A Review of Decolonial Feminist Research: Haunting, Rememory and Mothers (Futures of Data Analytics in Qualitative Research)

Abstract

How do we begin to connect to those who are no longer living, those who have been historically silenced, and those whose memory becomes a faint existence in our modern, colonial imaginary? Within Decolonial Feminist Research: Haunting, Rememory, and Mothers, Jeong-eun Rhee, a qualitative educational researcher, examines the tension that often accompanies the implementation of decolonial feminist knowledges, methodologies, and epistemologies, especially when these theoretical perspectives challenge the academic canon rooted in modernity and social scientific empirical realities. This review addresses Rhee’s major theoretical conceptualizations such as Rememory, M/others and Haunting throughout the various processes that often connect individuals through death and grieving. Rhee demonstrates that the production of knowledge being constructed through the rememory of those who have since passed, not only provides existence to their stories, but makes their lives, histories, and memories “very much alive and present.” Rhee challenges notions of the living/dead, remembrance/ forgotten, time, national borders, and the fragmented self in an effort to establish new decolonial imaginaries and methodologies for bringing the silenced voices of women of color to the forefront of our modern reality. This book is recommended for any qualitative researchers and decolonial feminist scholars who are interested in challenging colonial matrices of power that often silence voices/stories from being included in western canons of academia, and those who want to examine the very notions of academic scholarship, epistemology, ontology, and methodology in order to secure a place where the rememory of those silenced out of existence can thrive and whose haunting enacts a decolonial resistance to the continued systems of oppression dominating the colonized other.