A Feminist Urban Theory for Our Time. Группа авторов

of possibilities for decolonization within the academy through privileging the ‘singularity of indigenous, southern and subaltern narratives’ (Jazeel 2019, p. 11) is contingent on meaningful attempts to pluralize and heterogenize the bodies and voices that constitute the epistemic communities of the academy. As Tuck and Yang (2012) have reminded us, ‘Decolonization is not a metaphor.’ Rather, it is a radical and transformative political practice that belongs outside the confines of the academy. In this context, the decolonization of knowledge frameworks within and beyond the academy serves as an aid to political efforts to end colonial domination, from the dismantling of racist epistemological frameworks that underpin Eurocentric power, to Indigenous campaigns for the radical restructuring of relationships to land, resources, and the environment (Esson et al. 2017). As Indigenous scholars have long argued, the impulse to render legible and explicable, which is inherent in intellectual cultures of subsumption, may militate against the ontological possibilities proliferating from attempts to reach for a decolonial horizon (Hunt 2014; see also Santos Ocasio and Mullings, Chapter 2 and Fedoruk, Chapter 3). May we go so far as to ask whether an analysis of the creative and insurrectionary energies of decolonial praxis requires that we question and disinvest from the framework of social reproduction?

      In the ongoing quest for locating ‘new geographies of theory’ in urban studies (Roy 2009), for example, Jazeel’s recent call for a focus on ‘singularity’ as a way to open up to difference in knowledge production provides a useful epistemological intervention that begins by rendering visible disciplinary cultures of subsumption, which serve to reduce ‘examples and cases to exchangeable instances, or conceptual givens, for the benefit of a disciplinary theory culture located in the EuroAmerican heartland’ (2019, p. 11). If we were to privilege singularity, we may have to contemplate that decolonization as praxis may fall outside of any one overarching explanatory framework, including that of social reproduction, and may indeed exceed our known epistemological grids of representation (Jazeel 2019). For example, Santos Ocasio and Mullings’ chapter on the role of expressive musical practices in enabling the reconstruction of relational community infrastructures in the event of natural disaster, and in asserting critiques of ongoing imperial and colonial dispossession, offers a compelling example of urban praxes that manifest ‘affective and grounded alternatives to economies of dispossession’ (Byrd et al. 2018, pp. 11–12). Santos Ocasio and Mullings conclude their analysis by casting doubt on the transformative potential of the expressive arts to effect material change in the world. It might be worth asking could we gain more in dwelling in the space of the unspeakable evoked by the Haitian song leader they cite in their article, who says: ‘If you don’t have this reaction instilled in you, you cannot understand it; it’s inexplicable!’

Following ‘fragments’, translation and untranslatability, and poetics, are amongst the tactics put forward by Jazeel (2019) for working towards singularity. In Chapter 3, Emily Fedoruk traces the poetics of urban space through fragments of text and in so doing reflects on the role of illegibility in rejecting settler colonial regimes of recognition of Indigenous people in Canada. Juxtaposing it with another poem that also appears on the same building (by architect Graham McGarva), which adopts a colonial voice, she articulates some of the complexities of authorship. Ruminating on the space between translation and untranslatability, the written and unwritten, Fedoruk examines the potential of a fragmented poem in a public space to reclaim the survival of Indigenous people against the genocidal processes of colonial place-making. Fragments are also present in Chapter 8, with Natasha Aruri’s call to reclaim the ‘antispaces’ resulting from colonial logics of spatial dissection in Ramallah, and to re-imagine the possibilities of these forgotten spaces for grounding a politics of communal regeneration and, ultimately, decolonization in a context of ongoing military occupation. Such readings of fragments and untranslatable utterances map ‘decolonial geographies as constellations in formation’ (Daigle and Ramirez 2019, pp. 79–80), which evince tactics of refusing and resisting racialized economies of containment, displacement, and interconnected violences against lands, spaces, and bodies.

       Methodologies

      Positionality and reflexivity have been key methodological strategies in feminist scholarship since the mid-1980s, foregrounding the unequal power geometries of knowledge production (Harding 1986; Haraway 1988; Mohanty 1988; England 1994; Kobayashi 1994; Nagar and Ali 2003; Peake 2016). In keeping with this long-standing feminist practice of recognizing that all knowledge is situated in particular places, we asked contributors to this volume to reflexively locate themselves in relation to their work by explicitly addressing their positionality. There was considerable variability to the ways in which authors responded to this invitation, reflecting the multiple geographies they were situated in, and multiple vectors of power that are mapped by the transnational research networks evoked in this volume. The contributors have highlighted that positionality is not a straightforward matter; scholars may occupy complex and multi-layered positions drawn from personal biographies of mobility, migration, or displacement, which cast them simultaneously as settler colonial subjects, as diasporic and transnational subjects, and as both ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’, with experiential or empathetic connections with their research sites and subjects (Santos Ocasio and Mullings, Chapter 2; Miraftab, Chapter 6; and Aruri, Chapter 8). However, as Indigenous and feminist scholars have argued, reflexivity is about political accountability to the people and places one is working with (Nagar 2002). Esson et al. (2017), for example, claim genuine decolonization requires the cultivation of critical consciousness to work in concert with activism. Several authors in this collection have situated their work in the context of participation in, and ongoing relationships with, activist communities and have illustrated how research processes are also constitutive of researchers’ subjectivities (Katsikana, Chapter 4; Angel, Chapter 5; Karunananthan, Chapter 7; Gillespie and Hardy, Chapter 11).

Accounting for positionality also requires an acknowledgement of the ways in which scholars are themselves imbricated in structures of coloniality and, thus, often ambiguously placed in relation to projects of decolonization (Dodson and Riley, Chapter 10). A decolonial agenda requires a confrontation with structures of white supremacy, privilege, and racism (Esson et al. 2017) and its connections with ongoing economies of extraction in unequal geographies of social reproduction. To this end, in Chapter 3, Emily Fedoruk’s hermeneutic approach causes her to reflect on her position as a ‘settler-reader’ of the quote from Indigenous Chief, Rhonda Larrabee, of the Qayqayt First Nation, part of a public art work ‘on unceded territories of Musqueam, Qayqayt, Tsleil-Waututh, Skxwú7mesh, Katzie, and Kwantlen Nations’ in New Westminster. Her reading is, as she puts it, ‘conditioned by my experiences as a white settler living for 25 years on Coast Salish territory’. She returns to this positionality at various points in her text to forestall a possessive reading of Larrabee’s text, to recognize that her reading of the text is itself tied to her own social reproduction as a knowledge producer in the academy, and to remind herself of the limitations of her own readings of Larrabee’s text or even of the Indigenous feminist scholars she cites in her chapter. Fedoruk’s analysis of her positionality reflects the ongoing ways in which academic research relationships, whether in urban studies or other fields, are immersed in the extractive logics that have historically structured the processes of racial capitalism and colonialism that continue to undergird economies of dispossession (Nagar 2008; Byrd et al. 2018). Furthermore, as Esson et al. (2017) have cogently argued, the