Amefricanity: Toward a Decolonial Black Feminist Pedagogy

With the political-cultural category of Amefricanity, Gonzalez shows that the effective presence of Black women and men in the various countries of the Americas and the Caribbean has been constant but at the same time hidden and silenced by the denial of their existence as beings and subjects with agency. The Black experience has been made invisible by the discourse of colonialism that invented them as uncivilized and primitive by today's systemic degradation. The origin of this category is traced in a context of colonialism and coloniality; the latter is the dehumanizing global logic that remained even after the end of colonialism and that keeps the white, heterosexual, Christian man as the unaltered standard of humanity to be valued (Quijano Reference Quijano, de Sousa Santos and Meneses2010). Gonzalez worked with race and racism as structuring a global classification and hierarchy, and not as an epiphenomenon. Even so, she did not underestimate the existence of other hierarchical axes, nor did she reduce their impact, since she considered oppression as interconnected (Collins Reference Collins1986).

Through the application of this category, Gonzalez promotes a displacement of the gaze, changing the place of enunciation from Central-European narratives to the margins of Améfrica. She proposes to produce knowledge “from within Indigenous and African cultures” to counter interpretations centered on the worldview of European thought (Cardoso Reference Cardoso2014, 970). For example, in “A Socio-Historical Study of South-Amefrican Christianity: The Brazilian Case,” Gonzalez explores the creation of Black Catholic fraternities during the Brazilian slavery period to demonstrate a concrete expression of the legacy of Amefricanity in the past. She highlights the survival strategies of Black enslaved women and men, who many times used negotiation and resistance with perspicacity and sagacity, both to stay alive and to preserve their knowledge, beliefs, values, and cultural heritage. She characterizes these strategies as the beginning of Améfrica. Following her argument, Black Catholic fraternities in Brazil acted as mediators with the dominant figures, since on one side they served as protection for those who frequented them “to receive religious information,” and on the other side, they were used “as a subterranean passage through which they held the gifts and practices of African heritage” (Gonzalez Reference Gonzalez1988d, 213). These spaces were for socializing, having experiences, organizing plans, and strengthening their daily harassed humanity. In this way, Gonzalez argues, Black women and men formed the structure of their African religion in Brazil: “it was not in any way based on any European model, or even on a single African model.” So, she concludes, “we cannot accept the common idea that syncretism characterizes the Amefrican belief system in Brazil” (213). Her point of departure resides on "this" side of the Atlantic, on the side of the Black diaspora and Indigenous peoples. She teaches us to refute explanations from the viewpoint of the European hegemonic eye and offers an amefricanized reinterpretation from Améfrica, understood as an:

Amefricanity is constituted by the events unfolding throughout the crossing of the Atlantic, tinged by the different contexts and worldviews of the Americas and the Caribbean, and it acts as a construction of a “whole ethnic identity,” as Gonzalez underlines in reference to the valorization of the experiences and the history of the Amefricans within the Black diaspora (76). Identity here is perceived as a place of speech enunciation and, in this direction, it is important to remember, as Linda Alcoff states, that colonialism created identities as well as silenced and epistemologically unauthorized some of them while strengthening others. Thus “a project for an epistemological decolonization assumes the epistemic relevance of identity because it understands that experiences from different locations are diverse and that the location matters for the process of research and understanding.” In this way, identity has to be understood as a process that gives meaning to the construction of individual and collective experiences and historical narratives (Alcoff Reference Alcoff2016, 136).

In the movement for building knowledge created from the identification of different experiences, Gonzalez claims that it is necessary for us to deter “the look in order to better understand the importance of women in the struggles of yesterday and today's Amefrican communities” (Gonzalez Reference Gonzalez1988c, 24) since they constitute one of the most unauthorized and silenced subjects. She highlights, in the face of this reality, the compelling urge to research and announce the epistemic place of Black women's narratives within Amefricanity, not only as narratives against the modern colonialism of feminine subjects subjugated by hegemonic historiography, but as the daily Amefrican experience, which continues to confront racism, sexism, classism, heterosexuality as a norm, and other social inequities.

The consequences of racism and sexism, as well as the production of inequalities of Black and Indigenous women in Brazil, the Americas, and the Caribbean, are significant components in Gonzales's thought. Even though she did not develop in-depth research on the reality of Indigenous women, by including them in her reflections and emphasizing their historical discrimination and exclusion, she aimed to announce them as subjects of rights and as protagonists of a long process of resistance and resilience, and even intended to register and ratify a relationship of kinshipFootnote ³ between Black and Indigenous women who joined in the fight against oppression.

Gonzalez proposes an articulation between racism and sexism with the intention of understanding how Indigenous and Black women, “because of their social position, articulated with racial and sexual discrimination, suffer more abruptly the effects of a crisis.” This is why she underlines the importance of “explaining the articulation between race, class, sex, and power,” to the extent that the research so carried out “reveals the structures of domination of a society and a state” (Gonzalez Reference Gonzalez1988b, 138). With the intersection of sex, class, and race—or, in her words, with the articulation of categories—Gonzalez aims to “submerge the gender inequalities that place Black women in a different dimension of social relations from those of white women” (Cardoso Reference Cardoso2014, 974), although she does not make the gender category explicit.Footnote ⁴ According to Gonzalez:

Gonzalez situates Black and Indigenous women within the context of coloniality, and highlights “we, nonwhite women, have been spoken about, defined, and classified by an ideological system of domination that infantilizies us” (135, author's italics). Gonzalez assertively seeks to denounce and research the specificity of the logic of domination and expropriation of this model over bodies constructed from negation, such as women belonging to racially discriminated social groups. She says: “by imposing on us an inferior place inside the hierarchy (based on our sexual and racial biological conditions), [coloniality] suppresses our humanity precisely because it negates our right to be subjects, not only subjects of our own discourse, but also of our own history” (135).

The social place for the inferiorization and exclusion of the Black women was announced, Gonzalez evidences, when, “once their humanity is abolished, they are seen as animalized bodies: they are ‘donkeys of sexual burden’ (of which Brazilian mulatto women are a model). In this manner, this confirms an alliance between economic and sexual overexploitation” (139). In direct conversation with the coloniality of gender, Gonzalez analyzes how female racialized bodies were constructed inside colonialism to sustain the model of exploitation and oppression globally, in order to regulate production relations, as well as social, personal, and sexual relations.

As I have exposed in a previous work (Cardoso Reference Cardoso, Veiga, Nichnig, Wolff and Zandoná2019b), María Lugones, inspired by Aníbal Quijano's definition of coloniality, developed the category colonial/modern gender system, which is a result of the European colonial project that imposes a series of dichotomous and hierarchical distinctions over colonized people in the service of the Western white man. Among those distinctions, the system's primary classification is the division between human and nonhuman, followed by the invention of gender, that carries in its constitution the supremacy of the European white man, who has rights over the women of his own group, the European white woman, perceived as his partner and reproducer of race and capital, who is also human. Last, it established a division between man and woman, constituting the mark of human and civilization (Lugones Reference Lugones2008; Reference Lugones2011). This system built gender as a category, as well as its hegemonic relationship structure, in other words, it organized, in fact and right, solely the lives of white women and white men, bourgeois and heterosexual. Colonized people were divided into male and female, thus, “the colonized woman” became an empty category, since no colonized female is a woman; the violence and violation to which they are subjected are guided by this premise (Lugones Reference Lugones2011, 106).

In this way, Gonzalez's thought arrives at the present in dialogue with the current debate about gender and coloniality, and it shows how the place of gender is reconfigured by race in the structuring of the dynamics of capitalist exploitation. Her studies show that the place occupied by Black women inside the gender category even defines the pattern of femininity associated with white women, of the masculinity associated with white men, providers and owners of the ideal feminine, and of heterosexuality as a model to ensure the maintenance and perpetuation of the conservative, white, Christian, nuclear-family model. Identifying and analyzing the processes that constituted female racialized bodies as nonhuman and nonwoman reveals the complexity of the violences inflicted on these bodies. Gonzalez works with the principles that constituted what is conceptualized as modernity/coloniality and coloniality of gender (Quijano Reference Quijano, de Sousa Santos and Meneses2010; Lugones Reference Lugones2011; Grosfoguel Reference Grosfoguel, Bernardino-Costa, Maldonado-Torres and Grosfoguel2018). Her reflections are theoretical contributions that offer interpretive lenses that teach how to promote critical positions to the adverse reality of a world organized by solid borders of hierarchization and segregation, and aim for investigative paths that submerge the socially determined place of nonwhite women in that context.

In this way, Amefricanity has in its conception a distinctive character that defines it as a decolonial, feminist, pedagogical proposal, expressed in the texture of a learning path constituted by the knowledge and stories rewritten by women against subalternization and exploitation. As Catherine Walsh conceptualizes, it is a pedagogy present in the oppositional actions historically achieved by subalternized communities to confront processes of oppression, constructing answers to that domination and pointing to other forms of social and political organization: pedagogy as “practices, strategies, and methodologies that are intertwined and are constructed in resistance and opposition, as well as in insurgencies, cimarronaje, affirmation, re-existence, and re-humanization” (Walsh Reference Walsh and Walsh2013, 29).

Feminist decolonial authors Yuderkys Espinosa, Diana Gómez, María Lugones, and Karina Ochoa, in “Reflexiones pedagógicas en torno al feminismo descolonial: Una conversa en cuatro voces,” followed the same direction and conceptualized a decolonial, feminist pedagogy as one that aims to “achieve, above all, the development of an ability to (re)think the world and question everything” to promote the research of processes that installed certain worldviews above others, combined with the imposition of a social order structured for the maintenance of privileges of some social groups, to develop a new point of view (Espinosa et al. Reference Espinosa, Gómez, Lugones, Ochoa and Walsh2013, 412). By recovering experiences that have taught Black and Indigenous women to defend themselves and their community, and presenting those as pedagogic processes that facilitate an opportunity to comprehend and intervene in their social reality, Amefricanity offers significant contributions to decolonial Black feminism in its aim to radically transform relations of oppression and domination that have subjugated racially discriminated and inferiorized women throughout history.

In this way, Amefricanity proposes to illuminate the insurgencies organized against processes of invalidation, to highlight methodologies and strategies of mobilization, and to investigate how the diffusion of values and knowledges owned by subaltern subjects guarantees alternative ways to stop the daily kidnapping of human existence, carried out by various ways of dehumanization and violence inaugurated by colonizers, specifically concerning Black and Indigenous women.

Amefricanity is epistemological, and it seeks to unlearn the hegemonic narrative and to detach itself from colonizing white knowledge in order to think and elaborate new epistemological criteria and analytical categories that promote decolonial counternarratives born out of the trajectories of peripheral subjects from marginalized places, subverting the pole of enunciation and validation of discourse from the colonizing side to that of the colonized. This category promotes an epistemological shift within Black feminism, considering that the assumptions guiding the interpretation and production of new knowledge and meanings belong to the Black women themselves, and because of that, they can forge their own self-determination. Gonzalez's Amefricanity inspires us to pedagogically interpret the stories of those who preceded us, to learn their methods and transgressive practices of asymmetrical power relations as pedagogical processes. It teaches us to value the multiple knowledges and experiences, diverse and concrete, of subjects in order to produce new epistemological strategies to generate relevant knowledge that promotes social and collective emancipation to confront and help organize responses to existing heteronormative, patriarchal racism.