Womanism

Unification is a key cornerstone of Womanist ideology.

Womanism is a social theory based on the racial and gender-based oppression of black women, and other women of marginalized groups. There are varying interpretations of the term "womanist", and efforts to provide a concise and all encompassing definition have only been marginally successful. At its core, womanism hones in on the everyday issues and experiences of both black women and women of marginalized groups, but more importantly, womanism hopes to create an even-leveled environment for all people.[1]

Theory[edit]

Author and poet Alice Walker is credited with coining the term "womanist". From the original introduction of womanism as a social perspective, the term has evolved to envelop varied, and sometimes opposing definitions. Linda Hogan asserts that the term womanist has come to represent a feminist of color, specifically black women, since the Feminist Movement has been experienced by many as intrinsically racist.[2] While feminismcan be alienating to minorities, womanism allows black women to affirm and celebrate their color and culture in a way that feminism does not.[2] In the words of theorists such as Clenora Hudson-Weems and Alicia Boisnier, Black women struggle to identify with traditional feminism, because they do not identify with the issues that feminism typically advocates.[3] Alternatively, Delores Williams, a womanist theologian, associates womanism with the traditions and activism formed from the conditions, events, meanings and values within the African-American community. Williams further asserts that the task of the Womanist theologian is to embody activism by seeking out the voices of the unheard and the experiences of the neglected. She identifies the distinct difference between the experiences of the black woman and the white woman that makes it difficult to identify with feminism. One of the key components of feminism is to end a woman's subjugation to her male counterpart, yet there are other oppressive forces that black women face that takes precedence over the perceived subjugation of the black woman by the black man.[2] This represents an expectation and experience of the black woman as one filled with the quest for knowledge, competence, and authority that surpasses the individual, but encompasses the group.[4] This idea of community rather than individuality is further illustrated by the portrayal of a woman as the embodiment of her environment.[1] In this way womanism does not focus indiscriminately on the experiences of black woman, but desires the reconciliation of all people to their spirituality, their relationships with each other, and their relationship with nature. It characterizes women as willful and capable thereby contrasting the image of a women as subservient and inferior.[5] In doing so, womanism empowers women, and challenges them to break from the traditional definition of womanhood.

The Curandera of Conquest Gloria Anzaldúa’s Decolonial Remedy

Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 35:1 Spring 2010 © University of California Regents 135

George Hartley

ABSTRACT: In this essay I argue that the primary role that Gloria Anzaldúa creates for herself as a writer and activist is that of the curandera of conquest, the healer of la herida abierta (the open wound) created by the borders imposed by capitalism, nationalism, imperialism, sexism, homophobia, and racism. After examining Anzaldúa’s Prietita and the Ghost Woman as both an illustration (in content) and an example (in enactment) of her practice as a curandera, I provide a brief overview of curanderismo and key developments in the theories of decolonization within global indigenous studies since the turn of the twenty-first century. I read Anzaldúa’s decolonizing work as a companion to this recent decolonization move within indigenous theory and practice.

In a 1991 interview concerning the Quincentennial celebrations, Gloria Anzaldúa defines her project of “spiritual activism” as a decolonizing countermovement to Euro-American glorifications of both conquests, the Spanish and the Anglo (2000, 177–94). She anchors her rejection of colonialism in what she calls the “New Tribalism,” grounded in her attention to the indigenous roots of mestizaje. Noting that the Conquest was enacted through writing (letters between Columbus and Isabella, chronicles written by the clergy, and, we could add, treaties between the U.S. government and hand-chosen tribal “representatives”), she argues for “reclaiming the agency of reinscribing, taking off their inscriptions and reinscribing ourselves” (189) as a step toward healing of the Earth (193). In this example we see Anzaldúa’s self-definition as a curandera of conquest, a healer of la herida abierta, the open wound created by the borders that neocolonialism has imposed—borders policing class, national, gender, sexual, racial, and religious divisions. Anzaldúa’s healing work in defining mestiza consciousness functions as a necessary precondition for liberation from below and as the embodiment of a concrete, historically embedded alternative to the colonizing Eurocentric rationality of modernity.1

Such healing work involves a diagnosis and a remedy. Anzaldúa situates her diagnosis within her chronicling of Anglo terrorism in the Southwest. The social forces of oppression that she identifies produce the illness: internalized colonialism. Having internalized the perspective of the colonizers, one sees oneself through the colonizers’ eyes and in terms of the colonizers’ values and, then, is rajada: sliced right down the middle by the inner conflict resulting from such internalization. This slice or cut—what Anzaldúa (1987, 67) refers to as la rajadura—manifests as the individual incorporation of the herida abierta of the border. The Chicana’s process of recognizing and purging herself of this internalized alien and constantly self-damning perspective and replacing it with a positive, re-indigenized self-orientation is the primary act of decolonizing that Anzaldúa’s writings make possible. In this way she provides the remedy for the root cause of the many symptoms of colonized selfhood.

I clarify my claim that Anzaldúa is the curandera of conquest first by examining her book Prietita and the Ghost Woman (2001). Next, I lay out the key elements of curanderismo. I provide a brief overview of key developments in the theories of decolonization within global indigenous studies since the turn of the twenty-first century, looking specifically at the work of Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith and that of two native North American activist-theoreticians, Waziyatawin Angela Wilson and Taiaiake Alfred. Finally, I show how Anzaldúa’s decolonizing work is already operating in terms similar to this recent decolonization move within indigenous theory and practice. As a gesture toward a kind of pan-tribal solidarity, I want to suggest a cross-reading of Anzaldúa within the terms of indigenous decolonization—and the reverse. Such a move might function as a bridgebetween global movements of indigenous decolonization and Anzaldúa’s militant Chicana critique of Spanish and Anglo colonialisms, which in turn raises important issues for cross-border indigenism and for peoples who have been detribalized through ethnic cleansing of various sorts.2

GEORGE HARTLEY, an associate professor in the Department of English and the Latin American Studies Program at Ohio University, is author of The Abyss of Representation: Marxism and the Postmodern Sublime (2003) and Textual Politics and the Language Poets (1989). He is currently writing a book manuscript titled “The Curandera of Conquest: Gloria Anzaldúa’s Decolonizing Consciousness.” He can be contacted at hartleyg@ohio.edu.