Ecologies of De/colonization: Embodied Caribbean Diasporic Perspectives

Abstract

In this photo essay, we take readers through ecologies of de/colonization that we engage with in our creative methodology of walking and talking. As academics called upon to do equity, diversity and decolonization work in colonial institutions, we reflect on our location in lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ lands (“Victoria, BC, Canada”) and the circuits that extend to the Caribbean archipelago of our origins and families (Borikén/Puerto Rico and Jamaica). We take up the tasks of collectively reflecting on how to care for our communities and for each other in an interconnected world amidst socio-ecological crisis. Our method that emerged during the pandemic is specific to our embodiments “here” as settlers of Caribbean roots whose family histories “there” include both complicity with and domination by colonization, trans-Atlantic enslavement, and forced migration. We are attempting to learn, as we hold the messiness of institutions who want straightforward paths to remediate racism, colonization, and the like. Our walking and talking follow a meandering and re-visiting process prompted by our institutional contexts and circumstances, and also by serendipity, surprise and beauty offered through non-human elements on our walks. The photos evidence these moments and the connections to “here-there” in ecologies of de/colonization. We invite readers on our circuitous paths that involve deconstructing, and building or affirming, noticing, following literal paths and those in scholarly-activist circles. In the creative process of drawing relations of the here-there, and attending to serendipity, ancestral spirit, and more-than-human agency, we witness and imagine worlds otherwise (King et al., 2020). These circuitous roots and routes offer possibilities of reckoning, repairing and re-worlding.

Keywords

• coalitional decolonization
• ecology
• walking methodologies
• critical university studies
• Caribbean diaspora