My fundamental connection with bell hooks has been through her book All About Love: New Visions (hooks 2001). Hooks’s “love ethic” goes beyond superficial romantic constructs and conceives love as a transformative energy that emphasizes social justice. As a scholar and designer, I’m interested in businesses that emphasize anti-capitalistic social change and transformation based on love. I have explored everyday creative work practices that transform adversity (Weston and Imas 2018), affirm caring communal practices (Imas and Weston 2016), and utilize food and educational methodologies (Weston and Farber 2020). I run jewelry businesses to expand my practical understanding of work, and I reflect on the ways that my scholarship and practice intersect with my experience as a person of African origin.
There have always been tensions between my work and my history, which hooks’s ideas have enabled me to navigate. On one side, my jewelry designs are inspired by my mother’s Cape Malay heritage and the lace craft traditions from my father’s English heritage. Cape Malay is a unique community in South Africa formed through colonization, when enslaved persons, exiles, and political prisoners were brought to South Africa from South and Southeast Asia (Kader 2021). On the other side, my heritage and the core of my work, ‘business’ and ‘economics,’ are historically tied to these horrendous histories. I continuously question how to navigate these tensions. For me, moving forward is about acknowledging these difficult histories and actively creating new Afro-futures and possibilities for creative enterprise based on hooks’s beliefs about care, hope, and transformation.
Reading hooks gave me the words and essence to consider business in the terms of love and social purpose. She states that “all the great movements for social justice in our society have strongly emphasized a love ethic,” and she embraces “the idea of love as a transformative force” (hooks 2001, xix). Her words powerfully express love as a decolonial, feminist practice that embraces social justice and change, and they offer a “hopeful joyous vision of love’s transformative power”(2001: xxix) that values “care,” “respect,” and “responsibility” (hooks 2001, 7-8). Respect in this context resonates with Elizabeth (Dori) Tunstall’s work on respectful design (2023), which demonstrates the importance of care and regard for the values and cultural traditions of others. Hooks’s focus on love is truly radical as a decolonial act. Within my family, I have seen how the radical act of love is stronger than the hate and division caused by colonial oppression. My mother grew up during the South African colonial apartheid, and it was illegal for my parents to marry because of the race laws. They married elsewhere, resisting racial segregation. Their love was a radical decolonial act against political oppression.
My way forward as a scholar, designer, and woman of color is to courageously engage with business, as inspired by hooks’s and my family history’s commitment to a love defined by social care, respect, responsibility, social justice, and transformation. The following are my approaches to decolonial love in business.
- Create authentic relationships that co-create material change.
This involves rejecting the patriarchal, colonial assumption that love exists when one individual/ group has dominance over another and creating mutually respectful and responsible relationships that establish accountability, trustworthiness, and wellbeing for all (hooks 2001). There is an important shift taking place in which some businesses are raising awareness about social and community issues. However, Morrissette questionswhether “exposure to critical issues is always enough, and asks: what are the ways that structure can be woven into work that supports communities?” (2022). Decolonial love means having an authentic connection to a social issue and co-creating a meaningful, material, and sustainable impact with community members. At my jewelry business Fireflies Atelier, decolonial love means creating material supports that prioritize care for community and the earth in Zimbabwe. We have implemented sustainable studio practices and have collaborated on tree planting programs to enhance the wellbeing of school children. Future projects will co-create economic opportunities with women entrepreneurs and fellow artisans.
- Focus on cultural respect and mutual care.
Creating caring and respectful relationships means working against appropriation. Cultural appropriation occurs when cultural elements, including knowledge and products, are taken from cultural groups without permission. “ ‘Misappropriation’ describes a one-sided process where one entity benefits from another group’s culture without permission and without giving something in return” (IPinCH 2015, 2-3). Harm is caused when culture is disrespectfully misrepresented, or when people from a cultural group do not receive economic benefits from their own cultural work (IPinCH 2015). For communities exploited during colonization, including the Cape Malay community, Indigenous groups, and many others, cultural appropriation is harmful because it continues unequal relationships and exploitation. At my other company Alia Weston Jewellery, decolonial love means creating designs inspired by my own experience and heritage rather than work based on the experience of others. As a consumer, decolonial love means choosing to buy products and services authentically created by artisans and businesses from a particular culture. Making such choices are powerful because they demonstrate respect and care for artisans’ craft, cultural heritage, and economic wellbeing.
- Ask reflexive questions and be willing to work differently.
MacAskill (2016) argues that efforts towards social change are ineffective without opportunities for reflection because unquestioned “good intentions” can have consequences that undermine change, lead to less impact, and create harmful unforeseen consequences. For hooks (2001), engaging with love as an “action” means taking responsibility, acknowledging actions have consequences, focusing on wellbeing, and choosing how we respond to injustice. Decolonial love in business encompasses questioning the implications of our actions so that the historical harms of colonization are not repeated. One way to put this in action is to ask meaningful, self-reflective questions and then be willing to redirect and work differently (Weston 2019). As a designer and businesswoman, I regularly ask questions like, Is this social mission appropriate and respectful? How can I create authentic, mutually respectful collaborations? What are the negative or unintended consequences of my business practices? Ultimately, by focussing on decolonial love, we can reconfigure the values and practices on which businesses operate and strive to create meaningful social change.
References
hooks, bell. 2001. All About Love: New Visions. New York: Harper Perennial.
Imas, J. Miguel and Alia Weston. 2016. “OrgansparkZ Communities of Art/creative Spaces, Imaginations, & Resistance.” In Precarious Spaces: The Arts, Social & Organizational Change, edited by Katarzyna Kosmala and J. Miguel Imas, 131-151. Chicago: Intellect Books.
Kader, Yaseen. 2021. “Cape Malay: A South African Muslim Identity Borne out of Colonialism. Forgotten Diasporas.” Gal-Dem, July 15, 2022. https://gal-dem.com/cape-malay-a-south-african-muslim-identity-born-out-of-colonialism/
Intellectual Property Issues in Cultural Heritage Project. Think Before You Appropriate (IPinCH). 2015. “Things to Know and Questions to Ask in Order to Avoid Misappropriating Indigenous Cultural Heritage.” Simon Fraser University. https://www.sfu.ca/ipinch/sites/default/files/resources/teaching_resources/think_before_you_appropriate_jan_2016.pdf
MacAskill, William. 2016. Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference. New York: Avery.
Morrissette, Suzanne. 2022. Personal Conversation. June 27, 2022.
Tunstall, Elizabeth (Dori). 2023. Decolonizing Design: A Cultural Justice Guidebook. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Weston, Alia. 2019. “Challenging Perspectives: How Do You Know What You Don’t Know?” Think Future. Innovation Edge.
Weston, Alia and J. Miguel Imas. 2018. “Creativity: Transformation in Adversity.” In Palgrave Handbook of Creativity at Work, edited by Lee Martin and Nick Wilson, 287-307. Cham: Palgrave McMillan.
Weston, Alia and Zev Farber. 2020. “Food as an Arts-based Research Method in Business and Management Studies.” In Using Arts-based Research Methods: Creative Approaches for Researching Business, Organisation and Humanities, edited by Jenna Ward and Harriet Shortt, 109-142. Cham: Palgrave MacMillan.