Relinking as healing. On crisis, whiteness and the existential dimensions of decolonization

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I present my reading of two paths of existence in texts written by white Danes concerned with crisis. The first obeys the politics of purity and involves an existential commitment to status quo. I call this path whiteness collapsing into itself, inasmuch it remains locked in the confines of the politics of purity, makes impossible both delinking from modernity-coloniality, and relinking, as the process of delving and dwelling in the wider processes of becoming, which I have learnt to know as Mother Earth. The second text attests a decolonizing practice of collapsing whiteness that is creolizing and engages in relinking as healing. I conclude by addressing the importance of deciding to decide to relinking as a radical practice of cultivation of sociality and relationality rooted in specific places which, however, are interconnected precisely because social and relational. Therein, I argue, is the healing.

KEYWORDS:

• Delinking
• relinking as healing
• whiteness
• creolization
• decolonization

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 All translations are mine.

2 Hillerød Bibliotek: https://kunsten.nu/artguide/calendar/mo-maja-moesgaard-og-planterne-kravler-mod-toppen/.

3 E-mail communication, February 25, 2021.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Julia Suárez-Krabbe

Julia Suárez-Krabbe is Associate Professor in Cultural Encounters at the Department of Communication and Arts, Roskilde University, Denmark. Her work centres on racism, human rights, development, knowledge production, education and decolonization in Europe and the Americas. In close collaboration with the refugee movement in Denmark, her latest work includes examinations of state-sanctioned racism in Danish deportation camps. Her work additionally revolves around the ontological, epistemological and existential dimensions of decolonization in Denmark. Julia is the author of ‘Race, Rights and Rebels. Alternatives to Human Rights and Development from the Global South’ (2016).