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Thinking De<=>coloniality through Haitian Indigenous Ecologies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 June 2020

Beaudelaine Pierre
Beaudelaine Pierre*
Affiliation:
Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN55455
*
Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

I write this essay from a place of thirst, discontent, dream; from being housed in the United States but not at home there; from thinking through this writing in English, a language that is not home; and from wanting to continue making a place that is not home. I think through this inquiry from a place of cohabitation with Western ways of knowing that have purposefully demonized peoples of African descent as less than human; from the tradition of Haitian thinkers and resurgents who emphasize spirituality as crucial to recreating themselves endlessly; and from imagining the unseen, unfelt, and invisible powers that illuminate the process. In this place of feverishness, I sit with Haitian writer and singer Mimerose Beaubrun's monograph Nan Dòmi in order to consider the possibilities and impossibilities that might be realized through a practice of decolonial labor that bridges the known and the unknown, the seen and the unseen, the metaphysical and the material. Taking inspiration from María Lugones's phenomenological approach of decoloniality and Beaubrun's theory of nan dòmi (dream/ing), this essay asks: what in Beaubrun's Nan Dòmi opens decoloniality as a radical onto-epistemological terrain from which to rethink subjectivities, politics, and worlds in uneven and unjust geographies?

Type
Articles
Information
Hypatia , Volume 35 , Special Issue 3: Toward Decolonial Feminisms: Tracing the Lineages of Decolonial Thinking through Latin American/Latinx Feminist Philosophy , Summer 2020 , pp. 393 - 409
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Hypatia, a Nonprofit Corporation.

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