Reimagining the Politics of Belonging Through Counterstorytelling: A Decolonial Praxis of Refusal and Desire

Abstract

In this article, I trace landscapes of decolonial inquiry centered on two questions: What is the work of decolonial inquiry? What are the imperatives of researchers committed to decolonial work? I engage with these questions from my relationally rooted place in solidarity with communities at the frontline of decolonial struggles in Northeast India. Adopting a multimodal counterstorytelling approach, I narrate two imperatives of decolonial inquiry: rooting and remembrance and theorizing from struggle, driven by an ethos of desire and refusal. Across these endeavors, I strive to reimagine a radical politics of belonging that transgresses colonially configured nation state borders.

Healing heartburns and radically dreaming the new university into being: Retrospective auto-ethnographic poetries.

“…Our poetries reflect our subjectivities within the colonial structure of university we resist and refuse, and reimagine. In this way, we are striving to build "constellations of coresistance" (Atallah et al, 2022) and radical relationality (Dutta, 2022). Retrospective auto-ethnography aids us in our reflexive process as we write poetries in the present oriented toward a decolonial radical hopeful future.…”

“…We craft our article in the spirit of decolonial feminist imaginings. Writing poetries about and in resistance to coloniality (Dutta, 2022), we imagine a more just, humane, and decolonial New University. In sowing seeds toward the New University, we reflect on our experiences within the neoliberal university that has not rendered us human.…”

“…Communities of care are spaces where students are supported in their spiritual, emotional, and physical well-being, as well as the development of their critical consciousness. The subversion of the neoliberal university is made possible by pedagogies of love that begin with students and educators thinking beyond the Western Eurocentric perspective (Atallah, 2022; Dutta, 2022; Fernández et al, 2020).…”

A generative refusal: body inclusive methods with racialized women in knowledge creation

“…The author illustrates her contribution to personal and social knowledge both for researchers and cocreators through examples from her theatre practice with racialised young women in Arts Catalyst centre in London, as part of her PhD research in the University of Greenwich. Theatre and movement practice in research (Kaptani & Yuval-Davis 2008;Kaptani 2021b) is a practice of Refusal (Tuck & Yang 2014a;Simpson 2017;Dutta 2022;Emejulu & van der Scheer 2022) as activates the co-creators' muscles of desire where their bodies move to change oppressive situations in life, as well as in knowledge production. Co-creators refuse the current reality of oppression by saying no, while they say yes to something else (Tuck & Yang 2014a;McGranahan 2016) practised collectively in Forum Theatre inbodied interventions of their lived experiences (Kaptani & Yuval-Davis 2008).…”

Perspectives on colonial violence “from below”: Decolonial resistance, healing, and justice in/against the neoliberal academy.

“…Coloniality determines who has the right to express the full range of their humanity, while others are relegated to realms of subhuman invisibility. This normalization of violence and suffering unfolds within everyday existence for colonized communities-within the homeplace and the workplace, within relationships and bodies-all becoming sites of everyday trauma and resistance (Atallah, 2022;Dutta, 2022a;Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2016). Within normalizing narratives, knowledges, and discourses, Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) and many Global South peoples are constructed as being inherently violent, while the violence against them fails to be recognized as such (Das, 2001;Said, 1993;Sharma, 2015).…”