Breakdowns to Breakthroughs: Participating in a Decolonial Black Feminism Program

Breakdowns to Breakthroughs: Participating in a Decolonial Black Feminism Program

Mary Roaf

This essay highlights my rst-hand experiences as a participant in the 2019 Black Transnational Decolonial Feminism summer program in Brazil. Grounding the article in critical scholarship—including Black feminist thought and decolonial feminism—I explore, re ect upon, and examine key challenges and possibilities that emerged in the program. I am interested in contributing to fostering transnational, Black feminist solidarity and forging connections across lines of contention.

Keywords: Black feminism / Decolonial feminism / Transnational feminism

My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to t a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences.

—Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals

Introduction: Diasporic Coalition and Solidarity

I had the privilege of attending the third annual Decolonial Black Feminism Summer School program. The Center of Study and Investigation for Decolonial Dialogues hosted the program in Cachoeira, Brazil, which took place from July 28 to August 2, 2019 (Center of Study and Investigation for Decolonial Dialogues).

©2023 Feminist Formations, Vol. 35 No. 1 (Spring) pp. 5–17

I was excited to participate in this program since it aligned with my research interests on Black feminism (Roaf 2023), and it provided the opportunity to connect to a cohort of students, scholars, and community-based activists. In particular, I was inspired to share the space with diasporic Black feminists in the country with the largest number of people of African descent outside of Africa (Schwarz and Starling 2019). However, I did not expect to encounter the tensions that began between participants and the organizing institute prior to arriving in Brazil, eventually erupting into full-blown con icts during the program. These challenging and, at times, problematic interactions among participants revealed the ways in which race, class, gender, and nationality divisions appeared within the collective.

Thus, this exploratory essay is about my journey participating in the third annual Decolonial Black Feminism program. First, I discuss my scholarly framework that engages with Black feminist thought, decolonial feminisms, Indigenous feminisms, and Black feminist approaches in anthropology. I proceed by providing the social context of the Black decolonial feminism program as well as general information about its structure. Thereafter, I highlight challenging issues that arose through the program and the productive outcomes that emerged as a result. I’m interested in exploring the barriers involved in fostering transnational, Black feminist co-solidarity in the program, and I see this essay as a contribution to forging connections across lines of contentions that occurred.

Black (and) Decolonial Feminisms

My essay draws upon Black feminist scholarship and praxis. One central component of Black feminisms is the way in which Black women have contested gendered, racialized, and class oppression in the US at least since the 17th century (Collins 1999; Davis 1981; Giddings, 1984; Gross & Raimey 2020; Harris-Perry 2011; hooks 1984; McGuire 2010; Robnett 2000; Smith 1994; White 1999). For example, freedom ghters, such as Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman (Dunbar 2019; Painter 1997), demonstrated Black feminisms on the ground that challenged multiple oppressions. The Combahee River Collective describes these “systems of interlocking oppressions” in the following way: “The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, as seen as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are ‘interlocking’” (Combahee River Collective 1986, 1).

Sociologist and critical race scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality in 1989 to elucidate the 400 years-long institutional and legal forms of discrimination stemming from race, gender, and class that impact Black women (Crenshaw 1991). In doing so, she called attention to the interstitial elements distinguishing Black feminist activism as simultaneously countering

gender, class, and racialized norms. Finally, contemporary expressions of Black feminisms are evident in social movements like #MeToo and #MuteRKelly (Lukose 2018; Roaf 2023).

I am also in conversation with decolonial feminisms, which emerges in Latin America (Lugones 2007 and 2010; Velez 2019; Pitts, Ortega, and Medina 2020; Espinosa-Miñoso, Lugones, and Maldonado-Torres 2021) and is entangled with US women of color thought, speci cally Black and Latinx feminisms (Velez 2019). In the seminal essay “Toward a Decolonial Feminism,” María Lugones draws from women of color feminisms at the same time she moves away from this framework. Instead, she focuses on the coloniality of gender in the Americas and the colonially constructed categories of gender, race, and sexuality to offer a decolonial feminism: “I propose the modern, colonial, gender system as a lens through which to theorize further the oppressive logic of colonial modernity, its use of hierarchical dichotomies and categorical logic. I want to emphasize categorical, dichotomous, hierarchical logic as central to modern, colonial capitalist thinking about race, gender, and sexuality” (Lugones 2010, 742). A contribution of this framework is that it does not take the category of “woman” for granted but, instead, identi es colonizing categorizations and oppressions that must be grappled with, interrogated, and transgressed to build more transformative coalitions across colonial difference.

Emma D. Velez (2019) provides a critical reading of Lugones’s engagement with intersectionality theory. Velez argues that, in Lugones’s linguistic critique of intersectionality (the essentializing and separable assumptions in categories like “woman” or “race”), she “unwittingly distances herself from theories of intersectionality and, in so doing, also the intellectual labor of Black feminists” (Velez 2019, 392– 93). However, Velez nds value in Lugones’s theories in that, “decolonial feminism reorients our feminist practices of resistance towards the possibility of generating liberatory worlds for women of color by working to dismantle categorical logics with the aim of transforming their very meanings” (Velez 2019, 400).

Indigenous feminisms also provide an integral frame of reference within decolonial, transnational feminist perspectives. Decolonial critique necessitates the recognition of long-standing Indigenous resistance to the continued occupation of ancestral lands and exploitation of resources, and there are efforts to address the omission of Indigenous feminisms in the transnational space. For example, as part of the inaugural Transnational Feminisms Summer Institute held at the Ohio State University in July of 2014 (Leong et al 2015; Blackwell, Briggs, and Chiu 2015), scholars organized a roundtable that addressed “the absence of Indigenous feminisms from feminist discussions of the transnational, even though many Indigenous nations in the Americas are themselves traversed by settler colonial nation-states. . . .” (Aikau et al 2015, 84).

In addition, the institute included a roundtable that addressed the limitations and possibilities of transnational feminism. As part of the discussion,

scholar activist Maylei Blackwell shared her experiences, insights, and analyses from her work supporting Indigenous Mexican women activists in a movement to garner sovereignty over the resources of their ancestral lands (Blackwell, Briggs, and Chiu 2015). This highlights a key principle of Indigenous feminisms that addresses larger, transnational issues of poverty, marginalization, and state violence within localized contexts. Thus, decolonial feminisms also demands to challenge (settler) colonialism and heteropatriarchy (Arvin, Tuck, and Morril 2013).

I am interested in grounding Black feminisms in dialogue with lived experience and coalitional politics rooted in the loving relationship between women of color (Alarcón et al 2020: x). At the same time, I emphasize synthesizing analysis with practice that connects Black feminisms with María Lugones’s conceptualization of decolonial feminism, and the ways in which both frameworks inform and expand each other. By combining intersectionality with decolonial feminism’s targeting of “categorical” logic of the coloniality of gender helps to create an opening to render the structures of power and oppression visible. As such, a Black decolonial feminism can provide the possibility to contest the material impact of oppression on Black women’s lives, while also dismantling colonial categories to further create liberatory ways of knowing and being (Lugones 2010).

When I attended the Decolonial Black Feminism program, I did not go with the intention of conducting research or writing a scholarly publication. However, upon completion of the program, I realized that I could contribute to shedding light on coalition-building within a transnational context by writing an essay about my experience. Given that I re ect upon my involvement in the program through participant observation, my approach is grounded in Black feminist and decolonial methods in anthropology (Harrison 1991; Williams 2014). Erica Lorraine Williams’s application of a Black feminist anthropological lens to her advocacy with and research on sex workers in Brazil is useful: “Tensions around issues of race, gender, class, sexuality, and nationality surfaced not only among my research interlocuters, but also in ways that implicated my own identity… My engagement with these issues draws inspiration from the intervention of Black feminist approaches to anthropology, which highlight self-re exivity as an important strategy for ethnographic writing” (Williams 2014, 216 –218). As much as the complex or con ictual politics of race, class, gender, and nationality played out during the Decolonial Black Feminism program, I’m also implicated through my participation.

My self-re ectivity is part of an autoethnographic approach that foregrounds a critical lens, alongside an introspective and outward one, to make sense of who we are in the context of our cultural communities (Boylorn and Orbe 2014). That is, critical auto ethnography is a method that allows for personal and cultural critique. I utilize this approach due to my positioning as both participant and observer that blurred the boundaries between “subject”

and “researcher.” In addition, critical autoethnography is useful for centering lived experiences and problematizing colonialist epistemological concepts of what constitutes “valid” research and data. Finally, this method facilitates the “. . . blending of cultural and interpersonal experience of everyday interactions with others, intersectional components of identity, and the critical treatment of autoethnography as a method” (Boylorn and Orbe 2014, 15).

My goal is to contribute to the evolving conceptualization of Black decolonial feminism by sharing my experiences, observations, and insights from participating in the third annual Decolonial Black Feminism program. My positioning as a Black woman and Ethnic Studies scholar from the US in the context of Brazil allowed me to recognize and experience Blackness in marked and unmarked ways that a context of differing hierarchies of class, nationality, heteronormativity, and colorism shapes. By doing so, I bore witness to the “colonial wounds” within myself and others, formed connections across lines of difference, and forged a common ground based on identifying multiple, shared oppressions (Anzaldúa 1987; Lugones 2010; Mignolo and Vazquez 2013; Lopez 2018). Coalitional and solidarity work is a tradition in women of color organizing (Ordona 1994; Lugones 2003) and, although this type of work is dif cult and messy, it is also where we may dream and enact new horizons with decolonial love and joy (Negrón-Muntaner 2020; Sandoval 2000).

Decolonial Black Feminism Program

The Center of Study and Investigation for Decolonial Dialogues hosted the program in Cachoeira, Brazil, which is a small, historic, colonial town about 73 miles from Salvador, the capital city of the state of Bahia, located in the northeast region of the country. Cachoeira was intentionally chosen due to its long history and legacy as a center of Afro-Brazilian cultural, political, and economic signi cance (Center of Study and Investigation for Decolonial Dialogues). Cachoeira is a historically Black city that was the site of colonization and enslavement with an emphasis on sugar cane cultivation, which was central to Brazil’s colonial economy from the early 16th to late 19th centuries (Schwarz and Starling 2019; Skidmore 1999). Perhaps more importantly, Cachoeira is the site of three major uprisings launched by enslaved Africans between 1807 to 1835 and a historic maroon society comprised of escaped Africans, or quilombo (see Farfán-Santos 2016). In fact, Africans in Cachoeira spearheaded the rst of at least 10 revolts in Bahia during the 1820s (Reis 1988). Cachoeira has many houses of Candomblé—an African diasporic syncretic religion (Rodrigues de Souza 2020)—and has one of the oldest Catholic Sisterhoods of Black women in the world called Irmandade da Boa Morte (Smith 2002; Irmandade da Boa Morte), which was established in the 19th century to support manumission of family members and offer funerals to the enslaved community (Center of Study and Investigation for Decolonial Dialogues).

The Decolonial Black Feminism program included a cohort of 45 students from various parts of the world, including the US, the U.K., the Caribbean, and Europe, and 25 from Brazil (Center of Study and Investigation for Decolonial Dialogues). The program aimed to provide an immersive experience where participants could connect with the local context, practices, and people. One of the most important components of the program for me was that participants stayed in local accommodations as roommates close to the center where daily lectures and small group activities took place. Additionally, some roommates were matched by countries and linguistic backgrounds, and this provided a holistic experience in which participants not only learned together, but also ate, explored the city, and lived with each other.

The program’s instructional design and delivery consisted of whole-group lectures during the mornings, a break for lunch, and small-group discussions during the afternoons. For example, on July 28, 2019, the program began with Dr. Conceição Evaristo (literafro: portal da literatura afro-brasileira) addressing 70 program participants and 430 attendees as the lecture was open to the public. Guest faculty instructors came from the US, Mexico, and different parts of Brazil, and alternated lectures in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. These faculty also facilitated additional learning experiences for participants by conducting visits to landmarks of Afro-Brazilian signi cance in Cachoeira. An important element of the program was that the organizers invited participants to form groups. The goal of the groups would be for participants to share ideas and create presentations to contribute to a collective understanding of transnational decolonial Black feminism, enhancing the collaborative nature of our collective theorizing.

The program invited the participants to know a “different world” and learn about one another’s cultural differences (Center of Study and Investigation for Decolonial). I welcomed the opportunity to connect with African diasporic women, which included those from primarily English-speaking countries and Latin America. This meant speaking Spanish with my Colombian roommate and spending a lot of time socializing with her and Brazilian program participants who conducted their lively conversations exclusively in Portuguese. This decentering of English as the default lingua franca extended to the lectures. Program organizers provided headphones for live translations into languages spoken by participants.

The program structure of conducting whole group lectures in a large room, followed by smaller group discussions in breakout rooms created a balanced way to process scholarship and to re ect on how it applied to our speci c geographic locations and roles as academics or community-based activists. I found that participating in small group conversations enhanced the connections with other participants in personal ways. I was thrilled to be in a transnational space with Black feminist scholars and activists who were interested in participating and engaging in exciting dialogues around decoloniality because such spaces

are very rare in the context of where I live and work in the Central Valley of California (Gilmore and Gilmore 2003). However, challenges soon emerged throughout the program that created breakdowns among participants. In fact, it soon became evident that the issues were the result of ssures that existed long before the program even began.

Tensions and Breakdowns

Prior to the start of the program, there were email exchanges between participants. The program had provided the email addresses of participants to introduce ourselves. One signi cant source of tension was when participants expressed upset and disappointment to nd out that Angela Y. Davis (Davis 1981), who had spoken at the rst Decolonial Black Feminism program of 2017, would not be a guest faculty instructor, as the advertisement for the 2019 program led many to believe. Participants asserted that this information was false and had been intentionally disseminated to increase enrollment. In fact, a disgruntled participant expressed her disappointment during the opening address on July 28, 2019, upon learning that Angela Y. Davis would not attend the program. The next day, some participants stated that this person had returned home. A second con ict that involved attendees from the US was when they learned that their charges for tuition and lodging fees had been increased to cover the cost of Brazilian participants. Program organizers had not communicated this vital piece of information until members had paid these expenses along with travel costs. Many of the American attendees who were graduate students and community-based activists had created Go Fund Me accounts and other fundraising methods to nance their program-related expenses. As such, they objected to the inability to make an informed decision to also cover other attendees’ costs. As I observed these exchanges via email and during in-person conversations among participants, I recognized how colonial logic operated through the complex assumptions of those who were or were not considered economically privileged.

Other issues emerged during the remainder of the program. One challenge was that the program didn’t create a space for participants to position ourselves through the lens of power, privilege, and oppression based on our respective geopolitical contexts that we came from. Unfortunately, this void in uenced participants to create biases about one another based on looks, appearances, or assumptions. For example, given Brazil’s long history of complicated racialization that camou ages a deeply strati ed color-based hierarchy (Skidmore 1999; Jullié 2012; Schwarz and Starling 2019), there were complex and sometimes con ictual tensions among Afro-Brazilians and other participants, including non-Afro Brazilians and white-adjacent folks of other Latin American backgrounds. Finally, another problem came from dissatis ed participants of several regions of the world who found fault with the format of the daily whole-group

sessions. These sessions were held in a community/cultural center in which Brazilian, Mexican, and Caribbean guest faculty delivered traditional lectures in a large hall. These attendees critiqued the program in two ways. First, they did not agree with the lecture-style method and argued it was colonial for subscribing to a top-down delivery from “experts” that rendered participants as passive recipients, instead of as active agents engaging in an equal exchange of ideas and knowledge. As a result, this group petitioned the program organizers to replace a scheduled lecture by a guest faculty instructor in order to conduct their own presentation. Second, the dissatis ed group critiqued the physical layout of the large room in a colonial building. Speci cally, they disliked the auditorium style of the room comprised of nearly 200 xed seats that faced an open- oor space in front of the chairs with the one-way, didactic lecturing that took place during whole-group morning sessions.

While the insights of the dissatis ed group merited serious consideration and conversation, the delivery of their critiques and changes of the schedule failed to account for a critical positioning of the transnational hierarchy at play among members of the collective. This approach seemed presumptuous and contradictory since they overrode consensus from the rest of the group. Soliciting consensus, or at least an opportunity to discuss their concerns with the group without changing the schedule, would have been re ective of a more collaborative approach.

In addition, the dissatis ed group’s critique of the physical layout of the large room did not consider that the community center was the only facility in Cachoeira that could seat all the participants. As such, they did not consider the nancial constraints implicated with hosting the program in a small, Brazilian town with limited resources. By the end of their comments, all the Brazilian participants left the room and congregated in the outside hallway. Many of them were crying and comforting each other due to feeling personally attacked as de cient hosts who had provided an unsatisfactory physical location. A scholar based in the US who grew up in the Caribbean tearfully explained that the community center was the best that the program could offer due to limited resources and a proliferation of colonial-era buildings. She continued to explain that she had also undergone a similar educational experience due to growing up on a small, colonized island that did not have the resources to invest in cutting-edge, innovative architecture and design. This breakdown seemed like a missed opportunity to have a critical conversation between those who occupy marginalized statuses within their home countries while acknowledging their privilege in relation to fellow Black participants from the Global South.

Transformative Lessons: Breakthroughs

The challenges in the Decolonial Black Feminism program led to several breakthroughs. On a personal level, the critical dialogues that took place during

the program not only further developed my critical awareness by which to understand and question Blackness in the US in relation/comparison to other contexts but also enhanced my appreciation of rich and complex Afro-Brazilian histories, social justice activism, and cultural arts (Cavalcanti 2018; Jullié 2012; Reis 1988). Having the program in the predominantly African descent town of Cachoiera allowed participants to visit key historic and contemporary sites of Black resistance. For example, meeting with one of the members of the Sisterhood of the Good Death and attending a celebration with dance, song, and food at an Afro-Brazilian community organization enriched my understanding and appreciation of the strength and beauty of this centurieslong-heritage, bringing participants closer to building solidarity and sharing in decolonial love and joy.

In addition, the program brought together African descent women from all over the diaspora enabled participants to connect intimately within formal and informal contexts, and the layered dynamic between participants of the Global North and South reminded me of the dif cult but necessary work that’s required to create bridges across transnational borders. I often witnessed or grasped various insights from a range of perspectives by engaging with participants from the Global South, which included listening to the criticisms of non-US attendees during private conversations. For example, I connected with a participant who was half African and half European, and a young scholar of Caribbean background. Both lamented about feeling invisible and pushed to the margins by a binary focus on Brazilians and Americans. They believed that this attention devolved into a bifurcation of perspectives in which Americans imposed an imperialistic, hegemonic worldview onto the whole-group discussions. It reminded me of Chandra Mohanty’s groundbreaking essay (Mohanty 1984) where she argues that Western feminism scholarship reduces women in the third world as an unnuanced, homogenous group. Such experiences expanded my deep grasp of the nuances inherent in building substantive relationships across lines of race, gender, class, and nationality, which further enhanced the value of cultivating decolonial feminist co-solidarity.

Last but not least, some of the most important breakthroughs occurred when participants engaged in reparative and transformative discussions that would lay the groundwork for critical presentations that groups delivered at the end of the program. To elaborate, when addressing our shared challenges with gender-based and state-sanctioned violence and poverty, these groups highlighted the need for future program to integrate critical topics, such as pleasure activism, queer and trans color of critique, and transnational solidarity (see Brown 2019; Ferguson 2004; Salem 2019; Snorton 2017). I contemplated how future programs could more intentionally incorporate Indigenous theories, scholars, and community-based activists and participants to further enact decolonial feminisms. Regardless, the cooperative work at the end of the program powerfully illustrated how the participants contributed substantive theoretical

and praxis-based elements to the collective experience, which helped to expand our understanding of decolonial Black feminisms.

Conclusion: Forging Black Decolonial Feminist Pathways

As the title of the Decolonial Black Feminism program suggests, decolonial and Black feminisms merge. Although Black feminism might take certain subjectivity categories for granted, I don’t believe relying upon them is the end goal. Instead, it is through Black feminisms by which we can work towards decolonial feminisms to create new horizons beyond the coloniality of gender. While I recognize that coalitionary and solidarity work entails some degree of turmoil and con ict, I also propose a response to María Lugones’s questions of: “How do we learn about each other? How do we do it without harming each other but with the courage to take up a weaving of the everyday that may reveal deep betrayals?” (Lugones 2010, 755). I suggest to those who participate in critical spaces to consider entering them with mindful and intentional ways, with a vision toward understanding and transcending colonizing limitations. Furthermore, I believe it’s important to critically examine and ascertain our aspirations and objectives in relation to participants’ varying education/learning journeys, experiences, and praxis, as an answer to Lugones’s speci c question of “with whom do we do this work?” (Lugones 2010, 755).

I recognize the potential pitfalls of replicating the very structures and processes we seek to eradicate through gatekeeping in often elitist, arbitrary ways. The ip side of this conundrum, however, lies in imposing a super cial, non-critical, neoliberal inclusivity approach that can undermine or even derail nuanced and complex coalition-building. The Decolonial Black Feminism program invoked Lugones’s exhortation to problematize the colonial constructions of gender from the vantage point of lived experiences. Although the participants came from a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds, gender identities, sexual orientations, and nationalities, the program culminated in a breakthrough of openness, receptivity, and collaboration on personal and collective levels. In this light, the program helped to forge decolonial Black feminist pathways to further coalition, solidarity, and liberation.

Mary Roaf is the 2022–23 Interim Chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies at California State University-Stanislaus. Mary’s research, teaching and social justice activism addresses interlocking oppressions of race, class, and gender. Speci cally, her research addresses dismantling the “school to prison” pipeline and building upon her work on Black decolonial feminisms after participating in the 2019 Black Decolonial Transnational Feminism Program in Cachoeira, Brazil. Dr. Roaf’s commitment to exemplary decolonial pedagogy garnered her the Elizabeth Papageorge Faculty Award in Teaching for the 2020 –21 year. Dr. Roaf will also participate as a Fulbright Fellow in the Fulbright-Hays General Study Abroad program in South Africa during the 2023 summer.

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