This project emerges as a response to frustrations with colonial cis-masculinist approaches to cinema and education. With an effort to honor alternative spaces and practices that detangle the colonial threads of cinematic practice, this syllabus cites various authors, cinematic practitioners, and artists who have shaped/are shaped by decolonial feminist praxis. Decolonial feminist praxis is defined here as one that is committed to the process of untethering from strictly linear, colonial, capitalist, cis-masculinist, and extractive forms of knowledge production. Decoloniality is not a metaphorical term. It is one rooted in action. 

The works cited in this syllabus are inspired by Afro-descended and indigenous cosmovisions of Abya Yala (Guna word for Latin America). They engage the lived realities of racialized women throughout the region and make visible the ways the oppression on the basis of race, class, gender, and sexuality are firmly intertwined. Amid the backdrop of neoliberal governments, foreign intervention from global north powers, megaprojects, and resource extraction, the region faces one of the highest rates of feminicide and violence against environmental activists, many of whom are black and indigenous women. While the tumultous sociopolitical realities of Abya Yala often take center stage, it’s important to note that the region also holds one of the richest histories of collective resistance movements in the world. As black and indigenous feminist movements make clear, colonial intrusion is one bound with violence against racialized women and their ancestral lands, community, and practices. It requires measured and sustained resistance from coalitional groups comitted to the process of detangling capitalism, imperialism, and patriarchy. The process of decolonial feminist praxis is then not only committed to liberatory forms of consciousness raising, but most importantly to the protection and reclaiming of resources and territory.

From a dance ritual spell warding off US imperialism in present-day Puerto Rico, to a poetic visual eulogy for murdered women in rural Mexico, to a community prayer to Yemaya to bring relief to water scarcity in Cuba to a cautionary tale against environmental devastation by forest spirit Kaapora in Brazil, the films cited in this syllabus engage ritual as a way of processing legacies of coloniality and reclaiming the camera as a tool of liberation. Through storytelling, auto-ethnography, collage, and weaving to name a few, these cinematic rituals detangle dominant approaches to filmmaking, and by extension, knowledge production. They offer alternative aesthetic practices and visual cultures rooted in ancestral practices.

The syllabus is in open access format so as to bypass corporate paywalls and barriers to knowledge that often privilege the elite within the academic and cultural sectors. As a participant, you are invited not only to engage with the texts and films cited here, but to also engage with yourself, your body, heart, mind, and spirit as a site of knowledge production. May this syllabus inspire dialogue and action beyond the confines of academia, this website, and your screen.

Read more in: “Cinema & Ritual: Decolonial Feminist Approaches to Image-Making in the Americas and the Caribbean“