Abstract
This chapter presents my theory of cosmopolitical solidarity as political stance of encountering those enacting different worlds without assuming the possibility of getting close enough to understand them fully and yet striving to build bridges. I connect the results of the analysis to the work of Chandra Talpede Mohanty, Gloria E. Anzaldúa, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, among others. I argue that in encounters between heterogeneous social movements, exclusive construction of difference can be challenged, but only when pre-conceived categories of difference and identity are suspended and question of power in constituting difference is put center-stage. Bridging the gap to the Other is facilitated when emotions and personal histories are foregrounded, and political identities and a priori claims and categorizations are sidestepped.
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Notes
- 1.
Please refer to the edited volume by Conway et al. (2021a) for insightful case studies on the contours of political solidarity in the practices of social movement cross-border-mobilizations. If you are interested in how racialization and political solidarity intersect, please refer to Juliet Hooker’s (2009) monography. For an account of the history of the idea of solidarity, I refer you to Steinar Stjernø’s book “Solidarity in Europe: The History of an Idea” (Stjernø 2004). Rubén A. Gaztambide-Fernandez (2012) has written on how the concept and practice of solidarity reproduce colonial logics, drafting ways to decolonize solidarity.
- 2.
I translated all quotes from my analysis of the two encounters from Spanish to English.
- 3.
Nepantla is Nahuatl and can be translated as “in-between space” or “zone between changes” (Anzaldúa 2002: 548). The term indicates transitional space/time, liminality, and the potential for transformation. Nepantla also implicates a time/space of confusion and anxiety. It is a reworking of “borderlands,” as Anzaldúa recognized that “people were using ‘Borderlands’ in a more limited sense than I had meant it. So to elaborate on the psychic and emotional borderlands I’m now using ‘nepantla’” (Anzaldúa 2000: 176).
- 4.
Commonly, the concept of settler colonialism is reserved for contexts like the United States or Australia, where the main characteristics of settler colonialism apply directly. These are pertinently summarized by Maile Arvin and her colleagues as “a persistent social and political formation in which newcomers/colonizers/settlers come to a place, claim it as their own, and do whatever it takes to disappear the indigenous peoples that are there. Within settler colonialism, it is exploitation of land that yields supreme value” (Arvin et al. 2013: 12).
- 5.
The collective, based in the city of Iquitos, describes itself as “feminist collective that creates spaces for the personal and artistic development between women.” From what I could find out, it is a joint project of Spanish and Peruvian young feminists that link the Greek female history of resistance embodied by the Amazons with the indigenous anti-colonial resistances in the Amazon region in an effort to provide a decolonial, feminist counter-narrative (see Las Amazonas por Amazonas 2017).
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Leinius, J. (2022). Cosmopolitical Solidarity. In: The Cosmopolitics of Solidarity. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99087-9_6
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