6 De/coloniality

This chapter examines key concepts that challenge our understanding of ‘de/coloniality’ and its geopolitical implications across the globe. Utilizing an array of sources including music, spoken word, and case studies, this chapter seeks to expand the reader’s knowledge of what politics means from a decolonial feminist lens within and beyond the Western hemisphere. The chapter focuses on some of the core theories and intellectuals that are necessary to comprehend how decolonization is an ongoing political and epistemological struggle within and beyond the Global North. The piece also analyzes how decolonial struggles have influenced geography, and its implications for the discipline to reckon with its colonial past and ongoing legacy in the exclusion of non-Western epistemologies, academics, and lived experiences. Finally, the chapter focuses on the exclusions within feminist political geography, in particular the role of institutional racism and privilege within the subdiscipline. Ultimately, this chapter argues that decolonization is not an endpoint but a continuous process that seeks to dismantle systems of oppression.