Decolonising critique: From prophetic negation to prefigurative affirmation

Abstract

In this chapter, Motta visions a possible answer to the question ‘how do we decolonise the practice of revolutionary critique?’ Emerging from a dialogue between her praxis with women in movement over the last 15 years and the work of black, decolonial and Chicana feminists, she first deconstructs the classic twentieth-century Prophetic figure of critique. She does this through engagement with Zizek’s work demonstrating their reproduction and complicity in the epistemological logics and rationalities of coloniality. She then begins to map some elements of decolonising critique through the figure of the storyteller, for whom critique is existentially grounded in the/our self-liberating and collective practices of healing as emancipation. Here, possibilities for multiple grounds of onto-epistemological becoming are opened as racialised women, who are denied knowing-subjectivity in coloniality, co-construct radical community, critical intimacy and speak in multiple tongues enfleshing and thus reinventing revolutionary praxis.