Fracture is central to the praxis of decolonizing. Fracture is linked to resistance, friction, and contestation of the practices that systematically racialise and other Black people and people of colour. Much of the discussion about decolonizing the business school and the field of business and management, in particular, has placed attention on the curriculum. Very little has been captured on how decolonizing emerges, shapes and develops in everyday praxis. In many ways, decolonizing in this field has been taken as “something that is done to something else”, not as something that we do, inhabit and (re)formulate to respond to instances of structural, systematic oppression. In this piece, we reflect on praxis as lived experience, and we show decolonizing as collective action that purposely unsettles the white gaze by decentring its dominance in the use and control of sound, time and space.
The story
After years of individually shoe-horning our scholarship into pre-prescribed racialised modes of academic performativity that cut across writing, teaching, and conference attendance, the Decolonizing Alliance emerged as a collective of scholars who would no longer assume the position of invisibilized and silenced other. In a seemingly borderless academia, dominated by explicit racialised, masculinised, and Anglo-centric structures, each one of us took a risk to collectivise and become vocal about the shared experiences of oppression, marginalisation, invisibilisation and exclusion experienced by scholars in the Global South, Global Majorities, and people of colour working in white dominated regions and settings. In response, the Decolonizing Alliance (DA) has been constantly formulating strategies to support racially marginalised groups in the Global South and Global North, with a view to speak truth to power about oppressive practices in academic and academic-related settings and become a solidaristic network for those who experience them.
One of the key challenges of decolonial praxis is the creation of inclusive spaces that both bring the collective to life whilst also allowing individuals the legitimacy to live our/their own truth. Collective work arises in various permutations of alliances and solidaristic encounters. Some of these alliances emerge from a particular need for recognition as not-Other; other times, these encounters arise on occasions when need for support and allyship are communicated and actions are taken to meet those needs. Collective work is both planned and unplanned; it is timely and untimely, yet it is always embodied. It is always centering what Othered bodies know and it is always bracing with tensions around what a body cannot know.
Walking with Brown Folk
Responding to the call for papers for the International Critical Management Conference 2019, which took place at the Open University in Milton Keynes, we produced an open invitation to a performative session titled “Walking with Brown Folk: Remembering Ibarra Colado”. The session was scheduled in the final slot of our conference stream (9.30am to 11.00am on Saturday 29th of June 2019). The session had been thought about as an unorthodox encounter of bodies and voices articulated around three sequential performances:
Performance 1: “Structure of the white gaze”
Performance 2: “Unsettling the white gaze / authority”
Performance 3: “Communicational dynamics: Speaking to white people about whiteness”
A major component of these performances was an integrated walking and oral practice that would be led by people of colour and take participants on an unplanned journey around the grounds of the host university. The act of walking collectively and walking in a whitely institutional space without permission signified a breach with the conference management’s authority, which the DA have consistently exposed as racialised, gendered and masculinised. The oral practice included reading aloud sections of Ibarra Colado’s work and speaking in our regional languages. The centering of our regional languages signified the limits of translation and the politics of knowing. Some things cannot be known, some things cannot be translated. Accepting this core tension is a central tenet of decolonizing and working towards a pluralistic ecology of subjectivities, histories, and historiographies.
These aligned performances were based on a reading of Fanon’s (1986) Black Skin, White Masks (specifically chapter 2) and more loosely inspired by George Yancy’s (2008) critique of the multitude of white gazes that invoke different ways of becoming racialised by whiteness. In terms of the practice itself, we drew inspiration from Ingrid Pollard’s photographic series titled Self Evident, in which she dismantles logics that bind whiteness and space together. She challenges ideas of whitely English landscapes, particularly the English countryside, by creating portraits of Black men and women posing in English countryside scenes. These portraits incorporate objects associated with the Afro-Carribean diaspora and include artefacts that are used by Black communities as signs of self-affirmation as well as objects with stereotypical or derogatory connotations.
The aim of our session was to decentre white structures through the practice of collectively walking and claiming space, as well as unsettling the white gaze / authority of both speakers and audience. We developed the session with the clear aim to celebrate and reflect upon the legacy Eduardo Ibarra Colado, who was a central figure in building the grounds for a decolonial management and organization studies agenda in the early 2000s and was a formative organiser of the first LAEMOS conference in 2006. He died in 2013 and was commemorated by the organisation studies community.
To set the parameters of engagement for this practice, we developed a protocol beforehand and this was emailed to stream participants, as well as being printed up on flyers to distribute to the broader conference community. The protocol provided session participants with guidelines about what to expect and how to practice discussions in a principled way. It is reproduced in full below:
| WALKING WITH BROWN FOLK PROTOCOL This is a walk that centres people of colour, brown, black, global majority people – our experiences, feelings, desires, knowledge and curiosities. Building on inspiration from Ibarra-Colado’s paper, Thinking Otherness from the Margins, we take a walk around the university campus, asking no permission from conference organizers, from the stream organizers or from each other. Leading and following will be shared by Black and people of colour who are moved to do so. The only time organizers will interrupt is for a refreshment break or a pause to read from the paper. It is a principled space where we acknowledge white supremacy and other social hierarchies and we commit to taking steps back and letting marginalised people speak. Emotions, silence and stillness are welcome. We will support, uplift and empower each other. Please read Ibarra-Colado’s paper in advance and we will discuss it on our walk. References Ibarra-Colado, E. (2006). Organization studies and epistemic coloniality in Latin America: thinking otherness from the margins. Organization, 13(4), 463-488. |
There is an important socio-historical context of continuity in the decision to undertake this practice at the ICMS 2019 Conference. The DA had been engaged in a year-long politics of struggle with the board of the European Group of Organization Studies (EGOS) community, which up until 2018 had facilitated a Latin American academic conference entitled Latin American European Management and Organization Studies (LAEMOS). Following an open letter authored by the DA and with over 100 international signatories that set out critiques, questions and suggestions regarding the whiteness, Eurocentricity, and lack of governance transparency at the LAEMOS conference, especially LAEMOS 2018, the EGOS board took the unilateral decision to ‘end engagement’ with the ‘direct, practical coordination and governance’ of the LAEMOS conference. Adding to the tense exchanges between the DA and the EGOS Board, in the immediate aftermath of the letter being published online, the then President of EGOS targeted at least two women of colour signatories of the letter. When engaged in questions posed by DA members at the EGOS general assembly of 2019, the board failed to disclose how it had reached its decision without consulting its membership. This issue, incidentally, remains unresolved.
This background is important to highlight because it makes apparent the heightened mood of resistance in the DA to challenge a community that systematically and continually excludes and undermines the Black people and the people of colour who challenge its whiteness and Eurocentricity.
The session began at 9.30am against the backdrop of a warm sunny morning. We convened at the room we had been allocated, which already had evidence of our presence from previous sessions, alluding to racialised encounters, exclusions and violence we had already experienced at the conference.
We brought fruits and other snacks to share, as well as a travel speaker to play music loudly. We arranged the chairs in a circular shape. Participants began to arrive — some sat down, others remained standing, talking and catching up. Familiar faces and unfamiliar faces took up space. The organiser of another stream down the corridor asked us to turn the music off or at least reduce the volume as it was interrupting their session. We insisted we could not because we were disrupting space. We invited them to disrupt it with us –they did not! Laughter and chatter resounded and the music continued. At around 10am we turned the music off and asked participants to find a seat. The room felt full of intention and expectation.
Stream organisers took turns to speak and to introduce how we would use our time together. We began to read out the protocol. We read this in Portuguese, Spanish, Mandarin, and Hindi – all the languages that we, as co-organizers, have a relationship with. Tears streamed down some of the organisers’ faces, some of us remembered Ibarra Colado, and each of us felt the significance of bringing our languages and histories into this whitened space. Spontaneously, a participant asked if she could read the protocol out loud in Urdu and proceeded to do so. Lastly, we read these guidelines aloud in English. After this, we stated that we would begin our walk around the campus and stop only to read from Ibarra-Colado’s paper or rest for some light refreshments. We asked that a person of colour stands to initiate the walk and that the group would follow.
There was a silence and a stillness that pervaded the room, this silence seemed to go on for some time and the stillness felt both unbearable and necessary. An organiser read out a section of Ibarra Colado’s paper. More silence and more stillness followed, but then our Urdu translator got up to her feet and immediately we stood with her and followed her down the corridors and stairs and out into the openness of the university grounds. The music restarted and so did the conversations.
As we walked around the campus, we noticed people pointing to us and looking at us in puzzlement, in curiosity. We felt the power of the white gaze and we continued to walk. There was no specific destination and only the white gaze at every corner served to remind us of the importance of the walk as an act of resistance, defiance and reclaiming. Unintentionally, the walk was circular and ended as a participant began navigating the group towards a large green space under a leafy tree outside one of the main conference buildings. Under this tree we organised ourselves in a circle and sat down under its shade.
The fruits and snacks were passed around and we began to dialogue with each other. People of colour reflected on the structures of oppression and whiteness that made the conference a hostile space. These conversations became uncomfortable at times when white people who had joined the session made defensive comments and disputed that all white people have racial privilege. The shape and direction of the discussions that could take place in this moment were structured by white discomfort and some of the people of colour in the session felt that the safe space had been violated. Nevertheless, discussions continued despite the circle fracturing and some people breaking away to have private conversations.
This praxis was developed intentionally and collectively built as an affront to the whiteness of conference spaces. Moreover, it was a direct attempt to unsilence Ibarra Colado’s political message that manifested in the LAEMOS conference, and was ignored by the CMS community following the dissolution of the conference. It was in our oral practice of speaking our histories and languages into the conference space that we felt our wholeness and connectivity to Ibarra Colado’s legacy most strongly. Through our oral practice, the white gaze became secondary and eventually irrelevant as our practice transformed from resistance to (re)claiming our space and our bodies. It was during the walk that our bodies were re-set into a scene. The white gaze followed us, and eventually white rationality disrupted what we had temporarily reclaimed.
References
Fanon, F. (1986) Black skin, white masks. London: Pluto.
Pollard, I. http://www.ingridpollard.com/
Yancy, G. (2008) Black bodies, white gazes: The continuing significance of race in America. Rowman & Littlefield.
How to cite this piece: Decolonizing Alliance (2020) Decolonial resistances, contestations, and reclamations: Walking with Brown folk. Available at: https://decolonizingalliance.wordpress.com/
Decolonizing Alliance 