Fellow 2021-2022 YUDERKYS ESPINOSA MIÑOSO
Term: 10/2021 – 07/2022
Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso is a writer, researcher, professor and activist of Afro-Dominican origin, she is part of the Latin American Group of Studies, Education and Feminist Action (GLEFAS). She earned a BA in psychology, and studied an MA in social sciences and education at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences in Argentina, and a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Buenos Aires. However, most of her education has been self-taught.
Through her work, she explains the necessity of adopting a decolonial feminist perspective by reflecting on and confronting the hegemonic, Eurocentric, racist and classist perspectives that are intertwined in the feminist movement. As a PhD student in Philosophy from the University of Buenos Aires, she developed a "critique of the coloniality of feminist reason in Latin America".
She has become one of the fundamental referents of decolonial feminism in Abya Yala.
Her anti-racist and decolonial essays on feminism contribute to international discussion.
She is the author of many articles and editor books on decolonial feminism, such as “Ethnocentrism and Colonialism in Latin American Feminisms” (2009); “Weaving Other Modes: Feminism, Epistemology and decolonial Bets in Abya Yala” (2014), ”Toward a Construction of the History of a (Dis)encounter: The Feminist Reason and the Antiracist and Decolonial Agency in Abya Yala” (2018), “The Future Already Was: A Critique of the Idea of Progress in the Sex-gendered and Queer Identitarian Liberation Narratives in Abya Yala” (2017), “Why Decolonial Feminism is Necessary: Differentiation, Co-constitutive Domination of Western Modernity and the End of Identity Politics.” (2017), “Decolonial Feminism: New Theoretical and Methodological Contributions to More than One Decade” (2020), among others.
She is currently working on the compilation "Decolonial Feminism in Abya Yala: Contributions and Challenges", Edited with María Lugones, and Nelson Maldonado-Torres (Under Editorial Global Critical Caribbean Thought). Her works are currently being translated into English, German, French, Italian, Slovene, and Portuguese.
INTERVIEW WITH CAPAS FELLOW YUDERKIS ESPINOSA
A Never-Ending Historicity: The Antifuturist Discourses of Abya Yala and their Confrontation with the Finite Time of Western Modernity.
In opposition to the dominant modern and imperialist narrative, I counterpose narratives of native peoples of Abya Yala and Afro-descendants in this territory who have been systematically denied and silenced by modern-colonial reason. The research project proposes a survey of the discourses that question, confront and try to stop the advance of modernity as a program for the future; as the future for all existing societies. The project will undertake a mapping of the discourses emitted by communities of the world of life in relation that in Abya Yala deny modernity as a “way out” and oppose the idea of the future “as a way forward” and as a "break with tradition". It is about highlighting other narratives that confront this idea of modernity as the only destiny and, at the same time, as the end (in its double sense) of humanity and that, on the contrary, propose the “past” as a horizon and principle of life. The project is broad, but in principle, it aims at studying five potentially relevant discourses: 1) the antifuturism of the Nativo-Canadian movement; 2) the Afrofuturism of the United States; 3) the Mayan communities that state that "the future already was"; and 4) the oral history of Caribbean Maroonism.