Holding On: Notes on Mapping Resistance from the Margins

 

Resistance. The word rolls off the tongue as if it were obvious — to stand back, to oppose, to hold back the force of another. The Oxford English Dictionary, as of 1939, defines it neatly: ‘organized covert opposition to an occupying or ruling power.’ Latin roots — resistere: to stand back. Old French — résister: to stop.

But lately, I find myself wondering what these old roots might hide, and what they might keep us from seeing.
Because in the places I care about — the Global South, communities at the edges of empires, women whose names slip through official records — resistance is rarely so easily organized or so comfortably covert. Sometimes it is loud. Sometimes it is gentle, so quiet that even the powerful don’t hear it for what it is. Sometimes it isn’t recognized as resistance at all.

I am only at the earliest, most tentative edge of this question, and yet it feels like a question that has lived in my bones for a long time: What does it mean to resist — really? And how does this meaning shift if we look at it through the eyes of the ones who have survived, endured, and outlasted so many maps of power?

When I first began studying resistance, I turned to the familiar theorists: James Scott’s Weapons of the Weak, the sly power of foot-dragging, gossip, and sabotage — everyday defiance that hides in plain sight. Michel Foucault’s haunting reminder that power and resistance are locked in an endless dance. And Hollander and Einwohner’s careful matrix, breaking resistance down into intention and recognition: Is it deliberate? Do the powerful see it as defiance? Does it count if no one notices?

It is a useful map. But lately, I feel the limits pressing in.

Because in the communities I have known — and those I hope to listen to more deeply — resistance does not always look like opposition. Sometimes it looks like persistence. Like the refusal to be broken, even when the world demands your silence. Like cooking the old recipes in secret, singing the forbidden songs, remembering the names that empire tried to erase. Like imagining a future your oppressors insist is impossible.

These days, I find my thoughts returning to scholars who remind us that the Global South holds other ways of knowing what resistance is and can be. Saba Mahmood, for instance, asks us to sit with the discomfort that not all agency is oppositional — that women’s religious practices in Egypt, so often dismissed by liberal Western feminists, might be forms of ethical self-cultivation that refuse to fit the mold of “liberation” scripted elsewhere.

Aníbal Quijano and Walter Mignolo, writing from Latin America, talk of epistemic disobedience — not just saying “no” to colonial power, but living as if its categories do not have the final word. María Lugones writes of world-traveling: the possibility of living in multiple worlds at once, refusing to be pinned down by any one dominant narrative. And Linda Tuhiwai Smith insists that even the simple act of researching, of telling our own stories, can be resistance when it revives ways of knowing that genocide and epistemicide tried to wipe away.

If the dictionary tells us resistance is to hold back — maybe what the Global South teaches is that it is also to hold on. To each other. To the land. To languages, memories, kinship, and ways of being that empire would rather see forgotten.

It is too soon to say what shape my book will take. For now, I am in that beautifully unsettling place where the questions outnumber the answers. I know only that I want this project to listen carefully — to the small and large ways people resist not just through protest and revolution, but through stubborn living, quiet refusal, and the constant work of building other worlds in the cracks of this one.

So here I am: tracing maps of resistance while knowing they will never be complete. Watching how the lines shift when we look through the eyes of those who have always known how to survive unrecognized. Asking what it means to “oppose” when opposition alone is not enough — when sometimes, resistance is not standing back but standing with.

This is just a note from the margins, where my thinking begins. An invitation, perhaps — for those who carry stories of resistance that do not fit in the textbooks. For those whose survival has always been misread or overlooked. For those who have spent lifetimes holding on when the world told them to let go.

May this humble beginning grow into a book that holds space for all the ways we resist, remember, and remain.