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Freedom is celebrated as the definitive ideal of modern western civilization. Yet in western thought and practice, freedom has been defined through opposition to the unfreedom of most of the world's people. Allison Weir draws on Indigenous political theories and practices of decolonization in dialogue with western theories, to reconstruct a tradition of relational freedom as a distinctive
political conception of freedom: a radically democratic mode of engagement and participation in social and political relations with an infinite range of strange and diverse beings perceived as free agents in interdependent relations in a shared world.
List of contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Decolonizing Freedom
- Chapter 1. Noninterference, Nondomination, and Colonial Unknowing: Mis-Encounters with Indigenous Relational Freedom
- Chapter 2. For Love of the World: Relational Freedom as Love of Land
- Chapter 3. Dancing Resistance, Recreating the World: Philoxenic Relational Freedom
- Excursus: Freedom and Love: A Speculative Genealogy
- Chapter 4. Colonial Unknowing and Heterogeneous Relationalities: Alternative Formations of Power, Knowledge, and Freedom
- Chapter 5. Indigenous Feminisms and Relational Rights
- Conclusion: Critical Theory and the Spirit of Freedom
- References
- Index
About the author
Allison Weir is a Canadian social and political philosopher, a Faculty Associate in the Centre for Ethics at the University of Toronto, and a Fellow of the Centre for Humanities and Social Change at the Humboldt University in Berlin. She co-founded the Institute for Social Justice in Sydney, Australia, where she was Research Professor and Director of the Doctoral Program in Social Political Thought, and was previously Associate Professor of Philosophy and Gender Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. She is the author of Identities and Freedom and Sacrificial Logics: Feminist Theory and the Critique of Identity.
Summary
Freedom is celebrated as the definitive ideal of modern western civilization. Yet in western thought and practice, the freedom of some has typically been defined through opposition to the unfreedom of others. These exclusions are not secondary to a prior concept of freedom but are constitutive exclusions that have shaped the ways in which western theorists define what freedom is.
Allison Weir draws on Indigenous political philosophies and practices of decolonization grounded in conceptions of relationality and resurgence, in dialogue with western philosophies, to reconstruct a tradition of relational freedom as a distinctive political conception of freedom: a radically democratic mode of engagement and participation in social and political relations with an infinite range of strange and diverse beings perceived as free agents in interdependent relations in a shared world.
Through the work of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, John Borrows, Glen Coulthard, Audra Simpson, Rauna Kuokkanen, Joanne Barker, Jodi Byrd, James Tully, and many others, this book traces a tradition of colonial unknowing in western conceptions of freedom from Hobbes through republican and critical theories, and explores a countertradition of relations between freedom and collective love, exemplified in Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's love of land and Hannah Arendt's love of the world. It considers Indigenous modes of world-creation as performative, affective, embodied strategies of democratic life, skilled modes of addressing diversity and conflict, fear and hostility, in practices of freedom that embrace polycentric knowledges and rooted dynamisms, in contexts of complexity and constant change. Weir argues that Indigenous women's struggles to belong to communities and participate in governance have engendered new theories of relational rights that combine politics of rights and resurgence, and calls for a coalitional politics guided by queer and feminist Indigenous models of transformative resurgence. Finally, Weir proposes an approach to critical theory as a practice of self-transformation through openness to the other, oriented toward relational freedom.
