About each section
Elizabeth Sumida Huaman
Coloniality is different from colonialism. Colonialism denotes a political and economic relation in which the sovereignty of a nation or a people rests on the power of another nation, which makes such nation an empire. Coloniality, instead, refers to long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations. Thus, coloniality survives colonialism. It is maintained alive in books, in the criteria for academic performance, in cultural patterns, in common sense, in the self-image of peoples, in aspirations of self, and so many other aspects of our modern experience. In a way, as modern subjects we breath coloniality all the time and everyday.
-(Maldonado-Torres, 2007, p. 243) [1]
Coloniality gives us a framework for identifying the domains of economy, authority, normativity, and subjectivity, anti-colonialism gives us a lens for analyzing human struggles within these domains, and decoloniality demands that we recognize the act in the struggle and that it be different from what is expected. This is all thought and heart work, and ultimately, Indigenous peoples really do know that understanding what is our world and how it is changing is not the same as being able to defend it. Thus, there has to be something beyond decoloniality. What are we as Indigenous peoples remembering and wanting? What is the past-future in the present moment’s thought, feeling, and action? There has to be an open invitation to language for that.
-(Sumida Huaman, 2022)[2]
Each section in this volume addresses traditional domains of coloniality—economy/land, authority, normativity, and knowledge/subjectivity. The four sections are described in depth in the Editors’ introductory chapter—“The westernized university and us: Edgewalking stories and felt scholarship in higher education.”
Prior to each section, quotes are shared that we believe capture major themes and unresolved ideas within the domains. Contributing authors are therefore not looked to for their abilities to provide resolution to the struggles for power within each domain. They instead become sources of lived experience or progenitors of their own “felt theory” and thus facilitators of further debate about the role of academia and the westernized university in the work of political and embodied decolonization.
Maldonado-Torres, N. (2007). On the coloniality of being. Cultural Studies, Vol. 21 (2-3): 240-270. DOI: 10.1080/09502380601162548 ↑
Sumida Huaman, E. (2022). Keynote: “Conversations in Indigenous education across the Americas,” AERA SIG Decolonial, Postcolonial, and Anti-Colonial Studies in Education, San Diego, California, USA, April 24, 2022. ↑