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Decolonizing Freedom Summary

Decolonizing Freedom by Allison Weir (Faculty Associate, Centre for Ethics, Faculty Associate, Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto)

Freedom is celebrated as the definitive ideal of modern western civilization. Yet in western thought and practice, the freedom of some has typically been defined through opposition to the unfreedom of others. These exclusions are not secondary to a prior concept of freedom but are constitutive exclusions that have shaped the ways in which western theorists define what freedom is. Allison Weir draws on Indigenous political philosophies and practices of decolonization grounded in conceptions of relationality and resurgence, in dialogue with western philosophies, to reconstruct a tradition of relational freedom as a distinctive political conception of freedom: a radically democratic mode of engagement and participation in social and political relations with an infinite range of strange and diverse beings perceived as free agents in interdependent relations in a shared world. Through the work of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, John Borrows, Glen Coulthard, Audra Simpson, Rauna Kuokkanen, Joanne Barker, Jodi Byrd, James Tully, and many others, this book traces a tradition of colonial unknowing in western conceptions of freedom from Hobbes through republican and critical theories, and explores a countertradition of relations between freedom and collective love, exemplified in Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's love of land and Hannah Arendt's love of the world. It considers Indigenous modes of world-creation as performative, affective, embodied strategies of democratic life, skilled modes of addressing diversity and conflict, fear and hostility, in practices of freedom that embrace polycentric knowledges and rooted dynamisms, in contexts of complexity and constant change. Weir argues that Indigenous women's struggles to belong to communities and participate in governance have engendered new theories of relational rights that combine politics of rights and resurgence, and calls for a coalitional politics guided by queer and feminist Indigenous models of transformative resurgence. Finally, Weir proposes an approach to critical theory as a practice of self-transformation through openness to the other, oriented toward relational freedom.

About Allison Weir (Faculty Associate, Centre for Ethics, Faculty Associate, Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto)

Allison Weir is a Canadian social and political philosopher, a Faculty Associate in the Centre for Ethics at the University of Toronto, and a Fellow of the Centre for Humanities and Social Change at the Humboldt University in Berlin. She co-founded the Institute for Social Justice in Sydney, Australia, where she was Research Professor and Director of the Doctoral Program in Social Political Thought, and was previously Associate Professor of Philosophy and Gender Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. She is the author of Identities and Freedom and Sacrificial Logics: Feminist Theory and the Critique of Identity.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction: Decolonizing Freedom Chapter 1. Noninterference, Nondomination, and Colonial Unknowing: Mis-Encounters with Indigenous Relational Freedom Chapter 2. For Love of the World: Relational Freedom as Love of Land Chapter 3. Dancing Resistance, Recreating the World: Philoxenic Relational Freedom Excursus: Freedom and Love: A Speculative Genealogy Chapter 4. Colonial Unknowing and Heterogeneous Relationalities: Alternative Formations of Power, Knowledge, and Freedom Chapter 5. Indigenous Feminisms and Relational Rights Conclusion: Critical Theory and the Spirit of Freedom References Index

Additional information

NGR9780197507957
9780197507957
0197507956
Decolonizing Freedom by Allison Weir (Faculty Associate, Centre for Ethics, Faculty Associate, Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto)
New
Paperback
Oxford University Press Inc
2024-08-29
312
N/A
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