Getting Close to Other Others: Doing Difference Differently

ABSTRACT

This essay expands on my uses of the central concept of Sara Ahmed’s seminal work, Postcolonial Encounters, in a participatory theater-based research project with a cohort of women from different countries in West Africa ‘On their Way’ through the asylum/migration nexus in the Republic of Ireland. I situate asylum- seeking (and asylum-giving) in white nations as a fourth encounter between the West and the rest, and examine the shifting conditions in which encounters between the other, and ‘other others' take place. Part 1 of the paper provides a background to my research project and asylum-seeking in the Irish context. In Part 2, I outline my use of the ‘encounters’ method to make decolonial interventions across theory, epistemology and methodology. Part Three analyses a devised theatrical scene to illustrate how the women re-stage the past and present, disrupt relations of power, proximity and distance, and speak back to what has been said or known about them. I conclude with a discussion of ‘making theory from the flesh’ to distinguish specific forms of Black female agency and resistance and outline my current practice-based applications of Ahmed’s work in Australia.

KEYWORDS:

• Postcolonial asylum
• asylum
• participatory drama
• decolonial feminist praxis
• postcolonial encounters
• theory in the flesh

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I use the term woman as this is how participants and many women of non-Western origin identify and politically organize. As a category, however, it is inclusive of people identifying as gender queer, non-binary, trans, lesbian and gay. The term African women is used not to homogenize or erase the different countries and unique cultures of the African continent but as the collective term under which pan-African women politically organize in Ireland. It refers to women originating from the Continent and socialized there, rather than in diaspora. The women in this study originated from West and Central African nations. Black female bodies: I use bodies as an analytical construct to talk about how raced and gendered meanings are scripted onto material, enfleshed black and brown women. This avoids the re-inscription and essentializing of identity categories that proliferate in un-critical migrant and asylum studies. Third World Women as Mohanty (2003) defines it is a political (rather than racial or colour) identification that refers to Native/Indigenous peoples and people of African, Caribbean, Asian and Latin American descent in the US. I use it here to refer to women in and from the global South, to retain a sharp focus on neocolonialism and to acknowledge differences in cultures and socialization in diasporic locations. US Third World feminism as Sandoval (2000) defines it, refers to a deliberate politics across geographic, economic and cultural borders to create a location of third world in the first world, and a global feminist oppositional consciousness that challenges the limits of the nation state. Black Feminism refers to US Black feminism and British Black feminism that encompasses the political solidarity of diasporic women of colour. All are political identifications that infer an alliance though a common context of struggle through opposition to sexist, racist, neocolonial capitalist imperialist structures.

2 Decolonial is used here to refer to ontologies, philosophies and epistemologies that do not centralize European modernity as a referent. The term ‘decolonize' is contested by Indigenous scholars such as Tuck and Yang (2012) who argue that it’s overuse as a metaphor is incommensurable with Indigenous claims for the return of land. I use it to refer to practices by white institutions that re-racialize and subjugate black and women of colour.

3 For Lentin (2013: 54) the mothering role always carries a component of othering, which is doubly so for migrant m/others.

4 All names have been changed, and the pseudonyms used here were chosen by participants.

5 Semiotic analysis is a reading of signs, which are not simply a text, image or object, but one that has been coded with meaning, or ‘a thing plus meaning’ (Barthes 1973). These top-down representations circulate knowledge ideas, beliefs, values, affects and direct audiences towards ‘preferred’ or dominant readings (Hall 1997) that are already normalized in that context. I don’t ask ‘what does the representation mean’ but how might it frame difference in ways that disappears or mis-recognizes difference itself? What work does it ‘do’ in this place, at this time? Who benefits?

6 At the time, 66.7 per cent of people had lived in Direct Provision for more than three years, and around 19 per cent for more than seven years (Refugee Integration Agency 2015).

7 In 2014, local historian Catherine Corless discovered a mass grave where the remains of 800 babies and young children who had died at a Mother and Baby home in Tuam. Many died from malnutrition and neglect. A formal investigation established in 2015 into practices at this and thirteen other sites is ongoing. See Corless (2020).

8 Satire, a traditional form of African folk theatre is a form of ‘political media’ that have a didactic purpose to express ‘disgust, to report and comment on current affairs, for political pressure, for propaganda’ (Ebewo 2001: 51). The skillful use of satire evoked and circulated humour rather than guilt or shame.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nilmini Fernando

Dr Nilmini Fernando is Sri Lankan Australian interdisciplinary Postcolonial/Black feminist scholar and writer with research interests in Critical Intersectional and decolonial feminist praxis applied in the fields of migration/asylum, critical race studies, domestic and family violence, and arts- based practice. She is currently Research Fellow on a Critical Racial Literacy project at the department of Education at Griffith University, Queensland and an Anti Racism educator and organizational consultant in Melbourne. She is the originator and curator of Loving Feminist Literature, a performance-based collective that brings feminist of colour texts to public audiences. Her publications include: (2016) The Discursive Violence of Postcolonial Asylum in the Irish Republic, Postcolonial Studies, 19:4, 393–408; and (forthcoming 2021) The State of Race and Racism in Australia, Routledge Encyclopedia of Race and Racism.