The article draws on critiques in political theory and morality to argue that womanism, a worldview rooted in Black women's lives and history, provides an alternative conceptual framework to prevailing Eurocentric thinking, for promoting socially just institutions of higher education. Presupposing a positioned, encultured, and embodied account of identity, womanism’s social change perspective holds transformative promise. It foregrounds Black women’s penchant for reaching solutions that promote communal balance, affirm one’s humanity and attend to the spiritual dimension (Phillips, 2006 Phillips, L. (...) (Ed.). (2006). The womanist reader. Routledge.[Crossref], [Google Scholar]). Directed first towards scholars of color, fostering inclusivity, communalist values and acknowledged intersectionality offers an ethic of the embodied self. As a corollary, it argues for a universal that recommends at least two guiding principles for a pedagogical philosophy. It is, first oriented towards a love of self and second towards placing all disciplines within a cultural-historical context. In the first claim, there is potential for nothing less than suspending the symbolic and ontological violence to one’s sense of belonging in academia. In the second claim, such an understanding can position scholars of color to actively re-narrate their fields. As illustrations, we focus on three academic fields of education, theology in higher education, and criminal justice. (shrink)

Constellations, Volume 29, Issue 2, Page 176-183, June 2022.

The civil society opposition to economic globalization, at times referred to as the ‘anti-globalization movement’, is often seen as unleashing new democratic energies. Some suggest that part of what we are witnessing is some form of deterritorialization of the democratic experience. What is often missing from this claim, however, is a more thorough evaluation of the images of democracy drawn by the movement itself. The first section of this paper will draw from various readings of the democratic experience in view (...) of providing a conceptual framework capable of problematizing the equivalence between democracy and territoriality. On the basis of this understanding of democracy, a second section will offer a reading of the document Alternatives for the Americas prepared by the Hemispheric Social Alliance, a large coalition of civil society groups located throughout the Americas that has organized opposition to the Free Trade Area of the Americas. This document offers a unique opportunity to assess the anti-globalization movement's vision of democracy. The paper's reading of the document reveals a tension between territorial and non-territorial forms of envisioning democracy. (shrink)

The civil society opposition to economic globalization, at times referred to as the ‘anti-globalization movement’, is often seen as unleashing new democratic energies. Some suggest that part of what we are witnessing is some form of deterritorialization of the democratic experience. What is often missing from this claim, however, is a more thorough evaluation of the images of democracy drawn by the movement itself. The first section of this paper will draw from various readings of the democratic experience in view (...) of providing a conceptual framework capable of problematizing the equivalence between democracy and territoriality. On the basis of this understanding of democracy, a second section will offer a reading of the document Alternatives for the Americas prepared by the Hemispheric Social Alliance, a large coalition of civil society groups located throughout the Americas that has organized opposition to the Free Trade Area of the Americas. This document offers a unique opportunity to assess the anti-globalization movement's vision of democracy. The paper's reading of the document reveals a tension between territorial and non-territorial forms of envisioning democracy. (shrink)

This article explores the relationship between theory and praxis by contrasting three different models of intellectual endeavor: totalizing, particular and decolonial. Attending to the critique that Gayatri Spivak raised against Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze in Can the Subaltern Speak?, this article advocates a dramaturgical reading of texts as a model for political theory to address subaltern agency. It reads such agency in the smile that Pier Paolo Pasolini registers in his 1967 film version of Sophocles’ play, Oedipus Tyrannos. Dramaturgically (...) read, Oedipus reveals another text, the tragic history of a yet insufficiently explored democratic alternative that goes against the established democracy and its complicity with inequality in the continued naturalization of slavery despite its foundation in equality. This subtext demands understanding Oedipus as a political production from the speechless agency of dissident servants, a more subversive aspect of democratic politics. (shrink)

This paper seeks to destabilize the silent privilege given to the secured juridical-political position of the citizen as the stable site of enunciation of the problem/solution framework under which the stranger (foreigner, immigrant, refugee) is theoretically located. By means of textual, intertextual, and extratextual readings of Antigone, the paper argues that it is politically and literarily possible to (re)invent her for strangers in the twenty-first century, that is, for those symbolically produced as not-legally locatable and who resignify their ambivalent ontological (...) status between life and death as an alternative sociopolitical location of speech and action in equality with “others.”. (shrink)