"The Alchemy of Race and Rights", Patricia J. Williams

In The Alchemy of Race and Rights, Patricia Williams begins with subject position (herself, her body, her thoughts, and spirit), and then weaves a work around civil rights, law, and commerce within fractures of her own life and hystery. For this text, I learned and connected it to so much we have been thinking through in class about epistemology and the academy (post-modernism, post-post-modernism, humanism, Enlightenment, positivism) as methods of research inquiry.
However, for this text, what I found myself reflecting on was how much I was drawn to William's writing style. For example, as she explains her work to her sister, she practices, within her writing, both dialogue and pedagogy. This is critical and mindful of traditional law text / academic text, which is generally "explanation" -- not a critical pedagogy / praxis (bell hooks, "Teaching to Trangress") and also usually has a "fourth wall" which it's audience. As Williams branches on her theoretical framework, her writing embodies what she is talking about. For example, William's writes, "legal language flattens and confines in absolutes the complexity of meaning inherent in any given problem", and then offers anecdotes to complicate even what a "given problem" could mean or how it could be interpreted.
I connected it with why I was initially drawn to "Pedagogies of Crossing", by Jacqui M Alexander as well. It was, in part, politic. But also, an intentionality around the writing form itself, so that the text was both "peer-reviewed work" but also prose-like. Other writers I admire are: Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Angela Davis... 

Sudbury, "Rethinking Anti-violence Strategies, Lesson's from the Black Women's Movement in Britain"

In this piece, the Southall Black sisters challenge our ideas of U.S.-centric racial formation. Because of organizing in Great Britain was primarily around working class struggle + different relationships to the colonizer within Britain, black is defined differently than the U.S. context. Writing this blog post directly after sitting with Mohanty's work helped me 'see' the sorts of coalition building and feminist praxis that Mohanty envisioned. My reaction to this text was more visceral, perhaps because of the detailing of each case, my own personal and familial connections to Southall, Eastham etc. This reading became a reminder for me how racial formation function so differently outside of the U.S. context, so the traditional triangulation of desis within the US translates so differently in the UK. For example, I think of how in the US, the model[ed] minority was constructed post-1965 to triangulate a new immigrant group against marginalized communities within the US (mainly Black and Latino), to the point that in contemporary organizing  many South Asian American students do not consider themselves 'people of color'. Yet, in the UK, there's a different understanding of colonial legacies between Black and Desi communities. Still, from my personal experience, within the desi community within the UK there is so much weaponization against each other (Hindu vs Muslim vs Sikh, the ideas of pitting different nation states against each other).

A question this text left me with was, what is the difference between antiviolence/nonviolence?
I think it's such an important political distinction to think about. It reminded me of Arundhuti Roy's argument, "If you're an adivasi[tribal Indian] living in a forest village and 800 CRP [Central Reserve Police] come and surround your village and start burning it, what are you supposed to do? Are you supposed to go on hunger strike? Can the hungry go on a hunger strike? Non-violence is a piece of theatre. You need an audience. What can you do when you have no audience? People have the right to resist annihilation." (6/5/2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jun/05/arundhati-roy-keep-destabilised-danger)

"'Under Western Eyes' Revisited: Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist Struggles", Mohanty

I really appreciated this work by Chandra Mohanty, in part because she revisited a piece of work in a way that made me think of the ethics of writing. In what I umbrella as q/woc feminist text, text is not "dead" in the sense that is published, and then considered finished or complete. I think of text as an active process, so that text is alive and can be revisited, or can change meaning. Partially, I think this of this evolutionary reading of text comes from woc feminisms because so often woc feminist text emerges from a point of experience, or embodied knowledge. These sorts of embodied epistemologies are always in flux because the body, too, is always a site which is in flux and relational to its environment. For this reason, I see so much of Audre Lorde's poetic as theory, and as text that is "alive", fluid and changing with multiple expressions of meaning or significance. So as Mohanty begins her work speaking from a place of individual and personal experience within a larger academic and public politic, she revisits her text in a way that embodies a feminist praxis and a feminist epistemology about our "work" or "text".

In decolonizing feminist scholarship, she critiqued universalizing methodologies, referencing Mie's study of lacemakers in Narsapur as an example of a multilayered analysis to reveal how a feminist work can be particular and universally significant. Also, as Mohanty reiterates, it's important that Mie's work also had a materialist analysis, which connected it to circuits of capital and different vulnerabilities to life/death circumstances (Ruth Wilson Gilmore).

This connects to my current project because I was struggling with defining an indigenous model of Kashmir as particular to its historical context and material occupation, but also universally significant to various decolonizing projects. I think Mohanty's work gives me a vocabulary and reference point to bring up this point within my research (under "ethical considerations").

Mohanty also explained how the politics of capitalism and globalization have become the more urgent focus point of a feminist struggle. I think this is particularly important when writing on "decolonizing" feminist methodologies. It's important and necessary to question what "decolonizing" means within the academic setting, especially within the privatizing public space of the university -- how it is ironic / but also crucial to teach a decolonial syllabi but also being transparent about how the university is a locust of privatizing capitalist power.