Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

Sara Catherine Motta (University of Newcastle), Sara Catherine Motta is a mother, critical theorist, and
popular educator who currently works in the Discipline of Politics at the University of Newcastle, NSW
Australia. At present she is co-facilitating a number of activist-scholar projects including “La Politica de la
Maternidad (The Politics of Motherhood)” with militant mothers and grandmothers in Colombia, Brazil and
Australia and “Decolonising Domestic Violence” with survivors and critical practitioners in Australia and
Colombia. She has published in many academic and activist outlets, including a radical feminist column
Beautiful Transgressions – and Interface (of which she is also founding editor and currently Latin American
Editor). Her most recent book is Constructing 21st Century Socialism in Latin America: The Role of Radical
Education with Mike Cole (Palgrave Macmillan Press). She is currently writing a decolonial feminist nonmanifesto
of liberation, Liminal Subjects: Weaving (our) Liberation, and visioning (with others) the creation
of a political school and community in Newcastle. She is contactable at: sara.c.motta@newcastle.edu.au.
Abstract:
“The Coloniality of Knowing: From Identity Politics to a Politics of Integral Liberation”
This intervention develops a critique of current Marxist debate that condemns politics which begin
from the placed-based experiences of multiple oppressions by conflating it with a politics of
identity. Mark Fisher for example in “Exiting the Vampire Castle” equates this kind of politics with
“sour faced moralism” which condemns us to be “forever defined in the terms set by dominant
power, crippled by self-consciousness and isolated by a logic of solipsism”. From his arguments
such a politics can only ever do the work of capitalist hegemony and recuperate potential radical
politics into a liberal and individualistic moralism which disarticulates popular revolutionary
subjectivities and collectivities. I speak back to this (mis) representation of the possibilities of
politics which begin from such experiences through the work of decolonial feminist praxis emerging
from racialised subaltern women in Latin America. I demonstrate how their praxis enables us to
provincialise the Eurocentric revolutionary subject assumed in extant critique, and demonstrate
how its grounds of being are premised on the denial and dehumanization of the raced and
feminized “other”. I then move to conceptualise a subject and practice of liberation which speaks
from the categories used to name us as a means of creating the grounds of possibility for the return
of the revolutionary affirmative and a multiple revolutionary politics of the 21st Century.
Kado Muir (Independent Scholar), Dr Kado Muir is an artist, a cultural authority and a modern
entrepreneur. He runs an “infoprenuer” business supported by a young and talented team specialising in
Aboriginal art, culture and engagement. He is also an anthropologist and political activist, a scholar and
language expert. As a Ngalia man from the Western Desert of Australia, he has directly confronted the
forces that would create insecurity for Indigenous peoples. His cultural outputs are diverse and include the
books Learn Some Ngalia: You can learn to speak, read and write Ngalia (Createspace, 2014); and The Little
Mongrel: A Weekend Adventure in the Australian Outback (Createspace 2010).
Abstract:
“Imagine nation: the mystery of dusty windscreens and foggy mirrors”
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