Theatre Journal

Catherine Walsh’s richly braided contribution to decolonial thought and praxis tells the stories of human struggle that fracture the matrix of power constituting coloniality. Completed in Ecuador in 2022 during the Indigenous-led national strike and the globally ravaging effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, Walsh reflects on the lessons learned from bearing witness to decolonial struggles over the course of her five-decade career. She does so by foregrounding these struggles as re-existence: a word that Afro-Colombian thinker Adolfo Albán Achinte used to describe the dignifying mechanisms within Black social life that not only resist, but assert and transform life against colonial threat of systemic violence, dispossession, and de-existence at large. In doing so, Rising Up and Living On asks its readers to take part in the work of unsettling coloniality by walking with the present-day colonial struggles in Abya Yala and throughout the globe and to reflect, in turn, on where their own stories reside within this task.

This book’s methodology extends the importance of relationality in Walsh’s life-long commitment to decolonial pedagogy, spanning her years as a feminist anti-racist early childhood educator in Massachusetts to her present-day directorship of Latin American Cultural Studies at the Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar in Ecuador. If coloniality is “embodied, situated, and lived” (4), as Walsh reiterates throughout her introduction, then part of the work of cracking coloniality is to write one’s own story while thinking alongside the embodied and situated stories of others who persist in struggle. Walsh is explicit about her roots as a white working-class woman raised on dispossessed Nipmuc land, as well as her humbling transformation in walking with those who have risen up and persisted in life against the colonial intertwinement of “violence-dispossession-war-death” (7). She also emphasizes the relationality at the heart of the book, comprised of a compendium of autobiography, letters, notes, and empirical reflections, while also thinking with a wide plurality of Indigenous, Afro-descendent, and other anti-colonial and decolonial thinkers: “authors, artists, students present and past, ancestor-guides, intellectual militants and activists, and political-epistemic, collective, communal, and community-based subjects, processes, practices, actions, and movements” (10).

In weaving these multiplicities together, Walsh takes part in the work of cracking coloniality––the [End Page 586] book’s central, anchoring metaphor. Chapter 1, “Cries and Cracks,” delves into this metaphor by thinking about the polyvocal chorus of “cries” that fissure the seemingly impenetrable wall of colonial power. Interspersed with her own reflections on refusing silence in spite of threat, Walsh gives an empirical account of the state, capitalist, and extra-legal violences of recent decades that have murdered and disappeared people throughout the Americas––most notably the 2014 Ayotzinapa massacre in Mexico, but also the increase of femicides and anti-Black murders throughout the hemisphere. Here Walsh argues that cries of outrage against unimaginable brutality––most broadly understood as the expressive refusal to be silenced––are part of the work of debilitating coloniality’s wall.

Her opening chapter begins with an epigraph from “Who Decides,” a widely performed protest poem against police violence by Brooklyn-based spoken-word duo Climbing PoeTree. The epigraph highlights the ways Walsh traces the power of creativity in debilitating the brutal violence of the state against those who resist it throughout her text. In a final section focused on arts across the hemisphere, Walsh offers a moving inventory of cries that have manifested in the artistic labors of the Zapatistas (notably Zapantera Negra, their collaboration with Black Panther Party Minister of Culture Emory Douglas and artist Caleb Duarte), Muxe artist Lukas Avendaño, and Nasa Misak child author Violeta Kiwe Rozental Almendra. Walsh repeatedly makes clear that these acts of crack-making are not solutions to “coloniality’s permanence and hold,” nor are they quite utopic pursuits of hope or antidotes to despair; rather, they are a strategic...