Write a paper on the Global South, Black and Indigenous feminism.This course begins with a provocation from Vijay Prashad on the meaning of the Left, broadly conceived. He pushes Western intellectuals to do better; foremost among his prescriptions is the need to grow a new skin as part of the transformative project of resisting empire and bringing into being better worlds. In what ways have the people we’ve studied in
this course offered ideas that could inform this new skin? How do the strands of this course – Global South, Black and Indigenous feminism – snake together gracefully with each other? Where are there knots to unpick?
This paper asks you to attend to the political entailments of the course. In other words, the various authors we’ve taken up offer diagnoses of what’s wrong with the world – imperialism, patriarchy, racial capitalism, settler colonialism, heteronormativity – and prescriptions for how to change it for the better
– or defend the better that continues to exist. I want you to draw out the political dimensions of what we’re invited into: what sorts of values, practices, sites and organizational forms would we centre and elaborate if we were to take these political seriously? At its most aspirational, the authors in this course, collectively, are part of conceiving and articulating a way of life. What might you say about its contours, rhythm and mode of being?
Any political framework is multi-layered and complex. I do not expect you to attempt an exhaustive elaboration of all the above. Instead, you must exercise discernment in how to make your response. Some of you may choose to situate your response in the personal register, elucidating how the course has challenged your own inherited ‘skin’ and possibly challenged and changed you (if you go in this direction, I expect a more ambitious engagement than in your personal analysis). Others may already be part of existing political projects that this course can be put in conversation with. For instance, how might the authors in this course want to challenge Divest Uvic or LandBack or Defund to name their limitations and fully inhabit their. transformative potential? Or you may want to take the opportunity to get analytical and carefully attempt to unpick a knot this course has revealed, like the inherent tension between the right to move and the Indigenous practice of boundaries between territories. Finally, if I were responding to this question, I would probably jump at the chance to get big and philosophical and write about the kind of person these politics call into being and what it. might take to become one of these people, internally, relationally and extensively?
This paper is to be no longer than 2500 words, and should be uploaded to Brightspace in 12-point font, double-spaced. It is due April 13th by 11.59PM
