Decolonizing Spaces/Espaces decolonisants.(INTRODUCTION)

Decolonizing Spaces is a special issue of Resources for Feminist Research that confronts the longstanding utopian feminist project of seeking possibilities for breaking down barriers and dominant power structures. We conceptualized this issue through the framework of "decolonizing" in hopes of addressing not only our historical context, but also the "divide and conquer" logic of colonization. In a Canadian context, working for social and structural change must begin from an acknowledgment that we are part of a colonial culture that is significantly embedded in the social, political and economic structures of everyday life. Without the work of historicizing or "unmapping" the land (Razack, 2002, p. 128) by naming this national space as colonial, past and present, we cannot attempt to understand and develop practices to resist the multiple forms of everyday exclusions and domination that surround us. The title, Decolonizing Spaces, can thus be understood simply as an attempt to draw attention to the history of violent conquest and displacement of First Nations people in this geographical space, an effort that is deceptively simple given the constant efforts by first Anglo-British colonial agents, and then Anglo-Canadian government officials to claim what Glenn Deer calls "originary entitlement" to the nation and its land (p. 32, in Teelucksingh). To symbolically "decolonize" these "spaces" therefore often requires a number of strategies, including decolonizing knowledge by confronting the processes that recuperate and reestablish technologies of colonial power and knowledge.

We began by thinking about this issue in relation to the western imposition of binaries and the artifice of discrete categories, particularly those with an obvious spatial dimension: the segregation of private from public, the pitting of "citizen" against "foreigner," the bifurcations of local and international. Domination is premised on such absolute divisions often proclaimed as biological or cultural or both. Domination has also required the ongoing maintenance of borders--both real and imaginary. We wondered how these divisions were being addressed in the material and imagined spaces of oppositional politics. For instance, how do demands for social housing, struggles for status and citizenship, kiss-ins as responses to queer bashing, and First Nations blockades offer us not only examples of actual processes of decolonizing spaces, but the figurative terrain on which to challenge our own conceptual boundaries?

Among our desires for this issue. then, was to consider such obvious questions as what kinds of spaces constitute "decolonized" spaces? The use of space and spatial theory in this issue is not contained within one school of thought, in keeping with the complexity of how spaces are constituted. As mentioned above, "spaces" are both material and symbolic and their deconstruction can thus yield a cross-section of the workings of multiple discourses. For instance, work by human geographers, including Henri Lefebvre (1991), Edward Soja (1989, 1996), and David Harvey (1990, 1996) has encouraged theorists and researchers in numerous other disciplines to understand spatial dynamics as having a reciprocal relationship with subjectivity. Agreeing with this, Doreen Massey (1994), Linda Peake (1993), Liz Bondi (1998), Kathleen Kirby (1996), Gordon Brent Ingrain (1997) and others argue for analyses that push this approach to include gender and sexuality in examinations of spatial dynamics and social relations. Anti-racist and anti-colonial thinking has also inflected and been shaped by theorists like Kay Anderson (1991), Jane M. Jacobs (1996) and Radhika Mohanram (1999), who demonstrate not only the relationship between racialization and spatial regulation, but that segregation, gentrification and surveillance are ongoing practices of colonial projects that are profoundly territorial. And finally, as Edward Said (1994) has argued, "None of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography." And that struggle is not only about battles over land, it is also about "ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings" (p. 7).

Spatial structures and dynamics are explored here through a lens of interdisciplinarity that stems from approaching the processes of "decolonization" as a contemporary, everyday, universal problematic that is in part, spatialized. Such problematics have their roots in feminist and critical race theory. Anti-racist, anti-colonial feminist challenges have taken many forms and arisen from many vantage points. Chandra Mohanty has argued that, "... decolonization involves profound transformations of self, community and governance structures. It can only be engaged through active withdrawal of consent and resistance to structures of psychic and social domination" (2003, p. 7). Through her definition of decolonization, Mohanty makes clear that this is both a historical and self-reflexive process. Furthermore, she insists that a decolonization practice is achieved only through a self-reflexivity mobilized in the context of emancipatory collective politics. Bonita Lawrence and Ena Dua have recently engaged in this practice of self-reflexivity and challenged the instantiation of oppositional politics through their discussion in "Decolonizing Antiracism" (Social Justice, 2005). In this article Dua and Lawrence engage in a very important and difficult conversation between indigenous thought and practice and anti-racist politics. Through a discussion of identity, transnational contexts of colonization and the further entrenchment of colonial practices in North America, they cast light on a number of gaps within analyses of anti-racist politics. To name others who have informed our understanding of colonial structures and thus what we must undertake in challenging them, Andrea Smith (2005) names decolonization as a project connected to the history of sexual violence perpetrated by white settlers on the bodies of indigenous women. As mentioned above, Sherene Razack's work in Race, Space and the Law has demonstrated the dialectics of spatial and subject formation, such that decolonizing spaces brings us back to decolonizing the self. Cheryl Teelucksingh's 2006 edited collection, Claiming Space, offers numerous examples of the spatial forms that racialization takes in Canada and the oppositional responses to literal and figurative segregation. In the 2002 anthology, Colonize This! Young Women of Colour on Today's Feminism, editors Daisy Hernandez and Bushra Rehman have assembled a group of young scholars and activists who are claiming a space within feminism for anti-colonial knowledge practices. Feminist literatures have also taken up decolonization under the name of transnationalism: as a focus on migration, movement of bodies and citizenship; as attention to economic globalization; as an analytic framework for understanding the relationship between gender and the nation-state; and as community activism (see, for example, Kamala Kempadoo, Aihwa Ong, Grewal and Kaplan, Avtar Brah, Saskia Sassen). Across many of these initiatives is a recognition that their strategies have taken shape around what we think of as fluid, contradictory and the always fragmentary, partial quality of decolonizing.

The articles in this issue represent a range of sites and forms of decolonizing space. Here, decolonizing space has become a process of undoing something that exists, as well as the idea that spaces could produce or encourage decolonization, even as decolonizing is also identified in this issue as a process of self-reflexivity. "Space" and the literature that addresses it have been taken up sometimes quite differently by these authors, yet many of the same themes of domination and struggle and complexity have been repeated--of exile and belonging, decolonization as concrete and imaginative, the simultaneous specificity and transnationality of decolonizing processes, the co-existence in time and space of containment and criminalizing bodies, and transformations and reclamations of public space. These pieces remind us of ongoing tensions and possibilities in the project of decolonizing, and offer us new moments to examine matrices of power.