—it creates a world of re-privileging white, Euro-Western scholars over non-modern scholars of color who operate outside of the oppressive modernist tradition (Lugones Reference Lugones2010). Tuck and Yang liken it to “a path in tall grasses, choosing one path instead of others, over time will make that path more obvious. Paths become deep-set grooves, and over time, can appear to be the only option” (Tuck and Yang Reference Tuck and Wayne Yang2018, 6). This is what we see the new materialisms as doing: repaving a path of “modernity” and thus a path of coloniality. In the next section we discuss possibilities to actively move in the opposite direction: toward decolonization of the academy.

Toward a Decolonial Orientation: Abolishing Systemic White Supremacy in the Academy

While some take comfort in the “new,” we do not. New is threatening. It limits the possibility of the present in the future. It places a shelf life on the power of the past. Instead, we take comfort in knowing that we are connected and made of the “past” and that the entanglement of our past with our present creates a future that may respond to shapeshifting injustices.

It is the continuity, the connections that our presents have with the past and future, that give us courage and motivation. We do not have to be new to be valuable. That is a colonial, capitalist, white, male supremacist value. Rather, we are valuable in our difference. We are valuable in our relations to one another and in the transformations we encourage, witness, and create in ourselves and with the world.

What are we calling for? Not a savior complex of white scholars as the new materialisms might be read to be operating (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2008), but a decolonial commitment and practice that centers around acknowledging non-modern philosophies as part of the conversation of new materialisms in substantial ways (Weheliye Reference Weheliye2014; Tuck, Yang, and Gaztambide-Fernández Reference Tuck, Wayne Yang and Gaztambide-Fernández2015; Rodríguez Reference Rodríguez2018; Schaeffer Reference Schaeffer2018; Tuck and Yang Reference Tuck and Wayne Yang2018). In this section we (1) make a call for reparations of knowledge via a value shift toward “a logic of coalition of multiplicity” (Lugones Reference Lugones2010) that includes being intentional about citation practices (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2013; Todd Reference Todd2016; Schaeffer Reference Schaeffer2018; Tuck and Yang Reference Tuck and Wayne Yang2018) in order to (2) end the epistemology of ignorance we see functioning in the “new” (Tuana Reference Tuana2004).

Lugones states, “coloniality of gender is still with us; it is what lies at the intersection of gender/class/race as central constructs of the capitalist world system of power” (Lugones Reference Lugones2010, 746). We might see coloniality of knowledge as also central to the capitalist world system of power—and certainly in the academy. Our value structures and ethics align with decolonial and abolitionist projects (Tuck and Yang Reference Tuck and Wayne Yang2018) of refusing further supremacy of Euro-Western philosophy in the academy by foregrounding non-modern philosophers in our conversations. This is a value shift toward relating ourselves to difference as valid ways of knowing and being in the world. Ultimately, as Todd says, we need to engage the alterity, the non-modern differences in our academic conversations (Todd Reference Todd2016). We like Lugones's argument for a logic of coalition of multiplicity as “a movement toward . . . that impels us to know each other as selves that are thick, in relation, in alternative socialites, and grounded in tense, creative inhibitions of the colonial difference” (Lugones Reference Lugones2010, 748). A coalition of multiplicity inhibits or abolishes colonization by acting on our specificities in relation. It is “defiant of the logic of dichotomies; differences are never seen in dichotomous terms, but the logic has as its opposition the logic of power. The multiplicity is never reduced” (755). This refusal of binary logic and embracing of multiplicity takes us back to Lugones's curdling as an act of resistance. Curdling actively refuses the oppressor's logic-practices of separation and instead includes logic-practices of impurity, of mestizaje, or “nonfragmented multiplicit[ies]” (Lugones Reference Lugones1994, 340). Curdling enacts agency by creating selves and one another through ambiguous, transforming acts of (re)invention, defying the colonizer's imposed logics of control, sameness, and categorization. It also knows others in and through their particular dynamic curdled expressions—foregrounding fluid specificities in relation, or in our interbeing (Nhất Hạnh Reference Nhất Hạnh1988). If we foreground our fluid specificities in relation to one another, we must take into serious consideration how our ongoing practices in which we think-speak-act affect the many beings with whom we co-exist, co-depend, and co-create (Todd Reference Todd2016). If we erase the ways in which concepts addressed in the “new” have also been taken up differently by a variety of feminist and non-modern philosophers over time and space, we pretend we don't have to be responsible to our ethical relationship to one another. Then it seems not to matter if we are complicit in colonial practices that the academy continues to perpetuate. We suggest that we can continuously position ourselves to disrupt the colonial practice of new/old binaries and to actively engage with non-modern philosophers as an act and practice of reparations.

A conversation of reparations of knowledge needs to include an acknowledgment that delegitimized non-modern knowledges know things that the West doesn't (yet) esteem. It seems that new materialisms are the Euro-Westerner's attempts to heal the West (and all peoples and the earth who have been negatively affected) from the colonizer's oppressive logic-acts of separation, control, and violence. As Schaeffer contends, “The emergence of feminist materialism certainly marks the need for heightened attention to the toxic consequence of the Anthropocene on all forms of life” (Schaeffer Reference Schaeffer2018, 1008). That is what is broken: he colonial logic-practices of power dominating the Anthropocene and exploiting non-modern peoples and the earth. Non-modern epistemes have always already operated by refusing the human/non-human hierarchy and dichotomy of concepts such as a nature/culture divide, because the human/non-human binary logic was forced onto them through coloniality. So, we might read the new materialisms as displaying a complicated intention toward a sort of decolonization (by rejecting colonial, dichotomous logic). But we see it as needing to go further: needing to name its intention as decolonizing from Euro-Western-centric logic and to do so actively by engaging in conversation with colonized onto-epistemologies and by disrupting the new/old binary. It would be a good start to refuse to refer to this body of work as “new”! Being intentional about our citation practices is another way to decolonize and repair the academy.

We call for scholarly reparations by echoing invitations to reconsider our citation practices (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2013; Tuck, Yang, and Gaztambide-Fernández Reference Tuck, Wayne Yang and Gaztambide-Fernández2015; Todd Reference Todd2016). Eve Tuck, K. Wayne Yang, and Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández have organized the “Citation Practices Challenge Tumblr” where they encourage scholars to think about “who [we] choose to link and re-circulate in [our] work? Who gets erased? Who should you stop citing?” (Tuck, Yang, and Gaztambide-Fernández Reference Tuck, Wayne Yang and Gaztambide-Fernández2015). Referencing Sara Ahmed (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2013), they articulate how citation practices are political acts, reproducing and “making certain bodies and thematics core to the discipline, and others not even part.” They further explain, “our practices of citation make and remake our fields, making some forms of knowledge peripheral.” They challenge scholars to not just habitually reference dominantly cited scholars (and remarginalize others) but to produce something different—a decolonial engagement that seriously engages non-modern philosophers in the “new” to see what the new is missing. Todd, thinking with Juanita Sundberg and Vanessa Watts, offers guidance to Euro-Western scholars working with non-modern philosophers: “account for location (Sundberg Reference Sundberg2013) and Indigenous Place-Thought (Watts Reference Watts2013, 31)” (Todd Reference Todd2016, 9). In other words, she calls for the academy to abolish its colonial policies and practices by actively looking for Indigenous presences in scholarship and to assure depth and accuracy of Indigenous thought (as opposed to stereotyping and surface-level gestures). Though some scholars writing in the “new” do write with non-modern knowledges (Nxumalo Reference Nxumalo2016), the majority of scholarship centers Euro-western voices and does not include the many non-modern scholars also writing about issues of entanglement, challenging the autonomous subject, impermanence, rupturing binaries, and so on. If the “new” continues to present itself as is, we are complicit in conditions that recreate the horrors of ongoing white supremacy:

Without disruption, this pattern will continue, and colonization will continue. Todd writes, “decolonization of thought cannot happen until the proponents of the discipline themselves are willing to engage in the decolonial project in a substantive and structural and physical way, and willing to acknowledge that the colonial is an extant, ongoing reality” (17). This is the value and act of decolonization we hope to contribute through this paper: by naming the mutating colonization as we see it in the new materialisms and disrupting it by centering Lugones's and Nhất Hạnh's non-modern philosophies.

Our complicity in dominant practices is what enables Nancy Tuana's epistemology of ignorance to continue. Tuana posits, “Ignorance is not a simple lack. It is often constructed, maintained, and disseminated and is linked to issues of cognitive authority, doubt, trust, silencing, and uncertainty” (Tuana Reference Tuana2004, 194). In this way, we argue, the characterization of the “new materialisms” is not just a reproduction of the oppressive logic of coloniality, it is also, in Tuana's words, a construction, maintenance, and dissemination of ignorance under the guise of cognitive authority and with a methodology of silencing philosophies outside of the Eurocentric frame. Ignorance, Tuana states, is not neutral; it is implicated in power structures. We argue that the ignorance created by the construct of the new materialisms reproduces the colonial power structure of hegemony.

Lugones says of her argument that it is not necessarily a practical task, but that it is a critique (Lugones Reference Lugones2010). Combined with Todd's call to action (Todd Reference Todd2016), we hope we have composed a text that is a critique, an invitation to practice, as well as practice-in-action. Engaged together, we see critique plus practice as a decolonial and abolition project. Tuck and Yang describe abolition as connected to many deconstructions of unjust systems such as the abolition of slavery—movements to upend “the foundations of modern capital” (Tuck and Yang Reference Tuck and Wayne Yang2018, 9). They describe decolonization as “the rematriation of Indigenous land and life” (9), a dismantling of capitalist systems turning colonized onto-epistemologies into profit. Both abolition and decolonization counter the “Violence and [presumed] legitimacy of the nation-state and its apparatuses” (9). Tuck and Yang point out how such projects have always already been happening and how both require different social orders, different values: “Both abolition and decolonization object to the configuration of the nation-state” (9) and its institutions or “apparatuses” so that they can be dismantled and built into something different on different ethics—perhaps our interbeing in relations of difference.

What ethics are currently being propagated by the “new”? Lugones reminds us that “everyday practices . . . either habituate us to take care of the world or to destroy it” (Lugones Reference Lugones2010, 742). For those of us who call ourselves feminists, are we going to reify colonial logic? Or are we going to follow Lugones's commitment to organizational structures outside of the logic of oppression and resist the seductive capitalist temptation of the “new”? In a material-semiotic ontology, how we characterize something both materializes our reality and constructs our ignorance. The responsibility is ours. What will we see-be-create?