Critical Phenomenology and De/Postcolonial Thought: Towards a Radical Critique

Puja Ghosh (Oregon)

Phenomenology’s relationship with critique has considerably expanded as has grown the field of critical phenomenology.[1] If we think of critical phenomenology as a method, then Guenther’s approach and definition sits well, for it seems to have taken care of the main concerns with classical phenomenology, especially first person solipsism, as we expand our analyses to emphasize intersubjectivity and address the structurally complex layers of a social life.[2] In this vein, we see critical phenomenology as a powerful form of social critique addressing issues of racism, sexism etc., by enabling us to make visible the very conditions of possibility that makes happen, a certain marginalizing act in a given space.

In the array of emerging scholarship on socio-political critiques, decolonial thought holds a special mention as well. It is no longer an orientation of just writing back and merely responding to the empire, rather it is also a political movement to make seen other knowledge systems, to create the conditions of possibility for the existence of other non-western philosophies and cosmological traditions. We have finally perhaps entered a time where the work of decolonial philosophy rests on the making of a productive critique that simultaneously illuminates the politics of erasure. What is that which was violently erased? What is that which we continue to invisibilize in seemingly progressive epistemic and political spaces? Above all, how can we, rather, how do we make certain epistemic and existential nuances seen?

My effort here is to create a space for a conversation between critical phenomenology and decolonial thought. And in the process unfold a few questions: Can critical phenomenology provide some valuable insights into the already obtaining critical aspect of decolonial thinking? And in that case, what does it mean to do critical phenomenology? How far can decolonial approaches challenge and shift the way we understand critical phenomenology? How far can both walk together?

In the first section, I provide an interpretative understanding of the term ›decolonial thought‹ in relation to this paper, and examine its relevance in the works of scholars critical of colonialism and eurocentrism. Focusing on Saba Mahmood, Gayatri Spivak, and Oyeronke Oyewumi, I outline problematic comprehensions of non-western bodily practices, rituals and embodiment that have suffered from a reductive explanation as a result of the imposition of a universal western epistemic lens, and from a lack of available structure to cognize them. I argue that an aspect of such a reduction is made possible because of the lack of nuance, often in terms of a non-attention to the material, historical and structural particularities of colonial contexts. In the second section, I elucidate Sara Ahmed’s work on affectivity, as an exemplary form, to show critical phenomenology’s ability to be attentive to particularities in the context of coloniality.[3] Further, I outline the possibilities that might open up through critical phenomenology by being attentive to the affective politics and material nuances of a decolonial context. Finally, I gesture at the possible limitations in this exchange given phenomenology’s historical origins in European thought.

A decolonial critique: the issues of unintelligibility

There might be a tendency to understand the meaning of the term ›decolonial‹ in an already pre-given sense with an emphasis on a certain geo-political sense of belonging, therefore not leaving much room for interpretation or critical engagement. Various debates have taken place for quite some time in academic scholarship over the terms ›decolonial‹, ›postcolonial‹ and their usage, especially in relation to their distinct genealogical bearings.[4] However, commonality persists in the ways in which these various traditions have challenged a hegemonic Eurocentric understanding of the world and therefore an attempt in understanding the term ›decolonial‹ from a transnational perspective is possible.[5] In its emancipatory zeal to escape the Eurocentric gaze of continually being defined and categorized, both postcolonial and decolonial scholarship have engaged in producing critiques to a eurocentrism in knowledge production that saturates much of today’s world views, thus providing a nuanced space for imagination of distinct bodies and their existence in the life-world.

Alongside they have also challenged inter-linked systems of oppression by producing critiques of colonialism and capitalism, racism and other structural injustices that prevail due to coloniality. It is from such a spirit of collective understanding of traditions of resistance against practices of colonialism and slavery, beyond regionalism, that I take the liberty to interpret the term ›decolonial‹ in relation to the scholarly work done by Gayatri Spivak, Saba Mahmood, and Oyeronke Oyewumi\textbf{. }To provide an elaborate explanation on the similarities and differences between decolonial, postcolonial, and other similar thinking traditions across geopolitical spaces and varied political ends is beyond the scope of the present commentary.[6]

Oyewumi in her work challenges the very foundation of the most unquestioned premise of western feminism – sex difference. Questioning the notion of sex difference as a pre-given to organize the bodies in the world in relation to the concept of gender or gendering, Oyewumi illuminates how such a condition of pre-givenness obfuscates the origins and existence of certain other knowledge systems, cultures, bodies and relationalities. Through a detailed socio-linguistic analysis of the Yoruba language in relation to what is accounted for today as ›gender‹, along with historical evidence of an indigenous social organizing principle in alignment with Yoruba cosmology, the author provides an illuminating account of how gender as a social category or the ›women’s issue‹ is a western imposition on Yoruba culture.[7] Such an imposition is both as a result of a western thought process that has seeped into conceptual frameworks to cognize and interpret African studies, and a result of actual colonial practices that have been institutionally enacted to reify ›gender‹ as a social category in a lived way, as a form of reality.[8]\textbf{ }In an attempt to decolonize the ways of perceiving and interpreting difference amongst bodies in the Yorubaland, Oyewumi provides a carefully crafted account of the self-articulations in Yoruba language which show the redundancy of gender as a social category.

Primarily, the bodies situated in the space of Yorubaland are referenced through indicators of age and ritual practices, rather than ›gender‹ as a dominant marker for acknowledging difference. Such a view remains inadequate without elaborating the larger background of Yoruba indigenous practices, cosmological traditions, and the complexities of the Yoruba culture. Oyewumi’s account is therefore an exhaustive tracing of historical and socio-linguistic politics of bilingualism that clearly indicates the violence of translation from Yoruba oral traditions into the language of English. The author works rigorously to show how a western ontological and epistemic imposition happens when English as a language, which is ›gender specific‹ according to the author, is imposed on Yoruba bodies and spaces. This is particularly problematic in relation to Yoruba language, which, as the author claims, is clearly a language that does not have gender-specific categories in its usage and grammar.[9] Outlining the impacts of imposing linguistic, philosophical and social categories originating from the experiences of life-worlds in the West, Oyewumi highlights the aftereffects of a colonial lens that still persist and permeate our conceptualizing, especially in relation to how spatiality and bodily relationalities have been cognized and understood. Such an issue is not limited to an abstract domain – Oyewumi points out that such comprehensions often get taken up by grass-roots level policy-makers thereby increasing these ramifications in manifold ways\textbf{.}[10]\textbf{ }

Similar to Oyewumi’s decolonial approach in challenging the assumed western universalist ascriptions, yet issue-wise situated in the postcolonial Middle East, we find Saba Mahmood’s ethnographic work on grassroots women’s piety movements in the mosques of Cairo showing us the limitations of a secular-liberal academic language that inhabits in its very framing a limitation in thought of the available western philosophical categories, to render unintelligible the politics of certain bodies and spaces. In her ethnographic work, Mahmood articulates different modalities of agency, interpreting the embodied practices, gestures and negotiations that happen in the particular mosque she inhabits in Cairo. Lamenting the unavailability of a language that is bereft of the western secular liberal assumptions for comprehensions of a critique or an explanation in relations to a Islamist politic, Mahmood writes: »Even the concepts I have had to rely on in describing the mosque movement incorporates this evaluative purview«.[11] Mahmood makes the case about how certain ritualistic embodied practices can inform our theoretical comprehension, of what the philosophical labels are constituted – an intersubjective domain, rather than the latter being a theoretical comprehension which is informing the former categories of perception and being.[12] One might say that such a reading comes quite close to a critical phenomenological approach as well.\textbf{ }The author is critical of certain western theories which prescriptively and analytically have already defined how feminist ›agency‹ should be constituted or be operative, without addressing any particularities of a subjective disposition or invoking complex relationalities of the fabrics of a certain socio-historical space. Mahmood notes that in her work she is interested to begin with seeing the practices in a space, rather than a defined notion that already informs our thinking:

»In the context of mosque movement, this means closely analyzing the scaffolding of practices – both argumentative and embodied – that secured the mosque participants’s attachment to patriarchal forms of life that, in turn, provided the necessary conditions for both their subordination and their agency. One of the questions I hope to address is: how does the particularity of this attachment challenge familiar ways of conceptualizing ›subordination‹ and ›change‹ within liberal and poststructuralist feminist debates?«[13]

In these moments it might seem that Mahmood’s view on interpreting embodied practices to render them intelligible rings close to the main thesis in Spivak’s article »Can the Subaltern Speak?« as both authors delve to decipher the politics of the unintelligible. Spivak has underlined the issues of unintelligibility that surface when one attempts to translate or render visible, from the periphery, a certain voice. Articulating the concerns of unintelligibility within a hegemonic, dominant narrative of capitalism and capitalist knowledge production, Spivak states the emergence of the ›subaltern‹ whose voice is not articulated for its meaning as it is, as the existing grammar, sign and signifier of the dominant structure remains very much intact. The question that lurks throughout the various examples and readings of Spivak’s text is the issue of appropriation of voice and the making and unmaking of a political subjectivity through it. \ \

Citing two prime examples, the banning of Sati which was celebrated as a step towards »social and civil reform« by the British colonialists during India’s rule and the problematic conclusions on the death of a young Bengali woman of sixteen, Bhaduri, who hanged herself in her father’s apartment in 1926 Bengal, India (British-ruled), Spivak offers a reading which can be comprehended as the loss of dimensions due to an operative ignorance shaping a phenomenon of unintelligibility in both the contexts. Bhaduri, the young woman, does indeed provide a rewriting through her own body, similar to rewriting of a text as a form of critique, in resistance. Bhaduri was involved in Indian independence movement and was entrusted with a political assassination which she could not confront and therefore committed suicide.[14] Aware of the conclusions of how her dead body might be read, most probably as a case of a young woman in an illicit affair and pregnant, Bhaduri chose to commit suicide with much deliberation. She waited for her menstruating self to arrive. However, her dead body which was found in a state of menstruation was not seen. Her resistance to such an assumed conclusion in and through her bodily ascriptions, decisions and deliberations was not intelligible. It is also the same phenomenon of unintelligibility, of erasing contextual nuance, that allowed the colonizers to initiate a reformative »civilizing act« through banning Sati.

For clarity, the issue here is not whether Sati was a moral or immoral practice in colonial India, rather the issue at stake is the aggressiveness for universal or simplistic conclusions without leaving an openness of interpretation for bodies in their social fabric, in gestures of resistance and affirmation or denial. It is this particular modality of non-perception that then lends itself to the maintenance of invisibility, and sanctions the maintenance of colonial and other hegemonic logics which pre-determines the allocation of a certain category of perception or non-perception. Further, one can say that such an unintelligibility rests on non-attention to the politics of given spatiality, materiality, historic and cultural specificity. What would be a way to make the affective politics of colonized bodies, their corporealities and spaces, intelligible? My attempt would be to examine if critical phenomenology can render visible the complexities of the social fabric and enable specific modes of intelligibility and visibility.

Critical Phenomenology: An intervention of cognizance, \par of the affective nuance

For the purpose of this paper, I frame critical phenomenology to be operative in the same manner, as Gayle Salamon has articulated in the essay, »What’s critical about critical phenomenology?« Salamon underlines three crucial aspects of the relationship between critique and phenomenology, one of which is how critique and phenomenology can supplement each other. Salamon, inspired by Wendy Brown’s reading of the role of critique in today’s world, provides us with a version of critique that is life-affirming, reclaiming, affirmative in zeal. Brown elaborates that if critique has any uptake for political emancipation in the real world, then it has a promise of »future possibilities«.[15] Salamon’s conceptualization for critical phenomenology to be critical is not just in the form of a critique that rejects but rather in the form of a critique that is indicative of a life-affirming politics, that makes a certain life-form visible:

»And it is in that crossing-over, that gesture of opening, where the phenomenological and critical projects find what is arguably their strongest resonance. Surprisingly enough, for critique – just as for phenomenology – that opening is revealed through the work of description. To read critique as an unmasking, or the paranoid excavation of what is ‹really‹ going on behind superficial appearances, is to altogether mistake the relation between the apparent and the real. As Foucault puts it: ›the role of philosophy is not to discover what is hidden, but to make visible precisely what is visible, that is to say, to make evident what is so close, so immediate, so intimately linked to us, that because of that we do not perceive it‹.«[16]

Within the ambit of this precise motivation, I seek to explore critical phenomenology’s limits and openings in decolonial approaches; how can critical phenomenology, as a critique that affirms »life value«, attend to the non-attended materialities that is outlined in an already well-placed decolonial critique?[17] I imagine for Mahmood this would mean attending to the bodily nuances in the practices of women in the mosque, in its structural politics of historical and religious background. In Spivak’s example, it would be to render intelligible the unintelligibility of Bhaduri’s resistance through her bodily ascriptions. And finally for Oyewumi, it would be to engage in a critical phenomenological approach of attending to the bodies and their relationalities in an Yoruba indigenous and linguistic complexity.\textbf{ }

It would be helpful to note that by outlining the possibility of an extended project, I do not want to suggest that the above-mentioned authors lack something to their explanation in challenging the prevalent eurocentrism. Rather, the outline in relation with a critical phenomenological approach would further augment the radical element in the already existing decolonial critique. Articulating with further precision the politics of the flesh, the sphere of the intimate and the politics of affective injustice; the projects would be able to indicate the structures of conditions that enable the bodies to be visible or invisible in a certain context in the first place. If and when such a project will be carried out, in doing so, we will be able to produce a robust critique of decolonial thought as critical phenomenology that shall illuminate a few more dimensions.

These might be quite challenging projects, each by themselves, but they do indicate a necessary intervention of readdressing the politics of the intimate, the corporeal body planted in sociality; the corporeal body where attending to nuance could mean an interpretation of affect and self-articulation. It also means looking beyond the corporeal body, the seemingly visible colonial body, and thinking through and with the affective. Such affective denominations in articulation could also serve as a mode of translation and opening up of the intimate and the invisible. Politically speaking, it could serve to articulate the negligible in certain entangled socio-historical complexities. If not erase entirely the colonial hegemonic opacity maintained by western epistemic comprehensions, it could still illuminate the described unintelligibility of the flesh to an uninformed audience in a certain decolonial critique.

Ahmed provides such an illumination, a phenomenology of the affective for the colonized and racialized body upon reflection on Fanon’s writings. Attending to the affective denominations, Ahmed states that for Fanon attending to the movements of the racialized body is not sufficient. Ahmed reads Fanon suggesting to go beyond the visibly corporeal, embodied reality, the visual, »the tactile«, and it is here that one finds the historical-racial scheme existent; it is in the affective domain, one may say.[18] »Below the corporeal schema I had sketched out a historic-racial schema«, Fanon states.[19] Elaborating on how racialized and colonized bodies feel disoriented in the world, Ahmed states that the usual corporeal schema is for the »body at home« – it is the racialized body that feels rather disoriented.[20] Further, Ahmed narrates how histories of colonialism and racism »interrupt« the corporeal schema by a mode of not just disorientation but also relegating other structures of affective disposition, as the workings of »historic-racial« schemata continues.[21]

Emphasizing this sort of affective politics that is knitted and woven into the memory of the colonized body, beyond the ordinarily and corporeally visible, Ahmed makes room for the cognition of an intelligibility of the affective that articulates for itself the violent erasure that happens. In such a description, it is the affective articulation that then makes it possible to see the structure of invisibilities and also what is so intimately invisibilized. »Colonialism makes the world ›white‹, which is of course a world ›ready‹ for certain kinds of bodies, as a world that puts certain objects within their reach. Bodies remember such histories, even when we forget them. Such histories might surface on the body, or even shape how bodies surface«.[22] By giving the colonized body the legitimacy to remember history in itself, by themselves, in their bodies, such that the affective can possibly even shape the bodies futurity and consequential ascriptions, Ahmed makes a fundamental intervention in the way histories about colonized bodies have usually been written, comprehended, or even how history itself as a discipline has flourished.

Chakrabarty points to the limitations of historicism in Provincializing Europe, »This ›first in Europe, then elsewhere‹ structure of global historical time was historicist; different non-Western nationalisms would later produce local versions of the same narrative, replacing ›Europe‹ by some locally constructed center«.[23] Such an historicism is equally complicit in relation to interpreting the body which even in seemingly progressive social critiques has been displaced, disciplined and inserted in a framework of western linear time and notion of understanding. It suggests that we understand bodily practices happening anywhere in the world, exclusively by centering ourselves to the understanding of a temporal structure arising from the West. Of course, Chakrabarty cites Foucault and others who have been critical of such a historicism.[24] However, as he notes in the book, most social critiques still find themselves inserted in a very post-enlightenment era sort of critique, where lesser recognition for the need of an alternative imaginary and conceptualization is still the need. In short, the temporal structure is still quite uninterrupted in its extension and relation to other conceptual categories.

By centering ourselves on the affective as a modality to interpret the violence of colonialism and ongoing coloniality, we then also reorient ourselves to invoke an understanding of time that is intimate and perhaps disruptive. Centering on the affect of pain felt by indigenous Australians in the context of the document Bringing Them Home, which reports how indigenous children were taken away by the settlers for brutal assimilation policy, Ahmed states how the notion of pain is not just an individualistic phenomena anymore, but rather, given the context, involves a spatial and temporal shift – it is a pain felt by the community, a timelessness persists in its existence.[25] This transcendence is essential to note, as often what is felt is relegated to an inconsequential factor of the individual body’s disposition. Ahmed makes it clear, »Pain is not simply an effect of a history of harm; it is the bodily life of that history«.[26] Such an articulation can then allow the chance for the colonized self to conceive of its own stories and histories, beginning finally from a space of inhibited articulation, by themselves as authors.

Now as much as there is a danger lurking, of phenomenology falling into a first-person solipsism, in certain cases such as that of feminist, racialized, queer narratives, first person narratives and verbal testimony has often been illuminating. It has enabled the novelty of a comprehension, by bringing in light a certain cognition that would otherwise be brushed aside by the populous. Therefore, it provides an encounter with the fullness of lived bodies, their materialities, their historic experiences, and social nuances. Such a narrative then provides a window, a bridge to a certain kind of cognition, which might be otherwise eroded, lost or undecipherable as hegemonic and dominant modes of perception, comprehension, reception and dissemination prevail. I must note though, that by highlighting this particular aspect by no means do I want us to enter a first-person crisis, of which classical phenomenology is accused. Rather, it is only within a particularly careful critical phenomenological approach wherein the care is taken to understand first person experiences but also caution is taken against classical phenomenology’s transcendental position that the interpretations of the affective politics can serve as a revelatory critique. By admission for the need to articulate the affective to supplement the already well-placed critique of decolonial politics, my attempt is to emphasize on the conditions of possibility that allow for the politics of affective injustice – of the unseen and the often unintelligible to exist in the first place. Weaving the approaches along, the effort is to craft a source of radical and robust decolonial critique.

The Master’s Tools Can/not Dismantle the Master’s House

At this point, one can say that we may find a way in which decolonial critique can be supplemented with critical phenomenology. Such a supplementation as outlined and shown in the paper, especially in an affective denomination, might even strengthen the decolonial critique. On the other hand, such an approach to critical phenomenology performs the role of critique by actually being political, that is, by providing an opening, making visible the otherwise known and overlooked, participating in an affirmative life weaving politics of those oppressed. Such a conclusion seems to follow in the juxtaposing of decolonial critique to critical phenomenology. A few concerns raised by Mahmood, however, must be addressed.

Emphasizing the interpretation of the practices of a certain space and embodied intersubjective relationalities, Mahmood is emphatic in her intellectual commitments to not begin the recuperation of the left out others in a humanist project, again.[27] Critical of the secular-liberal humanist discourse in western academia, the author maintains her stand quite strongly, that to recuperate such left out bodies in any modality of interpretation within the available philosophical categories, especially post-enlightenment era, would be to claim the prevalent hierarchical and hegemonic system back again. For Mahmood, abolition of such a universalist humanist agenda and its implicit assumption is the way forward. The politics of visibility by a new modality of reading, attending, and redefining is necessary and possible only if we free ourselves from discourses that have already shaped and defined a certain notion of personhood. The author fears that enlightenment inspired secular-liberal humanist project, one that has already defined what personhood consists of and means, and therefore shaped what counts as the categories of morality and politics, to only be replicated consequentially.

Even if we do not agree philosophically with Mahmood’s arguments and her radically abolitionist tendencies here, it would still be productive to sit with at least the discomfort she has expressed. For it is not only Mahmood, but several other decolonial scholars who have similarly expressed the impossibility of a re-imagination of other modalities and their political potential, if one continually is made to insert their orientations of perception within the same philosophical and genealogical lineage. To that we must ask, then, the persistent question of how far do we see critical phenomenology challenging its own origins? How far can critical phenomenology transcend its Eurocentric lineage, its acknowledged heritage with classical phenomenology? The issue is not merely the acknowledgment but the meaning of this acknowledgment, the wider consequence of such an association. As we work on transcending the very meaning of what it means to do critical phenomenology in relation to decolonial approaches, we are similarly bound to challenge what becomes of critical phenomenology as a practice, as a method, as a definition/way for a critical method.

In its primary plea of a decolonial approach lies the critical exercise of turning the gaze inwards; the questions then remain how far can critical phenomenology look within its own perils and peripheries of limitations. If critical phenomenology were to be an authentic opening, as it claims in this paper, it is only expected that it too will be transformed in the process by its relationship with decolonial thought. Were critical phenomenology to make sense of the very openness it presents itself with, as has been attempted in this paper, it is necessary that it also evolves in the form of continual striving through the transformational episodic restructuring of self-critique as well – as a possible outcome of a dialogue with decolonial thinking. It is in its own struggle to free itself from its limitations of a Eurocentric origin and expression, as it extends its frontiers to other world-making spaces and practices (academic and beyond), that critical phenomenology shall survive and create if it were to be an emancipation-oriented political tool. And if and when this may be realized, we might have to take into consideration the politics that might lie in the very act of naming – critical phenomenology or/and decolonial thought – as each opens up to edify the other in this very act of exchange and transformational epistemic elaboration.

Endnotes

[1] Cf. Gayle Salamon, «What’s Critical About Critical Phenomenology?«, Puncta: Journal of Critical Phenomenology 1(1), 2018, p. 9-17.

[2] Lisa Guenther, Solitary Confinement: Social Death and its Afterlives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2013, p. XV.

[3] The term ›coloniality‹ has been borrowed from the author Quijano and refers to the ongoing colonial effects in distribution of power, frameworks of thinking that pertains to present day crises and effects the lifeworlds of the colonized in quite intimate ways even though colonialism as an event seems to have seemingly ended. For more, see Anibal Quijano, »Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality«, Cultural Studies 21, not 2-3, 2007, p. 168-178; Anibal Quijano and Michael Ennis, »Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America«, Nepantla: Views from South~1, no. 3, 2000, p. 533-580.

[4] For more, see Gurminder K. Bhambra, »Postcolonial and decolonial dialogues« Postcolonial Studies 17(2), 2014, p. 115-121; Gianmaria Colpani, Jamila M. H. Mascat & Katrine Smiet,~»Postcolonial responses to decolonial interventions«,~Postcolonial Studies~25(1), 2022, p.~1-16.~

[5] See also Kiran Asher & Priti Ramamurthy, »Rethinking Decolonial and Postcolonial Knowledges beyond Regions to Imagine Transnational Solidarity«, Hypatia 35 (3), 2020, p. 542-554.

[6] The term ›decolonial thought‹ in this particular article is used in a broad sense, as an umbrella term, to indicate thinking traditions that have expressed resistance (an act of decolonizing) towards the hegemonic bent of Eurocentric knowledge production, and have been been critical of colonialism and its oppressive implications. These might include and is not limited to postcolonial thought, decolonial thought, anti-colonial thought, africana thought, indigenous philosophies, other non-western philosophies and thinking/living traditions etc. More precisely, it accounts for emerging scholarship that revitalize indigenous and non-western forms of thinking and languages, and/or outline the dominance of an Eurocentric modality of thinking in our conceptual categories which has happened at the cost of a violent erasure of other ways of thinking and living traditions, facilitated by a history of colonialism and slavery. However, the distinctness of each of these traditions must be stated and carefulness to contextualize their unique genealogical, historical and political specificities and aims must be understood if and when engaged further. Therefore, the purpose of using an umbrella term ›decolonial thought‹, is purely a strategic one for this particular paper and by no means is intended to conflate the differences and undermine the specificities and richness of nuances that each thinking tradition brings forward to challenge eurocentrism in their own way. The word ›decolonial‹ is used here rather to indicate a strategic alliance of resistance and solidarity with an emerging body of scholarship in the global south albeit with recognized differences in these traditions. Across differences in appearing terminologies, philosophical nuances, geographical and political situatedness, these traditions aim at challenging, often in theory and/or practice, universal Eurocentric narratives that have been shaped by colonialism and/or slavery and are responsible for sustaining practices like racism, racial capitalism, and dominant Eurocentric worldview in knowledge production in today’s world. For a similar approach for understanding transnational solidarity through the work of decolonial and postcolonial thought, see Asher & Ramamurthy 2020.

[7] Cf. Oyeronke Oyewumi, The Invention of Women: Making An African Sense of Western Gender Discourses. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1997, p. IX.

[8] Oyewumi 1997, p. 82.

[9] Oyewumi 1997, p. 158.

[10] Cf. Oyewumi 1997, p. 176.

[11] Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ 2005: Princeton University Press, p. 189.

[12] Cf. Mahmood 2005, p. 188.

[13] Mahmood 2005, p. 154.

[14] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason. Cambridge 1999: Harvard University Press, p. 307.

[15] Cf. Salamon 2018, p. 12.

[16] Salamon 2018, p. 14.

[17] Cf. Salamon 2018, p. 12.

[18] Cf. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham 2006: Duke University Press, p. 110.

[19] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks. New York 1967: Grove Press, p. 47.

[20] Ahmed 2006, p. 111.

[21] Ahmed 2006, p. 111.

[22] Ahmed 2006, p. 111. See also Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh 2014 [2004]: Edinburgh University Press.

[23] Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ 2000: Princeton University Press, p. 7.

[24] Cf. Chakrabarty 2000, p. 6.

[25] Ahmed 2004, p. 34.

[26] Ahmed 2004, p. 34.

[27] Cf. Mahmood 2005, p. 154.