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MY JOB IS TO PERFORM RESEARCH AND TEACH Courses about women's history in the United States. Most of the archival evidence that underpins my job addresses the state explicitly and is preserved by its institutions. For example, the myriad national associations that are staples of textbook treatments of women's social movements are easily discoverable via library and archival searches. The word anti-imperialism often appears in archives -and textbooks -since this stance, typically directed at the legal apparatus of empire, leaves a particular documentary record. Given the statist suppositions of modern history, though, one is unlikely to find collections, boxes, folders, or documents labeled postcolonial or decolonial or subaltern.1 Fortunately, two generations of feminist scholars have investigated resistant practices, affiliations, and creative work by women that are not conventionally archived or even archive-able. In exploring the ways that women's bodies and domestic arrangements function as boundary markers of nation and empire, they have pointed out the limits of colonial archives.2 As Maria Lugones incisively states, categories such as "black" and "woman," even when read intersectionally, "show us the absence of black women rather than their presence" in the archive and beyond.3
One of the categories to emerge from this work, the decolonial, can be especially helpful for naming resistant practices, affiliations, and creative work by women that are not conventionally archived or even archivable. As both a descriptor and reading practice, the word decolonial makes discursive space for behaviors, social groupings, and affiliations by women that are resistant to imperial state-making and empire-building but that might be initially apprehended as "silence" or "absence." Instead of assuming the documentary format as petitions or public assemblies addressing a government so favored by textbook history, decolonial moves and institutions often take gestural forms as displacement, self-concealment, or even sacrificial death.4 If the postcolonial describes a context of dispersed and uneven legacies of imperial rule, the decolonial can evoke a set of diffuse, non-self-announcing practices of bodily, spiritual, and cultural recuperation rather than an officially oppositional ideology, as in a counternationalism. A decolonial lens thus opens up questions of subalternization by disturbing neat binaries such as colonizer/colonized, master/slave and citizen/alien, binaries that usually map onto a restrictive black/white or white/non-white social imaginary in the United States.
As kindred processes of...