Decolonial Feminist Research

Book excerpt: In Decolonial Feminist Research: Haunting, Rememory and Mothers, Jeong-eun Rhee embarks on a deeply personal inquiry that is demanded by her dead mother's haunting rememory and pursues what has become her work/life question: What methodologies are available to notice and study a reality that exceeds and defies modern scientific ontology and intelligibility? Rhee is a Korean migrant American educational qualitative researcher, who learns anew how to notice, feel, research, and write her mother's rememory across time, geography, languages, and ways of knowing and being. She draws on Toni Morrison's concept of "rememory" and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's "fragmented-multi self." Using various genres such as poems, dialogues, fictions, and theories, Rhee documents a multi-layered process of conceptualizing, researching, and writing her (m/others') transnational rememory as a collective knowledge project of intergenerational decolonial feminists of color. In doing so, the book addresses the following questions: How can researchers write in the name and practice of research what can never be known or narrated with logic and reason? What methodologies can be used to work through and with both personal and collective losses, wounds, and connections that have become y/our questions? Rhee shows how to feel connectivity and fragmentation as/of self not as binary but as constitutive through rememory and invites readers to explore possibilities of decolonial feminist research as an affective bridge to imagine, rememory, and engender healing knowledge. Embodied onto-epistemologies of women of color haunt and thus demand researchers to contest and cross the boundary of questions, topics, methodologies, and academic disciplinary knowledge that are counted as relevant, appropriate, and legitimate within a dominant western science regime. This book is for qualitative researchers and feminism scholars who are pursuing these kinds of boundary-crossing "personal" inquiries.