Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-m9kch Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-17T17:52:48.127Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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: dorel002@umn.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Alaimo, Stacy. 2010. The naked word: The trans-corporeal ethics of the protesting body. Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 20 (1): 15–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Barad, Karen. 2014. Diffracting diffraction: Cutting together-apart. Parallax 20 (3): 168–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bastien, Remy. 1961. Haitian rural family organization. Social and Economic Studies 10 (4): 478–510.Google Scholar
Beaubrun, Mimerose Pierre. 2010. Nan do`mi, le re´cit d'une initiation vodou. La Roque d'Anthe´ron: Vents d'ailleurs. I work with the translated version for this article: Beaubrun, Mimerose Pierre. 2013. Nan do`mi, an initiate's journey into Haitian vodou. San Francisco: City Lights Books.Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam. 2004. US-Haiti, https://chomsky.info/20040309/Google Scholar
Conde, Maryse. 2011 une voix singulière. With Vergès, Françoise, and Jérôme Sesquin.Google Scholar
Coole, Diana. 2005. Rethinking agency: A phenomenological approach to embodiment and agentic capacities. Political Studies 53 (1): 124–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Félix. 1980. Mille Plateaux : Capitalisme Et Schizophre´nie. Tome 2. Collection “Critique”. Paris: E´ditions de Minuit. Direct references from: Deleuze, Gilles, Félix Guattari, and Brian Massumi. 2011. A Thousand Plateaus : Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Repr. London: Continuum.Google Scholar
De´sir, Charlene. 2011. Diasporic Lakou: A Haitian academic explores her path to Haiti pre- and post-earthquake. Harvard Educational Review 81 (2): 278–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
DesRoches, Reginald, Comerio, Mary, Eberhard, Marc, Mooney, Walter, and Rix, Glenn J.. 2011. Overview of the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Earthquake Spectra 27 (S1): S1–S21. https://doi.org/10.1193/1.3630129.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Edmond, Yanique M., Randolph, Suzanne M., Richard, Guylaine L.. 2007. The Lakou system: A cultural, ecological analysis of mothering in rural Haiti. Journal of Pan African Studies 2 (1): 19–32.Google Scholar
Etienne, Sauveur Pierre. 1997. Hai¨ti: l'invasion des ONG. Port-au-Prince, Hai¨ti: Editions du CIDIHCA.Google Scholar
Farmer, Paul. 2004. An anthropology of structural violence. Current Anthropology 45 (3): 305–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Farmer, Paul. 2006. The uses of Haiti. Monroe, Me: Common Courage Press.Google Scholar
Glissant, Édouard. 2002. Le Discours Antillais. Collection Folio Essais, 313. Paris: Gallimard.Google Scholar
Groupe URD. 2012. Alice Corbet, Anthropologue, Rapport de recherche, Approche communautaire en Haïti : décryptage de la notion de « communautés » et recommandations, Nov 2012: https://www.humanitarianresponse.info/sites/www.humanitarianresponse.info/files/documents/files/Groupe%20URD_Etude%20Approche%20communautaire_Version%20finale.pdfGoogle Scholar
Haraway, Donna. 1988. Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies 14 (3): 575–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harney, Stefano, and Moten, Fred. 2013. The undercommons: Fugitive planning and black study. New York: Autonomomedia.Google Scholar
Hiepko, Andrea S. 2011. Europe and the Antilles: An Interview with Édouard Glissant. In The creolization of theory, ed. Lionnet, Françoise and Shih, Shu-Mei. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Lugones, María. 2003. Pilgrimages/peregrinajes: Theorizing coalition against multiple oppressions. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield.Google Scholar
Lugones, María. 2010. Toward a decolonial feminism. Hypatia 25 (4):742–5910.1111/j.1527-2001.2010.01137.xCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lugones, María. n.d. Indigenous movements and decolonial feminism. Unpublished paper. https://wgss.osu.edu/sites/wgss.osu.edu/files/LugonesSeminarReadings.pdf.Google Scholar
McKittrick, Katherine. 2006. Demonic grounds: Black women and the cartographies of struggle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
McKittrick, Katherine. 2013. Plantation futures. Small Axe 17 (3): 1–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Merilus, Jean-Yves. 2015. Rural development: The economic potentials of Haiti's “Lakou” system. Focus on Geography 58 (1): 36–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2015. Phenomenology of perception. Trans. Smith, Colin. London Routledge. Original publication: Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 1945. Phénoménologie De La Perception, Gallimard,Google Scholar
Michel, Claudine, and Bellegarde-Smith, Patrick. 2006. Vodou in Haitian life and culture: Invisible powers. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mignolo, Walter D. 2011. Epistemic disobedience and the decolonial option: A manifesto. Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1 (2): 44–66.Google Scholar
Million, Dian 2009. Felt theory. American Quarterly 60 (2): 267–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nagar, Richa. 2017. Hungry translations: The world through radical vulnerability, Antipode: The 2017 Antipode RGS-IBG LectureCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nesbitt, Nick. 2005. The Idea of 1804. Yale French Studies 107: 6–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Quijano, Anibal. 1991. Colonialidad y modernidad/racionalidad Perú indígena 29; Mignolo referenced the English translation from Aníbal Quijano, 2007 “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality,” Cultural Studies 21.2Google Scholar
Roberts, Neil. 2015. Freedom as marronage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. 2017. As we have always done: Indigenous freedom through radical resistance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Spillers, Hortense J. 1987. Mama's baby, papa's maybe: An American grammar book. Diacritics 17 (2): 64–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Trinh, T. Minh-Ha. 1989. Woman, native, other. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar