WP3:
Cultural Identities:
Gender, Race,
and Decolonial Theories
WP3 focuses on the so-called 'cultural identity' inequalities, which concern social status, self-respect, and esteem. In this case, the project deals with unjustifiable inequalities that spring from factors such as gender, race or residual, albeit often unconscious, colonialism. In a word, the project deals here with questions of recognition.
Although the distributive dimension and the dimension of recognition are closely related and often interdependent, they are irreducible to each other (Fraser and Honneth 2003; Celentano and Caranti 2021). Nowadays, the issue of cultural identity is central to public discourse. International movements such as Me Too, Ni una menos, and Black Lives Matter (but also paradoxically opposed movements such as All Lives Matter) exemplify a new wave of cultural struggles.
The current debate on cultural identity has also flourished thanks to the decolonial approach. Decolonial theories share the current diagnosis that liberal democracies are unable to propose inclusive models, socioeconomic systems of cooperation, and transnational institutions dedicated to safeguarding and protecting fundamental freedoms and human rights. Rather than adhering to the idealized and abstract methodology that often characterizes the traditional model of justice, decolonial models of rationality, political authority justification, and social cooperation adopt a non-ideal starting point.
They start from concrete experiences of structural and systematic forms of domination, oppression, and exploitation fuelled by racism, exploitation by large international economic groups, patriarchal culture, or oppression of local and indigenous communities. Based on these premises, the project identifies three recent theoretical developments that require further investigation.
(a) Challenging 'Progressive Neoliberalism': An Intersectional Approach to Cultural and Identity Injustice
The intersectional approach to cultural identity injustices focuses on the recent criticism of 'progressive neoliberalism'. These critics are dissatisfied with the attempt of those who believe that thirty years of neoliberal ideology can be remedied from within, with some progressive measures. In particular, they criticize the persistence of an individualistic approach. They intend to overcome it assuming that structural factors such as racism, gender bias, and social exclusion call for a systemic answer focusing on hierarchical power relations (Hooks 2014; Crenshaw 2019; Collins 2019; Butler, et al 2021; Fraser 2022). This structural methodology – they claim – allows to define an entirely new conception of justice (Pateman 1988; Mills 1997, 2020, Shelby, 2016).
Our project enrolls scholars who advocate this intersectional approach. We aim to test the advantages of this normative position and ask whether it really highlights otherwise hidden dimensions of (in)justice.
(b) Decolonizing Justice:
Rethinking the Foundations of the Western Values in a Non-Eurocentric Perspective
Decolonial theories have presented critical arguments regarding the supposed universality and neutrality of the way the Western tradition has justified or applied ideas and values such as individual liberties, equality, rationality, and liberal democracy (Fanon 2002; Mignolo and Walsh 2018; Seth 2021). For example, they question the normative priority of formal gender and racial equality, dear to liberals, over substantive and symbolic dimensions.
In this respect, we aim to verify how decolonial theories can overcome the challenge of proposing alternative models to the so-called Eurocentric paradigm of justice without falling into plain and simple moral relativism.
(c) The Future of Multicultural Societies: State Sovereignty and Migration
The massive phenomenon of migration due to economic factors, human rights violations, and climate change challenge both the paradigm of state sovereignty and that of liberal toleration in multicultural societies. The Manichaean idea that our era was characterized by a clash of civilizations (Huntington 1996) dominated much of the new millennium.
Fortunately, in recent years the phenomenon of hyper-pluralism in contemporary societies (Ferrara 2014) has been addressed with a multidimensional, non-parochial approach (Mignolo and Escobar 2010; Scauso 2021 Wolf 2020).
In this respect, decolonial theories can also offer interesting methodological perspectives from the viewpoint of migrants and innovative conceptual proposals concerning state sovereignty and the right to entry.