My Instagram quote compilation is meant to touch on the multiplicity of my feminist identity. Throughout the course, I’ve had to unlearn my pre-existing understandings of what it meant to be an active participant in the process of re-education of limited mindsets. At the start of the semester, there was only so much that I understood about the concepts of decolonization and post-colonialism. Before this point I had a habit of focusing primarily on the actions of colonizers rather than focusing on how the affected bodies navigate and manage their lives and environments thereafter.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bw_o-ZTHI2L/

The quotes I chose for my project were meant to represent the actions of reclamation of space, bodily autonomy after violation, and the multiplicity of identity. As a queer black woman that has endured the struggles of living with a body that was once not something I wanted to claim as my own, the quotes I chose from Remedios resonated with me and I felt that they spoke the loudest to me. The first quote I chose from Remedios was one of my favorites because it depicted the origins of man as a brown-skinned woman rather than the overused Eurocentric version. The fifth quote from Remedios resonated with me due to past experiences along with the empowerment that can be found as result of telling one’s story.

I interpreted the second quote by Lugones to be how we are conditioned to accept the racial conditions of our environments and that the internalized damage of these actions are not intrinsically our faults.

The third quote I chose because this piece resonated with me deeply as I truly believe that in order to be an effective and efficient feminist, one must be able to understand the experiences of others without imposing themselves upon someone else. The fourth quote I chose from Journeys of the Mind because it also fell in line with my multiple feminist identities, much like the sixth quote by Lugo-Lugo. For me, these two quotes represented the ability to engage in an intersectional mindset use one’s multiple identities to become a proficient social actor. I understood the seventh quote to be a call for a retelling of Native/POC stories and histories to combat the blatant omission of key elements and moments.

The eighth quote I chose was from the Through the Eyes of Rebel Women journal where there was a call for the ending of mutilation of POC, specifically Puerto Rican, female bodies. Far too often I’ve come across cases where women of color are not listened to about pains they endure with their reproductive systems and they end up dying as a result, but then on the flip side of this, women are having their autonomy stolen from them as a method of racialized population control.

The ninth quote also resonated with me as a survivor of assault and as someone that now finds power in sharing my experiences and stories with others who have had to endure similar hardships. My tenth quote was my favorite as a black woman and I felt that it most adequately portrayed the desire for black bodies to be proud of their histories and origins rather than being ashamed of them.

Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color edited by Gloria Anzaldúa (1990):

Waters, Anne. “Journeys of the Mind,” 159-161

Remedíos: Stories of Earth and Iron from the History of Puertorriquenas, 1-26 “Bisabuelas”

Remedíos: Stories of Earth and Iron from the History of Puertorriquenas, 55-102 “Discovery & Huracán”

Morales, Iris. 2016. “From the Frontlines,” in Through the Eyes of Rebel Women: The Young Lords 1969-1976, 181-211.

Pérez, Emma. 2006. “Agency through Decolonial Queer Theory” Conference Paper 1-25.

Lugo-Lugo, Carmen. 2018. “Getting to the Colonial Status through Sexuality: Lessons on Puerto Rico’s Political Predicament from Women Writers,” Centro Journal 30:2, 234-248.

in lieu of what we’ve been discussing about Afro Boricuas, i found this video. hopefully it shares and you all are actually able to see it.

https://www.facebook.com/jose.pagan.351/videos/10205831941794973/UzpfSTEwMDAwNTEzMzYzOTQ3NzoxMjExMzg2NjY5MDQyNDQz/

I painted these five images with the intention of showing my interpretation of how I understood the history of colonization. The combination of all five paintings is intended to show the progression of a world untouched by the outside world into an entirely different entity.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by FPOD Spring 2019 (@fpod_spring_2019)

The world before colonization, as represented by the first two paintings, was self sustaining and able to exist without the corruption of a colonizers perspective on how life should be experienced. The colors I chose to use here were meant to represent the lush green landscapes of a land free from industrialization, one with an expanse of water to represent the natural resources of the self sustained country. Here the colors are more free flowing and there is no rigid expectation of how the colors were meant to come together, and I didn’t do much to manipulate where the colors flowed (a way to not colonize the paint in a way).

The third image is meant to represent the beginning of outside powers and their influx into indigenous lands, reforming and imposing their country’s values and beliefs on the inhabitants. In this painting I chose to use more variations of colors and techniques to blend and combine the paint together with the goal of expressing the concept of the blurring of where a countries original beliefs begin and where the colonizers imposed way of looking at the world comes into play. With this specific painting I used a combination of finger blending the paints and tapping at the canvas to create imperfections in how the colors came together so that no one color had any more presence than the others. 

The fourth painting is meant to convey that there is almost nowhere in this world that can claim to be untouched and untainted by the western worlds ideas and beliefs about concepts like gender, race, what people do and do not deserve, and so on. This painting is was a bit darker to create and more sad to be completely honest. When choosing the colors to put in this piece, I thought that incorporating the darker shade of brown with the overpowering shade of red would convey the imposition of western ideologies on unsuspecting bodies of people. Even in the small section of green and blue there are still small pockets where there is the presence of another color giving way to the fact that even in countries that are seemingly detached from the western world, we as colonizers still impose our own values upon them even without having direct contact. 

The fifth painting is more of a futuristic interpretation of where I believe the world is heading. There are mixtures if different groups (represented by the different colors),  with some still holding onto their original shades, or their country’s personal distinctive qualities, but none of the lands would be anything like how they were prior to outside influence. This image serves the purpose of expressing that in order to get back to a world free from western thoughts, beliefs, and practices, there needs to be a lot of structural work done.

The points of this essay that stuck out to me were mostly in regard to the blatant erasure and commodification of Pacific Islander identities. All too often it is the case that entire bodies of people are lumped together into categories into which they do not fit, or the activisms that they are “meant” to be a part of do not actually serve them in the ways they need them to. Feminisms fall short to fully represent the immense amount of people that fall into different cultural, gender, orientation (and so on) based categories and it leaves far too many groups without a clear representative voice to speak for their wants and needs. The erasure of Pacific Islanders as “Asian” puts them in the position of being a marginalized group within an identity that they never made the choice to claim or take refuge in, which is entirely unfair. Pacific Islanders have their own stories to tell and their own histories unique to their culture and their experiences with the world at large, but as the authors stated, it is often the case that all of the work they produce tends to be in response to works that have been produced by other bodies not of their culture. For a lot of different races and ethnic groups it is often the unfortunate case that individuals must serve as ambassadors for their people and educate the masses on what information is correct, and what has been tainted by the colonial and settler gaze. One other point that I thought was interesting about this piece was the discussion about how hula is not only a dance, but it is a mode of expressing knowledge. This is something I did not know before this point, and I’m glad I can change that perspective.

When thinking of the term colonial, I tend to think of negative terms such as “colonizer” in which case I interpret the word as strictly antagonistic in nature. Colonial to me means a time before logic and reason were applied to the process of decision making when it involved the livelihood of others. The term colonial is often used to refer to the “beginning” years of America when white people introduced themselves to the continent. I feel like people use the term colonial simply to refer to a specific moment in American history, but more often than not I’ve come to notice that some tend to neglect the fact that other countries too have been colonized much in the same way as the Americas. Decolonial to me means the restructuring of thought and understanding of life and ones existence as it has been impacted by a colonized lens. Undoing the damage done to oneself in regard to how one might exist in their space and how they may in turn think about the roles they play whilst inhabiting that space are what I would consider to be in line with the term decolonial. I have only just recently begun to hear the term anticolonial so this term is still foreign to me. However, I would interpret it to be in reference to practices and actions that explicitly go against and seek to counter the institutions that colonialism seeks to impose upon bodies. I feel that one would use the term anticolonial to refer to a mindset followed by a reconfiguration of how one views the world apart from what they have already learned about the world from a colonized perspective. Postcolonial resembles the term postracial, so I would understand this term to be in reference to the point in time where society is able to accept the differences of others and reconfigure society by eliminating pre-existing conventions that influenced everyone upon unfortunate introduction to colonizers.