Speaking Face to Face: The Visionary Philosophy of María Lugones ed. by Pedro J. DiPietro, Jennifer McWeeny and Shireen Roshanravan (review)

Editors’ note: This review was originally submitted for publication before María Lugones’s untimely death due to cardiac arrest in Summer 2020. Slight changes were subsequently made in February 2021.

This anthology on the work of the great contemporary philosopher María Lugones (1944–2020) brings together a group of compelling essays on the relevance and significance of her work, extending the theoretical tools she developed to resist interwoven systems of oppressions, and offering models for decolonial theorizing and praxis. A prominent Latina/x political theorist, Lugones was among the first philosophers to name and investigate the solipsism and faulty logic of feminist perspectives which fail to understand the modern category “woman” as fundamentally, differentially shaped by racism. Her work highlights the liberatory practices of Women of Color, the plurality of reality and the self, the coloniality of modern gender, and the transformative power of true coalition. Theorizing resistance as a counterforce inherent within oppressive relations, she shows how shifting attention toward the inevitable opposition to mistreatment illuminates alternative worlds of meaning and sense that are necessary for liberation. Rather than assuming a universal subject, Lugones’s uniquely evocative and inventive approach to philosophy begins with perspectives of diverse Women of Color, imparting her writing with an awareness of multiplicity and complexity at every level.

Author of many influential essays, including “Playfulness, ‘World’-Traveling and Loving Perception” (1987), “Purity, Impurity, and Separation” (1994), “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System” (2007), “The Coloniality of Gender” (2008), and the book Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppression (2003), Lugones was an activist scholar whose political work has always been central to her ideas and theorizing. For decades she was a core member of La Escuela Popular Norteña (EPN), a popular education collective she co-founded with Geoff Bryce and Sylvia Rodriguez “for political education at the grassroots, focused on the liberation of Latinos from poverty, violence, and cultural extermination.” The organization has served as a context for projects, curriculum development, and collaborations that implement and inform her theoretical work and that of other members, as Cricket Keating and Sarah Lucia Hoagland describe from different vantage points in their anchoring memoir-infused contributions to this engaged and praxis-oriented collection.

Along with a dozen core chapters, Speaking Face to Face includes a revealing interview with Lugones herself, as well as a comprehensive bibliography and timeline of her publications, and a reflective afterword by Paula M. Moya. Chapters are organized around overlapping themes, such as “Moving with and beyond Intersectionality,” “Gender, Coloniality, and Decolonial Embodiments,” and “Knowing on the Edge of Worlds and Sense,” titles that allude to the perceptual, epistemological, and metaphysical issues at the heart of the Lugones oeuvre. Contributors examine Lugones’s theories in conversation with key feminist and decolonial thinkers who have influenced her work, including Gloria Anzaldúa, Combahee River Collective, Audre Lorde, Marilyn Frye, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Frantz Fanon, Aníbal Quijano, and many others. Each chapter reflects on or illustrates the usefulness of Lugones’s theories and practices for inhabiting situations, relationships, and identities in ways that recognize and amplify “the possibilities of decoloniality” rather than reinforcing injustice (280). For instance, riffing off Lugones’s writings on resistant logic, erasure, and impurity, Elizabeth V. Spelman’s vivid contribution “Trash Talks Back” uncovers connections between oppression and the logic of attempting to turn others into trash, noting the anxieties trash-makers reveal about themselves in their abuse of others as well as the “features the ‘trashed’ may wish to animate in themselves … the treasure the oppressors … cannot or will not see” (43).

An informative and artfully cowritten introduction by coeditors Pedro J. DiPietro, Jennifer McWeeny, and Shireen Roshanravan provides an accessible narrative overview of Lugones’s philosophical system, framed by each editor’s reflections on their relationships with María. They also consider...