Decolonizing Bodies

In Decolonizing Bodies, Sánchez-Flores explores how trauma makes racism take up residence in human bodies and how healing racial trauma is crucial to anti-racist and decolonial transformation. The book issues an invitation to embodiment, calling us to dismantle the empires within our own flesh and to world a shared humanity.
—Christopher Powell, Toronto Metropolitan University, ON, Canada

Decolonizing Bodies explores processes of racialization through decolonial and radical relational lenses. It weaves together theory and the author’s personal stories to examine how human bodies and whole nations are racialized by late capitalism’s colonial legacies. It begins by introducing Radical Relational Individuality, a decolonial and relational perspective on embodied humans. It then discusses mixed-race myths in Mexico and Canada that reveal the persistence of systemic racism as global white ignorance and structural gaslighting. It engages with the trauma of racism embedded in human bodies, how institutions perpetuate white supremacy, and the need for racial healing for everybody. Decolonizing Bodies includes an interview with educator and leadership coach Tovi C. Scruggs on her transformational teachings and concludes by discussing decolonial cosmopolitan localism based on pluriversality, a shared world, shared humanity, and an expansive form of radical relational freedom that centers an ethic of love and our deep interconnections and dependencies on everybody and everything. This book will be of interest to scholars of sociology, race and racism, and decolonial approaches.

Mónica J. Sánchez-Flores is Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Environment, Culture and Society in Thompson Rivers University ne Secwepemcúl’ecw (Kamloops, BC, Canada). She is the author of Political Philosophy for the Global Age (2005) and Cosmopolitan Liberalism: Expanding the Boundaries of the Individual (2010).