A Multiplicity of Selves-in-Coalition: A Decolonial Feminist Witnessing Through Autoethnography

A Multiplicity of Selves-in-Coalition: A Decolonial Feminist Witnessing Through Autoethnography

Annie Isabel Fukushima

This article offers a speci c methodology: an autoethnography of decolonial feminist witnessing to invite the reader into the world of the praxis of navigating institutional spaces recognizing where these entrances and departures are imperfect, messy, violent, and lled with resistance. The author offers examples of coalitional work through local and transnational experiences that were fostered through survivance in colonial systems. Recognizing how multiple institutions shape people’s lives, this article highlights lived exemplars where the author traverses academic and legal institutions. The author re ects on witnessing in the courts as a legal expert witness. The role of narrative and witnessing is central to a decolonial feminist praxis; therefore, the author re ects on a state-wide consortium to end violence, where opportunities to narrate stories were facilitated in a performance. To conclude, the author re ects the self-in-coalition as a response to the material violence of coloniality in institutions.

Keywords: Academic / Autoethnography / Decolonial feminism / Institutions / Legal / Narrative / Witnessing

It was 9:30 in the morning, and I had just nished a meeting. As I stared at my screen, I heard a light tap on my door. I turned to see a person peering through the window of the looking-glass door, Michel Foucault’s (1995) panopticon materialized in university spaces, where we regularly can feel how power is enacted through everyday surveillance. Glass windows under the guise of open concept become a way to know who is in their of ce, who is working, where people can look in on the everyday worker. I thought to myself as I grabbed a mask to cover my face to greet her, “this must be urgent.” I had left the “Do

©2023 Feminist Formations, Vol. 35 No. 1 (Spring) pp. 134–150

not disturb” sign hanging on my door. I opened the door, and she immediately entered my of ce with tears in her eyes. Without skipping a beat, she began to talk about the tone of my email. As the woman rambled on, I recalled how whiteness works in institutions. Seemingly innocent, fragile, defensive moves of victimhood, the sinister side is her tears are violent—people of color can be reprimanded (Accapadi 2007), red, denied tenure, arrested, or murdered (Matias 2019). She resolved that the next time she had a concern she would come to my of ce. They will come at you in-person and hide their paper trail. I documented the exchange, a passive maneuver of survival for women of color. A paper trail of witnessing racism structured by coloniality, a paper trail that cannot guarantee my own existence. The mundane exchange is something I have experienced before. The accumulation of small actions—tears, complaints, the denigration of women of color behind our backs about capabilities or professionalism, collectively accumulate to create narratives about women of color in spaces, places, of academia. Our brown, beautiful, erce, intellectual, bodies are hypersexualized, hyper-visual, and dangerous even when silent, because the threat is that we are in academic spaces—we exist, I exist. After the exchange, I immediately surrounded myself by texting my friends and mentors, connecting with comrades, and was immediately ooded with resources and presence. As I write this, I am now positioned in a role as Associate Professor and Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies. I am the rst woman of color in this administrative role, and I have been told I am the only Asian-Latina faculty at my institution. Regardless of rsts, I know that I am not the only woman of color administrator—I am surrounded by community of people known and unknown, who are in coalition with our presence resisting institutional violence.

The materiality of colonial violence occurs in institutions, including academic settings. As I re ect on a speci c institution in this opening, I am reminded of Louis Althusser’s Ideological State Apparatuses. The violence of institutions has material consequence. As stated by Stuart Hall, “The problem of ideology, therefore, concerns the ways in which ideas of different kinds grip the minds of masses, and thereby become a ‘material force’ ” (Hall 1996, 27). But, even in the face of such violence, there is abundance. Here I pause for lessons learned from Candace Fujikane’s “Indigenous economies of abundance” (2020, 3) where abundance is made possible through activist, community and Indigenous forms of practice, organizing and resistance.

I begin with the opening example as a gesture to open this article as an autoethnography of decolonial feminist witnessing resistance in institutions. Through this methodology, I invite the reader to enter into the world of a decolonial feminist praxis of navigating institutional spaces recognizing that these entrances and departures are imperfect, messy, violent, and lled with resistance. Recognizing that there are multiple institutions shaping our lives, and as a scholar, I am navigating multiple institutions, this article traverses academic and legal institutions, through a decolonial feminist methodology of witnessing.

Methodology: Decolonial Feminist Praxis of Auto-Ethnography & Witnessing

Multiple scholars including Maria Lugones (2003), Laura Perez (2019), Paola Bacchetta et al (2019), Chandra Talpade Mohanty (2003), Evelyn Nakano Glenn (2015), Chela Sandoval (2000), among others, fostered my arrival to decolonial feminisms. And my theory is deeply informed by a praxis—the practice of theory. Lugones’ understanding of the “self-in-coalition” (Zaytoun 2019, 47) appeals to theorists and decolonial practitioners to move towards a “sense of activity of the self in metamorphosis” (2008, 86). To that effect, Lugones’ seminal writings provide praxical interventions (Alarcon et al. 2020, xi).

Central to my own theory is witnessing is Lugones notion of faithful witnessing, a witnessing on the side of the oppressed (also see Figueroa 2015). Here, I refer to witnessing as encompassing the self-witness, the account of events, the witnessing of the process of witnessing, and the witness as human and nonhuman (i.e., the law). I grapple with witnessing in Migrant Crossings where I invite readers to enter into a practice of witnessing that bridges theory and practice—an ethnic studies praxis. In particular, Migrant Crossings endeavors to facilitate a theory and practice of witnessing how migrants cross into visibility legally, through frames of citizenship, and through narratives of victimhood. Witnessing is not merely passive; witnesses construct, participate in, and create the normative visions of what it means to experience contemporary violence and human rights violations in the twenty- rst century. To speak to witnessing is to grapple with narrative, storytelling, listening, testimonio, and subjectivity. Normative forms of witnessing reinscribe what it means to be legible. Therefore, new forms of witnessing are needed, forms that do not reify colonial dualities. While I take on the migratory subject as a border crosser, a subject of decolonial possibilities, where one traverses social, geographical, political, and ideological borders, to see subjects beyond a duality requires new forms of witnessing—an unsettled witnessing. An unsettled witnessing is a commitment to witnessing without being settled with what one is seeing. Unlike spectators, witnesses are called to action (Fukushima 2019a). The necessary actions to unsettled witnessing include raising questions about normative aspects of events and examining the politics of representation as infused with the discourses surrounding nationhood, race, and gender. Such witnessing enables the witness to see communities for their complex personhood, beyond the narratives that construct them as other, and a subject to be pitied.

In this article I draw upon a decolonial feminist autoethnography, where the scholar enters into what Walter Mignolo calls “epistemic disobedience”— a delinking from the disciplinary management of knowledge and an opening toward the plurality of decolonizing knowledges forged among the racially devalued and discredited (Mignolo 2009, 4). To this effect, the method offered in this article is a decolonial feminist autoethnography. Drawing upon a tradition

of autoethnography, I systematically analyze my own personal experience (Ellis et al. 2011) as a research modality that accommodates “subjectivity, emotionality, and the researcher’s in uence on research” (Ellis et al. 2011, 274). Additionally, autoethnography allows the researcher to “retrospectively and selectively write epiphanies . . . and to analyze these experiences” (Ellis et al. 2011, 276). I have utilized this methodology to examine my pedagogies (Fukushima and Vei 2022), therefore, epiphanies and experiences are sutured throughout this article. It is in this way I resist colonial epistemologies which creates a cohesive system of people, practices, values, and knowledge (Smith 2012, 95). The slippages offered here between institutions, between the self-witnessing institutions, the self-in-coalition, witnessing the self, that this autoethnography is an endeavor, albeit imperfect, to foster epistemic disobedience.

Coalition: From the Self to the Collective

To begin to offer a theorizing decolonial feminisms’ calling to witness as means to resist colonial structures, it is rst important to frame decoloniality. Decoloniality implies the “recognition and undoing of the hierarchical structures of race, gender, heteropatriarchy, and class that control life, knowledge, spirituality, and thought, structures that are clearly intertwined with and constitutive of global capitalism and Western modernity,” it is a relational way of seeing (Walsh 2018, 17). Building upon this understanding Walsh, to grapple with the relational ways of seeing, is to contend with the many hands that are part of our entrances and departures in this world. It is, as Walsh offers, a way of seeing decoloniality in the context of the everyday, what she refers to, drawing upon Anzaldua, as “decolonial cracks.” These decolonial cracks are the places within a colonial matrix or system are the place of one’s location, agency, and everyday struggle (Walsh 2018, 82), that give us a “nepantla perspective”-the ability to inhabit a liminal space. How does one witness the cracks in institutions if their whole world is de ned by settler colonialism?

My mother, a hanguk sadam (Korean) migrated to the US due to poverty from a legacy of Japanese colonization. There are cracks one begins to see when raised by a working-class immigrant mother whose family was shaped by Japanese colonization. It is instructive to turn to Kuan Hsing Chen’s Asia as Method where imperialism and colonialism are positioned within a global context. And in doing so Chen describes the multiple colonialities in Asia-from Japan’s colonization of Korea and Taiwan, imperialism in China, and Japan’s own dual status as colonizer and colonized in relation to the US (Chen 2010, 10). It is for this reason, as I write this as a KoreXicana whose entry into the world, my birth, on Omaha-Ponca lands, was not one where I was alone, no one ever does, but also determined by coloniality. An endeavor to rehumanize and counter practices (thinking with Maldonado Torres 2016, 10) is to share that I literally did not enter the world alone that was shaped by colonial structures that

led my mother to migrate to Nebraska. I was joined by my twin sister, where we were carried by the body of my Korean immigrant mother, pulled out into the world by the hands of doctors and nurses, whose presence I cannot remember. As the daughter of an immigrant woman shaped by coloniality, my presence has been one of multiple settler colonial realities that continues to shape where I call home. Recognizing the centrality of a multiplicity of feminisms, including Indigenous and Native feminisms, fosters a “potential to decolonize the ascendancy of whiteness in many global contexts” (Arvin et al. 2013, 11). I turn to a memory I have about a gure my mother told me about when I was maybe around 8-years-old. It was the story that there was a queen, Queen Min, my family’s namesake, who was known for her resistance of Japanese in uence on Korea and brutal assassination. She is also known for her resistance of patriarchy and a symbol of Korea colonized by Japan (Cha 1982; Lee 2006). I grew up learning about Queen Min, when my mother said that our name was the same as Queen Min and that we were from the same clan. I recall her saying with certitude that there was only one clan of Mins, meaning that we were possibly all related. I have never done a genetic test to trace the truth of this story, only to know that it empowered me to learn about the strong women in family, including my mother, who immigrated to the US in the 1960s.

A decolonial feminisms centralizes the self-in-coalition, which is de ned by Kelli Zaytoun’s drawing upon Anzaldúa and Lugones, as an awareness that “prompts deep listening to the speci cities of the testimonies and strategies of others as they participate with them in mutually formed resistance efforts,” where the selves, drawing upon Lugones understanding, are pluralistic (Zaytoun 2019, 47–48). After I was brought into the world on Omaha-Ponca traveled to Briton, at the age of 8 I migrated with my family to Hawaii, where I learned about the struggles of Kanaka Maoli and also about White, Asian, and colonial settler presence (Saranillio 2013; Fujikane and Okamura 2008). I have traversed many Native lands since my arrival, where today, I work in a Predominantly White Institution hosted by Ute, Paiute, Goshute, Shoshone, and Diné people. I offer this tracing to illuminate that coloniality is not singular-it is complex, lled with mobility and multiple settlements. The invitation then is towards a decolonial border thinking that “emerges from the people’s antiimperial epistemic responses to the colonial difference-the difference that hegemonic discourse endowed to ‘other’ people, classifying them as inferior and at the same time asserting its geohistorical and body-social con gurations as superior and the models to be followed . . . the decolonial epistemic shift proposes to change the rules of the game” (Tlostanova and Mignolo 2012, 62– 63). As my body navigates colonial spaces with decolonial turns, it is in reconciliation with being an author of an autoethnographic decolonial witnessing as one that inhabits contradiction, where even in moves to witness on the side of the oppressed (Lugones 2003; Figueroa 2015; Fukushima 2019). I too am shaped by colonial structures-where coloniality is multiple-spatially, historically, and embodied. Colonialities are

met with resistance, where even memory is a site of struggle and resistance (Vasquez 2009). A decolonial feminist witnessing embraces relational ways of seeing (Fernández et al. 2021), centralizes a nepantlera status (Anzaldúa 2015; Gutierrez-Perez 2018), and inhabits contradiction.

This is a signi cant theme that bridges decolonial feminisms: struggle and community. Chandra Talpade Mohanty frames this for us in how she describes “Third World Women” as an imagined community. She writes in the eld de ning text, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity: “I have chosen to foreground ‘Third world women’ as an analytical and political category, thus I want to recognize and analytically explore the links among the histories and struggles of Third World women against racism, sexism, colonialism, imperialism, and monopoly capital. I am suggesting, then an ‘imagined community’ of oppositional struggles-‘imagined’ not because it is not ‘real’ but because it suggests potential alliances and collaborations across divisive boundaries, and ‘community’ because in spite of internal hierarchies within Third World contexts, it nevertheless suggests a signi cant deep commitment to what Benedict Anderson, in referring to the idea of a nation, calls ‘horizontal comradeship’ ” (Mohanty 1983, 46). Here, Mohanty provides a way to understand the coalition as an imagined community that is in opposition to coloniality. As movement and the signi cance of names coalesce, Reina Lewis and Sara Mills often used interchangeably Third World Women with “women of color” (2003, 49). From Mohanty to Lewis and Mills, those whose subjectivity aligns mobilize through oppositional alliances of a common context of struggle. As such, the tradition of decolonial feminisms draws upon a rich set of theorists including Audre Lorde (see Negrón-Muntaner 200, Chela Sandoval’s understanding of “oppositional consciousness,” bell hooks, Rey Chow, among others), offer windows into a praxis of decolonial possibility. Drawing upon Shireen Roshanravan’s discussion of Ella Shohat’s notion of the plurilogue, which links together different, co-implicated sites of struggle (Roshanravan 2014, 41), throughout this article I suture different moments of institutional witnessing, seeming disconnected, yet cohered through witnessing the self-in-coaltion.

The cracks in institutions are seen in the places where those who endeavor towards decoloniality collectively organize. In 2016, we formed the Women of Color Academics (WoCA) Collective at the University of Utah, a collective of 16 individuals, students and faculty, including myself. It was under this sign of WoCA a collective began to uidly expand the boundaries of who counts as women of color—how gender is uid and racial connection complex. Paci c Islanders, Chicanas, Latinas, Asian-Latina, Asians and Asian diasporas from Korea and Vietnam, Native American women, were among our earliest founders. WoCA started as 16 individuals, and today is comprised of 260 people where we recognize that the category of “women” is a sign that is bordered, therefore we have broadened the mission to include “transgender and gender non-conforming / non-binary people of color academics.”1 We have always worked to resist

institutional co-optation from neoliberal equity and belonging endeavors in the institution. However, the collective relied on these very resources, and despite the many who participate in our collective, as such, we are limited in how we can grow based on the demands on our time, the limited capacity, and that I regularly hear from WoCAs about how they are tired, or their time stretched thin by institutional demands. Consequently, WoCAs nd means of feeding ourselves and sustaining connection in a myriad of ways through workshops, socials, online connections, nding each other, and being in community. It is not about the mass of people attending events that breathes life into WoCA, but the smaller organized activities, actions, and opportunities, that foster community and connection, the ability to be present for each other. In January 2023, our last writing retreat drew 45 WoCAs together, who wrote on their individual projects, in a space that was held for all of us. The clicking of the typewriters surrounded the group, rustling of papers, and soft voices chatting with each other, as we grounded together in our own individual writing projects.

Even the self-in-coalition is multiple, where the border crossing of disrupting coloniality can be materialized through creative and transnational forms of organizing. Transnationalism rejects rigidly de ned points of comparison, recognizing that migrants are shaped by a diffuse transnational eld (Fukushima 2019a). A theory of transnational feminisms is a theoretical and political project that pays attention to border crossing and draws on the works of transnational feminist thinkers and practitioners M. Jacqui Alexander (2006), Tina Campt and Deborah A. Thomas (2008), Inderpal Grewal (2005), and Chandra Talpade Mohanty (2003). Diasporas are shaped by global ows that are racialized and gendered. These ows cut across borders. And border crossings are shaped by multiplicity. At times, these crossings are subversive, at times, they are constrained by the nation-state in the form of deportation, anti-immigration laws and practices, and criminalization. To work in coalition is a central theory for my own praxis and pedagogies as a border crosser—that is, such gures, embodiments and lived experiences give rise to a theory of transnationalism and a transnational feminist framework which fosters border crossing as theory and practice. Migratory Times, a decolonial feminist platform and collaboration, which has been central to fostering my own understanding of the possibilities of transnational organizing and the limits of working across multiple sites. In 2013, in response to exclusionary practices in publishing, a group of us co-founded Migratory Times where we identi ed as feminists, artists, and scholars from Asia, Europe, Latin America and the United States. Migratory Times builds from conversations between scholars and artists and activists, from the streets to independent art spaces to college campuses. Our work constitutes a collective inquiry regarding digital spaces and global race, gender, sexuality, and labor politics; the transnational exchange of visual cultures and social justice through media and technoscapes; and the intervention of contemporary artists and activists in (re)de ning other landscapes of knowledge. It was beyond the institution

of collective spaces that I also found myself traveling into—that sometimes, the place of the institution cannot be our only home (although, it may be for some). Migratory Times projects construct a decolonized knowledge commons centering women’s voices and experiences in multiple settings. To this effect, a theory of witnessing coalition means nding it in multiple sites, places, and spaces, to enact relational ways of being, where the decolonial feminist praxis is not singular.

Witnessing: Pedagogies of the Border Crosser

To reconcile the colonial violence via institutions, is to recognize that such violence is not singular-it is multiple. As scholars have worked to reconcile immigrants as settler, thinking with Chadrashekar (2018), or even refugee settler desires (Espiritu Ghandi 2022). As the condition of coloniality perseveres, I return to witnessing in the cracks, where decolonial possibility occurs even in institutions. Here we turn to another institution that for some who are imbricated in educational institutions like me, nd themselves in another one—the institution of the law.

In 2021, I was asked by a public defender to provide an expert witness report for a migrant who was being criminalized for selling drugs. Like case exemplars appearing in Migrant Crossings—the case example of Saul and Rigoberto Valle—Giron t the patterns of human traf cking. While I am not saying it was or was not traf cking, here Giron is like the gures I discuss in my book as quasi-traf cked. I have been thinking alongside the work of Elizabeth Povinelli and a theorization of quasi-events. A quasi-event of human traf cking encompasses events that could not be veri ed as happening or not happening. The only veri cation was Giron’s testimony itself. I thematically analyzed his testimony for patterns familiar with others cases. His lawyer sought to settle this case, she asked me to write a letter, hoping that the judge would have sympathy for the Latino migrant forced to sell drugs in the US. An uncomfortable reality beset me as I realized the case was an appeal for a more humane form of criminalization. Even with the knowledge that Giron would be convicted no matter what I wrote, I was contracted to write a letter to the judge.

In 2021, I wrote to the judge the following:

Based on a review of the documents provided to me, my research and my knowledge of and review of academic literature, my knowledge of speci c cases involving traf cking, my experience with many human traf cking victims, it is my opinion that the facts Mr. Giron alleges are consistent with other individuals who have been human traf cked. It is my opinion that there are similarities to other traf cking schemes with recognizable fact patterns. It is my opinion that the circumstances in the Mr. Giron’s case are similar to many human traf cking scenarios where coercion exists and results in victimization.

. Labor traf cking occurs in a range of industries. Although, commonly

studied industries include domestic work, agriculture, restaurants, hospitality, factories, and construction, it is not the industry that makes it “human traf cking,” but rather the coercion and work conditions and exploitation as discussed below. Research shows that lack of upward mobility, perceived economic opportunity in the United States, and con ict in their home countries drives labor migrants to seek employment overseas in countries like the United States. Many victims of labor traf cking come to the United States for work opportunities and / or to improve the quality of life for their family members and themselves... The criminalization of unauthorized migrants has led to an overlap between drug cartels and human smuggling (Ibid).

Drawing upon Albert Biderman’s framework of psychological coercion (Baldwin et al. 2015) in the report I drafted, there was an endeavor to illuminate how coercion is utilized by traf ckers to establish compliance: isolation, monopolization of perception, induced debility or exhaustion, threats, occasional indulgences, demonstration of omnipotence, degradation, and enforcing trivial demands. Giron, a migrant from Honduras, was threatened, forced to sell drugs to pay debts, he was stalked by his employers, and out of fear for his life, he ed to Los Angeles, and he was lied to about the kind of work he would labor in. Despite the familiar pattern of human traf cking, Giron himself a survivor of violence, the carceral response of a human rights movement continues to persevere in the US. The appeals and the limits of these appeals are not lost on me; Giron sat in detention on Tonva land. The lesson learned from Giron, a border crosser, is how colonial systems continue to place power and control over those who disrupt the colonial order through mechanisms of carcerality—arrest and deportation—a form of social death.

Serving as an expert witness in multiple courts, I continue to witness how migrant subjects are bound to what I have referred to as a tethered subjectivity (Fukushima 2015; Fukushima 2019b), which is the product of neoliberal governance and security. The tethered subjectivity are the dualities in (self-) perception of migrant identities that discursively and in practice circulate and are rei ed through the law, social relations, and politics (Fukushima 2019b, 146). The duality of a tethered subjectivity encompasses victim/criminal, legal/illegal, citizen/noncitizen, and even human/subhuman, or, as phrased by Lisa Marie Cacho, “dead to others.” To untether migrants from being bound to being seen in dualities, an untethered subjectivity, requires new modalities of seeing. Where were the cracks of decolonial possibilities for Giron? As literal and gurative border crosser, Giron traversed geographically into the US, but also disrupted notions of categorical construction of criminality where his lawyer still sought to le for a “more humane” conviction, recognizing that within the colonial structures, he would be criminalized. He pointed to the limits of the law, where “victims” are criminalized, and whether one refers to immigrant as settlers or

not, the modern colonial system currently does not work to the advantage of migrants like Giron.

Due to my positionality, when I enter into the court spaces, my racialization and embodiment as a woman of color also makes its way into the courtroom. My body entering the courts can also produce cracks, even as I serve as a witness within them. In 2018 when I was called to appear in court as an “expert witness” for Echon Jr., et al., v. the Sacketts civil case. In this particular case, the accused represented themselves. I serve as a subject matter expert in court cases; for this case, I was brought to testify on human traf cking. It was the rst time I had been cross-examined by someone who was not a lawyer. The accused (defendant) included a white man, who after I had been questioned by the plaintiff’s attorneys promptly started his cross-examination by referring to me as “Ms . . .” As the defendant self-representing his case approached me to cross examine me, he paused after referring to me as “Ms . . .” He continued by telling me and the court that he would not bother to say my name. As a response to being unnamed, I started to say my name for the defense, but paused, as I did not want to come across as a condescending academic. It was the shortest cross-examination I had to date experienced, but it was also memorable. To be told explicitly by the opposing party that they would not even bother to say my name in the courtroom is a common form of racial microaggression, a brief form of indignity that communicates a racial slight (Sue et al. 2007). To be unnamed, is commonly experienced by communities of color and immigrant communities. In other cases, such as the Ghost Case where Chinese immigrants were forced to commit a scam (Fukushima 2019), they too were also unnamed by law enforcement who testi ed about their case, referring to the immigrant defendants in that case by what they wore or their age. Communities of color who navigate colonial legal systems, when unnamed, are reminded, they/we do not exist. While the party I was hired by (the plaintiffs) ended up winning their case, it was whiteness in this colonial context coupled with heterosexism that fostered the interaction, even in brevity, where the exchange about my name (or endeavor to not name me) in the courtroom was an endeavor to erase me. While I had been called in as an “expert witness,” I was reminded how power and whiteness in colonial systems wills its face in the courtroom.

I re ect on these experiences of being an expert, because as I work with a decolonial feminist framework, I am still not outside of institutions even in other spaces beyond academic institutions. Institutions shape life, community, and the world we live in. And as conveyed by anthropologist Carole McGranahan, “To testify on another's behalf is an exercise in privilege and compassion. As privilege, it is to use one's status and knowledge to serve another. . . . Such ethnographic witnessing is, as anthropologist and performance artist Gina Athena Ulysse (2015) puts it, a means of engaging the visceral in the structural so that processes of inequality and dehumanisation can be named and

challenged. Witnessing is moral optimism” (2020, 107). The plurality of border crossings occurring in institutions are multiple.

Building a Coalition—Witnessing Multiple-Selves in Coalition

In 2020, at the height of the pandemic I co-founded and co-led the GenderBased Violence Consortium (GBVC). At the same time other initiatives were being born as a response to the university’s failure to respond to the death of a white woman who had experienced intimate partner violence. In October of 2022, four years after her death, Lauren McCluskey, the McCluskey Foundation organized a Race for Campus Safety in memorial of her death, and life, she was a student athlete (Ashcraft 2022). Another case had occurred that year in February of 2022–of Zhifan Dong, an international student at the University of Utah from China, was found murdered. Zhifan was murdered by her ex-boyfriend Haoyu Wang, whom she had a protective order against—a legal remedy for domestic violence victims to court order a distance between them and a person abusing them. In reviewing the publicly made available documentation of campus communications, entitled “Timeline Documentation” communications on February 9, 2022, two days before Zhifan was found murdered in a hotel room in Salt Lake City, the documents showed that the Housing Residential staff notes had mixed up Zhifan (the murdered student) with her murderer (Haoyu Wang). The document showed Wang typed, and a pen mark crossing out the name, with Dong handwritten above it. And vice-versa, where Dong was typed, a pen mark crossed out Dong with handwriting above the name “Wang.” The crossing out of names, indicates someone had mixed up the two, where names of involved personnel are redacted from public records (University of Utah 2022). The crack in the case may be found in a re-reading of the names crossed out. Mae Ngai was interviewed re ecting on the colonial legacy of names and individuality. The news report conveyed, “Misidenti cation of people of Asian descent by Westerners dates all the way back to European colonialism in China, according to Mae Ngai, an Asian American studies professor at Columbia University. She said colonists didn’t ‘bother to register what any individual looked like, because they didn’t see them as individuals’ ” (Schermele 2022). As I write this it is February 2023, over one year since the murder of Zhifan Dong, the campus is, and was, silent—no foundations, runs or collective responses. There is a need to foster spaces that create coalition across racial and gender difference. I have witnessed in Utah, that while there is a growing discourse surrounding domestic violence, violence continues to be silenced and the norm. The GBVC is a state-wide coalition of academics and community advocates working on issues of violence—domestic violence, sexual violence and human traf cking.

On April 15, 2021, GBVC produced and premiered Utah Women’s Narratives. Utah Women’s Narratives. The project was co-directed by Diane Lê Strain,

Aimee Pike, and Francesca Hsieh. The project featured three acts—“Identity,” “Loss,” and “Resilience,” respectively–and it “emerged from an attempt to create a platform for women who were willing to share their stories, particularly those who experienced marginalization related not only to their gender, but also in relation to other identities” (LêStrain et al. 2022). The poems, narratives, and creative writing showcased a range of embodiments, experience, and the way that violence shapes are multiply gendered and racialized lives. I recall witnessing the raw vulnerability and erceness expressed by the actors, writers, and directors who told experiences of abuse, human traf cking, domestic violence, sexual violence, and survivance.

There are many lessons in the Utah Women’s Narratives, but one that I share here illuminated the painstaking need to witness each other. The piece entitled “Llorona” by Sandra Del Rio Madrigal tells the story of a narrator who informs her Tía (aunt) about having a miscarriage. In Spanish and English, the audience witnesses a person re ecting on the memory of telling their aunt about a miscarriage, a disclosure, and a witnessing of connection where Tía herself had also experienced a miscarriage. Llorona is performed by Micki Martinez. The descriptive work of the writing by Madrigal, a Chicana writer of Utah, illuminates how even when people are apart, there are ways people come together in support, solidarity, coalition, to witness: “Tía and I cried together. I didn’t then understand the landline’s buzzing sound. And as we said goodbye, nor the quietness that hung in the air. I only thought about how I had held my tear in my hands, holding the promise of hope that had only been like a silent whisper-a icker that would never light with the world” (Madrigal 2021, 14). Although an emotionally intense story about loss, it also captures the power of witnessing one another as connected with the realm of mythology and reality. As the narrative concludes, it continues as follows: “I still hear my Tía’s mourning wails through the halls of my bones each time I look at my two children. I hear Tía Martha’s crying, and I think of her as la Llorona. She sweeps memories of watching her baby leave; sweeping them into a stream” (2021, 14). The gure of Llorona is invoked, but not as a monstrous dangerous gure. Instead, the wailing woman, Llorona, is conjured up in time of loss and grief—a symbol of intergenerational connection and anguish. And it is through the conversation between the narrator recalling her conversation with her Tía, that coalition is illuminated between bodies coming together to witness each other in time of pain, dif culty, and even, trauma, breaking the disconnection created by violence. Re ecting on La Llorona, whose wails can be heard for Giron and Zhifan? It is this example that I share as illuminating the work of a decolonial feminist witnessing as blurring between the academic institution and the community. Through the performance of a community in coalition with the GBVC, the work shares a palpable connection between two individuals—Tia and her sobrina (niece)—via phone line, across time and space. While we do

not read if Zhifan’s parents cried for her through the phone calls, one can only imagine. And likewise, we know from the presentencing report, Giron had a wife and a son who were with him in the United States.

Suturing together multiple modes of witnessing, from the courtroom, to performance, to the banks of my memory, the praxis of a decolonial feminist witnessing occurs across space, place, and time. I offer my own autoethnographic re ections as a means to create a phoneline to others experiencing similar violence, resisting together, to model the modalities that have led to my survival of creating coalition and enacting a praxis of ongoing decolonial feminist witnessing.

In Conclusion

In the opening, I started with the knock on the door. And in colonial institutions, the forms of coloniality that pervades everyday life can feel like a knock, a quiet rap on the door from another person. Although I write now as an Associate Dean, Director, and Associate Professor, it was not long ago that I was almost pushed out of my institution. I had made the mistake of having a mediated meeting with a colleague to discuss the racism I was experiencing. It was a mistake because I did not know that my own tapping on this colleague’s door to have a meeting mediated by the then AVP of Diversity would send her on a path to push me out. This person won and lost at the same time; I am still here. Unlike many colleagues, I was fortunate. I read and hear story upon story of how colleagues are forced out of their institutions because of ongoing coloniality. A decolonial feminist witnessing through autoethnography facilitates opportunities to nd the cracks even within colonial structures. To see these cracks, one inhabits a nepantla perspective of a border crosser who is committed to the self-in-coalition, to being in coalition with the many. To be in coalition is to recognize the coalition that surrounds the individual is manifold; there are people who are seen and unseen. I was surrounded by chairs in Ethnic Studies, a transformative Dean, colleagues, peer-reviewers, colluders, community, who were and are always with me, leading to my early tenure during a global pandemic.

Multiple emotions arise as I re ect on these experiences-from the experiences I have survived in colonial structures, to the endeavors to continually witness on the side of the oppressed, witnessing myself, witnessing others. As Audre Lorde teaches us, “Women responding to racism means women responding to anger, the anger of exclusion, of unquestioned privilege, of racial distortions, of silence, ill-use, stereotyping, defensiveness, misnaming, betrayal, and coopting. My anger is a response to racist attitudes, to the actions and presumptions that arise out of those attitudes” (1981). Colonial violence can lead to our death, socially and physically. I survived in academia because I am surrounded by people who will me to live, to be present, and to exist. And through witnessing

on the side of the oppressed, I too will others to exist, supporting, connecting, being in coalition.

I do not re ect on my experiences naively. The violence I have struggled against was not only enacted by white bodies but because of an investment in colonial violence. The violence is also internalized and within communities of perceived allyship I have witnessed others endure much worse forms of colonial violence; it is not a race to the bottom, but I know their pain and experiences are not found in this autoethnography. The violence of coloniality is multiple, ongoing, a struggle that seeks not to rest, therefore the self-in-coalition cannot rest. If trauma breaks our connection to ourselves and community, the work to heal from colonial violence are connections. And to work to resist the violence of racism and internalized violence in our communities, I endeavor to do this work in coalition with a commitment to witnessing on the side of the oppressed, even if imperfectly, at times limited and bounded, and in other cases also experiencing failure. It is the connection of coalition, and the empathy of entering into the world of the Other, that makes possible a radical present, and possible future. It also means the intellectual work of the decolonial feminist scholar is ever-more pressing.

Annie Isabel Fukushima is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies in the School for Cultural & Social Transformation at the University of Utah. She also serves as the Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies and the Director of the Of ce of Undergraduate Research. For 2023, she is the Lead Fellow for Mellon Funded Transformative Intersectional Collective. Fukushima is the author of the award-winning book, Migrant Crossings: Witnessing Human Traf cking in the US (Stanford University Press, 2019).

Notes

1. Women of Color Academics Collective. 2023 University of Utah. https://woca .utah.edu/

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