Catherine E. Walsh’s Rising Up, Living On: Re-Existences, Sowings, and Decolonial Cracks (Duke UP, 2023) is, on the one hand, a report on the contemporary global situation through the lens of decolonial theory and, on the other hand, a re-thinking of how to think decolonial thought through theorizing what could bloom from its cracks and fissures. It is also a metadecolonial performance through the mixture of memoir, letters to ancestors, and practices of, in effect, saying their name, with crucial attention to saying “her” name, as the importance of women’s contributions come to the fore. It is thus at the intersection of feminist theory along with decolonial and many other Global Southern theoretical currents.
Walsh’s approach includes epistolic theorizing. This aspect also takes the form of an ongoing walk or journey in which ancestors and present-day interlocutors come forth in pedagogies of listening, sharing, and, thus, learning.
In addition to coloniality and decoloniality, varieties of nuanced concepts come to the fore, such as the contemporary use of “(re)existence” /”re-existence,” “de-existence,” and distinctions such as “femicide” and “feminicide,” “learning to unlearn in order to relearn [perhaps also actually learn?].”
The conceptual metaphor, which through its unfolding in the text becomes allegorical, is the life-conditioned possibility of “cracks.” The monumental aspects of stones, walls, covered-over organic life with concrete, serve as metaphors of coloniality with decoloniality as the crack through which life could take root and blossom.
A striking feature of the text is its transdisciplinarity. This is a decolonial practice, since each disciplinary resource is brought in conversation with others ranging from critical pedagogy to political economy.
The underlying analysis of the erosion of nation-states under waves of global corporations and the death projects they issue in their fantasies of profits without human beings are examples, but there are also philosophical, literary, sociological, and metatextual critical reflection through which the project of decoloniality is put forth in pressing questions of life-giving purpose.
The text culminates in an urgent cry for re-existence. If one bears in mind that “existence” means not only to emerge but also, as in the French use, to live, the significance of flowers growing out of cracks comes full circle.
The virtues of Rising Up, Living On are many. First, it is beautifully written with prose that flow like refreshing water at the edge of a desert. This makes sense, since an ongoing critical concern in the text is dehumanization. Highly humanistic, connecting forms of writing evoke and invoke Walsh’s thesis.
Second, there are so many gems from thought across the Global South. As the text begins reflectively in the United States with the author’s realization of settler colonialism being hidden in plain sight, the journeys that follow facilitate the reader joining her along with those she reads, re-reads, and knows into the reality beneath the colonial veils of denial. These gems are not only the rich array of theoretical insights, stories of resistance in the face of despair, and artistic representations, but also portraits of different ways to live thought and gender. I love, for example, the letter on Paulo Freire crying. I know of at least three other philosophers who publicly cried—Frantz Fanon, William R. Jones, and myself, although I’m sure others would offer testimony.
The conversations with so many from Rita Segato to Sylvia Marcos to Sylvia Wynter advance powerful ways of rethinking questions of what it means to be human in motion. There is an openness to each chapter, which makes sense with the culminating, albeit not (and correctly so) linear, argument.
I’m not a fan of the concept of “unlearning,” except when it is offered as a nuanced rethinking of the concept of habitus. In other words, as working at discarding but not forgetting harmful behaviors, practices, rules, and so forth. Interestingly enough, Walsh’s career began through critical pedagogy, and her ideas as an educator continue. “Learning,” after all, has roots in ancient Germanic and Greek words for “track,” which makes the German infinitive Lernen mean, in effect, to follow or find the track. Think of the allegorical connections to Walsh’s argument about finding the crack in systems through which different paths or possibilities grow.
An achievement of this book is the small set of extraordinary texts with which it would be appropriate to compare it, at least in the English language. The reason I say this is because although it could be placed among decolonial theoretical texts, its mode of presentation and metatheoretical challenges are structurally more within the Africana and Indigenous forms of inscriptive unshackling. By this, I mean writings such as Anna Julia Cooper’s A Voice from the South, W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Frantz Fanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs (1952), and Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987). But—crucially—it achieves this without imitation. This is Catherine Walsh’s voice throughout.
As Walsh is a major thinker in her own right, the text should attract not only readers interested in decolonial thought but also, like Walsh, joining her on her journey to learn and unlearn from and with her as well.
Lewis Gordon
Lewis R. Gordon is Chairperson of the Awards Committee of the Caribbean Philosophical Association and Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Global Affairs and Head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut. He is also Honorary President of the Global Center for Advanced Studies and Distinguished Scholar at The Most Honourable PJ Patterson Centre for Africa-Caribbean Advocacy at The University of the West Indies, Mona. He is the author of many books, including, most recently, Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization (Routledge, 2021); Fear of Black Consciousness (Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the USA, and Penguin-UK 2022); Black Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge: Writings of Lewis R. Gordon, edited by Rozena Maart and Sayan Dey (Bloomsbury, 2023); and “Not Bad for an N—, No?”/ «Pas mal pour un N—, n'est-ce pas? » (Daraja Press, 2023).
