Modernity, Violence, Decoloniality: Towards a Feminist Dialogue across the South

Abstract

This paper stages a critical dialogue from the location of feminism in India with three major scholars  who have played pioneering roles in the development of decolonial feminism.  Oyeronke Oyewumi, a Nigerian anthropologist, has offered a provocative analysis of pre-colonial Oye-Yoruba society to make the claim that Yoruba society had no concept or practice of gender, which was purely a colonial imposition.  Her work has become quite influential, including in the writing of Maria Lugones, an Argentinian philosopher in the US who coined the notion of “the coloniality of gender”, arguing for non-binary forms of gender in the Americas before the conquest in the fifteenth century and after.  The third thinker is the anthropologist Rita Segato in Brazil, who presents evidence of what she calls “low intensity patriarchy” prior to colonial and republican encounters and the consequences of this today.  I seek out possible engagements with these thinkers for feminist concerns in India, leading to a possible reconceptualization of our encounter with British colonialism.