Decolonial Feminist Research

Jeong-eun Rhee is Professor of Education, Long Island University, USA. She is the co-editor of Promiscuous Feminist Methodologies in Education: Engaging Research Beyond Gender (Routledge, 2014).

With every page of this book, I held my breath and asked myself: How is it possible for an author to both challenge and move me so deeply as she speaks of memory, relationship, connections, and rememory? Rhee’s breathtakingly brilliant work defies genre and categorization. It moves gracefully and complexly, whispering incantations of feminist of color theory, biography, fiction, and memory studies. It is a multilayered inquiry that very deftly and purposefully helps us unlearn, remake and connect our minds one to another, our bodies and spirits across differences, and our ways of engaging relations and generations of hope, fears and struggles. This book is an intimate opening into the power and possibility of women of color feminist knowledge that lays bare the vulnerabilities, inabilities and difficult work of (re)search that, in its meanderings, remains unattached to a particular outcome. In this way, it heals all who engage it in the often-tumultuous journey toward visibility, connection and justice. Rhee’s words inspire. Her stories conjure. Her work opens us up, allows us to feel the spirit of theory in our flesh, bones and lives. We would do well to accept Rhee’s invitation to explore what continues to haunt and make demands in/on our lives, not as something to be avoided or feared, but as generative spaces of inner sight and wisdom. This magnificent and necessary book points the way—Cynthia B. Dillard, Ph.D. (Nana Mansa II of Mpeasem, Ghana), Mary Frances Early Professor in Teacher Education, University of Georgia Rhee’s embodied, poetic and theoretically rich work compels its readers to engage across generations of shared oppressions, histories of injustice, and subjugated knowledges of hope and transformation. Intertwining time and space, Rhee pursues her mother’s rememories as a decolonial feminist project that enlivens connections to m/others of color—past, present and future—and as a methodology that challenges modern, colonialist ways of knowing and being. This beautifully written book itself performs inquiry as a method of vast possibilities and imagination—Sofia A. Villenas, Ph.D. President, Council on Anthropology & Education of the American Anthropological Association, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, Cornell UniversityHow do we not turn our backs on what we have been trained to desire not to see? Jeong-eun Rhee works through matrilineal rememories and rememory-ing to invite readers to feel and imagine beyond the narrow confines of linear time and the individual self. Her work creates a space of generative dis-illusionment with the universalization of the modern onto-epistemology that surrounds us and beautifully illustrates how educational research can bridge academic and auto-biographical spheres—Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Race, Inequalities and Global Change at the University of British Columbia.

• Introduction: Writing Mothers’ Rememory: Connectivity as/of Self 1. Haunting Rememory of Mothers: Decolonial Feminist Methodology 2. Fiction Theory: Beloved and Dictee as M/others’ Rememories 3. My Mother’s Feminism: Y/Our Rememory 4. Research as Daughterly Work/Life for Healing and Connectivity. Codas. Appendix. References