Decolonial dialogues: COVID-19 and migrant women's remembrance as resistance

Abstract

This contribution presents a text-journey documenting decolonial moments experienced during COVID-19 with other migrant women from Pakistan residing in the Netherlands. It explores women’s negotiations of epistemic disregard experienced during integration, by means of Urdu language proverbs that arose during our conversations. Through remembrance, the presence of relationalities and multiple temporalities [Vazquez (2009). Modernity coloniality and visibility: The politics of time. Sociological Research Online, 14(4), 109–115] are expressed in knowledge practices we have brought from Pakistan. This raises crucial questions: How do relational and temporal dimensions (in)form migrant women’s practices and struggles? In what ways do migrant women defy modern knowledges and follow their ancestral ways of knowing, being, and doing? In addressing these questions, a decolonial approach is used to create (alternative) spaces, for those bodies that are relational and are sites of memory and temporality. Maria Lugones’ [(1987). Playfulness, “world”-travelling, and loving perception. Hypatia, 2(2), 3–19] concept of world traveling and Rolando Vazquez’s [(2009). Modernity coloniality and visibility: The politics of time. Sociological Research Online, 14(4), 109–115; Vazquez, R. (October 2015). Relational temporalities: From modernity to the decolonial. Unpublished manuscript] concepts of plural temporalities and relationality are used as a framework to understand remembrance as resistance to dominant world views.