Mbembe’s Matrix and the Matri-Archive

Achille Mbembe shows how the West’s denigrating projections on Africa as a chaotic void perpetrated a founding epistemic violence. The matrix of Black Reason, Blackness, and The Black worked systematically to justify colonialism and undermine African subjectivity. By maintaining its grip over the psyche, the postcolonial commandement effortlessly and indefinitely sustained subjugation. This is its ‘little secret’. Mbembe suggests that liberation may be possible by appealing to an archive from the ‘underside’ of African history to retrieve a self that is not constituted by toxic colonial projections. Drawing on my work An Intimate Rebuke: Female Genital Power in Ritual and Politics in West Africa, I argue that the traditional appeal by postmenopausal women to their ‘bottom power’ is just such a living matrix – a ‘matri-archive’. Performing this ritual in the context of public protest, the ‘Mothers’ deploy their own ‘little secret’ with the capacity to break the hold of the postcolony’s spell.

A feminist ethos for caring knowledge production in transdisciplinary sustainability science

Transdisciplinary Sustainability Science has emerged as a viable answer to current sustainability crises with the aim to strengthen collaborative knowledge production. To expand its transformative potential, we argue that Transdisciplinary Sustainability Science needs to thoroughly engage with questions of unequal power relations and hierarchical scientific constructs. Drawing on the work of the feminist philosopher María Puig de la Bellacasa, we examine a feminist ethos of care which might provide useful guidance for sustainability researchers who are interested in generating critical-emancipatory knowledge. A feminist ethos of care is constituted by three interrelated modes of knowledge production: (1) thinking-with, (2) dissenting-within and (3) thinking-for. These modes of thinking and knowing enrich knowledge co-production in Transdisciplinary Sustainability Science by (i) embracing relational ontologies, (ii) relating to the ‘other than human’, (iii) cultivating caring academic cultures, (iv) taking care of non-academic research partners, (v) engaging with conflict and difference, (vi) interrogating positionalities and power relations through reflexivity, (vii) building upon marginalised knowledges via feminist standpoints and (viii) countering epistemic violence within and beyond academia. With our paper, we aim to make a specific feminist contribution to the field of Transdisciplinary Sustainability Science and emphasise its potentials to advance this field.

IDEOLOGICAL VIOLENCE TOWARDS THE ETHIOPIAN ORTHODOX TEWAHIDO CHURCH IN THE POST-1960s

The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahido Church (EOTC) is one of the religious institutions in Ethiopia. EOTC has faced some challenges, which have created both physical and epistemic violence on it. This study analyses the two historical events that the EOTC and its believers faced with epistemic and physical violence. It argues that Ethiopian elites and intellectuals used ideologies and new experiences inappropriately to analyse the existed contexts in these two historical events, which in consequence created violence on the EOTC and its believers. Investigating these historical events that made violence on the EOTC is very important as the EOTC and the believers have been facing with violence so far. Through thematic analysis, this study concludes that considering the EOTC as the past feudal regimes’ tool that oppresses some ethnic groups in Ethiopia; and viewing the EOTC as an Amhara’s institution have been continuing. The study integrates how elite’s inappropriate use of ideologies or new experiences for analysing the existed contexts, which caused violence on EOTC and its believers.

On the Mis-Education of Teachers of Color: A Letter to Teacher Educators

Although teacher education researchers have long claimed their commitment to successfully preparing teachers to educate students of Color—a growing majority in U.S. schools—notably absent from their attempts are the voices of teachers of Color. This silence often results in pathological portrayals, positioning teachers of Color as the problem while obscuring the pervasive, problematic, and harmful Whiteness of teaching and teacher education. In this context, inspired by James Baldwin’s letter-essays and centering truthtelling as theoretical framework, eight tenured New York City public school teachers of Color and a teacher educator of Color engaged in collective analysis of a truthtelling exercise focused on what practitioners and institutions of teacher education can and should learn from teachers of Color to develop an antidote to the overwhelming Whiteness of teaching and teacher education, which has been shown to disproportionately disadvantage students of Color. Herein, we offer a composite counter-story—a letter to White teacher educators and, in fact, teacher educators of any racial identification who are in any way aligned with protecting and upholding Whiteness—revisiting our own nuanced memories of becoming and being teachers, unveiling teacher education’s epistemic violence, and issuing a call to action.

When We Feel: Racialized Emotions and Epistemic Violence in German Higher Education

In this article I autoethnographically examine and reflect upon the connection between racialized emotions and epistemic violence in higher education. By having a closer look at one of the seminars I attended and my work in the General Student Committee, I analyse how every racialized emotion is consequential. Drawing on Ahmed’s (2012), Bonilla-Silva’s (2019), Lutz and Abu-Lughod’s (1990) and other’s notions of emotion and power I discuss my experiences and strengthen the understanding of emotion in race-related issues and knowledge-discourse.

The ‘uncorrupted’ Paradise: Religion and imperial epistemic violence on Pitcairn Island

This article analyses chapters from Amasa Delano’s Narrative of Voyages and Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres (1817) and Rosalind Amelia Young’s Mutiny of the Bounty and Story of Pitcairn Island, 1790–1894 (1894) in the context of US American perception of Pitcairn Island’s cultural identity. It envisions both Delano’s account of the island and the Californian Seventh-day Adventists’ missionary work, as described by Young, as examples of epistemic violence. The latter derives from imperial misrepresentations of the islanders as well as an imposition of US American cultural identity upon them. The violence committed against Pitcairn’s community is discussed in connection to Delano’s self-proclaimed approach of non-intervention and his depiction of the islanders as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ‘children of nature’, as well as to the direct involvement of the Adventists who converted the islanders. This article tests whether Delano’s and the Adventists’ approaches are mutually exclusive or whether they represent two different visions of the same imperialist project to constitute Pitcairn Islanders as the colonial ‘Other’.

Subverting the white cis gaze: Towards a pedagogy of discomfort, accountability and care in the anthropology classroom

We write from the starting point of teaching an anthropology course together consisting of predominantly white, middle class cis students. The course collaborated with a local NGO, and the students were given the task to study issues of discrimination and exclusion within youth, leisure activities. This gave us the opportunity to examine, and therefore challenge, what we and our students were taught in terms of ‘the other’, positionality and accountability in anthropological research. We share our journey of creating a norm-critical classroom, which was built on our counter-archive (Haritaworn, Moussa & Ware, 2018) of anti-oppressive, queer, trans, BIPOC1 knowledge. We discuss how we made the students investigate their own positionalities and research interests, through our pedagogy of provoking discomfort by decentering whiteness and cisnormativity. We meditate on what it means to be teachers of anthropology that learn and work from differently marginalized positions within the Academic Industrial Complex (AIC). We honor the treasures we find in anti-oppression knowledge from the margins by joining a collective discussion on how to end epistemic violence within the classroom, the discipline and the broader AIC, while navigating the deeply colonial, cis- and heteronormative fabric of what is considered canon.