15 - Incantation: Insurgent Texts as Decolonial Feminist Praxis

Summary

Introduction

INCANTATION: chant, intonation, recitation, song, spell, cantillation, cry, slogan, rallying call, war cry, chorus, mantra, ritualistic, repetitive. Saying love out loud. Saying race out loud. Over and over to evoke the energy and spirit of our textual utterances and release their transformational power into unconditioned space. (Fernando and Banks, 2022)

Writing, art and drama have long served as vehicles for intellectual women of colour worldwide to magnetize their psychical and intellectual resistance and theorize their insurgency and survival of imperial domination (Sandoval, 2000). Drawing from this tradition, Incantation1 is a collective decolonial feminist praxis that creates and curates live, multivoiced performances of seminal feminist of colour texts and original creative responses to them by women of colour.

The praxis model for Incantation emerged through my doctoral research with a group of women from West Africa ‘on their way’ through the asylum/ migration nexus in the Republic of Ireland (Fernando, 2016a , 2016b, 2021). Instrumentalizing arts- based methodologies of the oppressed (Boal, 1979; Sandoval, 2000), my research examined identity, representation and power through interrogating the poetics (practices that signify/ make meaning) and politics (the power dynamics that govern these practices) of participant women's narratives and devised performances of their journeys.

As a diasporic Sri Lankan Australian researcher researching with women crossing multiple geographical, political and cultural Global South– North borders, specific Black/ Third World feminist theory and decolonizing epistemologies and methodologies enacted in the Irish context proved invaluable ground for critical decolonial feminist of colour praxis in the contemporary Australian settler- colonizing context. First, the location as academic/ artist/activitist, which served as a critical counterpoint through which to interrogate identity, power and representation from ‘below’. Evocation of Anzaldúa's (1987) construct of ‘mestiza consciousness’ for positionality opened channels for multiple reading/ listening positions and loci of enunciation. This, in turn, forged the development of multiple critical literacies necessary to read and decipher the colonizing assemblage of visual, affective, political discourses that entrapped women of colour in postcolonial asylum encounters in the West.