ANTI-COLONIAL BOOK CLUBS

CREATING A DIFFERENT KIND OF LANGUAGE FOR A NEW CONSCIOUSNESS

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18432/ari29548

Keywords:

anti-colonial, book club, white settler colonial discourse, Indigenous women, racialized women, new consciousness

Abstract

What possibilities does reading anti-colonial and counternarrative fiction have? By “plugging in” Coloma’s constitutive subjectivities, Anzaldúa’s new consciousness, and Sumara’s embodied action, I share the possibilities with the explanation of an anti-colonial book club. Part of a larger research project conducted with a feminist Deleuzian methodology, this paper focuses on one of the “hot spots” that arose during the reading processes of two participants in the book club. Through their self-reflection during their reading processes, the counternarrative and anti-colonial fiction gave the women a different kind of language which allowed them to build a stronger trust in themselves, their subject positions, and their experiences of marginalization outside of a white settler colonial discursive lens. This building of trust by creating a different kind of language to explain their subject positions and experiences of marginalization created a new consciousness that allowed them to continue subverting simplified white settler colonial understandings of who they are.

Author Biography

Shawna Carroll, Okayama University

Shawna Carroll is a queer, white woman and Senior Assistant Professor at Okayama University in the Graduate School of Education. Shawna’s research focuses on anti-oppressive and anti-colonial English teaching and research methods. Most recently, Shawna is the co-author of How Discomfort Reproduces Settler Structures: Moving Beyond Fear and Becoming Imperfect Accomplices (2020).

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Published

2021-04-22

How to Cite

Carroll, S. (2021). ANTI-COLONIAL BOOK CLUBS: CREATING A DIFFERENT KIND OF LANGUAGE FOR A NEW CONSCIOUSNESS. Art/Research/International:/A/Transdisciplinary/Journal, 6(1), 11–31. https://doi.org/10.18432/ari29548