Challenging Violence: Decolonial and Anti-Imperial Feminist Imaginary of “Disrespectable” Feminism

This paper proposes an anti-imperial transnational feminist intervention of the violence engendered by racial neoliberal capitalism and neo-imperialism aligned with the global securitization and militarization. Taking lessons from scholars on pluriverse and multiple worlds (Blaser 2009; 2013; de la Caldena 2010; Fitzgerald 2024; Ling 2014; Mignolo 2021; Rojas 2016) who question the political ontology of modernist Westphalian world that imposes the universality of human/nature, male/female and other essentialist binaries that have normalized scarcity thinking, competition, militarism, surveillance, extractivism, labour and sex exploitation and marginalization of beings that are deemed less than human, the paper proposes an alternative relationality of care, reciprocity and accountability, and map linkages of power.

This paper demonstrates the connections between for example, racisms against Muslims and Asians stemming from colonialism and imperialism that also dispossessed Indigenous peoples and enslaved Blacks Africans. It names the way racialized, colonized diasporic peoples are flattened into “migrants” and outsiders through the historical amnesia underlying nation building and settler colonialism, along with the distortion or the general lack of knowledge about our collective imperial histories that continue to exalt white European subjects and Christian superiority (Thobani 2007) while demarcating racialized diasporics as beings from undemocratic and authoritarian spaces of Communism, Islamic Fundamentalism, Terrorism and Underdevelopment. Such discourses and ahistoricized views have justified and produced racial violence in various parts of the world. The paper explores popular and progressive social movement discourses to identify the activation of relationality and pluriversal care built upon ontological parity of multiple worlds and articulating a discursive and actual solidarity among, by and for diversity of peoples.