HUMA Book Launch

Author: Nadira Omarjee (Virje Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands)

Introduction: Firstly, this book shows how the personal and political intersect using African radical communitarianism (Ramose 1999) such as uhuru and ubuntu, reflecting on the everyday praxis of decolonising scholarship, linking the classroom to the community, highlighting the necessity of pushing back against the colonial gaze. The personal and the political strands are intertwined in the intimacies of coloniality, highlighting how Black womxn are made fungible through the coloniality of gender (Lugones 2007, 2016) in a world still determined by the white European man as the standard. Much of my personal journey has been about uhuru with decolonising the self; confronting disavowals through a psychic death, and resisting the system that is founded on the narcissism of coloniality. Fanon (1961, 1967) shows us how unhappiness is a colonial condition that is reified by the system. Challenging the system is about confronting the narcissism of coloniality whether it is in the intimacies of coloniality or the violence of citizenship that upholds the system.  Secondly, the book bridges art, activism and scholarship through engaged scholarship, focusing on how decolonial feminism addresses epistemicides by rethinking ontological and epistemological erasures. It explores healing as a pedagogical praxis, acknowledging the violence of coloniality and the ways in which it operates to produce the coloniality of being. And, lastly, it explores academic writing through poetry and prose including artistic expression of paintings, sculpture and film that contribute towards decolonising the curriculum

See the book: We belong to the Earth: towards a decolonial feminist pedagogy rooted in uhuru and ubuntu (Langaa, 2023)

About the author: Nadira Omarjee is a  decolonial feminist scholar, working internationally. Previously, she was a Senior Researcher at the Nordic Africa Institute on the Africa Scholar Programme at Uppsala University, Sweden. She is currently a Research Associate with the Identity, Diversity and Inclusion (IDI) Research Group in the Sociology Department at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Her previous book dealt with questions on decolonising academia by following the decolonial student movements in Cape Town and Amsterdam: Reimagining the Dream: Decolonising Academia by Putting the Last First (2018). This book is known for the methodological approach of “… thinking beyond one’s own lived experiences, challenging our own perceptions, with the aim of achieving critical pedagogy and sharing the lived experiences of others in any space that we occupy as academics.” Her current research interest focuses on decolonial feminist pedagogies with her latest book: We belong to the Earth: towards a decolonial feminist inquiry rooted in uhuru and ubuntu. This book deals specifically with the ways in which conscientisation can lead towards justice and healing. It attempts to connect the classroom to the community by inserting lived experiences against epistemicides: the personal is political. She experimented with flipping the classroom using Freirian (1970) concepts of learning through sharing; connecting ontology with epistemology by bridging art, activism and scholarship. 

Colonialism has dehumanised the coloniser and the colonised in what Fanon (1968, pp. 169 – 170) refers to as an existential ‘unhappiness’ that ‘manages’ to keep the system (racial capitalism, heteropatriarchy, ableism) in place. In order to shift beyond this to achieve a decolonial feminist programme, we need new imaginaries with new ways of being. This means undoing the coloniality of being through the emotional labour of repetitive self-reflexivity of unlearning and relearning. Furthermore, learning new ways of being through decentralising Eurocentric ways of knowing is crucial for the decolonial feminist programme. As a facilitator, she employs a decolonial feminist ethics of care in my work, knowing that we are all produced through coloniality and that the project of decolonising the self is ongoing.

More about the HUMA Book Lunch Series

Lunch will be served at 12:30 SAST (GMT+2).

Register to attend: send us an email at huma@uct.ac.za

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