When we couldn’t breathe. (Our) Stories from the Margins

ABSTRACT

We begin our introduction by situating our special issue Our Bodies Breathe Resistance: COVID19 Stories From/In the Margins within the emergent academic debates around global inequalities, breathing and the body under COVID19 conditions informed by international relations, critical development studies, and anti/post/decolonial feminist scholarship. We do this while articulating our experiential approach to knowing as one that questions false dichotomies between theory and practice. In this way we practice enfleshed and positioned thinking while dialoguing with literature that de-centres from western ‘contemporaneity’ and allows us to display the limits of detached and disembodied thinking in times of COVID19. Guided by the following question: What happens when global inequalities, breathing, and bodies are thought of from a different geo-genealogy to that of western critical feminist antiessentialist approaches we introduce each of the contributors to the special issue organized around the actions of Refusing, Healing, Caring, Eating, and Learning.

KEYWORDS:

• Decolonial
• feminism
• enfleshed
• breathing
• body
• global inequalities

The COVID19 Global Pandemic has brought into stark contrast multiple complexities, in particular a heightened awareness of the body in terms of health and our ability to breathe. During the COVID years media and academia focused on access to ventilators and personal protective equipment (PPE), we are reminded of Eric Garner’s death in 2014, where his final words to police officers were ‘I can’t breathe’, the same last words uttered by George Floyd in May 2020, and echoed by Tyre Nichols in January 2022 who complained of shortness of breath shortly before his death at the hands of the police, reinforcing for us that breathing is a political act. What has been evident during this pandemic and its aftermath is the heightened ways in which differently enfleshed bodies have and still are experiencing its effects, which is discernible across differentiated and specific lines of inclusion and exclusion marked by race/ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality, age/generation, and disability. As such, when oppression continues to take our/their breath away, our inhales and exhales during COVID19 become radical acts of resistance.

Similarly, these exclusionary politics have been reproduced in the numerous expert analyses on the future of the world after COVID19. Interestingly, these analyses are often spoken of from a mostly western ‘contemporaneity’. Through contributions from around the world, our special issue aims to problematize why our common post COVID19 futures continue to be thought and prescribed from an assumed global contemporaneity and mostly urban contexts?

To address this question, the contributors in this special issue explore what sort of silencing movements are taking place when ‘some’ are ‘far away’ and hence better equipped to think for all humanity while ‘others’ are deemed ‘too close or situated’ for doing exactly that. What operations are taking place for ‘some’ to be considered representatives of contemporaneous (read universal) debates? These are the sorts of questions that are central to our collective aim of global decolonial existence.

The global circulation of ideas reinforcing colonial divides in the politics of knowledge production and circulation is not new phenomena and has been explored from a plurality of disciplinary perspectives and inter/transdisciplinary approaches. For example, critical development studies, critical feminist and critical race studies have for a long-time researched inequalities in the political economy of knowledge production and distribution. Scholars such as Arturo Escobar, Raewyn Connell, and Frederique Apfel Marglin have explained that inequality by pointing at the concentration of ‘experts’, theories and knowledge generation mechanisms and networks in the so-called Global North as intimately and complexly related to the (modern) representation and production of the so-called Global South as a place in need of expert intervention to gather empirical evidence. These authors proposed some solutions to address inequality in the political economy of knowledge production such as a politics of citation, calls for the diversification of academia’s demographics, South-South forms of cooperation, and so on.

However, approaching the politics of knowledge production and circulation with a feminist decolonial orientation, entails a move towards making visible the plurality of alternatives through which social life is organized and experienced across the colonial divide. Precisely, anti-, post-, and decolonial scholarship has revealed the articulations and entanglements of power through which such a divide operates rendering ‘some’ a condition of contemporaneity and universality that enable them to prescribe global designs for our world futures (Mignolo, 2000) while many ‘others’ are not, precisely due to their situatedness (Motta, 2016). Following Homi Bhabha (1994), these many ‘others’ inhabit a non-synchronic temporal existence.

In this special issue, an experiential approach to knowing, as one that questions false dichotomies between theory and practice is expressed well by Maria Lugones’ (2003) praxical challenge to political philosophy: ‘I don’t think what I don’t do’. This means that we not only articulate the explanatory purchase of enfleshed and positioned thinking of global inequalities, breathing, and the body in times of COVID19, but also practice it. Therefore, we do enfleshed and positioned thinking while dialoguing with literature that de-centres from western ‘contemporaneity’ and allows us to display the limits of detached and disembodied thinking circulating in the form of intellectual analyses on the affective, vulnerability, and the body in times of COVID19. This is for us to practice situatedness in radical pluralities as our point of departure.

A story on knowledge and ‘expertise’¹

In March 2020, Pablo Amadeo creator of ASPO (Aislamiento Social Preventivo y Obligatorio) published online the edited collection ‘Sopa de Wuhan – The Soup of Wuhan’, a collection of essays featuring the ongoing debates between well-known intellectuals Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Zizek, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Byung-Chul Han, and David Harvey (ASPO, 2020a). This ‘soup’ also included essays from Judith Butler, Alain Badiou, and Paul B. Preciado and from militant intellectuals who are lesser known in the English-speaking world such as Raúl Zibechi and María Galindo and from academics such as Markus Gabriel, Gustavo Yáñez González, and Patricia Manrique.

Like in many other compilations, Pablo Amadeo acknowledged that many voices and perspectives were excluded, but he also emphasized the importance of the experiment as a ‘soup’ in which many ingredients and perspectives co-exist. Later on, Amadeo (ASPO, 2020b) published the Argentinean version of the Soup, called ‘La Fiebre – The Fever’ this time featuring academics and militant intellectuals such as Maristella Svampa, ETC member Silvia Ribeiro, Maria Pia Lopez, and Candelaria Bott.

Reflecting on these two compilations, Amadeo mentioned in an interview that while ‘Sopa de Wuhan’ brought ideas about the ‘immediate future produced by European and North American intellectuals … La Fiebre featured Argentine intellectuals thinking on “closer themes” such as “communication, economy, work, anguish, the State and activism” in a “more situated way”’ (Heinrich, 2020).

On social media in the Spanish-speaking world, Amadeo’s efforts have been praised for its experimental nature, its free distribution, and in the case of the second compilation, for its inclusive nature. Nonetheless, these compilations have also been criticized.

The first compilation – Sopa de Wuhan – has been characterized as an example of the opportunist style of philosophical thinking, while its book cover has been described as a dehumanizing imaginary contributing to discrimination and racial profiling against Asian-origin people across the Americas and the world. The compilation has also been characterized as transpiring an orientalist understanding of the ‘East’ which, from our point of view, is spoken of from a mostly western ‘contemporaneity’ positionality. Of course, it is not new that these sorts of compilations reinforce the colonial divide in the politics of knowledge production and circulation in which some are deemed as occupying a condition of contemporaneity and universality and hence are better suited to prescribe global designs for our world futures, while many others are not, precisely due to their situatedness and, following Bhabha (1994), their non-synchronic temporal existence. And don’t get us wrong, the second compilation La Fiebre is particularly commendable, and a rare opportunity for those able to understand Spanish, to learn from the excellent sociological and feminist analyses featured there. But what we want to problematize is why our common futures need to be thought and prescribed from an assumed global contemporaneity and mostly urban contexts? We want to question what sort of silencing movement is taking place when some are deemed ‘too close or situated’ and others ‘far away’ and hence better equipped to think for all humanity? What operations are taking place for some to be considered representatives of contemporaneous (read universal) debates? These are the sorts of questions that we think are central to address if our collective aim is a decolonial existence.

When looking closely at the essays in the first compilation by Butler (2020), Badiou (2020), and Preciado (2020) on the affective and the body, we do recognize the contributions of these authors’ critical perspectives on vulnerability and bodies. But we wonder, which are the bodies that are thought of with these frameworks and which bodies are not considered? What happens when vulnerability and bodies in the middle of COVID-19 are thought of from a different geo-genealogy to that of western feminist anti-essentialist approaches?

Our proposal is to generate spaces for collective reflections that speak about our common futures from their situatedness in radical pluralities. And it is precisely that we find our point of departure for such a reflection in the thinking of and with collectivity of Yasnaya Elena Aguilar Gil (2020, June), Ayuujk researcher and activist for linguistic rights. Aguilar Gil’s powerful essay Aqui [Here] invites us to consider where is the here we inhabit when experiencing COVID-19 physical mobility restrictions and its aftermath:

The “here” that I enunciate is Ayutla. A Mixe community in the Sierra Norte de Oaxaca. A place without access to drinking water for almost three years when by violent means we were stripped from our spring and our entire drinking water system was destroyed. But also, the “here” that I pronounce means my house, the orchard, the field already planted with cornfields that hopes to sprout, the house of the turkeys, the avocados, the leaves of the medlars that shade the patio. The spaces we inhabit, in general, are open and allow unthinkable circulation in an apartment block. Here is a place with a central loudspeaker from which the community authorities transmit prevention messages, sanitary measures in Mixe and in Spanish to deal with the pandemic. A community structure makes things easier.²

Storytelling and positionality

This final section introduces the thinking of and with collectivity of each of the contributors to this special issue organized around learning, refusing, eating, caring, healing, and nurturing. Our contributors’ situatedness in onto-epistemic, geo- and body-political margins transpires in their thinking of and with collectivity around verbs that most of us use and act on daily, instead of nouns or concepts. In this way, our contributors cultivate a return to action in language to encourage critical reflexivity around the everyday instead of detachment via disembodied abstractions. In other words, positionality in practice (Icaza Garza & Vázquez, 2018).

Deeply inspired by Sara C. Motta (2016) invitation to decolonize critique, our special issue features perspectives, which today are produced as non-existent under problematic and violent assumptions of Prophetic Intellectuals as guardians of critical academia. We unleash the creative decolonizing force of the storyteller by unmuting enfleshed ruptures and the re-generations taking place right now as an affirmation of difference and possibilities.

We envision storytelling as a meta-epistemological task, whereby the storyteller positioned at the epistemological margins, speaks to us from a place, a body, a history, an ecology (West, 1989 in Motta, 2016, p. 39). Where to tell our/their stories, is to breathe deeply, in order to break out of the isolation imposed by oppression and heightened by the pandemic, so that we create solidarity and the possibility to heal together. The storyteller reflects deeply on everyday life, seeking out the invisibilized reach of power in our lives, whilst privileging those in our communities who have suffered multiple oppressions and silencing.

The idea of collective learning through a series of stories emerged in the context of a MA course we were both involved in at the International Institute of Social Studies named Transitions to Social Justice LAB. A majority of the participants in this course are students situated in an onto-epistemic, geo- and body-political ‘South’. Despite our initial hesitations and criticism towards the prevailing ‘business as usual’ in academia, we decided to run the course as a means to keep in touch and connected with each other in the middle of COVID19 and social distancing policies in the Netherlands.

The final outcome includes academic articles, nurturing words and conversations, healing visual and poetic horizons. Each of these contributions has been commissioned to some of the course contributors, storytellers, in response to the online interactions with participants. Some of our contributors are colleagues engaged with a decolonial and anti-racist approach to globalizations, learning and development (Motta, Samaradiwakera-Wijesundara, Suarez-Krabe, Salim, Sathi, Sheik, Zavenport). Some others are involved in place-based communal forms of resistance and regeneration in communities in the Global South and North (Aguilar, Ngema et al., Nooijer). In a nutshell, this special issue brings together individually and collectively generated reflections that speak about our common post COVID19 futures from their situatedness in radical pluralities. Last but not least, the special issue was honoured by the company of Centehuatl from the artist Isabel Tello who kindly donated her design as a visual companion for our stories from/in the Margins.

Storytellers

The special issue is organized around the actions of refusing, learning, eating, caring, healing, and nurturing. In refusing, Sara C. Motta open the special issue with ‘The Epistemological Intimacies of the Urban Frontier: Mangrove Swamps, Possessive (non)Belonging and Kinship (M)Otherwise’. Motta’s text charts rich possibilities of interconnections among caring, refusing, and becoming. By foregrounding a black genealogy of the virus Motta’s transcend the presentism of COVID19 revealing heteropatriarchal coloniality as the virus that produces epistemological and social death. In so doing, Motta unearths relationships of care and love, practices of homecoming and becoming visible, and of actively refusing the violence of White heteropatriarchal (settler)subjectivities.

In Hand in Hand: Refusing Research during a Pandemic, Zuleika Bibi Sheik brings into question the practice of research during COVID-19. The article tackles how research is complicit and has been re-invented during the pandemic, while still under the extracivist logics of the neoliberal university. Using refusal and abolition as generative groundings, the text seeks radical alternatives and offers Hand in Hand, a relational accountability exercise, as one such practice. Sheik positions refusal to go back to ‘normal’ as the first step to practicing research that is anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-colonial, and antiracist.

Continuing with refusal in ‘Andizi’: black women remaking the university in KwaZulu-Natal, Luthando Ngema, Fikile Vilakazi, Ongezwa Mbele, and Nomcebisi Moyikwa reflect on their experiences as black women in academia during the COVID-19 pandemic. Designed as a dialogue amongst the authors, the text explores how the COVID-19 pandemic revealed the distrust the world has for black women and how this is reproduced in the university. Their narratives of the impossibility of existence within the institution are juxtaposed with theoretical Nguni concepts in order to demonstrate everyday resistance as survival.

In learning, the text Consciousness breathing resistance in higher education: not separate but equal, by Charmika Samaradiwakera-Wijesundara’s takes the online classroom during the COVID19 pandemic as a starting point for thinking through inequalities in higher education. The text demonstrates the ways in which apartheid doctrine is reproduced in approaches to online teaching creating exclusions along the lines of race, gender, and class. This argument is extended to a philosophical discussion on the limitations of the Eurocentric unitary-self in higher education. By bringing ‘double consciousness’ and ‘multiple consciousness’ in conversation with Ubuntu and Buddhist philosophies Samaradiwakera-Wijesundara reveals the possibilities for liberation through being-becoming and inter-being.

Around the action of eating, Rosa de Nooijer’s Reflecting on The Dinner of Relations delves into the relationship between farming, food, and eating. In the text Nooijer builds upon prior research with organic and biodynamic farmers in the Netherlands, critically reflecting on how the COVID19 pandemic has led to asking new questions on previously gathered data. Nooijer’s text contributes to agrarian transformation by providing recommendations that move away from monocultures in farming and singular ways of existing, demonstrating how we can start to think through more social and ecological ways of producing food and research about food.

Caring features the text by Fleur Zantvoort, Movement pedagogies in pandemic times: Extinction Rebellion Netherlands and (un)learning from the margins. In the text Zantvoort takes a pedagogical approach to social movements, using the COVID19 pandemic as an entry point to delve into the ‘pedagogy of urgency’ that reproduces hegemonic forms of life under modernity/coloniality. Doing research alongside Extinction Rebellion Netherlands, Zandvoort brings to light the ways in which the movement is bound up in the reproduction of and resistance to dominant ways of knowing and being, whilst showing what possibilities of care can emerge by treating the movement’s margins as a privileged space of epistemic possibility. Zandvoort demonstrates how a reorientation to caring relations, marks a move away from the exclusion and violence inherent in modern/colonial power relations.

Continuing on this thread Sreerekha Sathi writes about care in relation to women health workers during the COVID19 pandemic in India. In How do we pay back? Women health workers and the COVID19 pandemic in India, Sathi takes a feminist perspective on health worker’s rights questioning the ways in which care is gendered in the context of corporate globalization. In reflecting on the everyday struggles of women health workers during the COVID19 pandemic, Sathi provides a reflection on critically rethinking the role of women health and welfare workers in India.

In healing, Julia Suárez-Krabbe uses the COVID19 pandemic as a springboard to critically reflect on the relationship between whiteness, crisis, and healing. The text Relinking as healing. On crisis, whiteness and the existential dimensions of decolonization provides a reflection on the Danish context through two illustrative texts by white Danes, where Suárez-Krabbe argues that a politics of purity and commitment to the status quo prevents a delinking from modernity/coloniality. For Suárez-Krabbe the possibilities for a decolonizing practice of collapsing whiteness that is creolizing and engages in relinking to Mother Earth is the space in which interconnection, sociability, and relationality can be the healing.

Paulina Trejo Méndez continues on the strand of healing in Decolonizing healing: weaving the curandera path, in which healing is seen as the remedy for fragmentation caused by dominant logics. Using a feminist framework, informed by theories on modernity/coloniality Méndez proposes the curandera path as a means to decolonizing healing by engaging with spirituality.

In Decolonial dialogues: COVID19 and migrant women’s remembrance as resistance, Umbreen Salim presents a text-journey documenting the experiences of Pakistani migrant women in the Netherlands during the pandemic. Salim questions the relational and temporal dimensions of their acts of remembrance as resistance, which demonstrate a connection to ancestral ways of knowing, being, and doing. Using a decolonial framework Salim posits that (alternative) spaces are needed for bodies that are relational and sites of memory and temporality.

The special issue closes with the text Tejiendo palabras – weaving words liaising with the Mexican national indigenous council communities by Valiana Aguilar member of the Maya collective Suumil Mookt’an and the Mexican National Indigenous Council. As a closure positioned outside the onto-epistemic territory of modernity coloniality, we learn about nurturing life practices amidst struggles for life and political affirmation under conditions of death, land destitution, and patriarchal violence. Following Ayuuk intellectual Yasnaya Elena Aguilar Gil, we are invited to chart together with the collectives we are a part of, what the possibilities are for a post-COVID19 political horizon that is able to sustain and nurture life.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rosalba Icaza

Rosalba Icaza is a Professor of Global Politics, Feminisms, and Decoloniality whose work has explored questions of knowledge and power, feminism, resistance, and decoloniality in Latin America and beyond.

Zuleika Bibi Sheik

Zuleika Bibi Sheik is a Lecturer in Gender and Postcolonial Studies at Utrecht University. Her areas of focus include decolonizing methodology, gender studies, decolonial feminism, black studies, transformative justice, and abolition studies. As a South African scholar of South Asian descent, her work centres on onto-epistemological re-existence and collective liberation.

Notes

1 A previous version of this section appears in the ‘convivial thinking’ website. See: https://convivialthinking.org/index.php/2020/05/09/worlds-stories-from-the-margins/

2 Translation from Spanish to English by Rosalba Icaza.