The Nuzhat al-mushtāq fi’khtirāq al-āfāq, by Muhammad al-Idrisi, circa 1154 CE.

Image source: The Decolonial Atlas-November 13, 2014

SWANA Collective Vision

Our collective vision is rooted in our collective liberation as racialized women, our vision is grounded in principles of feminist decolonial/anticolonial praxes and struggles. In line with this understanding, we envision this collective to uplift the voices of the people of the global majority, particularly those with a feminist agenda and are working towards a liberatory future in the SWANA region.

We acknowledge and value the works of Black and Indigenous feminisms in imagining alternative futurities and teaching us the importance of these alternatives to our collective emancipatory agenda. However, in inspiration, we are cautious of cooptation, and as such our vision must uphold that we honor and cite Black and Indigenous feminists who are leading the way for collective liberation struggles.

The unique experiences and intersecting identities of women of color, Black and Indigenous women, and their respective unique liberation struggles, do not align with those of mainstream liberal feminism. Our vision is to reach a much larger goal of ensuring that marginalized voices do not fall through the cracks. Our work would not be possible without feminist thought, particularly Black, Indigenous, and the inspiring but often marginalized feminisms of the Global South.

Our work is to also address and define how we understand feminist decolonial/anti-colonial struggles. We know that decolonization is not a metaphor, decolonization is rooted in Indigenous feminist thought and we know that is is a much larger project of liberation. As a project, settler colonialism has been ongoing for thousands of years on Turtle Island and hundreds of years in the SWANA region, and decolonization is not simply a tool; rather, it is an ongoing project of resisting, unsettling, and reclaiming.