Decolonizing Spaces/Espaces Decolonisants

Decolonizing Spaces is a special issue of Resources for Feminist Research that confronts the longstanding utopian feminist project of seeking possibilities for breaking down barriers and dominant power structures. We conceptualized this issue through the framework of in hopes of addressing not only our historical context, but also the divide and conquer logic of colonization. In a Canadian context, working for social and structural change must begin from an acknowledgment that we are part of a colonial culture that is significantly embedded in the social, political and economic structures of everyday life. Without the work of historicizing or unmapping the land (Razack, 2002, p. 128) by naming this national space as colonial, past and present, we cannot attempt to understand and develop practices to resist the multiple forms of everyday exclusions and domination that surround us. The title, Decolonizing Spaces, can thus be understood simply as an attempt to draw attention to the history of violent conquest and displacement of First Nations people in this geographical space, an effort that is deceptively simple given the constant efforts by first Anglo-British colonial agents, and then Anglo-Canadian government officials to claim what Glenn Deer calls originary entitlement to the nation and its land (p. 32, in Teelucksingh). To symbolically decolonize these therefore often requires a number of strategies, including decolonizing knowledge by confronting the processes that recuperate and reestablish technologies of colonial power and knowledge. We began by thinking about this issue in relation to the western imposition of binaries and the artifice of discrete categories, particularly those with an obvious spatial dimension: the segregation of private from public, the pitting of citizen against foreigner, the bifurcations of local and international. Domination is premised on such absolute divisions often proclaimed as biological or cultural or both. Domination has also required the ongoing maintenance of borders--both real and imaginary. We wondered how these divisions were being addressed in the material and imagined spaces of oppositional politics. For instance, how do demands for social housing, struggles for status and citizenship, kiss-ins as responses to queer bashing, and First Nations blockades offer us not only examples of actual processes of decolonizing spaces, but the figurative terrain on which to challenge our own conceptual boundaries? Among our desires for this issue. then, was to consider such obvious questions as what kinds of spaces constitute decolonized spaces? The use of space and spatial theory in this issue is not contained within one school of thought, in keeping with the complexity of how spaces are constituted. As mentioned above, are both material and symbolic and their deconstruction can thus yield a cross-section of the workings of multiple discourses. For instance, work by human geographers, including Henri Lefebvre (1991), Edward Soja (1989, 1996), and David Harvey (1990, 1996) has encouraged theorists and researchers in numerous other disciplines to understand spatial dynamics as having a reciprocal relationship with subjectivity. Agreeing with this, Doreen Massey (1994), Linda Peake (1993), Liz Bondi (1998), Kathleen Kirby (1996), Gordon Brent Ingrain (1997) and others argue for analyses that push this approach to include gender and sexuality in examinations of spatial dynamics and social relations. Anti-racist and anti-colonial thinking has also inflected and been shaped by theorists like Kay Anderson (1991), Jane M. Jacobs (1996) and Radhika Mohanram (1999), who demonstrate not only the relationship between racialization and spatial regulation, but that segregation, gentrification and surveillance are ongoing practices of colonial projects that are profoundly territorial. …

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