Sharlene Mollett

Critical feminist reflexivity and the politics of whiteness in the ‘field’

Feminist geographic commonsense suggests that power shapes knowledge production, prompting the long-standing reflexive turn. Yet, often such reflexivity fixes racial power and elides more nuanced operations of difference – moves feminist scholars have, in fact, long problematized. To counter this, we revisit Kobayashis (1994) ‘Coloring the Field’ [‘Coloring the Field: Gender, “Race”, and the Politics of Fieldwork,’ Professional Geographer 46 (1): 73–90]. Twenty years on, and grounded in our fieldwork in South Sudan and Honduras, we highlight how colonial and gender ideologies are interwoven through emotion. Decentering a concern with guilt, we focus on the way whiteness may inspire awe while scholars of color evoke disdain among participants. Conversely, bodies associated with colonizing pasts or presents can prompt suspicion, an emotive reaction to whiteness not always fixed to white bodies. These feelings have significant repercussions for the authority, legitimacy, and access afforded to researchers. Our efforts thus disrupt notions that we, as researchers, always wield power over our participants. Instead we argue that the positioning of ‘subjects of color’ in the global south, racially and in their relationships with us, is historically produced and socioculturally and geographically contingent. Rethinking the field in this way, as a site of messy, affective, and contingent racialized power, demonstrates the insights offered by bringing together feminist postcolonial and emotional geographies.

Mapping Deception: The Politics of Mapping Miskito and Garifuna Space in Honduras

In Latin America, indigenous and Afro-descendant land movements find traction in participatory mapping projects. The success of these projects is measured in a variety of ways: from the abatement of land conflicts to the employment of these maps in winning state-sanctioned ownership “rights.” Although worthy of celebration, such “countermapping” projects (Peluso 1995), often exemplified by the practice of binding a particular culture (or ethnicity) to a particular space, might arouse contradictory outcomes. Drawing from ethnographic interviews with Miskito and Garifuna communities on the Honduran Atlantic coast, this article reflects on the Consensus Mapping of Shared Boundaries Project (CMSBP), an indigenous countermapping initiative inside the Honduran Mosquitia. In this work I argue that racial power and racialized processes constrain the emancipatory possibilities of countermapping in multiple ways. Such power and processes legitimate the devaluation of subaltern land claims and, in Honduras, contribute to the legitimacy of ladino incursions inside Miskito and Garifuna space.

Está listo (Are you ready)? Gender, race and land registration in the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve

Geographers and political ecologists are paying increased attention to the ways in which conservation policies disrupt indigenous customary tenure arrangements. However, much less attention is given to the particular ways protected area management shapes natural resource access for indigenous women. With this in mind, this article examines how a recently proposed state land project in Honduras, Catastro y Regularización, requires that Miskito residents individuate collective family lands in the interests of ‘sustainable development’ and ‘biodiversity protection’. In the debates that followed the projects announcement, Miskito women feared that such measures would erase their customary access to family lands. As the states project seeks to re-order Reserve land, intra-Miskito struggles intensified among villagers. Such struggles are not only gendered but are shaped by longstanding processes of racialization in Honduras and the Mosquitia region. Drawing upon ethnographic research, I argue that Miskito womens subjectivity and rights to customary family holdings are informed by their ability to make ‘patriarchal bargains’ with Miskito men inside the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve. Such findings suggest that scholars and policy makers continue to reflect on the ways global conservation and sustainable development practices may undermine indigenous customary tenure securities, whether intentionally or not.

Racial narratives: Miskito and colono land struggles in the Honduran Mosquitia

This article examines the multiple ways race and racialized processes are embedded in Miskito Indian and ladino colono land struggles in Honduras. In the context of more than 30 years of state refusals to formalize the boundaries of Miskito ancestral territories, this article interrogates the ways in which the state accommodates ladino colono encroachments inside Miskito space. State and colono challenges to Miskito customary claims echo early post-colonial narratives of integration under the Civilization Program. Drawing from ethnographic accounts, this article illuminates how meanings and practices are intertwined in the way land use production and racial hierarchies are mutually constituted. Thus, I argue that Miskito, state and colono narratives of land struggle draw on, contest and reinvigorate a longstanding state nationalist project of ‘whitening’ where racial imaginaries are encoded in environmental arrangements and assessed through ascendant conceptions of suitable and unsuitable land use practices.

Irreconcilable differences? A postcolonial intersectional reading of gender, development and Human Rights in Latin America

Abstract In 2015, the United Nations set in motion the International Decade for People of African Descent (2015–2024). While this mandate provides much to celebrate, its reliance on universal and human rights narratives collides against the reality of a persistent inferiorization of Afro-descendant communities as less-than-human. The paradoxical nature of human rights discourses notwithstanding, Afro-descendant women (ADW) leaders in Latin America embrace the opportunity provided by the UN Decade, to rethink human rights discourses and Afro-descendant inclusion in development practice. I draw insight in this article from black feminist and postcolonial thinking to contribute to a growing engagement with the concept of intersectionality in the subfield of feminist political ecology. Employing the concept of postcolonial intersectionality, I reflect on how ADW operationalize particular knowledges and their racialized gendered subjectivities to challenge regional imaginaries that limit livelihoods, access to natural resources and that cast Afro-descendants outside humanity. I connect such organized activism to that of quiet, every day and largely unrecognized acts of resistance among Afro-Antillean women situated in the growing residential tourism enclave along Panama’s Atlantic coast, in a place known as ‘Bocas’. This article draws from ethnographic and historical data collection and is supplemented with news articles, activist scholarship, government documents and secondary resources. Together, I center the intersectional logics of power in Bocas and argue that ADW lead a material and symbolic process of place-making, one that prioritizes life while struggling over carnal, gendered and racialized dispossession and the right to be recognized as human.

“Displaced futures”: indigeneity, land struggle, and mothering in Honduras

This paper draws from the insights of feminist political ecology and ethnographic fieldwork in the coastal Miskito communities of the Honduran Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve. In this paper, I highlight how Miskito matriarchal land organization is challenged by both the state and Miskito men. Through a reflection of multi-scaled narratives, I argue that Miskito women “work” to counter entrenched patriarchal assumptions and racialized state development practices that deny womens labor in agriculture and undermine their means “to mother.”

Celebrating Critical Geographies of Latin America: Inspired by an NFL Quarterback

Normally, I have no idea when the NFL football season begins. It seems to simply appear as summer turns to autumn. In 2016, however, the start of the NFL season could not go unnoticed, nor could San Francisco 49ers quarterback, Colin Kaepernick. For those who managed to miss this story, Kaepernick’s refusal to stand for the national anthem during a pre-game moment of military appreciation made international headlines. At the time, his one-man protest was as an act of civil disobedience in the face of a long and recent history of police brutality and racial oppression in the United States.1 As Kaepernick insisted, “I’m not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color...there are bodies in the street and people [police officers] getting paid leave and getting away with murder” (NFL.com 2016). Kaepernick’s protest reveals someone who recognizes that racism (and injustices more generally) will not simply disappear by looking away. It is in this vein that I welcome the invitation to reflect on what a critical turn, a move towards more “critical and progressive scholarship,” might look like in the Journal of Latin American Geography (JLAG) (Gaffney et al. 2016: 1). Of course, this is not the first time in recent memory that critical geographers working in the region have sought to reflect on what it means to be “critical.” These efforts have popped up as both special issues and conference presentations since at least 2005 (Sundberg 2005; Kingsbury and Sletto 2005). Also we must acknowledge that there exists a robust mini-subfield of critical Latin Americanists who have made important contributions on various topics including migration and inequality, gentrification, race and urban space, women’s environmental knowledges, indigenous mapping, the politics of biodiversity conservation, extraction, land titling, labour injustice and femicide to name a few (Wainwright 2008; Swanson 2010; Werner 2011; Finn 2012; Mollett 2013; Ojeda 2013; Wright 2014; Hanson 2015; Bastia 2015; Bryan 2015). What is different now, however, is that the new editorial team is calling upon scholars, much like those cited above, to populate the journal with scholarship that offers “a conceptually pluralistic and geographically extensive understanding of Latin America” and research that “explicitly challenges the injustices of this notoriously unequal

Historical geographies of, and for, the present

While many human geographers maintain a long-standing interest in historical analysis, we believe that there is a need to more explicitly examine the theories, methods, and, ultimately, the stakes of such work. For this forum, we invited five geographers to reflect on their own approach to historical analysis and its implications for scholarly and political debates in the present. These commentaries suggest that, at its best, historical analysis is not just about the past; it is also crucial for critical human geographers’ efforts to understand, and intervene in, the present. Thus, we argue for a rejuvenation and extension of approaches to historical-geographical scholarship which are inspired by direct engagement with problems in the present and intend to do something about them.