Territory and decolonisation: debates from the Global Souths

ABSTRACT

This extended introduction to a volume on territory and decolonisation from the Global Souths highlights a series of tensions that arose in its production and discusses possible strategies for further developing dialogue on the theme. Specifically, it looks at the centrality of Latin America – as an idea, experience and epistemology – from which debates on the intersection of territory and decolonisation have been framed. The seeming hegemony of certain lines of Latin American critical geography could present a challenge to decolonial imperatives. In response, this introduction is framed around two discussions. First, this article considers a resurgence of interest in Area Studies and relational conjunctural analysis in Anglophone geographies, and suggests the latter may provide a fruitful intersection with decolonising tendencies. Second, it discusses recent feminist debates on body-territory as a travelling idea and practice that has the potential to articulate across different geographical realities. In making these humble contributions to existing debates, the introduction also reflects on the significance of positionality and highlights tensions between the authors as a means of exemplifying strategies of epistemic dialogue that may (or may not) provide ground for decolonial discussions on territory.

KEYWORDS:

• Territory
• decolonisation
• Global Souths
• Latin America
• feminism

Introduction

In the Global Souths – the multiplicity of struggles against-and-within the colonising North – the idea and practice of territory has been held as a crucial component to decolonising projects. The movement towards decolonising territory is most visible in the praxis of Latin American activists and scholars, as a region that has featured centrally in academic debates to date. For example, in recent decades, territory has been held as a core idea and practice in anti-racist, anti-extractivist, feminist and popular urban movements. From these starting points, territory has been reconceptualised beyond its implicit colonial legacies, opening a rich debate at the intersection of territory and decolonial thought and between theory and praxis. Decolonising approaches to territory draw on diverse theoretical standpoints, seeking to dismantle ongoing practices of colonial place making. In this context, the volume seeks to broaden the geographic scope of decolonial dialogues on territory from across the Global Souths.

We understand decolonisation as a movement that breaks down distinctions between thinking and doing, theory and praxis, and involves a commitment to situated territorial struggles. From a Latin American perspective, decolonial frameworks overlap yet are distinct from ideas of territory, although both exceed the region. Within academic debates on decoloniality, the Modernity-Coloniality and Decoloniality (MCD) school is considered the prevailing framework within Latin American critical geography (Carmo Cruz V and de Oliveira 2017; Haesbaert 2020). Latin American ideas on territory exist not just within the discipline of critical geography but also stem from critical economy and sociological debates as well as political ecology and different feminisms (Ulloa 2016), thus exceeding decolonial thought. It is important to state that we are not interpreting Latin American territorial debates as inherently decolonial, particularly when they have not clearly identified as such. This volume contributes to the literature on critical debates on territory by making an explicit link to discussions on decolonisation.

An initial aim of the volume was to move beyond a singular idea of the Global South with the hope of yielding conversations with other parts of the globe to further decentre Western and Global North discussions on decoloniality and territory. Our ambition is to support and facilitate dialogues, particularly with those seemingly on the periphery. Indeed, the genesis of the volume was an initiative of the Global South Colloquium Fund to support and foster the work of early-career researchers from the Global South(s). The volume began as a series of two workshops with the authors and editors, aiming to initiate new conversations on territory and decolonisation across diverse geographies and facilitate strategies of writing and publishing. These workshops were key in pluralising debates on territory and decolonisation between scholars whose research stems from Mexico, Australia, Ecuador, the UK, Brazil, Colombia and Ghana.

An emerging question in the volume is: who is included and what is understood by the Global Souths? We specifically wanted to move the discussions on territory and decolonisations with and beyond Latin America. However, the latter proved to be a challenge. What is apparent is that even those contributions that are geographically situated outside of Latin America refer to Latin American schools of decolonial thought and ideas of territory. How, then, do we make sense of Latin America within dialogues on the decolonisation of territory? Are Latin American theories on decoloniality and territory too central within the Global Souths? Can theory (with)in the Global South ever become hegemonic? What are the implications for decolonial knowledge construction that looks towards decentring the West within the Global Souths? Finally, what strategies can we promote for developing dialogues across different positionalities with regard to movements for decolonising territory?

This extended introduction to the volume provides an opportunity to respond to these questions, drawing both on the insights of the authors published here as well as debates happening beyond these pages. In so doing, we make three contributions to debates on territory and decolonisation. First, we note a recent tendency to privilege certain authors and ideas within literatures on decolonising territory and, in response, consider strategies for opening greater dialogue across the Global Souths, specifically Area Studies and conjunctural analysis. These approaches have (re)gained traction in recent Anglophone debates including human geography from which Halvorsen situates them. Overall, he remains critical of Area Studies (Zaragocin would outright reject it), due to its strong lack of decolonial sensibility, but sees potential in the latter, which emphasises articulation (and translation) across geographical scales and places and may provide a means to decentre the Latin Americanist epistemic dominance that this volume brings to the fore. Crucially, we argue for the need to devise better tools – methodological, epistemological, linguistic – for reaching across barriers.

The second contribution is to consolidate emerging feminist debates on territory and the re-scaling of territorial struggles to the body, core themes across the volume. What might feminist debates on territory entail for a decolonising praxis? Authors in this volume respond in different ways. First, by showing the methodological potential of feminist debates on territory, second, by taking feminist debates on territory from Latin America to other parts of the globe, in particular to the North and, finally, by linking feminist embodied debates on territory to theoretical discussions outside geography such as risk and disaster studies. Here, we argue that feminist approaches to territory are overtly politicised and question the androcentric nature of territorial debates in the Americas. We thus seek to further Finn and Hanson’s (2017) call for a more politicised understanding of Latin American in geographical terms and the processes by which we come to understand it as a region.

Finally, the extended introduction highlights the significance of positionality for understanding territory and decolonisation and experiments with a form of co-authorship (and, moreover, co-editorship) that does not attempt to resolve differences, but instead represents them in a dialogic manner. This text thus represents a conversation between a White European male based in the UK and a Latin American mestiza woman based in Ecuador. Our ambition to move towards a global, relational approach to decolonising territory, that weaves across different epistemic terrains, requires paying explicit attention to our own positionalities. Before we elaborate in more detail on the aforementioned arguments, which in turn introduce and draw on the volume’s contributions, we provide a brief overview of our positionalities that have shaped an influenced this text and the volume as a whole.

Author positionalities, territory and decolonisation

Halvorsen is a white, British, male scholar based at an institution in the Global North. He has spent much of his life in/with Latin America due to a range of personal and professional commitments, and for many years it has been the focus of his research. He has lived in Argentina and Brazil and, visited much of the region. His academic starting point for making sense of Latin American territories was through the lens of Anglophone scholarship. In this sense, it has been necessary to grapple with and unlearn several epistemological assumptions in order to reorient his knowledge to those understandings produced in and from the region. During his academic engagement with Latin America, he has searched for a certain grammar to give sense to his (new) understandings, and it is in this move that he may have fallen into and epistemological trap of reifying knowledge production in the region. This has led to a replication of assumptions and at times a narrowing down of academic horizons. For example, his initial engagement with work and territory pointed towards a romanticisation of the emancipatory potential of this category based on a highly selective reading of cases and places. Breaking down this narrow vision has involved a deep questioning over the appropriate scales through which we come to make sense of and understand concepts and theories (see Halvorsen 2018).

Zaragocin is a mestiza cisgender Latinx and Latinamerican feminist geographer based in Ecuador. She was born in Ecuador and grew up in the United States, and then returned to Ecuador where she has lived all her adult life. Her research has focused on bridging feminist geography theory across the Americas, publishing in both English and Spanish on issues of decolonial feminist geography. She is a part of the Critical Geography Collective of Ecuador and the Reexistencia Cimarrunas Collectives, which are autonomous spaces from which she along with her compañerxs develop research activist praxis on feminist, anti-extractivism and anti-racist geographies. Her own critiques of essentialising Southern theories and the decolonial in relation to the South, disrupt notions of the North-South binary particularly around feminist debates on territory. Her recent work adds to existing literature on the hemispheric as a decolonial imaginary from which connections between Black, Indigenous, Latinx and Latin American debates on territory can co-exist. Her theoretical engagements with the decolonial are based on Latin American decolonial feminisms that directly question the androcentric nature of the MCD framework. Latin American decolonial feminisms position the epistemological and ontological frameworks of women and other gender identities at the forefront of creating other feminist praxis and theories from the geopolitical place of Abya Yala (Espinosa-Miñoso, Correal, and Muñoz 2014) and Améfrica Ladina (Gonzalez 1988).

The decolonising imperative of this volume represents a shared set of values and desires from both authors although situated in different trajectories and from seemingly antagonistic positionalities. In writing this text, several epistemic tensions arose. While our work is anti-capitalist, anti-racist and anti-patriarchal, the relative emphasis given to each category by the authors is not always inline. For Halvorsen, territory appears as a central strategy for diverse sets of social and political movements seeking to both resist injustices and forms of domination, while also providing a means through which to create (or reterritorialise) new institutions, values and encounters (see Halvorsen, Fernandes, and Torres 2019). For Zaragocin territory is directly tied to social struggles in Latin America, but in particular to feminist ideas and struggles. The MCD framework is dominated by an androcentric focus, that makes it difficult reconcile with emerging decolonial, feminist, intersectional and antiracist frameworks on territory in Latin America. For Zaragocin, there are tensions between Marxist and feminist geographical frameworks, also present in this extended introduction. She questions the possibility of decolonisation through a reconceptualisation of Area Studies, and how this can answer the questions posed in this introduction regarding how decolonial understandings of territory from Latin America travel globally.

Decolonising territory beyond Latin America: towards the Global Souths

Situating knowledge in/from the Global Souths is a strategy for decolonising knowledge production by taking seriously the politics of place. From an academic perspective, this is an underdeveloped task which requires significant attention (Chari 2016; Jazeel 2016). There is now a significant volume of scholarly literature that both demonstrates the coloniality of academic knowledge production, including the politics of citation and publishing (Aalbers 2004; Alatas 2003; Grosfoguel 2002; Keim, Celik, and Wohrer 2014; Paasi 2015), as well as the urgent necessity to break down and resist colonial structures that pervade the modern university (Noxolo and Noxolo 2017). Inspired by those approaches that seek to develop and diversify an ecology of knowledges (Santos 2014) that are Southern in their method and politics (Comaroff and Comaroff 2011; Connell 2007), but that take seriously multilingualism (Müller, 2021) as well as translation (Ekers, Kipfer, and Loftus 2020), we argue for a revalorisation of place (i.e. geographical context) with regards to the politics and ethics of knowledge production. By seeking to foster debate across the Global Souths this volume has posed geographical challenges to epistemic dialogues.

Latin American critical geography has taken on a central position for framing dialogues on the intersection of territory and decoloniality within Anglophone debates. This centrality was replicated in the course of developing this volume. Despite our explicit aim of highlighting how other places within the Global Souths are proposing territory and decoloniality, Latin American theories remained dominant. There are two sides to this seeming hegemony – within the region and outside – both of which present a reductive and homogenous understanding of Latin American. We stress at the outset that we do not understand Latin America as a monolithic place and we question its very idea by recognising the politicisation of spatial identities such as Abya Yala or Améfrica Ladina (Gómez Correal 2019). Nevertheless, in the context of recent Anglophone debates, we note a rapid impact and consolidation of decolonial debates around territory (Carmo Cruz V and de Oliveira 2017; Halvorsen 2019; Zaragocin and Caretta 2021).

We also acknowledge the internal coloniality of power that has long structured Latin American epistemological struggles. The territories of the region have been constantly appropriated and re-configured by diverse actors with complex geographies and histories. To speak of Latin America is thus to speak of a postcolonial context that has subsumed but not eradicated Abya Yala and not engaged with Améfrica Ladina. From the Mapuche in the occupied territories of Patagonia to the Nahuatl in Mexico, through its diverse geographies of Maroonage (Zavala Guillen 2022; Berman-Arévalo 2021; Bledsoe 2017), and its highly contested cities, the region is constituted by overlapping and entangled territorialities (Halvorsen 2019; Zaragocin 2021). This has significant implications for knowledge production and what it means to start our debates from the idea of Latin America in territorial terms. There is a real risk that alternative knowledges within the region we call Latin America (produced across multiple languages, ontologies and experiences) and beyond are silenced as they are interpellated from within hegemonic ideas (e.g. “territories of resistance”) rather than articulated through difference. Let us elaborate briefly.

Latin America is torn between anti-imperial resistance and post-colonial landscapes that complicate any unified or inherently emancipatory direction for our epistemological dialogues. The case of academic work on territory is exemplary. It demonstrates a radical set of ontologies and epistemologies that breaks from the limitations of Anglophone hegemonies. Territory is democratised and “reconfigured” (Santos, 1994) by grassroots struggle. The modern state formation is side-lined, or at least contested, in territory produced in and through radically open subjectivities. What is notable is that since around the 1980s territory not only became an important buzzword in academic research in Latin America (Sandoval, Robertsdotter, and Paredes 2016) it also proliferated in grassroots practice, becoming a key slogan in indigenous, afro-descendent, anti-extractivist and urban movements across the region (Svampa, 2017; Zibechi 2012). The latter can be explained as a strategy for engaging with the post-colonial state in a period of democratisation and, constitutional reform as well as deindustrialisation and neo-liberalisation.

Nevertheless, there is a bias within academic accounts of Latin American territories. Highly cited scholars within Marxist critical geography traditions in Latin America tend to reside in the large metropoles and are mostly white men. Linguistically, the debates are dominated by Spanish and Portuguese with very little space for non-hegemonic languages. Moreover, themes and ideas produced by indigenous scholars have been appropriated and taken up by white scholars to whom credit has been given (Rivera Cusicanqui 2010, 2012). Too often, decoloniality is a metaphor that serves to hide underlying colonial practices (Tuck and Yang, 2012). Finally, as we discovered in the course of preparing the volume, there is a greater need (on our own parts) to consider the ways in which discourses of territory and decoloniality may not resonate across the Global Souths. As scholars with strong roots in Latin America, we failed to generate an epistemological and perhaps even ontological translation to other places. Instead, the authors maintained that these dominant categories rooted strongly in Latin American debates.

The ideas and practices of territory and decolonisation only take on meaning when located in their historical and geographical conjuncture. In building a theory that has its origins in Latin America, we thus need to be attentive to the potential “violences” of abstraction and the work that is done in translating, moving and articulating across different space-times. One ethico-political starting point is that of rejecting an attempt to build a monolithic “Southern theory” and Southern space that is complicit in neatly bringing together decoloniality, territory, and Latin America in a way that can serve as a kind of decolonial master-narrative for making sense of struggles elsewhere. We thus note how the rapid growth of “Southern studies” that aim to learn from and reposition their epistemological frameworks from the Global South risk falling into a romanticised and reified view of “the South” as an emancipatory and radically othered space-time. There is an urgent need to avoid a reification of the category of “Latin America” and instead direct attention to the broader set of geographies of the Global Souths through which struggles for decolonising knowledge production and ideas and practice over the production and appropriation of space are mobilised. Two strategies prevalent in recent Anglophone geographical literatures provide initial points of reflection on ways forward.

First, recent years have seen a tentative (re)turn to Area Studies by human geographers, who are grappling with the underlying tensions between a colonial history of Cold War geopolitics and a strategy for decentring Eurocentric knowledge production (Cheskin and Jašina-Schäfer 2022; Klinke 2015; Jazeel 2016; Sidaway et al. 2016). A critical reappraisal of the potentialities of a re-invigorated Area Studies is urgent although, at present, we remained unconvinced, if not highly critical, by its decolonial potentials.

Latin American studies, despite falling into a crisis with the unfolding geopolitics of the Cold War (Miller 2018), remain a strong and vibrant area of scholarship. A core contribution is to take language and translation seriously. It explicitly involves scholars working across different linguistic contexts and translating for a (usually) Anglophone audience. This has the benefit of allowing for a serious engagement with local knowledges, including academic. Hence, the recent embrace of Latin American studies within Anglophone geography has led to a much greater engagement with key regional thinkers, such as Milton Santos (Santos and Baletti 2021; Santos and Davies 2021), with a growing turn towards translations and multilingualism (Ferretti 2022). More specifically, there has been a clear embrace of Latin American thinkers and knowledges within Anglophone debates and reconceptualisations of territory (Clare, Habermehl, and Mason-Deese 2017; Halvorsen 2019; Schwarz and Streule 2016). These knowledges are rooted in area-based epistemologies and ontologies and rely on a delicate process of translation into Anglophone contexts.

Nevertheless we, and particularly Zaragocin, have concerns about Area Studies. One of the main critiques from feminist studies has been the homogenous nature of a regional category that simplifies complex and highly differentiated worldviews and experiences. Latin America as a unified category of analysis has long been rejected when it is seen as a facile additive approach from critical transnational feminist studies that call out submerged US nationalisms (Shohat 2002). The double exclusionary logic connecting both peoples’ gender identity with their geography under Area Studies (Shohat 2002) promotes the very essentialisms necessary for the coloniality of gender to spread at a transnational scale. Critical geography’s critiques of regional studies and in particular Latin America (Correia 2020) are particularly relevant to the debates on territory and decoloniality. As Correia has mentioned, territorial debates from Latin America can help move beyond the binary logic enforced from the North/Latin America spatial imaginary (2020:135). In the following section, we extend this possibility to feminist debates on territory from Abya Yala/Améfrica Ladina.

Area Studies are not static, however, and may provide an opportunity for a more relational analysis of how different regions speak to each other and reproduce knowledges. A call for a relational Area Studies has been most vocally made by scholars of the “Global East” and attempts to weave Eastern European and Russian narratives into discussions elsewhere (Cheskin and Jašina-Schäfer 2022; Stenning 2005). This moves beyond the monolithic assumptions of “Southern theory” and opens a more variegated set of global knowledges. Indeed, our call for reflections on the Global Souths in this issue reflects such an ambition. As such, if Area Studies is to provide a productive way forward, it needs significant reworking alongside the necessary structural changes to Anglophone disciplinary landscapes. Most problematically, the impulse from Area Studies to translate into an Anglophone context raises issues in terms of what is left out when such a move is made, and where things are left untranslatable. Recent calls for worlding Anglophone geography (Müller 2021; McFarlane 2022) demonstrate what is at stake with regard to linguistic privilege and the challenges of translation, posing significant challenges to the politics of doing Area Studies.

Second, a relational Area Studies also move us towards a geographical conjunctural analysis, most clearly developed by heterodox Marxist geographers and Gramscian scholars such as Gillian Hart as well as the late Doreen Massey (see Massey 2011). This approach similarly provides a relational comparative method (see Hart 2018) but tries not to reify any particular scale a priori. It is based on a dialectical reading of the (often contradictory) inter-relations between the particular and the universal and strives to understand the broader whole or totality, from the multiple positionalities of geographically rooted experiences. Articulation and translation and thus two core strategies (Ekers, Kipfer, and Loftus 2020) and involve a careful appreciation of how knowledges are always shaped in and through socio-spatial relations (Halvorsen and Torres 2022).

A geographical, conjunctural approach to territory allows for a potentially decolonising method that moves relationally across multiple scales and intra-local networks, through a politics of translation. Translation, in a Gramscian, conjunctural sense, is much more than mere transmission of an idea between languages; it involves a transformation as it moves into different geographical and historical contexts (Kipfer and Hart 2013). To translate territory across geographical context involves an articulation that conjoins and transforms, ultimately reworking the initial idea. In launching dialogue through this volume, it may have been more productive, for example, to formulate the call for papers during (and after) our workshop with interlocutors rather than preceding. Yet we were still constrained by our initial provocations on territory and decoloniality rooted in our positionalities.

Nevertheless, it is worth stressing that the territory has been successfully articulated as a popular discourse and practice across Latin American since the 1980s. This has relied upon a dialogue between radically different contexts: e.g. rural anti-extractivist movements, peasant land occupations, indigenous and afro-descendent appeals for autonomy and self-determination. Inter-cultural and multi-linguistic fora, such as the World Social Forum, undoubtedly facilitated such a dialogue, or ecology of knowledges (Santos 2014). It is only across the totality of these struggles, put into dialogue and articulation, that territory takes on its broader, decolonial meaning.

Yet what happens when it is articulated beyond “Latin America” and translated into other contexts? The volume brings two contributions from outside Latin America. Ray (2022, this issue) weaves together Latin American decolonial understandings of territory with post-colonial debates over the state and political society in South Asia. Drawing on the extensive fieldwork in Kolkata, the author deploys “spatial adhocness” as a means of successfully articulating between these differently placed debates, yet drawing out a common problematic over the subaltern appropriation of space in urban settings. Such a reworking of categories (urban territory) is an excellent example of articulation. McGiffin’s (2022, this issue) contribution opens dialogue across feminist and embodied literatures on territory in the context of terrorism and Islamophobic racism, as discussed below. By focusing on the embodied experiences of humanitarian worker Sophie Mariam Pétronin, McGiffin adeptly recentres the epistemic starting point for the paper, demonstrating another strategy that avoids some of the pitfalls mentioned above.

Elsewhere, Reyes-Carranza’s (2022, this issue) analysis of epistemic decolonisation in Rio de Janeiro bridges Anglophone literature through a dialogue between black geographies and geografias negras, allowing her to assert the centrality of the “social uses of space” beyond an explicit focus on territory or territorial appropriation. Reyes-Carranza thus elaborates a geographical strategic for epistemic decolonisation that is attentive both to difference and the particularities of place(-making). Finally, other contributions made more explicit interventions in territorial debates, based on a premise of future articulations beyond Latin America. For example, Jasser, Radhuber, and Inturias (2022, this issue) contribution uses the case of forest fires in the Bolivian Chiquitanía to further develop the notion of motley territories for an Anglophone audience, expanding the repetoire of Latin American concepts relating to territory and decolonisation. Ugarte, Melin, and Caniguan (2022, this issue) make a methodological intervention, based on extensive work with Mapuche spatial planning practices, to take forward discussions on participatory action research and “land-based methodologies”. Moreover, they emphasise the crucial ontological dimensions to decolonising territory and provide an explicit approach, or “methodological disruption”, that other scholars (and activists) will likely benefit from.

The relatively low number of articles explicitly engaging dialogue beyond Latin America may itself be a sign of a failure of articulation, an inability to move beyond the discourses, networks and “certainties” of the Latin American conjuncture. Had we been able to reformulate the concerns of other places and times, and sufficiently transformed sedimented and taken-for-granted Latin American epistemologies, then perhaps we would have been more successful. Doing so, however, would involve more than a cursory reading of how territory may intersect with decoloniality across diverse contexts and, perhaps most centrally, an openness (and hence capacity) to multilingual difference (Müller 2021). One strategy would be for a more global sense of territory that opens the category to all languages and space-times (Müller 2021) while locating it within a global conjuncture (Massey and Hall 2010). This may involve not only opening the Global Souths to its plurality but also exploring global easts (Müller, 2020), north(s) and elsewheres (Oswin 2018). Recasting decolonial debates from the territoriality of the body may provide another strategy, to which we now turn.

Travelling feminist debates on territory

A guiding framework for some of the authors in this volume has been feminist debates on territory from Abya Yala that relate bodies, territories and emotions from embodied perspectives and towards decolonial understandings of territory. Satizábal and de Lourdes Melo Zurita (2022, this issue) emphasise the relationality between bodies, territories and the earth that help uncover how the coloniality of gender is present in disaster and risk studies. Through an analysis of feminist brigades during two earthquakes in Mexico (1985 and 2017), these authors present sororidad (sisterhood) as territorial concept. Meanwhile Lopes Heimer (2022, this issue) proposes travelling cuerpo-territorio (body-territory) as a decolonial feminist geographical methodology for migration studies. She questions the link between intimate and state forms of violence by prioritising the body as the first territory-scale of analysis. In doing so, Lopes Heimer demonstrates how colonial, racist and patriarchal territorialisations of gender-based violence experienced through migration can be questioned from travelling praxis and notions of body-territory. Urban and territorial development have also been further questioned by feminist debates on territory in this volume, as exemplified by the conceptual work of two contributions focused on Colombia. As highlighted by Del Carmen Gutierrez Rivera (2022, this issue), women’s grassroots movements in revising the city’s development plan position women’s experience and ideas of the city of Medellin, based on sentipensar (feeling-thinking) strategies of everyday care activities. Meanwhile, Moreno-Quintero, Córdoba, and Acevedo (2022, this issue) focus on mapping methodologies in local planning practices that continue cartographic colonial legacies that are then questioned by Black social cartography and Black social movements.

Bodies producing territories are a common theme in many of the contributions of this volume based on existing Anglophone feminist geography’s intellectual traditions (Smith 2012, 2020; Smith, Swanson, and Gökarıksel 2016; Koopman 2011) and in dialogue with Latin American feminist debates on territory – in particular that of cuerpo-territorio (body-territory) (Chari 2016; Ulloa 2016). The relationship between decoloniality, bodies and territories, however, is not just a Latin American affair. McGiffin (2022, this issue) emphasises the decolonisation of the body of Pétronin with regard to terrorism and territory in Mali and France. McGiffin draws on a decolonial feminist scholarship on feminist geopolitics of bodily territories together with Islamophobic racism and environmental racism. All of the authors who engage with feminist debates on territory in the volume have questioned masculine, Western and colonial understandings of territory where the body and embodiment are traditionally side-lined.

While territory has long been the spatial identity prioritised by Latin American critical geography, the articulation with contemporary feminisms is recent. Androcentrism has been at the heart of Latin American critical geography for a long time and feminist debates on territory are also part of this unfortunate dynamic (Ibarra García, Herrera, and Irma 2016). The recent travelling of Latin American feminist debates on territory, in particular cuerpo-territorio, is startling in the face of Anne-Marie Hanson’s provocative question with regard to Latin American feminisms: “Why are regional feminist ideas not believed in, cited sufficiently, or used as the central framing to critical scholarship?” (2020:2019). Hanson’s question is shared by Latin American feminist geographers within countries that have established critical geography traditions such as Argentina, Mexico and Brazil (Haesbaert 2020).

More sustained engagement by Latin American critical geography and other fields with feminist debates on territory has to do with the importance of contemporary gender debates and praxis in everyday life. Feminist ideas of territory unsurprisingly stem from activism focused on femicide, the decriminalisation of abortion and #NiUna Menos that have travelled within and beyond the region (Hanson 2020). Linking these reflections to the initial guiding questions of our volume on territory, decoloniality and the Global Souths, we can state that feminist debates on territory from Latin America have travelled in particular ways within the Global Souths and beyond. For example, Latin American critical feminist geography has been garnering attention from decolonial, antiracist feminist geography in the North, largely to do with feminist debates on territory such as cuerpo-territory (Zaragocin, 2018). Alongside this, collective feminist geography with a focus on social cartography has pushed forward a decolonial feminist praxis (Hanson 2020).

The link with territory is a pillar of contemporary Latin American feminisms, with insights from economic feminisms, theology feminism, political ecology feminism and feminist geography. Feminist debates on territory have been summarised in the following ways: proposals stemming from a dialogue between decolonial and communitarian feminist frameworks, the gendered effects of extractivism on territory and territorialised gender-based violence concepts; and social cartography and thematic maps on gender-based violence (Zaragocin 2021, 244–245). Latin American authors are proposing distinct terms such as: territorial feminisms (Ulloa 2016), territorial communitaria feminisms of Abya Yala (Cruz, 2017), feminist debates on territory (Colectivo de Geografía Crítica 2018), feminist reading of the plural territories of life (Vela et al 2021) and the relationship between body and territory (Cabnal 2010, 2018, Colectivo Miradas Críticas del territorio desde el feminismo 2017). Furthering decolonial understandings of territory in this context signifies embodiment of land and space.

Decolonising territory is proposed through the relationship between bodies and territory through cuerpo-territorio (body-territory) in the Global Souths. As a Latin American decolonial feminist geographical method (Zaragocin and Caretta 2021) and a concept (Cabnal 2010, 2018) that prompts the ontological unity between bodies and territories (Cabnal 2010, 2018), it is being taken on by scholars and activists in a variety of fields and geographies. Inspired by communitarian feminisms and in particular the work Guatemalan indigenous feminist Lorena Cabnal (2010), Cabnal (2018), there are many proposals that establishing the relationship between body-territory and the sustainability of life from women’s groups and feminists in the Abya Yala (Tait and Moreno 2021)

Though cuerpo-territorio has been primarily used to depict extractivist industry and its consequences on bodies and territories, it is expanding to other topics and disciplines. Armijos and Loiaza (2021) have brought this concept and method to disaster risk studies to further expand on practices of care towards and from their bodies and territories. Berman-Arevalo (2022) connects cuerpo-territorio to the embodiment of Black territories in Colombia, while others have brought it in conjunction with peace and conflict studies as well as gender-based violence and violence against women. Finally, these discussions also extend to other spatial identities such as aquatic spaces with proposals such as water-territory (Panez Pinto 2017), the eco-geo-politics of water (Bolados et al. 2017) and water-body-territory (Zaragocin 2018, Carrillo Rodriguez 2020, Lobos 2021). In this volume two articles focus on cuerpo-territorio and relate it to human mobility, gender-based violence, disaster and risk studies and apply this framework to a Global North and Global Souths context.

This brief literature review, which positions several of the contributions of this volume within a wider set of discussions, demonstrates the potential for feminist, embodied approaches to territory to provide a decolonising method and approach that can travel with less friction than some of the “Latin American” approaches to territory and/or decolonisiation. In other words, we see a feminist approach less constrained to the scale of the region as it starts from the intersecting spatiality of the body. This provides potential for dialogue that is relatively free of the shackles of Area Studies and one that may be able to productively engage with a conjunctural approach that situates embodied practices and ideas within a relational set of geographical scales.

Conclusion

This extended introduction, and the volume it represents, is a contribution to furthering discussions on decolonising territory. We have engaged with difficult questions on the movement of theory, and in particular Latin American ideas of territory and decolonisation frameworks within and beyond the Global Souths. We understand that putting together one volume is not sufficient to come to any decisive conclusions. In line with the introduction’s intellectual humbleness, we have agreed to present the discomfort that arises from travelling Southern theory instead of attempting to situate it in any particular direction. This is especially the case given that we are writing in English and in a Western and Global North journal between a white male scholar in Europe and a mestiza woman scholar in Latin America. The underlying question of how to understand the protagonistic role of Latin American ideas of territory and decolonisation at a global scale remains. We reiterate that we do not see Latin American ideas of territory and decoloniality as one of the same, but understand them in relation to one another. This is evident with regard to feminist ideas of territory in which the embodiment of territory furthers decolonial forms of spatial constructions. Feminist ideas of territory and decoloniality are two different perspectives but in relation to each other strengthen overarching ideas on decolonising territory. For Latin American feminist ideas on territory such as cuerpo-territorio to take a more central role in knowledge production these need to be understood within the confines imposed by Androcentric Western epistemologies. No amount of centring of feminist ideas on territory from Latin American contexts will be enough to undo the historical dominance of the Western, white, male gaze within the Global Souths and beyond.

Tensions explicit in this volume – but also in other academic venues on how theory travels between the Global North, Souths, East(s) and other regions – are an important area for future research in decolonial studies. Critiques of area and regional studies are critical for understanding the potential of Latin American debates on territory (Correia 2020), and in particular feminist ideas on territory. Positioning decolonial theory produced by the Souths in the North and vice-versa needs to be nuanced, taking into account positionality, reflexivity and embodied theory across space and in a relational manner. All of the authors in this volume have taken on this task either by writing in a language that is not their first language or by taking theoretical frameworks found in one part of the world to another. The experiences shared in the two workshops preceding this issue highlighted connecting ideas on territory and decolonisation that are now evident in their contributions.

This introduction also represents the possibilities and tensions when writing collaboratively from two distinct and at times opposing perspectives on Latin America geography and territorial debates. There are important differences that become apparent when writing within and outside Latin America on decoloniality and territory. It is not surprising that the dominant perspective on Latin America from outside is connected to the Brazilian school of critical geography that has little presence within feminist territorial debates from Abya Yala/Améfrica Ladina. Nevertheless, we have chosen to write this introduction together to showcase that even if these perspectives are not in conversation with one another they co-exist and have become apparent in the contributions made by the authors of this volume.

In closing we re-iterate, in the spirit of asking rather than answering, the possibilities for a relational conjunctural analysis together with travelling feminist debates to foster critical discussions on territory that emerge from “Latin American” dialogues around decoloniality. Our intention has been to take seriously the challenges and opportunities that the decolonial “moment” presents us, while not shying away from a series of ongoing tensions and difficult conversations between the authors, their positionalities and related set of disciplinary debates. At heart, we agree on the need for a greater geographical sensibility to how we come to ask questions about decoloniality and territory and a humbleness in the paths we take to respond to them.

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the Global South Colloquium Fund for supporting the workshop and subsequent collection and to Madeleine Hatfield for her editorial support. Thank you also to all the authors for their participation.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sam Halvorsen

Sam Halvorsen is Senior Lecturer in the School of Geography at Queen Mary University of London, London E1 4NS, UK. E-mail: [email protected]. His research examines the role of territory in grassroots urban politics and, more broadly, explores political participation and democracy in Latin America cities. He has published widely in journals such as Progress in Human Geography, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographies and the Annals of the American Association of Geographers. He is founder and chair of the Latin American Geographies Working Group of the Royal Geographical Society. He is currently editorial board member of Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers and sits on the international editorial boards of: Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography; Journal of Latin American Geography; and Third World Thematics: A TWQ Journal.

Sofia Zaragocin

Sofia Zaragocin is a decolonial feminist geographer based at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador. Her research focuses on developing Latin American decolonial feminist geography thought and praxis as well as connecting Latinx and Latin American geographies across the Americas. She is also part of the Critical Geography Collective of Ecuador and Reexistencias Cimarrunas, which are autonomous spaces for alternative geographical knowledge production and praxis, and is co-director of the institute of advanced studies on inequalities at USFQ.