In her book Queer Freedom: Black Sovereignty, Lara articulates a number of meaningfully charged concepts like Blackness, queerness and Black sovereignty in the hope to see emerge the “wholeness” of which “arrivant” populations were deprived under the yoke of what she calls Christian colonization and capitalism.
I was particularly struck by her statement that categories such as race, gender and class, which one uses daily to problematize systems of oppression and power structures are actually not decolonial concepts because created by the very culprit of colonization. She therefore opens up her reader to the rise of utterly new decolonial concepts which she theorized as “woven density”. On page 18 she claims: “This ofrenda is not the master’s house. It will not look like the master’s house. It is not even in the master’s field. This text lives in the locus of difference in which the polarities (body/spirit; heaven/earth) that have sustained Christian coloniality will be challenged and undone in order to render new states of being and knowing as possible.” Only through the challenging of Christian colonial worldview and the embrace of woven density of knowledge will then decolonization truly be possible.