Enfleshing temporal insurgencies and decolonial times

ABSTRACT

Time and temporality often remain the unthought in our spaces, moments, and movements of radical political imagination and practice. In this contribution, we aim to open a dialogue between current queer/feminist/black/decolonial scholarship on time, and the praxis of feminist movements and women in movement in Cali, Colombia. We hope to nurture, in this way, a systematization of the role of decolonial times and insurgent temporalities in our anti-capitalist praxis and deepen the theorization of decolonial emancipation and/as healing. We develop this systematization through exploration of three moments of encounter; the first a women-only workshop ‘Finding Voice’, the second a workshop that was part of a diálogo de saberes between feminist/peace movements in the region, and the final a public talk-performance at the International Conference in Mental Health and Well-Being, all held in Cali. Exploration and excavation of these moments suggest-enflesh that embracing our untimely rhythms and that which is out-of-time in our subjectivities, excavating together the epistemological possibilities of silence and the pauses in-between speech, as well as reconfiguring ‘failure’ as a moment of possibility, open embodied pathways to decolonising and feminising the revolutionary political.

KEYWORDS:

• Decoloniality
• Decolonial/Black/Indigenous feminisms
• insurgent temporalities
• time
• feminist and women’s movements
• anti-capitalism
• Colombia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This conceptualization of contemporary capitalism begins from the proletarian othered-subject and an understanding that primitive accumulation (as ongoing continual process) is premised upon the construction of particular subjectivities and social relationships which are classed, raced and gendered. The knowing (agentic)-subject of this structuration of social desire and potentiality is the White, masculinised bourgeois subject and the object other to be known, tamed, controlled and exploited are all those who do not meet phenomenologically this subjectivity, often raced and feminised, or queer others (Ahmed, 2007; Motta, 2017b, 2018b).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sara C. Motta

Sara C. Motta is a mother, critical political theorist, poet, popular educator and Associate Professor in Politics and Political Economy, based in the Discipline of Politics and International Relations at the Newcastle Business School, University of Newcastle, Australia. She is currently facilitating a number of activist-scholar research projects including ‘La Politica de Maternidad’ with militant mothers and grandmothers in Australia, Colombia and Brazil. She has published over 40 academic articles, two edited books and is the author of Constructing Twenty first Century Socialism in Latin America: The Role of Radical Education (2014), and Liminal Subjects: Weaving (Our) Liberation (2018).

Norma L. Bermudez

Norma. L. Bermudez is based in the Instituto de Educación y Pedagogía in the Universidad del Valle, Cali. Her research focuses on popular education, feminism, and resistance. She has recently published articles in La Manzana de la Discordia and in Revista BoEM, and a chapter titled, ‘Cali’s Women in Collective Crossing for Three Worlds: Popular Education, Feminisms and Nonviolence for the Expansion of the Present, Memory and for Nurturing Life’, in the book Education and Social Change in Latin America (co-edited by Sara Motta and Mike Cole).