Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences
\nVolume 18, Number 2, Spring\/Summer 2010<\/p>\n
Marcelle Maese-Cohen , Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui , Cho Haejoang , Ueno Chizuko , Laura E. P\u00e9rez , Paola Bacchetta , Lewis R. Gordon , David Marriott , Adrian Johnston , John E. Drabinski , Didier Eribon , Elizabeth Freeman<\/strong><\/p>\n The title of this dossier honors the social activism and political philosophy of the coalitional project of decolonial feminisms. While those involved in this conversation have for the most part been located in geographical spaces regularly referred to as the United States and Latin America (particularly Bolivia and Mexico), the central question that motivates our solidarity\u2014what does it mean, as Laura P\u00e9rez writes in her essay here, \u201cto engage in decolonizing coalitions that take feminist queer of color critical thought seriously as central to the work of decolonization?\u201d\u2014is one that is necessarily posed between and beyond these reified time-spaces. The contributions to feminist thinking made in this dossier by scholar-activists working in and across the contexts of Bolivia, the United States, Korea, Japan, India, and France can perhaps best be understood as moving between the \u201cpost\u201d and the \u201cde\u201d colonial; beyond the reification of our globe toward a version of what Gayatri Spivak has named planetarity.1 I put emphasis here on placing postcolonial studies in conversation with decoloniality, rather than \u201cintroducing\u201d decolonial feminisms as a new and therefore more accurate or universal way of unthinking colonization. My aim is to defamiliarize postcolonial studies by \u201cintroducing\u201d the project of decolonial feminisms as an open-ended question, \u201cwhat does it mean to take feminist queer of color critical thought seriously?\u201d rather than as a predetermined program disciplined by a rigid lexicon. I offer an image of feminisms inspired by Cho Haejoang and Ueno Chizuko\u2019s dialogue across the postcolonial border between Korea and Japan, \u201cSpeaking at the Border\/Will These Words Reach . . . ,\u201d which is featured here. Taking my cue from their discussion of Miwa Yanagi\u2019s artwork My Grandmothers and Ueno\u2019s sixth letter, I say, \u201c[l]et us embark on a journey called a [trans]modern old age\u201d feminisms. Given the alarming rate at which gains made by the civil rights movements are being overturned by the dissolution of various progressive, interdisciplinary, \u201cethnic,\u201d or \u201cgender\u201d studies programs at the university, this journey will be highly oppositional.2 (Marcelle Maese-Cohen)<\/p>\n