Paper short abstract:

In this performance-presentation, I show that in the wake of large-scale projects of death-making, feminist performance and, through it, inherited transnational feminist (anthropological) knowledge, makes space for rehearsing moments of livability, allowing us to imagine a world beyond coloniality.

Paper long abstract:

What do feminists need to dis-order, dis-organize, un-discipline in anthropology so that the moves they make as scholars are moves to holding life as precious everywhere and not moves to innocence (Tuck and Yang 2012) that treat “decolonization” as a metaphor for the optics, turning it into an unrecognizable lifeless distortion, a façade? In this presentation-performance, I creatively touch the past as a palimpsestic fresco, to tell a feminist story of livability with text and song, as I ethnographically listen to some mothers (and speculatively to others) who lost children to wars. Drawing on embodied feminist praxis, I create affective resonances between the mothers, the ethnographer, and the listener to touch and feel the (un)familiar people in (un)familiar places deeply and with care as I rehearse and collage a livable life from what’s left, to see and feel anew, oriented toward sustaining life, without losing sight of any neocolonial ideological violence across nation-state borders. Weaving together ethnographic knowledge and feminist performance, I enliven all the senses through which to rehearse a more livable life (Gilmore 2023), since just like death-making projects, such as colonization, life-making projects, too, are multisensory. Through this performance, then, I show that in the wake of complex and interwoven large-scale projects of death-making, feminist performance and, through it, inherited transnational feminist knowledge, anthropological and otherwise, makes space for rehearsing and accumulating moments of livability which will allow us to imagine and enact a more livable world beyond coloniality.