TY - JOUR
T1 - Walking the story of my Indo-Mauritian indentured ancestry
T2 - an arts-based inquiry into voiced resistance and conflict with reconciliation
AU - Belford, Nish
N1 - Nish Belford, Ph.D., is a lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Monash
University, Australia. Her teaching and research experience are in arts-based
research and other interdisciplinary fields. Using auto-ethnography, she has
explored issues of women of colour from diverse theoretical lenses, including ancestral history, postcoloniality, migration, acculturation, identity politics
and settlement. Her recent works examine influences of postcolonial identity,
ethnicity and education in affording privilege and disempowerment to identity negotiation in a transnational space.
PY - 2022/3
Y1 - 2022/3
N2 - Reconciliation is a contested term often associated with postcolonial discourses, contending with global histories of injustice, racial discrimination and dispos-session that affect diverse groups (slaves, indentures or Indigenous people). Reconciliation stories mainly encounter resistance when problematized by individ-ual experiences. As a woman of Indo-Mauritian indenture descent, I explore my ancestral stories from gendered dimensions: hailed by hardships, discrimination and patriarchal norms from colonialization and its legacies. I discuss my perceived subalternity and disempowerment in defining my positioning and identity. From an arts-based inquiry, I use bricolage to combine art·I/f/act·ology, evocative auto-ethnography and emotional reflexivity in framing emotion-based writing. Intersectionality as a theoretical lens situates the influences of race, culture, ethnicity, caste, gender and identity processes within my narratives. The discus-sion emphasizes a voiced resistance and conflict with reconciliation. My visual narratives display and are rooted in the listening and co-ownership of ancestral stories as mine, wherein I find voice and agency.
AB - Reconciliation is a contested term often associated with postcolonial discourses, contending with global histories of injustice, racial discrimination and dispos-session that affect diverse groups (slaves, indentures or Indigenous people). Reconciliation stories mainly encounter resistance when problematized by individ-ual experiences. As a woman of Indo-Mauritian indenture descent, I explore my ancestral stories from gendered dimensions: hailed by hardships, discrimination and patriarchal norms from colonialization and its legacies. I discuss my perceived subalternity and disempowerment in defining my positioning and identity. From an arts-based inquiry, I use bricolage to combine art·I/f/act·ology, evocative auto-ethnography and emotional reflexivity in framing emotion-based writing. Intersectionality as a theoretical lens situates the influences of race, culture, ethnicity, caste, gender and identity processes within my narratives. The discus-sion emphasizes a voiced resistance and conflict with reconciliation. My visual narratives display and are rooted in the listening and co-ownership of ancestral stories as mine, wherein I find voice and agency.
KW - Arts-based inquiry art
KW - I/f/act
KW - Ology emotional reflexivity indenture descent intersectionality reconciliation
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85126328199&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1386/eta_00080_1
DO - 10.1386/eta_00080_1
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85126328199
SN - 1743-5234
VL - 18
SP - 11
EP - 32
JO - International Journal of Education Through Art
JF - International Journal of Education Through Art
IS - 1
ER -