Coloniality and Feminist Collusion: Breaking Free, Thinking Anew

Feminist studies remains mired in coloniality. While the formal transfer from European empires to independent nation states appeared to mark a transition away from direct domination, rule and subjugation, continuities exist in the contemporary that have been strikingly reproduced through feminist alliances and loyalties with the new/old world order in line with the directives of capitalism, neoliberalism and nationalism. By positing that feminist studies has been both implicit and complicit in coloniality over time, this themed issue contests the notion of ‘post’colonial as ‘past’colonial, and instead recognises coloniality as the colonial past and present (Gregory, 2004). Thus, coloniality reflects a longue durée that requires a recognition not only of continuity but of epistemic violence and the ongoing hegemony of the coloniality of power (Quijano, 2000, 2007). Sylvia Wynter (2003, p. 262) reminds us that the empirical outcomes of ‘the rise of Europe’ and its centring of itself within world civilisational narratives enabled and justified African enslavement, Latin American and other settler colonial projects of conquest and Asian subjugation. This is what Wynter (2003, p. 263) identifies as ‘the master code of symbolic life and death’, hinged on the notion of differential/hierarchical degrees of rationality based on distance or proximity to the apex of Western knowledge and power. Feminist studies, in its proximate positionality, like other academic fields, has been implicit and complicit with the modern episteme of coloniality by envisaging a feminism that can operate within the coloniality of power rather than viewing the dismantling of its tools and edifice as a necessary step for epistemic change. As Audre Lorde so resoundingly warns: