Abstract
Emancipatory social movement solidarities are prefigurative associations. While pursuing broad-based social transformations, solidaristic agents attempt to model—in an incomplete and provisional way—the social relations they wish to bring into existence. Existing structures of domination, deep-set and overlapping as they are, pose an abiding challenge to the prefiguration of just relations, however. This article considers the challenge of prefiguration by developing a diachronic, goal-oriented, and epistemic account of solidarity. The author argues that solidarity is a collaborative process whereby agents prefigure relationships of nondomination while working together to reach shared understandings about the political task at hand. The author examines two epistemologies that have not been traditionally connected to philosophical discussions of solidarity, philosophical hermeneutics and creolization, to elaborate the account. While both frameworks enable an understanding of solidarity as a properly transformative relation, creolization illuminates the possibilities and difficulties of collaborating under conditions of domination.
Solidarity is a transformative relation. Straightforwardly, the kind of solidarity we encounter within and across emancipatory social movements is conducive to broad-based social transformations. As Robin Zheng has recently argued, solidarity is “the collective ability of otherwise powerless people to organize themselves for transformative social change.”1 This kind of solidarity is also transformative in a prior, constitutive sense. It involves not only the pursuit of some just end but also an attempt to realize justice in the means to that end. The principal means to realize justice are the relationships agents build, here and now, in the path toward future change. Thus, we can recognize solidarity as a prefigurative association in which participants attempt to model—in an incomplete, provisional, even experimental way—the social relations they desire to bring into existence, whether locally, nationally, or even at a global scale. By building strong relationships based on care, trust, respect, and the like, we try out more just ways of relating to each other, even while the conditions needed to properly sustain and reproduce such relationships do not (yet) exist. Put otherwise: through solidarity, we demonstrate to each other that the transformation we seek is already underway.
But prefiguring emancipatory relationships within deep-set and overlapping contexts of domination is a difficult pursuit. Asymmetric power threatens to reassert itself within transformative projects and undermine the collective efforts needed to bring about change. How should we approach the hard work of building solidarities in light of this abiding challenge? In this article, I argue for a diachronic, goal-oriented, and epistemic account of political solidarity, according to which participants unite based on certain shared understandings and a shared commitment to emancipatory social transformation. This account prompts a reframing of the challenge of prefiguration in terms of what I call collaboration: the dual processes of epistemic convergence (i.e., of arriving at the requisite shared understandings) and prefiguring nondomination. My principal aim in this article is to descriptively model collaboration with the end of better understanding solidarity.
After presenting the collaborative account of solidarity in section 1, I turn to two theories of knowledge that have not been traditionally connected to philosophical discussions of political solidarity: hermeneutics and creolization. As I demonstrate, this turn is especially fruitful for any attempt to understand solidarity as a properly transformative relation. One of the premier Continental approaches to articulating the conditions for intersubjective knowledge production, as well as the process of its unfolding, the obstacles to it, and its effects, is Hans-Georg Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics. In section 2, I propose that Gadamer's theory offers a general schema for epistemic convergence that applies to solidarity. Its open-ended and participant-dependent conception of understanding, conceived as a transformative experience, suits solidarity well. Unsurprisingly, however, hermeneutics neglects the possible power asymmetries that may influence and potentially jeopardize processes of collaboration. I find that a promising approach to this problem lies beyond European critical theory in a family of decolonial theories of knowledge known as creolization. Creolization originated as a framework to analyze historical developments in the Caribbean. In my interpretation, creolization situates the hermeneutical process in actual, thoroughly power-laden contexts. In section 3, I show how creolization's amended account of epistemic convergence under conditions of domination as well as its accounts of political identities and coalition building help us better understand how processes of solidaristic collaboration may unfold. I conclude that, in addition to helping us better understand solidarity, hermeneutics and creolization offer valuable practical orientations toward building effective transformative solidarities.
1. Solidarity as Collaboration
The kind of solidarity that persists in emancipatory social movements is, first, a form of political solidarity. As I understand it, political solidarity concerns the interpersonal bonds forged by agents through, and for the purposes of, collective action. Accounts of political solidarity vary in terms of scope (Who is included?), explanation (Why and how do participants come together?), and expression (In what ways do such bonds manifest?). In the philosophical literature we find theories of group-level action-oriented political solidarity based on or expressed in one or a combination of the following: shared identity, shared values, shared goals, shared experiences or shared conditions (e.g., of oppression), fellow feeling, trust, dispositions of mutual support, and so on.2 Such accounts, which theorize connections in contexts ranging from the local to the transnational, differ from another common use of the term political solidarity, also known as “civic solidarity.” The latter describes bonds between members of a polity, usually mediated by the state, based on elements such as shared national identity3 or relations of mutual obligation.4
Like others who theorize political solidarity within social movements specifically, I conceive of the relation in primarily teleological terms: that which binds participants in a social movement together, and which motivates them to act, is the shared aim of social change.5 This genre of political solidarity is not exclusive since anyone committed to the aim in question is eligible to join.6 A key condition for solidarity, so conceived, is epistemic: shared understanding of the aim. In the case of emancipatory social movements, there are, broadly speaking, two kinds of aims: immediate goals (e.g., legislative reform, institutional policy change, etc.) and a long-term vision (e.g., racial justice, an end to oppression, collective liberation). While solidarity can persist despite a somewhat broad range of disagreement regarding tactics and strategy, and thus about immediate aims, it requires participants to at least converge on the commitments that may then orient those practical disagreements. Epistemic convergence is a diachronic rather than a synchronic condition. It is misleading to conceive of solidarity as a state of affairs whose necessary and sufficient conditions can be consistently observed at any one moment in time. Rather, it is a chronologically unfolding process of building collective power from below, as Zheng puts it.7 Epistemically, solidarity is a laborious and fraught enterprise of working out with others what must be done, doing it, learning from the experience, and repeating.
By highlighting the shared knowledge conditions as well as the processual nature of coming to share long- and short-term political goals, my account is better suited to describe social movement solidarities than alternative teleological accounts. According to Andrea Sangiovanni's “joint action” model, for example, agents are in solidarity with one another when they are each individually committed to the goal of overcoming some adversity.8 For Sangiovanni, agents who are in solidarity with one another need not work together toward that shared goal. Independent parallel actions that advance toward the goal suffice so long as each agent acts in such a way that doesn't undermine others’ pursuit of the goal and so long as there is some “overlap” between each person's ideas on how to achieve the goal. Sangiovanni's account is descriptively inadequate, first, because it fails to capture the need for coordination among various individual actions—not just to ensure that actions don't undermine others, as Sangiovanni considers, but to ensure some degree of success. Nathan Rochelle DuFord illustrates this point with reference to boycotts as expressions of solidarity: in order to work, boycotts cannot amount to individuals independently deciding to refrain from purchasing some product and thereby sending the same market signals. Boycotts “are organized. Agents work to build social organizations, groups, and structures to publicize, politicize, inform, and encourage boycotting,” as in the case of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement to challenge Israel's colonial and illegal occupation of Palestine.9 Zheng likewise argues that mobilizing and organizing, the two principal mechanisms for realizing collective power from below in historical and contemporary social movements, rely on coordinating the actions of disparate actors.10
Second, Sangiovanni's joint action model presents political decisions in a deceptively synchronic manner that ignores not only processes of strategic coordination toward immediate ends but also processes of contestation, disagreement, and deliberation that affect the meaning of the overall long-term shared goal. Agents don't just spontaneously arrive at a shared vision for change. Sangiovanni's own references to disagreements among proponents of forming a separate Black-led polity in Africa and proponents of fighting for equality within multiracial countries like the United States demonstrate that the shared political vision, in this case some version of racial justice, should not be taken for granted. Support for each position assumes prior processes of collective discernment.
There is another dimension of emancipatory solidarity that philosophical accounts largely ignore despite its routine thematization in anthropological and historical studies of social movements: the distinctly prefigurative character of solidarity.11 Participants’ commitment to social transformation doesn't just inform their immediate ends. It also informs the way they organize together. Whether they seek legislative reform, governmental or corporate policy change, or certain cultural shifts, solidary agents do so while trying to realize their transformative political vision in the way they relate to each other throughout the course of struggle—in meetings, on the streets, and so on. Kurt Bayertz suggests that solidarity is simultaneously the means and the end of struggle since solidarity is itself “an anticipation of future society, as a part of Utopia already lived.”12 Another way to put this idea is that the relationships that solidary agents build, here and now, are not merely instrumental to succeeding in addressing present crises—they are valuable in and of themselves, and thus a valid target of those agents’ efforts. Solidary agents strive to “anticipate and rehearse” the society they wish to create.13 Despite their ongoing interpellation by structures of domination, participants in emancipatory solidarities deliberately attempt to halt the reproduction of domination in their interactions. Instead, they build working relationships with each other that are trusting, caring, respectful, democratic, long-lasting, and resilient. As a prefigurative rather than directly utopian political project, solidarity involves provisional and experimental attempts to realize, on a reduced scale, an ideal of nondomination that is impossible to fully achieve absent wider structural changes.
This article is concerned with how solidary agents might arrive at relevant shared understandings while prefiguring nondominating relationships with each other, a process I term collaboration. I maintain that both dimensions of collaboration are intimately intertwined. Overlooking the epistemic, communicative, and processual aspect of solidarity, as we will now see, leads theorists like Avery Kolers to mischaracterize prefiguration even as they acknowledge its centrality to solidarity.
Kolers's theory is one of the few philosophical accounts of social movement solidarity that recognizes the prefigurative character of the relation.14 Kolers proposes that solidarity involves “picking a side” and then acting on that side's terms. Unlike in relations of loyalty, solidary agents align with a group based on agent-neutral reasons of justice—specifically, whichever group is least well-off in a given context.15 As long as what the subordinated group wants is “not unreasonable,” and as long as the group-selection criterion continues to be fulfilled, the only solidary actions supporters should take are those directed or authorized by the selected subordinated group. So even if they are unconvinced about the directed course of action, supporters should defer to the subordinated group's practical judgments about how to fight injustice. In this account, participant understandings may significantly diverge. Supporters may disagree among themselves and with those in the subordinated group regarding the nature of social injustice, what immediate ends to adopt to address injustice, and even the broad political vision that motivates each agent's participation in the struggle. In effect, Kolers theorizes one popular version of allyship: the kind of solidarity that exists between members of an oppressed group and relatively privileged nonmembers, whereby outsiders commit to “follow the lead” of the oppressed.
Kolers explains that deferring to the least well-off realizes equal treatment in the face of inequality. In deferring, he writes, “we are not only working to (teleologically) bring about the end of oppression; rather, we constitutively embody a non-oppressive alternative world—even if, as is likely, our joint efforts ultimately fail, in part or in whole.”16 However, merely realizing a local redistribution of power via deference to a subordinated group's judgments is not the same as prefiguring relationships of nondomination. Though Kolers rightly draws attention to the relational nature of solidarity, he treats relations in a problematically static way. Relationships are connections between persons, mediated by mutual communication, that build (or weaken) over time. In this deference model, outsiders follow the instructions of those they support regardless of whether they agree or, more importantly, whether they understand the reasons for which those whom they support have decided upon a certain course of action. This bases the deferential relationship in a merely practical injunction instead of a communicative-epistemic one—that is, an injunction to engage with and learn from the group's reasons. Thus, deference jeopardizes supporters’ commitments over time. It's difficult to stay committed to a cause one dimly understands (or misunderstands).
Deference can be a start to prefiguration. Over the longer term, however, a lack of critical engagement with the supported group's reasons effectively reduces them to their social position—to the “agent-neutral” criterion used to identify the group as worthy of support in the first place. Prolonged deference threatens paternalism and represents a failure to take seriously members of subordinated groups as political agents.17 Communication, especially regarding information that directly pertains to the collective effort solidary parties undertake, is a key component of building mutually respectful relations of nondomination. In the end, Kolers offers a model that does not allow agents even to aspire to act, eventually, on shared terms rather than simply “on others’ terms.” Acting on shared terms is a goal that is admittedly difficult and perhaps impossible to fully realize, especially in starkly asymmetrical relations. Still, for prefigurative reasons, I think it is one worth striving toward as the basis of durable transformative solidarities.
Relatedly, like many articulations of allyship that draw a sharp distinction between privileged and marginalized groups, Kolers's approach wrongly presumes uniformity within the groups involved in solidarity. The presumption of uniformity is bolstered, in practice, by a deferential relation that encourages unidirectional engagement on the part of supporters with a clearly demarcated “side” and discourages working together. This presumption threatens to obscure not only disagreements among members of the “side” whom allies have reason to pick but also the need for members of that subordinated group to work together toward shared understandings—including about what to demand from outsiders. By reifying the two kinds of parties involved in solidarity, Kolers's proposal ignores the intersectional complexity of many, if not most, solidary coalitions. Multiaxial power asymmetries persist within any given oppressed class as, for example, the history of feminism teaches us about race, class, caste, sexuality, and myriad other differences. They likewise persist between members of differently oppressed groups who may decide to join forces, as in the alliance I describe in the following section between coal miners and LGBTQ groups in the United Kingdom in the 1980s. Any viable attempt to prefigure nondomination must recognize its numerous axes. And any viable descriptive model of social movement solidarity must acknowledge the ubiquity of processes of collaboration responsible for generating multilayered and overlapping moments of coalitional unity among multifariously different people.
To theorize collaboration as I have presented it here, in sum, we must take seriously two features of solidarity. First, we must foreground the processual, iterative, and deeply, even radically transformational, nature of working with others toward understanding political reality. The process of building power together is not just individually transformative, as participants gain new skills, strengthen their commitments, reinterpret their experiences, and experience the feeling of collective power firsthand.18 It can also be transformative of the meaning of the shared goal—that is, of the raison d’être of the collective. Second, we must keep in view solidary participants’ aspiration to act collectively as equals despite structuring contexts of domination.
Hermeneutics and creolization offer frameworks capable of effectively illuminating these features. Unlike many mainstream epistemological theories, both traditions grapple extensively with the inescapably intersubjective, historical, and transformative character of understanding. As I will now argue, this makes them especially well suited to theorize emancipatory solidarities. Let's consider each in turn.
2. Hermeneutics
In Truth and Method (1960), Hans-Georg Gadamer sets out to “clarify the conditions in which understanding takes place.”19 Gadamer rejects the possibility of certain and objective knowledge achieved via positivist scientific methods that purportedly allow inquirers to adopt a neutral, context-transcendent standpoint. Instead, he argues that several elements are always implicated in our attempts to know: our own desires for self-understanding; our rich cultural, historical, and linguistic contexts; and our relationships with other inquirers. He develops a “philosophical hermeneutics” that recasts knowledge as an intersubjective and interpretive experience of understanding that is undergone by particularly situated inquirers. Although in Truth and Method Gadamer reflects primarily on the epistemic dimensions of art and the human sciences, he maintains that philosophical hermeneutics applies to “all human experience of the world and human living”—including ethics and politics.20
Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics offers a basic descriptive schema for the kind of epistemic convergence that undergirds successful collaboration. While Gadamer makes no explicit mention of solidarity in Truth and Method, I find this text to be a much richer resource for theorizing solidarity than direct treatments, notably his essay “Friendship and Solidarity” (1999).21 Although this essay valorizes respect for difference and suggests that solidarity need not rest on shared identities of nation or religion, as Georgia Warnke comments, it frames solidarity defensively: as a group uniting to react against threatening outside forces.22 Such framing is of a piece with Gadamer's political conservativism. Against this tendency in his thought, I follow feminist interpreters of Gadamer's much broader-ranging work Truth and Method such as Warnke and Linda Martín Alcoff. They suggest that Gadamer's emphasis upon the historicity, context-dependence, and impermanence of meaning outweighs countervailing conservative arguments in favor of, for instance, the permanent authority of tradition.23 These and related emphases are precisely what attune hermeneutics, as an epistemological theory, to transformative experiences such as solidarity.
2.1. Understanding as a Personally and Collectively Transformative “Fusion of Horizons”
In Truth and Method, Gadamer challenges the standard modern binary conception of knowledge as involving a knower (subject) and a known (object). He proposes, instead, that understanding is a process of interpreting meaning. Because, in Alcoff's words, “meaning is not a feature of a world that exists apart from humanity, but a feature that comes into existence through the fusion of its constituent elements,” interpretation is relational.24 That is, interaction with other knowers, whether through texts or in real life, is necessary for understanding the world. Understanding is therefore conceived as a three-way relation: “One person comes to an understanding with another about something they thus both understand.”25 Truth about a given subject matter, or what Gadamer calls the Sache, arises at the meeting point of two knowers’ perspectives, or, to use Gadamer's term, “horizons.”
A horizon encompasses a set of beliefs, affects, prejudgments, and dispositions to render some things more salient than others as well as to ask certain questions and utilize certain metaphors to make sense of things.26 Horizons are molded by both idiosyncratic, arbitrary features of a knower's history and features shared with others such as social identity, geographic and temporal location, political commitments, cultural background, and so on. Gadamer emphasizes the objective character of the latter set, which makes up the “historical reality of [a knower's] being.”27 He specifies that “the interpreter . . . finds his point of view already given, and does not choose it arbitrarily.”28 Given, but not static; knowers inhabit their horizons reflectively insofar as they decide which aspects to foreground in a given epistemic situation and what these aspects mean.29 On the one hand, horizons represent a “standpoint that limits the possibility of our vision,” but on the other, they constitute the very condition of possibility of understanding.30 We can't help but inhabit our horizons, which grant us the framework through which we can grasp meaning.
Understanding does not represent a mere encounter between two knowers, nor a confrontation or negotiation between them. Rather, it arises as the result of a “fusion of horizons.” This conceptualization is especially helpful for shedding light on epistemic convergence within relations of solidarity, in which individuals motivated by the goal of emancipatory social transformation develop shared conceptions in order to act together. We can think of the relevant action-guiding Sachen for solidary agents as (1) the social problem they seek to address and (2) the normative political vision they seek to realize.
The fusion of horizons is a creative process that produces new meaning out of the old. Gadamer models understanding on dialogical communication, with “each interlocutor trying to reach agreement on some subject with his partner.”31 He argues that trying to reach agreement necessarily involves a common language, namely, some shared terms to grasp the Sache. Establishing a common language, according to Gadamer,
is not an external matter of simply adjusting our tools; nor is it even right to say that the partners adapt themselves to one another but, rather, in a successful conversation they both come under the influence of the truth of the object and are thus bound to one another in a new community. To reach an understanding . . . is not merely a matter of putting oneself forward and successfully asserting one's own point of view, but being transformed into a communion in which we do not remain what we were.32
In this picture, epistemic convergence is transformative in several senses. Not only is something new produced out of the fusion of horizons: a shared understanding, mediated by shared terminology, that draws from the interpretive toolbox of each knower. Additionally, the horizons that generated this understanding are themselves altered. The terms and saliences a knower uses to interpret the world are liable to change under the influence of the Sache, on one hand, and of others’ horizons, on the other.33 Interactions with others catalyze changes in how one inhabits one's horizon and expand it beyond previous limits. Note that what is being modeled here is a diachronic process of “trying” to reach agreement. This process need not proceed in a straightforward way but can involve “disagreement and distantiation” and even misunderstanding.34
How might this process play out in real life? Consider the process of collaboration that took place between coal miners and gay and lesbian people during the 1984–85 miners’ strike in Thatcherite Great Britain. To help sustain the protracted strike, contingents of gay and lesbian people in urban centers throughout the country organized sustained monetary and presential support for striking miners. What began as a mostly unidirectional show of support soon turned into relationships of mutual solidarity. Miners eventually reciprocated support for the gay and lesbian community during and beyond the strike—for instance, when a contingent of about eighty miners and community members from South Wales mining towns marched alongside their gay and lesbian supporters in the 1985 Pride march in London.35 In-person interactions between the unlikely allies gave members of both groups the time and space to understand one another's experiences of struggle. 36 Historian Diarmaid Kelliher recounts how interactions with gay and lesbian supporters, who communicated their experiences during visits to rural mining towns, helped miners gain better insight both into what sexual oppression was like and how it overlapped with miners’ own treatment at the hands of the state. These epistemic transformations were especially significant as challenges to the prevailing homophobia in the context of media sensationalism around the HIV/AIDS crisis and the “anti-gay crusades” of the conservative government.37 Kelliher quotes one (presumably straight) miner's testimony, “We've suffered in the last year with the police and, you know, at different things, what [lesbians and gay men have] been suffering all their lives.” Another felt that “we were next in line after lesbians and gays. . . . It's a horrifying position to be in. You cannot sympathize with an oppressed group until you've actually been a member of one.”38
Approaching their encounters with lesbian and gay supporters from their own situated experience of the strike was ultimately transformative for coal miners. The horizons of lesbian and gay supporters already had some element(s) that enabled them to understand the miners’ struggle as worth supporting; for example, personal experience with economic exploitation or police violence meted out in response to social status. But the fusion of the horizons of gay and lesbian supporters with those of coal miners, facilitated by collective political action in mining towns, produced a more textured, comprehensive analysis of state violence—that is, an enhanced shared understanding of the problems faced by solidary agents. These statements also disclose an enrichment of the miners’ conception of justice that was surely mirrored in their gay and lesbian supporters’ outlooks; better understanding sexual oppression, a recognition-based paradigm of justice, helped complement and even reconfigure miners’ predominantly redistributive notion of justice.39 The “effect” of this fusion of epistemic horizons may also attest to the creation of a common language—or, perhaps more accurately, the attribution of new meaning to common terms such as oppression, to better reflect both groups’ experiences and aims.
The miners’ statements reflect epistemic transformations on a personal level. Via collaboration, these participants gained new information and new abilities to grasp unfamiliar contexts. But clearly the history of growing support between both parties demonstrates a process of collective learning, too. Collaboration generated a multifaceted understanding of justice that reframed issues for both groups well beyond the initial strike. It also created new relations of political solidarity that could evolve, strengthen, come up with new ideas for working together, and bring into focus new features of the world over time. It was largely because miners and their supporters interacted face-to-face, built trust with each other, earnestly attempted to understand each other's realities, and sought to learn from each other that they were able to revise their terms and formulate a common language to grasp the Sachen at hand—and realize valuable personal and collective transformations in the process.
2.2. Reaching Shared Understandings under Conditions of Domination?
Owing to its intersubjective and interpretive nature, hermeneutic understanding is conditioned upon openness, on the part of knowers, to what the subject matter and other knowers have to say. To characterize this condition Gadamer distinguishes among three modes of what he calls “I-Thou relations.” One knower (“I”) treats another (“Thou”), in the first mode, as an object to be managed, predicted, and controlled; in the second, as a subject whose perspective can be preemptively known in advance of any interaction; and in the third, as a genuine other, whose pronouncements are liable to differ radically from what the I already knows or anticipates. Gadamer contends that only the final I-Thou relation, when reciprocated by both parties, leads to understanding.40 Hermeneutics accordingly encourages agents to cultivate a series of dispositions conducive toward successful epistemic convergence with new perspectives. Such dispositions include a concern for truth and a willingness to modify or abandon existing beliefs based on suitable evidence and, even, as Warnke suggests, an eagerness to discover when revision may be necessary.41 Importantly, in establishing the requirement of reciprocal, open, respectful, nonappropriating I-Thou relationships between epistemic agents, Gadamer recognizes the ethical demand associated with understanding.
There is a serious difficulty in translating these hermeneutical insights to nonideal contexts of solidaristic collaboration, however. Gadamer fails to investigate the conditions for establishing, even prefiguratively, I-Thou relations of somewhat equal political footing that enable understanding. In addressing epistemic considerations Gadamer ignores questions such as the following: Under what conditions do agents converge? Are conditions such that one side's insights are systematically devalued? How have respective horizons been shaped by histories of domination, and how do these inhibit the relations conducive to knowledge exchange? These concerns must be addressed if hermeneutics is to provide theoretical purchase beyond the kind of analysis I presented of the miners’ strike.
Consider the central importance of trust in establishing reciprocal I-Thou relations. If openness involves epistemic humility, on the one hand, it must presumably be mirrored by epistemic generosity, on the other. The Thou must be willing to share their insights in the first place. However, epistemic generosity is hardly a given among strangers operating in a world structured by multiple dynamics of domination. Members of subordinated groups engaged in political struggle may reasonably hesitate to share insights and “let down their epistemic guard,” as Alcoff puts it,42 around those from relatively more powerful groups with a history of misusing, abusing, or exploiting subordinated groups and their knowledge. In light of these histories and ongoing conditions of injustice, solidary agents may find it hard to trust potential supporters’ motives. What guarantee do they have that supporters actually seek mutual understanding and emancipatory social transformation rather than the continuation of an oppressive status quo? A lack of trust leads knowers to withhold information and even avoid or refuse engagement, inhibiting collaboration.
Inkeri Koskinen and Kristina Rolin examine this dynamic in the context of scientific research. Where ongoing colonial usurpation of Indigenous people's authority to interpret their own cultures erodes epistemic trust between Indigenous communities and outside researchers, Koskinen and Rolin propose practical and structural changes toward generating the trust required for knowledge exchange and collective knowledge production.43 Changes include the adoption of participatory research methods and the creation of institutional ties to increase researcher accountability to the community. Similarly, we should not assume that collaboration proceeds on the basis of preexisting relations of trust between solidary agents. Rather, conceived diachronically, collaboration involves remedying histories of mistrust and building trust over time so that knowers feel comfortable sharing their insights with each other. The deferential approach described by Kolers could be incorporated into the process of collaboration if we think about it as a practice that addresses the deficits of trust that likely persist in incipient or starkly asymmetrical relations of solidarity and gradually leads to more mutual, dialogic, and cooperative relations of working together. Outsiders who deferentially recuse themselves from solidaristic deliberation avoid dominating discussions and, at the very least, inspiring further mistrust among members of the subordinated group.
Another practice that solidary agents may use to address trust deficits is caucusing—that is, temporarily separating into affinity groups. Caucuses bring subsets of the solidary collective together on the basis of a shared identity or shared set of experiences. Temporary separations enable marginalized subgroups to discuss and agree upon what to share and what to withhold from those they may have reason to mistrust in the broader coalition. All told, it's important to recognize that collaboration need not require complete and unconditional openness between agents. Throughout the trust-building process, involved parties may choose to share only those pieces of information that they deem relevant to discerning the Sachen of collective struggle.
These reflections on trust suggest that Gadamer's approach can potentially be supplemented to account for certain aspects of domination. Another important addition regards Gadamer's argument in favor of certain epistemic authorities. Consider that, according to hermeneutics, truth sits at the fusion of horizons and is therefore participant-dependent.44 Because the selfsame Sache looks different from different vantage points, the understanding of the object achieved at the fusion of two particular knowers’ horizons may differ from that achieved at the fusion of two other horizons. In other words, the epistemic product or “effect” of two alternative meeting points may both be true despite differences in emphasis, application, and so on. Horizons are “‘decisive’ constitutive components of any interpretation” along with the human independent reality that conforms the object of inquiry.45 Altogether, this implies that knowers can always stand to learn about the Sache from differently positioned individuals; understandings are perpetually revisable in this way. However, according to Gadamer, just because every interaction can teach us something new does not mean that all points of view are epistemically valuable in the same way. Gadamer argues that knowers are justified in acknowledging certain individuals’ judgments as superior to their own.46 What he calls “prejudices” in favor of epistemic authorities are not arbitrarily legitimated, for example, because we like or feel attached to these authorities. Gadamer establishes that prejudices are justified insofar as they are “productive of knowledge”—that is, in terms of the truthfulness of the content they reveal.47
When it comes to the Sachen of solidarity—social reality and emancipation—feminist and critical theories of epistemic advantage fill in Gadamer's notion of “prejudices.” According to many such theories, social reality is constituted by interconnected structures of domination that are occupied by differently positioned, and differently empowered, agents.48 Individuals can't occupy these structures neutrally and adopt a “view from nowhere”; rather, they occupy it in and through their distinct “locations.” Social position comprises a significant part of a knower's horizon. And power makes a difference to what a given social position discloses. As Marx argued about proletarian and bourgeois classes regarding the workings of capitalism, and as feminists from Nancy Hartsock to Patricia Hill Collins have argued regarding structures of gender and racial domination, subordinated individuals are positioned to develop a better theoretical grasp of the dynamics of social power and the idea that certain harms are not accidental but structural.49 (Importantly, such understanding is typically understood as an achievement of collective processes of consciousness-raising rather than something automatically bestowed upon all subordinated individuals.) We learn from bringing hermeneutics and standpoint theory together that collaboration can and should account for knowledge asymmetries between agents that stem from occupying different social positions. Differential epistemic advantage implies that, in solidarity, a bidirectional fusion of horizons does not necessarily require “meeting halfway”—that is, eliciting equal contributions from the relevant horizons. It also implies that we can expect certain experiences and positions to shed special insight on certain epistemic domains.
We might think that supplementing hermeneutics in the ways I've described is not enough to address concerns about domination, however. Gadamer's overall silence on power has led critical theorists like Jürgen Habermas to argue that philosophical hermeneutics lacks the necessary resources to detect and address the “systemic distortions” of communication generated by structures of domination, including ideology.50 Gadamer relies on the influence of the Sache and of other knowers’ horizons to reveal the prejudices and prejudgments operative in one's own horizon. Habermas argues that these elements are inadequate for conceptualizing the forces that may be shaping the social consensus reflected in knowers’ horizons. For this, knowers additionally require “reference systems” that generalize across experiences to understand society-wide dynamics—notably, a comprehensive critical theory of society.51
In light of this critique, I should clarify that my concern with power is less directly with “distortions” internal to knowers’ horizons. In attempting to describe processes of epistemic convergence within the building of solidarities, I am interested in how power asymmetries directly jeopardize or decisively influence encounters among those who share in a political goal and therefore have presumably overcome certain ideological obstacles to recognize, say, the value of feminist struggle. I seek to model quotidian political interactions whereby people, informed in different ways and even by multiple and incomplete theories of society, attempt to act together. Such a model must consider how power directly impacts processes of collaboration. For this, the feminist and critical work I have cited here to supplement hermeneutics offers a start. In addition, we should turn to creolization. This decolonial theoretical framework reconceives hermeneutics in a way that clarifies the political dynamics and stakes at play when agents attempt to converge under conditions of domination, as I will now explain.
3. Creolization
The term creolization originates in transdisciplinary scholarly reflection about the experience of diverse peoples in the Caribbean post-1492. Creolization refers to a set of theoretical tools to analyze the political and cultural developments in the region in such a way that foregrounds the decisive influence of colonization. One of creolization's key moves is to emphasize relationality among different individuals and groups and the dynamics of power operative among them. This corrects misplaced emphases on group purity throughout colonial encounters—whether of dominant European culture, to which Africans and surviving Indigenous people supposedly merely assimilated, or of African and Indigenous cultures supposedly thought to carry on in the colonial context as ossified and untouched remainders. Creolization also avoids reducing differences in the name of a homogenizing or totalizing social order, in the way of “melting pot” metaphors. Jane Gordon explains that creolization examines Caribbean cultural phenomena as “mutually instantiating practices” that emerge when disparate peoples find themselves coexisting after “previous more coherent and discrete orders of collective meaning” are abruptly disrupted.52 The violent, coercive character of “encounters” and “disruptions,” such as they were mediated by structures of domination, are front and center in creolizing analyses. Edouard Glissant remarks that featured participants in this process—namely, Africans who were violently uprooted and enslaved in plantation economies—did not have the option of preserving traditional cultural and political practices, much less returning to them. They were forced to construct new ways of being out of “traces” of the old.53 Creolizing analyses demonstrate that no culture involved, including the dominant, remained as it was preencounter, and that new and unexpected cultural expressions resulted therefrom. They show this by investigating how, in Gordon's words, “in the midst of extreme brutality, those who unequally occupied such societies did not remain sealed off from each other but lived within relations marked by mundane dependency and antagonism, by intimate and complex interpenetration.”54
For the purposes of this article, creolization provides a set of conceptualizations that refine and supplement those provided by hermeneutics. While these conceptualizations originate in reflections upon the concrete historical experiences of Caribbean societies, from the Middle Passage to plantation economies to the postcolonial contemporary, proponents of creolization consider them to be lessons that may be brought to bear well beyond that context. For Glissant, these ideas shed light on processes of cultural transformation on a global scale.55 For others, like Kris Sealey, they constitute a distinct “mode of theory” that can illuminate certain intellectual and political projects.56
In my reading, creolization reinterprets the “fusion of horizons” process by situating it within actual historical situations thoroughly wrought by dynamics of domination. This reinterpretation occurs when theorists attempt to trace the persistence of differences while taking seriously the newness of resulting practices. In describing processes of epistemic convergence, creolization takes structures of domination much more seriously than hermeneutics. Moreover, creolizing interpretations assume a decolonial and thereby explicitly emancipatory normative stance. Given the harrowing conditions of the plantation societies they study, creolizing analyses typically articulate freedom in a subversive register. They search for “everyday practices with which subjects engage—so as to sabotage—systems of domination in order to move themselves just that much further away from subjection.”57 Kris Sealey contrasts such modes of quotidian resistance from larger-scale revolutionary projects like anticolonial independence movements. Still, she notes that the former condition discursive imaginaries that set the stage for the latter.58 Creolization's orientation toward emancipation is a necessary complement to the hermeneutical orientation toward truth when it comes to theorizing collaboration, which is a process guided by both liberation and understanding. Fittingly, creolization's subversive articulation of everyday freedom is similar to solidarity's prefigurative one. While directed toward a broad-based structurally transformative vision, solidary agents are concerned with relating more justly, in their day-to-day, with others in their political community.
My theorization of political solidarity via creolization somewhat resembles Sealey's proposal to “creolize the nation” by mobilizing conceptualizations of subjectivity, belonging, community, and the everyday pursuit of freedom toward rethinking “what it might mean to live with and in the nation-form differently.”59 In what follows, I highlight how creolization helps us reconceptualize epistemic convergence, political identities, and coalition building to reorient our understanding of collaboration. This reorientation allows us to account for the “dynamism and ambiguity” not so much of postcolonial contexts, as Sealey aims to do, but that of organizing toward social transformation under contexts of domination. It also brings into focus important difficulties of solidarity and ways we can, if not resolve them, at least approach them differently.
3.1. Reconsidering Epistemic Convergence—as Political
Like philosophical hermeneutics, creolization foreshadows the profoundly transformative effects of communicative encounters. Creolizing studies of historical developments show how prolonged engagement between heterogeneous groups whose previous orders of meaning have been disrupted create new terms to understand, and new practices to inhabit, a shared world. The shared temporal, spatial, and social context plays the role of the Sache here, conforming the “the condition of possibility of each partial perspective and [that] to which all [participants], in conflicting ways, refer.”60 The products of historical encounters across cultures—knowledge in the form of language, art, music, religion, philosophy, and so forth—are novel and distinct, constituting more than the sum of its component parts. Glissant calls these irreducible yet genealogically traceable products of creolization “résultantes, results: something else, another way.”61 The production of something new distinguishes creolization from mere métissage or crossbreeding, for Glissant.62 The epistemic implication is that creolization “opens on a radically new dimension of reality” since crafting a new interpretive lens through which to view the world (new concepts, idioms, metaphors, rhythms, cosmologies) both brings different features of socially mediated reality into view and generates new objects, as it were, to see.63 Glissant appeals to linguistic production, treating creole languages as exemplary of creolization and as a point of reference for résultantes in other cultural spheres. Creole languages combine the forms of two or more linguistic traditions but produce a distinct synthesis that is “a new kind of expression, a supplement to the . . . series of roots from which [it] was born.”64 Creolizing processes do not only create a new result but also leave “none of the poles that ‘in-betweenness’ negotiates intact,” in Gordon's words.65 That is, the horizons involved are themselves transformed as converging groups translate, and yield to being translated, in order to understand each other.
Because encounters across perspectives hold this transformative promise, creolization, like hermeneutics, suggests that we should not recoil from apparently unproductive tensions between competing, contradictory, or seemingly incompatible frames of reference. We should instead embrace ambiguity in our epistemic and political efforts. At the same time, creolization acknowledges that, in our colonial world, power asymmetries are built into convergences. It thereby offers a caution to consider asymmetries when it comes to collaboration, in at least three respects.
First, as I have already intimated, power asymmetries condition creolizing convergences in the first place. The impetus for generating new practices is necessity: the need to continue living and the need to cooperate. For Glissant, as Sealey highlights, creolized entities like creole languages represent the possibility of “beginning out of nonbeing, of beginning after the totalizing violence of colonial catastrophe.”66 Creolizing agents aren't creating for the sake of creation or even, as per hermeneutics, for the mere sake of understanding—but for the sake of achieving some degree of freedom under conditions of domination. Sealey goes on to cite Wendy Knepper's account of the creolizing agent who “adapts and improvises in response to a loss of power (social, political, cultural), not in an explicit attempt to reverse power relations but, rather, in an attempt to create alternative conditions within that experience of powerlessness.”67 Solidary convergences likewise arise in response to existing conditions of injustice with the aim of pursuing emancipatory change. Solidary agents do seek to explicitly reverse structural power relations, society-wide—but they do so by building power “from below” and by prefiguring alternative conditions in their direct relations with each other.
Second, unequal relations and attempts to keep groups separate from each other influence the domains in which résultantes emerge. In the Caribbean experience, for example, language and philosophy appear less creolized and more defined by the dominating group than other domains of symbolic life such as music, dance, food, and domestic customs. That is, influences from disparate European, African, Indian, and Indigenous genealogies are less integrated in the former than the latter domains.68 Paget Henry observes that the most visible strands of Afro-Caribbean philosophy respond to European problematics (existentialism, Marxism, liberalism, etc.), while concerns that are less inflected by Western categories remain undertheorized.69 Henry argues that a number of sociological dynamics spurred by colonization led to anti-African, anti-Indian, anti-Indigenous, pro-European biases, and thus less creolization, in the intellectual domains; among them, the need to legitimize the colonizer's authority.70 We can observe parallel distortions in social movement contexts. There, dynamics of domination, especially along axes that intersect with the explicit goals of a coalition, can likewise systematically privilege certain voices in certain domains. It's not uncommon to find gendered divisions of labor in movements that are not explicitly feminist, for example, where men are overrepresented in decision-making and women are overrepresented in movement care work—cooking, cleaning, organizing social events, and so on. It's also not uncommon to see those with formal educational attainment disproportionately influencing strategy decisions. Creolization cautions prefigurative efforts to consider the various domains in which participants collaborate and to directly address patterns of domination reproduced therein.
Third, creolization warns that, under unequal conditions, résultantes lend themselves to co-optation by elites who establish themselves as the “highest embodiment of a principle of mixture and radical openness.”71 Historically, creole identities have been articulated in revisionist fashion as “monolithic and pure” in their own right.72 Michael Monahan notes that, once we define creole identities “in opposition to the constitutive elements that engender it, then the ambiguity, dynamism, and openness that characterize the processes of creolization . . . [are] lost.”73 As the case of the creole identity mestizo/a shows, the worry is not merely a loss of creativity but more seriously the reentrenchment of existing inequalities. This term typically depicts whiteness as “bettering” nonwhite races through mixture. Creolization warns against allowing sedimented forms to become reified or appropriated, lest we jeopardize further transformations. Résultantes are never fully fixed; neither do they definitively nor indefinitely belong to any one group. This caution applies to the ideas operative in solidarity: from shared understandings of social problems and of emancipation, to the political identities that solidary agents adopt in the process of struggle.
With these conditions of power asymmetry and the tendency toward reification in mind, how might we stave off the dangers of co-optation? Creolization's ambiguous, dynamic, and open account of identity offers a key.
3.2. Reconsidering the Meaning and Role of Identities
Let's begin by considering creolization's approach to history. Creolization stresses historical contingency, first and foremost. Encounters are negotiated in the moment, with concrete pressures, players, timings, and interests at play. Their résultantes are thus “unpredictable” and break with “the trajectories that their previous collective genealogies would have anticipated.”74 What turned out to be may just as well have turned out otherwise. Why is this so? I find Stuart Hall's approach to creolizing histories to be especially helpful. In Hall's view, any given situation is overdetermined by multiple social forces and historical processes. These forces, including hierarchies of race or gender, work in tandem to structure the choices available to agents. In a turn toward the global from the peculiarly local akin to Glissant's, Hall argues that formerly colonial societies like contemporary Jamaica's demonstrate vividly what is true about societies in general: historical events can only be understood when we have the full range of social forces in view and a textured grasp of how they operate in a particular local context.75 Theories that reduce phenomena to one overarching explanation—say, the workings of capital alone—take too narrow a view. Similarly, importing a US-based legalistic conception of race to the analysis of Caribbean societies, where racial difference was more informally than formally enforced, produces a skewed picture.76 Hall emphasizes the complexity of the interactions between different vectors of social power—these are “interpenetrating, mutually reinforcing as well as mutually destabilizing, productive but also disruptive and contradictory . . . [interacting] without losing their specificity of form or effect.”77 In navigating crisscrossing systems of social hierarchy, in making choices to conform to or disavow particular expectations, agents influence the structures of their lives. For Hall, as for other theorists of creolization, agency and struggle are thus principal contributors to historical contingency.78
Now, just as a multiplicity of social forces bear upon any historical event, “multiple, competing forms of belonging [are] experienced by any one individual.”79 Creolization's thesis about historical overdetermination and struggle opens the way toward a productively antiessentialist and dynamic account of identification. Standard essentialist conceptions typically posit fixed, homogenous, and unified collective identities that correspond to positions in hierarchical social structures of race, gender, class, ability, and so on. In variations of this view, which we find in popular discourses of “identity politics” and the Western philosophical tradition, groups like “women” or “whites” are composed of individuals who share a certain set of features, experiences, interests, and so on by virtue of their common position. Creolization challenges the standard view by proposing an account of identity as identification. In Hall's words, social and political identification should be understood as “a construction, a process never completed—always ‘in process.’”80 This is a process that “operates across difference.”81 For each of us is “complexly constructed through different categories, of different antagonisms, and these may have the effect of locating us socially in multiple positions of marginality and subordination, but positions which do not yet operate on us in exactly the same way.”82 The forms of belonging that one experiences can be competing, even contradictory, insofar as we find ourselves simultaneously empowered and disempowered.
Crucially, Hall's creolizing account of identification recognizes the objectivity and real determining capacity of structural forms of power without at the same time reifying them. Identities should be understood as dynamic, even within these weighty structures, for two reasons. First, the conjunction of social forces in which hierarchies are reproduced shifts over time; thus, the norms, expectations, and practices associated with social positions change. Second, individuals exert agency when their choices render one category more salient than the other, produce certain trade-offs between categories, or bring various categories together to innovate upon existing ideas of what “being an X” entails. Identification admits of a significant subjective dimension, too. As a result, neither identity as an individual phenomenon (one's sense of self) nor as a collective one (the constitution of a social group) can be said to have an unchanging essential “core.” Hall's claim that identities are at once a “necessity and [an] ‘impossibility’” should be understood in light of the need to make sense of one's individual and collective relation to broader historical forces and the impossibility of ever fixing this understanding.83
Discussions of solidarity rightly emphasize differences in experience, knowledge, and power among participants, especially as stemming from their divergent social identities. Creolization's nonstandard account of identity cautions solidary agents to take heterogeneity seriously when engaging with social identities. As such, it counteracts tendencies to assume cohesiveness across any social group like we encountered in Kolers's model of deference. Assumptions of cohesiveness in contexts of political solidarity facilitate a pernicious pattern of co-optation characterized by Olúfẹmi Táíwò as “elite capture.”84 Táíwò describes situations in which a particular vector of identity is prioritized above others—notably, because that vector is perceived to be the most marginalized, and agents desire to defer to or “center” the most marginalized. Under conditions of structural inequality, relatively privileged members of the group end up commanding attention and resources. But it's a mistake to treat the interests of elites from marginalized groups as “necessarily or even presumptively aligned with the broader group's interest”—in other words, to assume a unified social position.85 The model of collaboration can mitigate this tendency by adopting a creolized account of identity that not only recognizes diversity within any one social group but also recognizes that, owing to larger structures of inclusion and exclusion, only a restricted set of intersectional identities may be present in a collective at any given time.
3.3. Reconsidering Epistemic Convergence—as Plural
Creolization's emphasis on the plurality of sociohistorical elements involved, and even the disparity and potential contradiction among them, invokes a significant amendment to the hermeneutic notion of horizon. For the most part, Gadamer conceives of the elements that constitute a horizon—including the frame of reference a knower has by virtue of a given identity—to be homogenous and cohesive. Horizons on this view presuppose, explains Alcoff, “a single coherent tradition that is dynamic through history but unchallenged by alternative horizons competing in a given space or time frame.”86 Hall, by contrast, underscores the multifarious nature of each location and thus of the perspective from which one attempts to understand. The frame of reference provided by any given social identity is not monolithic but plural. There are “multiple traditions . . . at play in the political contestation over meanings in a postcolonial world.”87 Contestations occur not just discursively between knowers but internally, as a knower sorts out alternative and even competing meanings among the elements of her horizon. Creolization invites us to think of horizons as dynamic and complex in themselves—that is, as “pluritopic” rather than “monotopic,” to use Walter Mignolo's terminology.88
Furthermore, creolization discourages us from expecting a social movement to eventually produce a singular, all-encompassing vision of emancipation or a singular comprehensive and systematic understanding of the social whole. Agents working together can and should certainly strive to produce ever better, more unified analyses. Processes of epistemic convergence in solidarity are anchored by the fact that solidary agents live in a shared world. This world is deeply interconnected—materially, socially, and culturally—such that the structuring forces that affect a collective in one locale are frequently global in reach. Despite the relative (and perhaps, in some ways, increasing) unity of this Sache, though, we can expect attempts to get it into view to differ widely from place to place and time to time. Owing to the contingency of history and the complexity of identity, what agents can expect to produce are convergences and solidarities—in the plural—as the composition and context of groups changes, disagreements cause splits, new encounters generate new ideas and new coalitions, and so on. We might imagine epistemic convergences as themselves résultantes, as products of collaborative processes, understandings that are born of struggle are “durable but not sedimented,” in Gordon's words, and always open to further change.89 That said, collaboration pursues the epistemic end of understanding toward the normative political end of prefigurative emancipation. Collaboration is not quite “unpredictable” in the way that Glissant describes creole languages. Collaboration is unpredictable because these epistemic and political aims define the process, and both aims are underspecified insofar as they are perpetually under construction and open to reinterpretation. Nevertheless, amid plural possibilities, these twin goals constitute heuristics that firmly guide solidary agents’ exploration of political ambiguity.
3.4. Reconsidering Processes of Coalition Building
Creolization's accounts of complex identification and plural epistemic convergence affirm that the problem of convergence across asymmetric knowledge and asymmetric power—the fusion of horizons in a context of domination—permeates every stage of political action. Just as social categories like “woman” are revealed to be always under construction, so are solidaristic political identifications like “feminist.” Political coalition-building processes in fact take place iteratively within and across social groups. Creolization thus bolsters the case for prioritizing the prefiguration of nondomination at the level of everyday interactions, such that trust, respect, communicative capacities and structures (including to work through disagreement), and sensitivity to power asymmetries are cultivated at every step of building solidarities.
Recent developments in the political articulation of working-class solidarity in Argentina illustrate what the creolized approach to collaboration can look like in action. The organization of feminist strikes has taken place across iterated processes of collaboration within and across the feminist, labor, and various other social movements in the country over the past eight years. (The timeline can, of course, be pulled back further in time, as these are movements with much longer histories of organization.) One way to understand this process of organization, following philosopher and participant Verónica Gago, is to begin with the feminist contribution expressed, practically, through the call for a feminist strike. Namely, the shared understanding that tasks of organizing everyday life like cooking, cleaning, child-rearing, and so forth—what is known as the labor of social reproduction—are indispensable components of the capitalist division of labor. This analytic implies that any principled commitment to opposing exploitation must include traditionally feminized unwaged work. Gago explains how, in the Argentine context, this reformulation of labor enabled the adoption of an expanded yet differentiated articulation of the “working class” adequate to the restructuring of class relations under contemporary neoliberal material conditions. This articulation includes not just unwaged social reproductive workers but also the growing populations of unemployed, underemployed, informal, migrant, and precarious workers. The feminist strike thus became a “strategy for making visible and valorizing those labor trajectories that usually remain unrecognized.”90 And thus, for Argentine feminists, it represented a strategy for building political alliances based on an expanded understanding that recognizes unity across difference—different manifestations of exploitation and precarization.
In a country with one of the highest unionization rates in the world—two-thirds of waged workers—feminist strikes successfully intervene upon established understandings of who can call and participate in a strike as a worker.91 In my reading, mass participation in feminist strikes is enabled by a creolized account of identification as dynamic, processual, antiessentialist, and shaped by both structural forces and political decisions. Gago recounts how one of the main challenges of pulling off the first major strike in 2018 was getting the union federations on board. One of union leaders’ principal objections was that the feminist strike weakens the unity of union demands by excluding men.92 It's not difficult to see how a mistakenly static understanding of workers’ interests as categorically separate from women's interests, and a misplaced assumption of homogeneity within these respective groups, generates a failure to grasp the feminist strike as a crucial component of building worker power writ large. Securing institutional support from labor federations required, first, the mobilization of women union leaders (the creation of a “Feminist Intersindical”) and, second, recognition from male leaders that social reproductive concerns are labor concerns. If we understand this development as, in part, the expansion of the Argentine labor movement, we see very clearly how, in Glissant's words, “open and strong identity is also a strong solidarity.”93 Cultivating openness to identifying with others who are different from oneself creates way for cultivating stronger and broader political coalitions.
What's more, we can read the slogan “all women are workers,” which Gago describes as “sealing the alliance” between union federations, workers of the popular economy, the unemployed, domestic workers, and the rest, as well as the practice of feminist strike as two résultantes of the convergence of perspectives at a specific historical conjuncture in Argentina. The feminist understanding of social reproduction holds theoretically and of course applies in other places and times. In this context, however, they make sense of a distinct constellation of experiences. Its meaning is ever-changing as different perspectives intervene upon it, for example, at the assemblies held around the country to organize the strikes. The assemblies convened representatives from various groups—trade unionists, students, domestic workers, migrants, Indigenous communities, and more—and created opportunities for forging various “unusual alliances” among them through collaboration toward a shared aim. Gago, who describes these assemblies as spaces for “thinking together,” reports that “even if assemblies have been held many times, the situated evaluation of each conjuncture creates a state of newness.”94 The praxis of feminist strike qua résultante opens up onto new features of social reality and, in so doing, transforms participants’ individual and collective self-understanding. The strike functioned for Gago and others as a “threshold, an ‘experience,’ something that is crossed, after which one cannot go back to having the same relationship with things and with others. Many of us were transformed in and by this process.”95
Collaboration toward a feminist strike involved working through myriad conflicting understandings. One of the most difficult was the supposed impossibility of striking from social reproductive labor. Gago recounts how, at an assembly that took place in a villa (slum) of Buenos Aires, many participants who worked in community soup kitchens expressed that their responsibility to feed neighborhood residents, especially children, inhibited them from striking. These soup kitchens are important fixtures of the informal economy in communities where the inflationary crisis and unemployment hit hard; unsurprisingly, the heightened stakes of striking tracked power asymmetries among social reproductive workers. Yet the kitchen workers wanted to take part in the collective mass action. An idea emerged during the assembly: to leave raw food at the door of the soup kitchens and rescind the labor of cooking, serving, and washing. The idea was graffitied all over the neighborhood: “Today, March 8, we distribute raw food—Ni Una Menos.”96 Competing, even contradictory, frames of reference represent a difficulty for epistemic convergence, as do power asymmetries that in so many ways inhibit people from working together. Nevertheless, as this anecdote attests, solidary agents need not abandon the shared emancipatory aim in light of these difficulties. The possibility of collaboratively revising the aim is always available, even if it means deeply transforming the nature of the struggle.
Conclusion
While case studies of the coal miners’ strike in 1985–86 and the feminist strike in Argentina suggest that my account of collaboration enjoys a degree of practical as well as philosophical purchase, the ultimate test of a theory of solidarity is practice. It's not possible to articulate a step-by-step guide to coalition building in advance or at this level of philosophical generality. If anything, figuring out how to relate to each other must take into consideration the very specific language, beliefs, motivations, and dispositions of the individuals involved. Neither do I think such a guide is desirable given the arguments I have presented for eschewing finality.
What I do hope to accomplish is the most we can aspire to as theorists: presenting a set of analytic tools that more precisely articulate what solidary agents are up to. And, insofar as the description resonates with those who practice solidarity (including those of us engaged in both theory and practice), by encouraging a shift in perspective, this theoretical exercise contributes a set of practical orientations that help agents relate prefiguratively and contend more effectively with the difficulties that present themselves along the way.
Hermeneutics and creolization offer two such orientations and enable a transformed, and transformative, understanding of solidarity. Hermeneutics helps us to conceptualize solidary encounters as contributing to a process of epistemic convergence between differently situated horizons. This process aims at a shared notion of social reality and of emancipation but conceives of these aims as perpetually open to revision. Creolization reminds solidary agents of the fluid, contested nature of the identities through which they interpret the world and, accordingly, of the pluritopic nature of their horizons. It stresses that all groupings are always already coalitions of differently situated and differently empowered individuals and groups. In Hall's words, dynamics of power and entanglement are “always at stake.”97 Creolization reminds us that coalition building takes place at all levels of political identification and that, to collaborate successfully, we should attend closely to the ways in which dynamics of domination shape processes of convergence at every step. Hermeneutics and creolization, considered together, underscore the importance of cooperating reflectively, accepting the possibility of error, and striving to live out a better future, here and now.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the innumerable people who have taught me about solidarity over the years, foremost among them members of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and their network of allies. Thank you to Linda Martín Alcoff and Rachel Fraser, two wonderful academic mentors who helped me give philosophical shape to the ideas expressed in this article and earlier versions of this project. Thanks to Michael Greer, Pedro Monque, Mori Reithmayr, Kevin Rogan, and Miranda Young for their support at various stages. I also wish to thank two anonymous reviewers for their insightful suggestions as well as the editorial team, especially Jessica Ling, for their tremendously helpful comments and edits.
Notes
Examples include Scholz, Political Solidarity; Shelby, We Who Are Dark, on Black solidarity; and hooks, “Sisterhood.”
See, for example, Miller, On Nationality.
See, for example, Hooker, Race and the Politics of Solidarity, which criticizes accounts like David Miller's for ignoring the racialized politics of national identity-based solidarity. See also Scholz, Political Solidarity, 27–33, for a discussion of civic solidarity.
For other theories that share this approach, see Scholz, Political Solidarity; DuFord, Solidarity in Conflict; Zheng, “Reconceptualizing Solidarity.” For an account of “networked” social movement solidarities that combines goal-orientedness with other bases, see Gould, “Transnational Solidarities.”
This is one of the features that distinguishes emancipatory from reactionary social movement solidarity. On this point I am compelled by Nathan Rochelle DuFord's immanent critique of reactionary solidarity. DuFord argues that political solidarity steered by a goal of furthering domination is defective insofar as it undermines its own social existence by virtue of the antisocial norms it adopts, including exclusionary norms (Solidarity in Conflict, esp. chap. 3).
See, for example, Poletta, Freedom Is an Endless Meeting; Graeber, Possibilities; Juris, Networking Futures; Bonilla, Non-sovereign Futures.
Bayertz, “Four Uses of ‘Solidarity,’” 20.
In addition to Kolers, Moral Theory of Solidarity, the short list also includes Bayertz, “Four Uses” (Bayertz uses the term “anticipative”) and DuFord, Solidarity in Conflict.
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for raising this point.
Gadamer, Truth and Method, xxvii.
Weinsheimer and Marshall, translator's preface, xv–xvi.
Thanks to Linda Martín Alcoff for emphasizing this point.
A stronger reading of Gadamer's claim would be that the terms knowers use to cognize the world not only are liable to change but in fact do change through every instance of understanding.
Personal contact became somewhat necessary to support the striking miners when Thatcher's government froze the National Union of Mineworkers’ bank account, making it impossible to donate directly to the union. See Kelliher, “Solidarity and Sexuality,” 244.
Kelliher, “Solidarity and Sexuality,” 247, 250. The importance of interactions in building mutual relations of solidarity, considering the challenges of geographical distance and the ubiquity of antigay propaganda in more socially conservative areas of the country, is powerfully portrayed in Matthew Warchus's 2014 film Pride. Thanks to Rachel Piper for introducing me to this film.
See Fraser, “Social Justice in the Age of Identity Politics.” Thanks to Rachel Fraser for suggesting this interpretation.
Participant-dependence is not the same thing as relativism about truth, for knowers can misunderstand the object of inquiry or be wrong about what they claim to know about it. Thanks to Linda Martín Alcoff for clarifying this distinction.
For example, Collins, Black Feminist Thought; Einspahr, “Structural Domination and Structural Freedom.”
Marx, Capital; Hartsock, “Feminist Standpoint”; Collins, “Black Feminist Epistemology.” For more recent treatments, see Toole, “Demarginalizing Standpoint Epistemology”; Celikates, “Remaking the Demos ‘from Below’?” Briana Toole and Robin Celikates connect standpoint theory to discussions in analytic epistemology and critical theory, respectively.
For example, see Georgia Warnke's discussion of Jürgen Habermas's and Axel Honneth's criticisms in Warnke, “Hermeneutics and Critical Theory.”
Habermas, “Review of Gadamer's Truth and Method.” Psychoanalysis likewise serves as a “reference system” to identify individual-level “pathologies” that lead to distorted communication. I think developing a critical theory of society is an invaluable project for describing the problems solidary collectives face, for better articulating the nature of emancipation, and for understanding whether the goals they strive for may inadvertently prop up domination. For Gadamerian reasons, however, I think of the development of critical theory as an interpretive and open-ended task that is most productively pursued by many theorists and from many cultural horizons. As Habermas himself admitted, “reference systems” are legitimated with reference to particular time- and place-bound traditions.
Glissant, “Creolization in the Making of the Americas,” 83; Gordon, Creolizing Political Theory, 3.
Hall, “Old and New Identities,” 78. Hall recognizes the affinity of this account of identity with intersectionality theory.
