Constructing Coalitional Memories Where Religion, Race, Gender, and Nation Collide

This paper looks to queer feminist authors and activists for insights about coalition-building amidst ongoing traumas stemming from structures of coloniality. M. Jacqui Alexander’s theory of palimpsestic time, Aurora Levins Morales’ focus on narrating histories of interconnection, and artist/activist JeeYeun Lee’s organizing will frame an example of coalitional activism in 2021 that re-enacted memories of disputed Indigenous land rights in the same location as the 1983 Parliament of World Religions. Attending to the entanglement of racism, sexism, religious supremacy, and settler colonialism shows how identities, histories, and even city structures hold the legacies of violence that continue to persist today. I argue that re-narrating histories that focus on the intersection of religion, race, gender, and nation can move decolonization from a metaphor to a practice. Both trauma and spirituality, in different but interconnected ways, show how the past must be acknowledged as embodied in the present.