A critical reflexive politics of location,‘feminist debt’ and thinking from the Global South

Abstract

In this article, I raise a question and acknowledge a ‘feminist debt’. The ‘feminist debt’ is to the politics of location, and the question asks: what particular stipulations and enablements does a critical reflexive feminist politics of location put in place for knowledge production and for doing feminist theory? I suggest that there are at least three stipulations/enablements that a critical reflexive politics of location puts in place for knowledge production. Firstly, it demands/enables scholarly accounts to reveal their location within the prevailing entanglements of power relations and to highlight the politics of struggle that underpin these. Secondly, it demands/enables conceptual work from different geographical spaces – and in particular, it facilitates the production of conceptual work in non-standard background contexts and conditions. And finally, a critical reflexive politics of location demands/enables a methodological response to capture the different conceptual and analytical and empirical knowledges produced in different locations.

In this article, I raise a question and acknowledge a feminist debt. The ‘feminist debt’ is to a critical reflexive politics of location, and the question asks: What particular stipulations and enablements does a critical reflexive feminist politics of location put in place for doing feminist theory? And, furthermore, what does it mean for doing feminist theory from the Global South? Through invoking the metaphor of a feminist debt, I acknowledge the work that a critical reflexive feminist politics of location does, and in particular, of rendering the very ‘thinkability’ (Trouillot, 1995) and intellectual possibility of producing knowledge from different locations. Now, to centre location and to think with the Global South, is to already establish two things right away: it is to flag the ‘provincial’ location of all theory and also to signal the specific context of unremitting power relations that inform theoretical and representational endeavours (Said, 1978): the imperial, colonial entanglements of epistemologies with contemporary global geographies, prevailing political economies (Cusicanqui, 2012), and the transnational circuits of power through which knowledges travel and assume authority (Alexander and Mohanty, 2010; Grewal and Kaplan, 1994; Mohanty, 1995). In recent years, scholars have drawn attention to the ‘planetary imperialising expansion of global coloniality’ (Wynter and McKittrick, 2015) and to the institutional power of the ‘epistemologies of ignorance’ (Mills, 2007) and forms of ‘colonial unknowing’ (Lugones, 2010; Stoler, 2011; Vimalassery et al., 2016) that drive, sustain and reproduce the coloniality of knowledge production. A key concern in many of these debates is to do with the location of knowledge production itself, with some scholars explicitly bringing their location in the ‘colonial present’ under epistemic and ethical scrutiny to ask: ‘how do we understand our locations in the colonial present, as we contemplate and work towards the imperative of decolonization’ (Vimalassery et al., 2016: 1)? While others are calling for a relocation of theory building to and from the global south (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2012; Connell, 2014) and the ‘third world’ (Mignolo, 2018). I acknowledge the important and crucial interventions on ‘doing theory from the Global South’ but also suggest that the problem, however, lies not so much at the level of theory production, for that simply reflects on the patterns that one looks at and assumes, but at the level of concepts. In other words, it is not so much the lack of diversity in theory production that is the problem but the lack of diversity of conceptual production which is the key difficulty. For quite simply, there are not enough concepts in place to capture but also produce theorized accounts of different, historically specific and located forms of worldmaking in ‘most of the world’.

Many feminist scholars have written influentially about location as a place in space and in time but also in history, law ¹ and epistemology. They have invoked location to draw attention to unequal distribution of intellectual and institutional capital and production of knowledge around the globe but also to the entanglements of theory building with the heteropatriarchal, racist, capitalist geopolitics and power relations that structure and inform knowledge production (Cusicanqui, 2012; Mohanty, 1991, 1995; Rich, 1984; Smith, 1999; Wynter, 2003). Questioning the location of knowledge production is, of course, hardly confined to certain strands of feminist thinking alone. Within wider scholarship, location has been used to draw attention to the interstitial and ‘in between spaces’ where differences are negotiated (Bhabha, 1994), to the ‘provincialism’ of the universalist pretensions of thought (Chakrabarty, 2000), to ‘place based consciousness’ as ‘new contexts for thinking about politics and the production of knowledge (Dirlik, 1999: 151–152) and to the historicity of concepts (Hacking, 2002). More recently, location has come to inform ‘border thinking’ espoused by decolonial scholars (Mignolo, 2012). However, what is perhaps unique to feminist scholarship on location is its insistence on location as a critical reflexive ethics. This critical reflexive ethics comes in two forms: the first helps register and document the global power relations that underpin the production of knowledge and privilege particular sites of knowledge production and dissemination. It insists that the theorist declare their location and position within the global circuits of intellectual division of labour (Spivak, 1988) and account for the epistemic tracks of their location upon their theorizing. In other words, a critical reflexive politics of location demands an answer to the question: from where are you looking, and whom/what are you seeing? And, the second forges a dynamic, theorized and historicized relationship between the self and the collective in specific locations and contexts of struggle (Mohanty, 1992) and consequently, redraws the ethical relationship of the self or selves to the site(s) of knowledge production. Acknowledging a feminist debt is one such ethical redrawing of a relationship, that between the self and the institutional production of knowledge. Here, acknowledging a feminist debt, is to actively interrupt the neoliberal politics of knowledge production and its exalted ethic of individuation, ruthless competitiveness and general intellectual disinterestedness and lack of reflexivity on one’s complicity and implication in upholding and reproducing the material structures of epistemic inequality and injustice. At this point you might say to me, well, why feminist debt, though? And, what about citational practices? Are they not the primary form in which acknowledgement works in the academy? And, you would of course be right; well, at least, for most part. To be sure, citational practice is certainly one form of acknowledgement of course, but a feminist debt that I have in mind goes beyond citation. While a citation brings scholars into existence (Ahmed, 2013), a feminist debt on the other hand is an acknowledgement of the possibility of doing particular research in the first instance; it is an acknowledgement of the intellectual, institutional and political practices and interventions that make particular kinds of knowledge production possible. Critically, however, it is to do with the ‘thinkability’ of particular knowledges and of their being counted as knowledge. A feminist debt cannot be repaid. But to acknowledge one’s feminist debts is to acknowledge a responsibility and an ethics, where ethics is not limited to knowledge making but involves a call to responsibility: a responsibility to (re)produce conditions of thinkability and to open up possibilities for different knowledges.

A feminist debt to a critical politics of location, however, not only demands a responsibility to produce conditions of ‘thinkability’ but also institutes certain demands and constraints on how one engages in knowledge production. These demands and constraints require: asking different questions, naming the epistemic ground one speaks/writes from, refusing a technical application of theory, while insisting on ‘speaking back to it’ and working to/for justice – i.e. to work towards shifting the epistemic centre of knowledge production. But, what in effect do these stipulations put in place by a politics of location actually mean for how knowledges are produced, not least from the Global South? Well, there are at least three concrete ways in which these stipulations bear on knowledge production. Firstly, a politics of location demands/enables an account of knowledge production that draws attention to the entanglements of power relations that underpin knowledge production and highlights the politics of struggle that underwrites it. Secondly, a critical politics of location demands/enables the production of conceptual work in different geographical spaces – and in particular, it facilitates conceptual work in non-standard background contexts and conditions. And finally, and relatedly, a critical politics of location demands/enables a methodological response to capture the different conceptual and analytical and empirical knowledges produced in different locations.

In acknowledging its feminist debt, this article refuses the relentless theoretical incitement to identify limitations of existing frameworks, and in this case, those of the politics of location. Instead, it identifies, highlights and extends the generative and productive epistemological and methodological interventions that a critical reflexive politics of location enables. In what follows, I will elaborate on three extensions or demands/enablements instituted by a critical reflexive politics of location through a discussion of how these enable thinking on questions of agency, rights and human rights. In particular, these enablements/constraints insist that questions of agency and human rights are relational and contextual in nature and therefore require specific conceptual descriptions of their complex articulations in different locations. By demanding an epistemic accounting of the specific historical specificities of the politics of agency and that of rights and human rights, a critical reflexive politics of location calls for radically shifting the standard background contexts that inform theory building and for curating, assembling and documenting different epistemic registers, imaginaries and possibilities for thinking otherwise. To identify and envision different epistemic registers and possibilities is to go beyond recognizing and documenting the prevailing forms of Eurocentrism and subjectivities. It is to focus on generating intellectual resources embedded in materially and intersectionally informed concepts arising from historically specific locations and encounters in the world, including on the different modalities of agency and the particular stakes and struggles that animate the politics of rights in the Global South.

Location of/as struggle

For some years now, I have been somewhat insistent to tell a different story of rights and human rights. I tell a story located in contemporary struggles of subaltern groups in rural India and Pakistan. My starting point is to ask: What different stories of human rights would we tell if we produced human rights scholarship from the standpoint of the stakes and the struggles of subaltern groups at the frontline of human rights mobilizations in ‘most of the world’? The subaltern struggles I study tie rights firmly to gendered struggles for economic, political, epistemic and ontological justice. They interrupt state centric but also well rehearsed originary stories of temporalities, global institutional histories and abstract subjectivities, which are the staple of global human rights discourse, to generate historically specific discourses of rights replete with their own languages of claim making, subjectification and worldmaking. Their stories of rights and human rights foreground the conflictual, intersectional, and gendered nature of rights struggles tightly sutured to economic redistributive justice, and open up not only a different epistemic terrain for rights talk but also register their epistemic presence in the face of wilful ignorance and epistemic erasure. This epistemic erasure is mostly maintained and kept in place through a distinct lack of theoretical, conceptual and philosophical scholarship on the different normative languages and political struggles animating subaltern politics of rights in different parts of the globe. Driving the scholarship on global human rights is an inordinate preoccupation with the politics of origins, which stipulates that human rights originate, belong, travel from and operate for the West. This politics of origins is shared by both celebrators and detractors of human rights and is not without effects. In the hand of the detractors, it places a politically expedient argument to delegitimize modes of protest and questioning of excessive state power on the basis that human rights are illegitimate and foreign and therefore with little traction and legitimacy. In critical/progressive scholarship on human rights, this originary story shores up the ‘West’ as the epistemic subject of human rights, although this time via critique and through displaying wilful ignorance and historical amnesia around rights struggles in most of the world. At stake, therefore, in displacing the politics of origins lie questions of epistemic authority, agency and democratic politics.

Struggles over epistemic authority are of course neither new nor novel questions in feminist scholarship. Feminist epistemologists have insisted on asking not only who is and can be the knower, but also what can be known, about what, and from which locations. They have unmasked, decentred and located the figure of the ‘all seeing and all representing universal knower’ and challenged the Archimedian position long held as the privileged location of theory building, and in so doing, identified the contradictory assumptions that underpin epistemological thinking. For instance, philosophical thinking not only presupposes only particularly located persons as knowers (Code, 2012) but also presupposes these particularly located knowers are also located nowhere! Parsing through these contradictions, feminist epistemologists have unmasked the identity of the knower and located the knower in particular social and historical milieus, demonstrating thereby not only the political and ontological entanglements of knowledge production (Alcoff, 1991, 1993) but also the methodological individualism and the assumptions of ‘human homogeneity’ that underpin epistemological enquiry. Adrienne Rich, the feminist poet and author, titled her essay ‘Notes towards a politics of location’ and catapulted struggles over accountability, responsibility and ethical politics to the centre stage of feminist knowledge production. Exhorting white feminists to examine the ‘thoughtlessly white’ assumptions underpinning their feminism, Rich directs her ire at the deadly ‘sameness’ of abstraction that ‘allows no differences among places, times, cultures, conditions, movements’ (1984: 219, 221). As opposed to this ahistorical, ‘lofty and privileged’ abstract theorizing which centres white women and engenders a ‘confusion between [our] claims to the white Western eye and the woman-seeing eye’ (1984: 219), Rich demands that we recognize the location and ‘name the ground we are coming from and the conditions we have taken for granted’ (p. 219). As is well known, a significant effect of this refusal to locate oneself in the geopolitics of theory production has been the prolific circulation of the universalizing representational manoeuvres that produce visions of ‘global sisterhood’ while erasing power differentials of race, class, caste, sexuality and geopolitical location (Grewal and Kaplan, 1994; Mohanty, 1992). As opposed to this feminist politics of ‘global transcendence’ and its denial of global power relations, Chandra Mohanty calls for a feminist politics of engagement that is located in the ‘temporality of struggles’ and draws on ‘historically interpreted and theorised’ experiences of differently located and ongoing struggles over what it means to experience gender/gender oppressions in different locations (1992: 87–88). It is this centrality of and complicity within crisscrossing and dynamic entanglements of power structures and relations across different locations, including national ones, and their implications for knowledge production that distinguishes transnational feminist scholarship and practices from global and international feminisms (Alexander and Mohanty, 2010; Grewal and Kaplan, 1994; Mohanty, 1995; Nagar and Swarr, 2010). This focus on uneven and unequal entanglements of power relations dispels any attachment to location as signifying difference for difference sake. If anything, invoking location as power saturated and as signifying ‘specific relations of domination and subordination’ institutes a meaningful corrective to the easy slip slide into ‘neo relativism’, where difference and multiplicity are celebrated without any recognition of the fields of power in which difference and sameness operate and are invoked (Frankenberg and Mani, 1993). But what might be the implications for knowledge production of taking into account unequal historical, geographical, political and institutional locations? In their introduction to an important edited volume, Richa Nagar and Amanda Lock Swarr (2010) argue that taking entangled global locations seriously can result in refusing individualist modes of academic knowledge production by ‘reclaiming collaborative praxis’ as a keystone of transnational feminist scholarship and practice. Reconceiving collaboration as an ‘ intellectual and political tool’ can ‘consciously combine struggles for socio-political justice with feminist research methodologies’ (2010: 13), and thus, bridge the gap between those ‘theorising the complexities of knowledge production across borders and those concerned with imagining concrete ways to enact solidarities across nations, institutions, socio-political identifications, and economic categories and materialities’ (2010: 2). Vigilance and hyper-reflexivity are key here (Kapoor, 2004; Spivak, 1999; Thapar-Björkert-and Henry, 2004), and it is critical that these collaborative exercises do not become yet another occasion for ‘reproducing colonial power relations’ all over again, and as Farhana Sultana (2019: 36) cautions, scholars need to be reflexive on how their locations in global imperialist logics can potentially threaten best intentions.

But even as feminist scholars continue to challenge epistemology’s ‘irrepressible connection with social power’ (Fricker, 2007: 2) and critique the epistemic exclusions that have denied (white) women a place at the epistemology table, questions of who, where and what possesses epistemic authority within feminist theory itself refuse to die down. And, while struggles over what counts as feminist theory and who can be a feminist theorist have been remarkably generative and productive in challenging the internal colonialism of feminist theory, opening up new intellectual directions and forging new conceptual and theoretical tools steeped in different realities and locations, these have done little to concretely address the steep inequalities and coloniality that characterize the transnational institutional and political economies of knowledge production (Boni, 2017; Cusicanqui, 2012; Mama, 2007; Medie and Kang, 2018). It is striking, of course, that disproportionally large volumes of academic scholarship, including by feminist scholars of colour, is published by those located in the Global North. Quite simply this scandalous state of affairs exists not only because struggles for epistemic authority have yet to be heard seriously enough but also because the operation of ‘epistemologies of ignorance’ and those of ‘colonial unknowing’ together with the vice grip of positivist knowledge production has meant that the coloniality of knowledge systems and their geopolitical, and institutional entanglements have remained largely invisible but also unspeakable. Consequently, the key question demanded by a critical reflexive feminist politics of location – from where are you looking, and whom and what are you seeing? – is often, resolutely refused.

A key site where contestations over geopolitical location, civilizational and representational politics and white saviour complex converge to overdetermine but also characterize great swathes of feminist thinking is over the status of agency, autonomy and rights/human rights in feminist scholarship and politics. If anything, feminist thinking on autonomy and agency and also human rights is heavily complicit in the transnational politics of judgementalism, which has been so prolific in pronouncing on the quality, degree and nature of agency and also rights enjoyed by women in the ‘third world’. Within various strands of feminist scholarship, the fierce, lively, fractious and contentious debates on the status of agency and autonomy within feminist theory and politics have more often than not pivoted on a set of paradoxical attachments. On the one hand, these critique hyper-individualist masculinist, universalist, ahistorical, acontextual autonomous persons, while, on the other, validate an enduring attachment to liberal ideas of agency and freedom and in particular, to a heroic agent capable of challenging/resisting power relations and embodying a global feminist emancipatory politics. Unsurprisingly, these paradoxical attachments have meant that feminist theorizing of agency has been mired in epistemic erasures and civilizational and representational dilemmas, traps and misdescriptions (Abu-Lughod, 2013; Chow, 2003; Madhok, 2013; Mahmood, 2005; Mohanty, 1991; Spivak, 1988). However, such is the entrenched epistemic hold and cultural attachment to autonomy as an ideal of personhood, that it is has been very hard to shift intellectual perspectives and also the political expectations that are so tightly woven around the idea. Things are not much different in the arena of global human rights either, where critical progressive scholarship has, as I noted earlier, resulted in shoring up and reproducing Europe as the subject, albeit via progressive critique. These contradictory and paradoxical responses to agency and also to rights/human rights in some ways reflect the double-sidedness and the familiar push and the pull of the work that characterizes their operation on the ground: the enchantments and the disappointments; the enablements but also regulatory effects; their mobilizational power and democratic potential but also their civilizationalism; the unremitting Northern pressure behind their power but also their take up by the powerless and the precarious across the Global North and South; and their politically conservative effects but also the ‘insurgent imaginaries’ (Natera, 2013) they produce in their wake that can, at times, exceed existing terms of recognition/inclusion/justice and rights.

Acknowledging the double-edged nature of the work agency and rights do in upholding civilizational and epistemic hierarchies while also recognizing their indispensability for critiquing precisely what they reproduce has led many scholars to argue for a need to rethink and reconceptualize and retool agency and rights. What is at stake in these efforts to reconceptualize agency is this: that ‘misdescriptions’ of women’s agency in the Global South will continue until we reorient concepts to reflect the critical politics of location of their articulation and deployment (Madhok, 2013). And, it is this commitment to a critical politics of location that can be discerned when Saba Mahmood argues that we should keep the meaning of agency open and allow it to emerge from ‘within language and institutional contexts which make possible of relating to certain people, oneself and things’ (2005: 15). Or when Lila Abu-Lughod (2010) advocates for an ethnographic study of the ‘active social life of Muslim women’s rights’. In my earlier work, I have queried the spatial geographies and intellectual contexts that operate as the standard background contexts for theorizing autonomy and agency. I argued that negative freedom is the unquestioned standard background context for theorizing agency and autonomy and that the governing measure of agency and autonomy privileges free action. The former institutes the latter together by shoring up the heroic unbounded white onto epistemic subject able to operationalize without exception this governing action bias. However, even a cursory regard for the realities of people’s lives shows that lives and living are constrained in all manner of ways, and that agency thinking cannot continue to regard conditions of negative freedom as ‘standard’, a necessary given, and to insist that persons display their agentic selves through their ability to commit maximal free action in all circumstances. Therefore, conceiving agency of persons outside of imaginaries of full and complete negative freedom requires loosening agency’s reliance on negative freedom and its inherent action bias but also displacing the principal site of recognition and analysis of agency.

The location of concepts

Refusing action bias in conceptual descriptions of agency becomes thinkable because of a critical reflexive politics of location. As an epistemic intervention, location signifies the role of place in knowledge production, and as a generative site (McKittrick, 2011) in which concepts and persons come into being (Hacking, 2002). Concepts are the ‘building blocks’ of theory and make our world ‘visualisable and discussable’ (Rabinow, 2011: 122) and, therefore, the work of theory building requires concepts able to capture different encounters with the world in different locations. Furthermore, not only is there a need for concepts to describe and visualize different life-worlds but also for these different conceptual descriptions to intervene in and disrupt the normal and ordinary work of theory production that carries on thoughtlessly and wilfully ignorant of different life-worlds and their conceptual architectures. To put it differently, the problem in producing ‘theories’ for most of the world is that concepts that are put to use in producing theoretical descriptions of the world are ‘provincial’ (Chakrabarty, 2000) and reflect particular temporal, spatial, social and historical contexts. And, therefore, an important way to interrupt the pervasive epistemic violence is not simply only to refuse to misrecognize provincialism for universalism and refuse to know the world only through unidirectional translation, it is also to insist on directing efforts towards producing a wider array of conceptual descriptions. Critiques though hugely useful and significant in demystifying the constellations of power and their entanglements must only be the starting point for the production of new intellectual and conceptual histories, geographies and epistemologies from different locations.

It is worth repeating that the production of concepts from most of the world is a matter of urgency. But how to study concepts in ‘most of the world’ without falling into the trap of either violent commensurability (Tuck and Yang, 2012) or radical unintelligibility? The first trap, of forced and violent commensurabilty, leads to theoretical and conceptual misdescriptions, and the latter, down the poisonous hole of cultural relativism. Both traps refuse meaningful and careful theoretical engagement and shut down conversations. This urgency of studying concepts has informed my own work on theorizing agency and coercion in non-standard background contexts but also how to conceptually capture the politics of rights and human rights outside the Anglo-American, European worlds. And, it is in thinking about these questions that I recognized the crucial work that a critical reflexive feminist politics of location does in making it ‘thinkable’ to do conceptual work in ‘non-standard’ locations and contexts, i.e. contexts outside those of which concepts are standardly produced, described and visualized.

Important strands of feminist scholarship are admirably attentive to the coming into being of concepts at particular locations. Consider for instance how the emergence of certain conceptual categories within feminist theory challenges not only the epistemological privilege of unmarked, androcentric whiteness masquerading as unencumbered, placeless, disembodied knowledges but also provides alternative methodologies for knowledge production. Many of the key feminist conceptual categories that we have become accustomed to deploying in everyday theorizing, empirically and in policy work, emerge out of critical engagements with location of particular subjects. So, for instance, Kimberlé Crenshaw coins the term ‘intersectionality’ to visualize and describe the invisibility and erasure of the Black women located at intersectional locations of hierarchy and oppressions. The political and intellectual roots of intersectional thinking run deep in Black feminist thinking (Hill Collins and Bilge, 2016; Nash, 2018), however, significantly, and this is crucial, intersectionality comes forth from a place that is a ‘non-standard’ background context for conceptual/theory building. After all, how often does one come across or deploy concepts that do not emerge and in turn reflect hegemonic and privileged raced and classed world views and histories? Another feminist conceptual intervention premised on the epistemic authority of marginalized subjects whose ‘shared histories are based on shared location’ within existing hierarchical power relations (Harding, 1983; Hartsock, 1983; Hill Collins, 1997: 376) is, of course, feminist standpoint theorizing. Standpoint thinking itself has been a hugely productive site for a range of important conceptual interventions. Sandra Harding has argued for ‘starting off thought from marginalised lives’ (1993: 56) and for the necessity of ‘strong objectivity’ for critically evaluating which social situations tend to generate the most objective claims, and Donna Haraway has argued powerfully that ‘feminist objectivity’ is about ‘limited location’ and ‘situated knowledge’ and, that it ‘allows us to become answerable for what we learn how to see’ (1988: 583). Haraway cautions against a single feminist standpoint, arguing that a politics of location is ‘insatiably curious about the webs of differential positioning’ and resists the politics of ‘fixation’, ‘finality’ and ‘closure’ to embrace ‘vulnerability’ (1988: 590). Also insisting on specific and different feminist standpoints, Patricia Hill Collins writes of a Black feminist standpoint as a ‘subjugated knowledge’ located in a context of racialized and gendered economic and political domination that emerges from an ‘interdependence’ of the everyday knowledges of Black African American women and ‘the more specialised knowledge of Black women intellectuals’ (2000: 269). And Sharmila Rege (1998) writes of a Dalit feminist standpoint that derives from and is located in Dalit women’s struggles but, crucially, does not originate from an authentic well of Dalit women’s difference or experience. As opposed to the politics of authenticity, Rege argues that a Dalit feminist standpoint is not only a ‘liberatory’ feminist project but also one that is ‘multiple, heterogenous, contradictory’, which needs to be open to and in dialogue with all other liberatory projects. ² In a slightly different vein, but carefully locating and starting from poor rural women’s ‘contradictory experiences of globalisation’ within transnational circuits of production and consumption, in Southern India, Priti Ramamurthy (2003) introduces ‘subjects in perplexity’, who ‘experience both joys and aches of the global everyday, often simultaneously’ (2003: 525). Perplexity, writes Ramamurthy, is the site of convergence of ‘multiple ideologies that constitute subjects – cultural practice, temporalities and place’ (p. 525). Drawing on intensely conflictual feminist struggles in different locations in Africa, Patricia McFadden (2018) conceives ‘contemporarity’ as a ‘new framework’ for ‘Black resistances’. ‘Contemporarity’ is a critique and an alternative to neoliberal extractive capitalism and gendered nationalisms and envisages itself as an ‘innovative feminist sensibility’ and an epistemology located in imaginaries that sustain relationships between the self, feminist politics and the ecological universe. Locating herself firmly in the political economy of knowledge production in Latin America, and critiquing statist ideologies of hybridity and multiculturalism deployed to manage difference, especially, indigenous difference, Silvia Maria Cusicanqui (2012) writes of the notion of ‘chi’xi’, which is the ‘most appropriate translation of the motley mix that we, who are called mestizas and mestizos are’ (p. 105). A hugely capacious ‘notion’ of many ‘connotations’, chi’xi is irreducible to colonial governmentalizing moves, capturing instead the ‘parallel coexistence of multiple cultural differences that do no extinguish but instead antagonise and complement each other. Each one reproduces itself from the depths of the past and relates to others in a contentious way’ (p. 105). Crossing South Central America and heading north to the borderlands of Mexico and South West USA, is the location of Gloria Anzaldúa’s conceptual offering: borderlands. Also the title of Anzaldúa’s pathbreaking book, ‘borderlands’ locates the history of a people living in a specific geography; a geography spanning and telling the history of Mexican-origin US Chicanas. Straddling specific border geographies, imperial histories, racialized political economies of dispossession and psycho-sexual socialities, it tells the history of coming into being of a ‘border culture’ and of a ‘hybrid subjectivity’ informed and striated by histories of loss, psychic unrest, marginality, struggles to belong, displacement and perpetual transition. The borderland hybrid subjectivity is not one of a celebratory variety that confidently celebrates multiculturalism and diversity but is born of an acute recognition of unequal power relations, and of alienation, ‘cultural ambiguity’, ‘perplexity’. But this ‘psychic unrest’, economic and historical alienation in the borderlands also produce an ‘alien consciousness’ – a borderland consciousness, born out of a ‘struggle of flesh, a struggle of borders, an inner war . . . towards new possibilities’ (Anzaldúa, 1987: 100, 101). By highlighting these conceptual interventions, my aim is not to provide an exhaustive list of location-based concepts, which, of course, by any means, these are not, but rather to draw attention to some of the conceptual work that derives from and becomes available when we start paying attention to a critical reflexive politics of location. What is common to these conceptual interventions, however, is that they go beyond the production of critique to produce new knowledge constructs that powerfully capture the complexity of the different forms of world-making while also bringing these into conceptual existence.

An attentiveness to a critical reflexive politics of location allows one to see clearly the lack of conceptual diversity but also the inadequacy of existing conceptual repertoires for describing the complexity of the life-worlds of subaltern rights politics in ‘most of the world’. And, to seek to unreflexively apply the global human rights framework to describe these would be to not only activate a technical application of theory but to also invoke the serious charge of reproducing and authorizing the epistemic and geopolitical power of the global human rights discourse by (re) telling hegemonic stories of power and the powerful. Impelled by the theoretical, conceptual and ethical concerns galvanized by a critical reflexive politics of location, I needed to find another way of entering this field of subaltern rights struggles without either reproducing the huge epistemic power and the time space provincialism of the global human rights discourse or compromising the complexity, dynamism, difference and epistemic and political struggles of human rights mobilizations in ‘most of the world’. In effect, I had to find a way of forging a theoretical, empirical and conceptual path in order to engage global human rights in a critical, dynamic and generative way to bring to light new possibilities for imagining and expanding rights and human rights. This theoretical-empirical-conceptual formulation that I have forged is that of vernacular rights cultures.

To think with vernacular rights culture is to signal an epistemic intervention into knowledge production from the standpoint of the subaltern groups declaring and struggling for rights/human rights. The ‘vernacular’ here also signals that this is a rights politics that is linked to but significantly is not that of global human rights. These rights struggles are testimony to the fact that rights/human rights are not only stuff of institutional and legal rights talk but that they are productive and generative: producing particular rights bearing subjects and also political cultures of rights. Viewing rights politics through the lens of vernacular rights cultures is to refuse binary rights talk of the local/global and ‘West/non West’ that characterize human rights discourses, and to insist that rights politics in most of the world is not one that is simply mimetic, and engaged in the translation, enactment and localization of ‘global human rights’ but rather is one with its specific languages of rights and entitlements grounded in specific political imaginaries, justificatory premises and subjectivities. Key to vernacular rights cultures is that the subject of rights is not an a priori person, always already given and non-gendered, but comes into being through particular institutional, policy, political and discursive interventions and contexts that are intersectionally gendered.

The vernacular in vernacular rights cultures flags the different literal and conceptual languages of rights deployed by subaltern groups in different parts of the globe. In order to study vernacular rights cultures in my work, I have taken my cue from the principal word signifying a right in South Asia, which is haq. The word haq is hardly confined to South Asia alone, of course, and is also the word for a right across the Middle East, Iran, Turkey and North Africa, appearing in Arabic, Urdu, Manipuri, Persian, Turkish and Hindustani among other languages (Madhok, 2017). For the better part of the last two decades, I have been relentlessly tracking the deployment of the haq through the deserts of Rajasthan in North Western India where subaltern groups have mobilized to demand rights to food, public information, gender and caste equality, and employment from the state, and where the indigenous peoples have demanded rights to sacred and ancestral forests, streams and lands. The word haq does not recognize national borders and formations; if anything, it undermines them. And, so, I have travelled with it further north west in the subcontinent – from the lush forests of the Aravalli mountain ranges to across the border and into the green fertile plains of the Punjab in Pakistan, a land fed by South Asia’s five large rivers, where for the last 18 years very poor marginal peasants have taken on the great might of Pakistan’s military over their struggle for land ownership to emerge as most significant working class struggle against the military in postcolonial Pakistan.

The methodological imperative of location

But how does haq come into being as the principal word for a right in contemporary subaltern struggles in South Asia? What sorts of meanings does it acquire; how does it ‘make up people’, aid the production of subjectivities and produce new possibilities for relating to oneself? In other words, in what ways does haq enable but also constrain possibilities for being a (gendered) subject of rights? While I think these are not unreasonable questions, they do however raise another set of questions: namely, how does one study these questions? Or to put it in a starker way: what is methodologically involved in studying vernacular rights cultures? And, so, I am yet again back to the drawing board, to figure out a methodological entry point for this work. Through deploying a feminist historical ontology, I show how haq comes into being as the chief literal and conceptual term used to signify a right/human right; acquire meanings, ‘make up people’ (Hacking, 2002), produce rights subjectivities, while also putting in place possibilities for becoming a (gendered) subject of rights and relating to oneself. Readers will discern that through assembling together a feminist historical ontology as a methodological device, I am not only drawing on but also supplementing the work of the philosopher Ian Hacking. An important element of Hacking’s historical ontology projects is the focus on words and concepts: of how concepts come into being and acquire traction at particular historical points. And, it is Hacking’s focus on words and concepts and their role in ‘making up people’ together with my longstanding interest in the gendered processes of political subjectivation and in the self-fashioning exercises undertaken by subaltern subjects (Madhok, 2013, 2018) that draws me to his work on historical ontology.

However, even while I write this, I am acutely aware that Hacking is not specifically interested in the coming into being of gendered concepts, or in the gendered nature of power relations, imaginaries and subjectivities they put in place and not even in the gendered processes which ‘make up’ people. And, even though Hacking is deeply invested in the particular historical sites at which words develop into concepts, he does not acknowledge the feminist politics of location. And, if he did, then in thinking about the conceptual work of haq in South Asia, it would become evident to him that the word haq is a caste inflected masculine term, and the question of gender equality needs invariably to be begged separately in all the citizen mobilizations I am tracking. Quite simply, this means that haq puts in place particular gendered and caste inflected political imaginaries of rights, which in turn engender a whole new arena of a politics of struggle over haq.

Gendering historical ontology, therefore, is to infuse it with an awareness of the inhering power relations in the meanings that concepts take up in specific historical locations, and in the work they do. Gender is an intrinsically political concept and struggles over gender relations are political struggles that involve an attentiveness to multiply intersecting and interlocking layers of conflict. A gender lens is, therefore, manifestly important and crucial because bringing to bear a gendered perspective means one is constantly aware of the intersectional and conflictual nature of rights but also of the limits of the normative ontological possibilities offered by haq. Accounting thereby for the centrality of conflict and struggle through and within which gendered subjects operate and function is a key methodological imperative of feminist historical ontologies. So, for instance, rights claims by very marginalized gendered subjects do not simply involve instrumental claim making for distribution of resources. When rights are seized to make political claims by these gendered subjects, what is claimed in effect is also a particular subjectivity and relation to the self. It is for this reason that when gendered subjects engage in claim making, it is almost always conflictual; their claim making is more often than not read as oppositional to and/or disrupting of an established normative and embodied gender order.

At this point, I imagine, that you might be asking a series of questions starting with, why a feminist historical ontology, though? What does the coupling of ‘feminist’ with historical ontology bring to the methodological table? Why must Hacking’s historical ontology have a ‘feminist’ prefix? Is feminist historical ontology yet another addition to the growing list of ‘ontological turns’ declared by an ever-increasing number of disciplinary formations? What does ontology mean anyway? ³ Certainly, ontology means different things to different people depending on who you are asking, and if the ‘ontological turns’ declared by several academic disciplines are any indicator, then it is clear that ontology means a range of different things depending on the different disciplinary orientation. However, what is common to all these disciplinary ontological turns is the deep suspicion of epistemology, and consequently the drawing of a wedge between epistemology and ontology, and privileging the latter over the former. In contrast with the ‘ontological turn’, a feminist historical ontology, however, refuses the disentanglement of epistemology from ontology. Epistemologies have particular ontological effects and are, therefore, necessarily entangled. As the philosopher Sylvia Wynter argues, specific epistemologies, origin stories and ‘knowledge-making practices’ (Wynter and McKittrick, 2015: 32) produce ‘a system of learning’ (p. 47) that keeps in place a particular conception of the human and an understanding of who/what we are. In effect, the role of such ‘knowledge systems’, she writes, is to elaborate the ‘genre specific (and/or culture specific) orders of truth through which we know reality, from the perspective of the no less genre specific perspective of who that we already are’ (p. 32). Making explicit connections between epistemology and ontology, influential Black and postcolonial feminist scholarship has called for the need to develop feminist theory that emerges from ‘individuals who have knowledge of both margin and center’ (hooks, 2000: xvii) and for ‘understanding marginality’ as a ‘position and place of resistance’ that is ‘crucial for oppressed, exploited, colonised people’ (1990: 150–151). Instituting an unequivocal umbilical link between epistemology and ontology, the Black feminist statement released by the Combahee River Collective ( 1977) identified ‘major systems’ of ‘interlocking’ and ‘simultaneous oppressions’ and declared that ‘we find our origins in the historical reality of Afro American women’s continuous life-and-death survival struggle for survival liberation’. The epistemic and political importance of ‘generating cultures of resistance’ (Hill Collins, 1997) is also a key insistence of standpoint theorists for whom standpoint thinking is ‘a collective political project with both epistemological and ontological valences’ (Weeks, 2011: 245 n 16). And, partly drawing on standpoint approaches, Clare Hemmings (2012) argues that the mutual relationship of epistemology and ontology could potentially spark off a ‘critical dissonance’ to generate possibilities for feminist solidarity and transformational politics; for a politics of solidarity not based on essentialisms but on ‘affective dissonance . . . of also feeling the desire for transformation out of experience of discomfort’ (p. 158) rather than on any grounds of shared identity or assumed feeling.

A feminist historical ontology unequivocally locates itself firmly in the imbrication of epistemology and ontology as it works to make explicit the ways in which concepts come into being in different locations and within particular knowledge systems. It tracks the political imaginaries and justificatory premises, the political cultures they enable, the kinds of people they make up, and the politics in which they are invoked and sustained. The work of a feminist historical ontology begins with an insistence that concepts are gendered, that they are taken up and attach themselves to gendered bodies, and that ‘making up people’ is a gendered exercise as ‘people’ are intersectional subjects. By drawing attention to the different and historically specific and located languages of rights/human rights – both literal and conceptual in different parts of the globe – a feminist historical ontology attends to the political imaginaries these languages make available, and to the subjectivities, forms of political subjectivation, conceptions of personhood and the claims for subject status and gender orders they render possible. In this context, it is important to note that accounting for conflict and struggle is central to feminist historical ontologies. Deploying a gender lens to historical ontology is to exercise awareness of the inhering power relations in the meanings that concepts take up but also in the work they do. Finally, ethical commitments to working to/for justice drive feminist historical ontologies. In particular, I want to highlight two issues in this regard: the first is to do with the thorny question of representation and the other is concerned with the relationship of marginal epistemologies to the politics of the marginalized. Driving both is the ethical question: how to acknowledge the intellectual contributions of the counterhegemonic ideological work that feminists scholars/activists do in the Global South? And, furthermore, how to demonstrate ethical responsibility by not appropriating epistemologies of subaltern movements or indeed indigenous mobilizations in the Global South, on the one hand, and/or by not displaying historical amnesia about their temporality, location and counterhegemonic contributions, on the other hand? In other words, how to practise vigilance against an easy forgetting of the counterhegemonic work that is done by subaltern grassroots struggles or rights in the Global South? These are hard questions, which must be a key focus of methodological investments.

Practising ethical vigilance, a feminist historical ontology of haq attends to the gendered saturated sites of grassroots political struggles to document the different meanings of haq that are mobilized, towards what and by whom. Alongside tracking the forms of subjectification haq engenders and the political imaginaries it engages, a feminist historical ontology is attentive to the forms of rights politics and the erasures/silences it puts in place. It seeks to illuminate what haq allows, articulates, renders intelligible, refuses, and to highlight how the gendered articulation of concepts/rights exceeds both the purpose and nature of their mobilization. In other words, a feminist historical ontology of haq is explicitly concerned with processes and discourses of subjectivation and with how gendered subjects of rights come into being in the vernacular.

A feminist debt

A critical reflexive feminist politics of location scaffolds and informs the work of feminist historical ontologies. As a methodological device, feminist historical ontologies draw on different conceptual and theoretical interventions made by feminist scholars who have insisted on historical and political specificity, and have stipulated ‘naming the ground’ from where they speak. It acknowledges its debt to the epistemologies that situate knowledge in multiple, interlocking and intersectional locations and circuits of global political economies in order to track the path of power that forges knowledge production in particular sites. By activating the question: from where are you looking and what/whom are you seeing, feminist historical ontologies demand to see and view all knowledges as marked knowledges, marked by those who inhabit particular locations and sites of knowledge production. Finally, through insisting on locations as epistemically and politically generative sites, feminist historical ontologies focus on the production of conceptual languages and processes of subjectivation, and also on political mobilizations, in order to track gendered political cultures and intellectual histories of social transformation in different locations.