Will you come to my party?
Photo: at St James Palace early 1996 Often when I am invited to speak or give interviews in international spaces I am painfully conscious of my undeniable privilege and coloniality. People like me from the global south are invited to the slick platforms that are dominated by the voices from the global north because of our fluency in the language, and because despite our brown/black skins we literally and metaphorically speak the same lingo The phenomenon is not recent. Way back in the early 1980s as the Project Coordinator at the Lanka Mahila Samiti (a Sri Lankan association of rural women's societies) of a USAID funded programme that supported small enterprise development for rural women, I represented the USAID mission in Colombo at many conferences in the region – a young woman, skin burnished browner by days spent with women in rural Sri Lanka, but with near flawless English and the panache to navigate the seminar worlds of the Bangkok Hilton or the resort hotels in Paran