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legacies of functional (il)literacies
triple autoethnographic explorations on
finding voice(s) in academic and everyday life
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liminalities 9.3 (2013) / ISSN 1557-2935
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a
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hari stephen kumar is a Ph.D. student in English, specializing in Composition and Rhetoric, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His teaching and research engages the college classroom as a space where performance autoethnographies and decolonizing methodologies can foster critical cultural interventions in academic knowledge production. For his current projects, please visit: www.kineticnow.com
bryant keith alexander is Professor and Dean, College of Communication Studies and Fine Arts at Loyola Marymount University. He is the co-editor of Performance Theories in Education: Power, Pedagogy, and the Politics of Identity (Erlbaum, 2005) and author of Performing Black Masculinity: Race, Culture, and Queer Identity (AltaMira, 2006) and The Performative Sustainability of Race (Peter Lang, 2012).
claudio moreira is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication, University of Massachusetts Amherst. Together with Marcelo Diversi, he is the coauthor of Betweener Talk: Decolonizing Knowledge Production, Pedagogy, and Praxis (Left Coast Press, 2009), winner of the 2010 Best Book Award, National Communication Association, Ethnography Division.
We are deeply grateful for our family of colleagues at the International Congress for Qualitative Inquiry who supported our work. In particular we thank Tami Spry and Norman Denzin for contributing their cameo vocal performances in this multimedia text.
This project was composed for the web using the HTML5 authoring program Hype, which hari recommends highly for its intuitive interface, powerful capabilities, and in-depth support resources.
Corresponding Author: hari stephen kumar, Department of English, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 305 Bartlett Hall, 130 Hicks Way, Amherst, MA 01003-9269, USA.
bryant keith alexander is Professor and Dean, College of Communication Studies and Fine Arts at Loyola Marymount University. He is the co-editor of Performance Theories in Education: Power, Pedagogy, and the Politics of Identity (Erlbaum, 2005) and author of Performing Black Masculinity: Race, Culture, and Queer Identity (AltaMira, 2006) and The Performative Sustainability of Race (Peter Lang, 2012).
claudio moreira is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication, University of Massachusetts Amherst. Together with Marcelo Diversi, he is the coauthor of Betweener Talk: Decolonizing Knowledge Production, Pedagogy, and Praxis (Left Coast Press, 2009), winner of the 2010 Best Book Award, National Communication Association, Ethnography Division.
We are deeply grateful for our family of colleagues at the International Congress for Qualitative Inquiry who supported our work. In particular we thank Tami Spry and Norman Denzin for contributing their cameo vocal performances in this multimedia text.
This project was composed for the web using the HTML5 authoring program Hype, which hari recommends highly for its intuitive interface, powerful capabilities, and in-depth support resources.
Corresponding Author: hari stephen kumar, Department of English, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 305 Bartlett Hall, 130 Hicks Way, Amherst, MA 01003-9269, USA.
Email: hari@kineticnow.com
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openings
(Conquergood, 1998, p. 26)
Speaking—/
/—writing—/
/—embodying—/
/—in 1995, Dwight Conquergood called for performance-based approaches to knowledge production that stage
“resistance to the textual fundamentalism of the academy”
in part by emphasizing
“performance as a counterbalance to the weight and prestige given texts in the academy—both text as a metaphor for conceptualizing social reality, and actual texts as representations of knowledge”
However, what happens when the textualized academy deploys discourses of (il)literacy to legitimate only certain texts as demonstrations of knowledge?
What happens to marked bodies, both within and outside academic spaces, and their experiences of “functional (il)literacy” in a cultural economy, especially in a class-based economy?
(Conquergood, 1998, p. 33)
References on this screen:
Conquergood, Dwight. (1998). Beyond the text: Toward a performative cultural politics.
In S. J. Dailey (Ed.), The future of performance studies: Visions and revisions. (pp. 25-36). Washington, D.C.: National Communication Association.
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References on this screen:
Alexander, Bryant Keith, Claudio Moreira, and hari stephen kumar. (2012). Resisting
(Resistance) Stories: A Tri-autoethnographic Exploration of Father Narratives Across Shades of Difference. Qualitative Inquiry, 18(2), 121-133.
Diversi, Marceo & Claudio Moreira. (2009). Betweener Talk: Decolonizing Knowledge
Production, Pedagogy, and Praxis. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
As a continuing exploration of collaborative autoethnography, this performance-text intertwines three individuals writing across chasms of difference to both resist and engage narratives of (il)literacy in everyday life and in academic spaces.
We—/
/—an Indian-American man—/
/—an African-American man—/
/—a white-Brazilian man—/
/—embody our narratives within and against structures of academic knowledges, using autoethnography as an articulation of lived experience that resists/reverses 'traditional' academic articulations of scholarship in/as knowledge production.
As marked bodies we navigate betweener lives
across academic and everyday borders of race/culture/gender,
but in this space
on this page-stage
we come together to co-perform
a collection of invitational inquiries, enfleshed by theories that expose:
the vulnerability and power
Of our branded bodies
Making visceral knowledge count
(Diversi & Moreira, 2009, p. 223)
We are all betweeners
Us, betweeners
Them, betweeners
You, betweener
Everybody, betweener
Writing from the flesh
Exposing the vulnerability and power
Of our branded bodies
Making visceral knowledge count
~ Marcelo & Claudio
Us, betweeners
Them, betweeners
You, betweener
Everybody, betweener
Writing from the flesh
Exposing the vulnerability and power
Of our branded bodies
Making visceral knowledge count
~ Marcelo & Claudio
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Note 1:
Building on our previous collaborative methodology (Alexander, Moreira, and kumar, 2012), the following text was completed through a continual process of triggering narratives. Each movement in the text contains narrative and performance snippets that evoke the next movement, each writer responding and performing as sparked individually by the preceding teller, without discussion in between movements among the writers.
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"Western systems of knowledge the object of inquiry"
References on this screen:
Alexander, Bryant Keith. (2000). Skin Flint (or The Garbage Man's Kid): A
Generative Autobiographical Performance. Text and Performance Quarterly, 20, 97-114.
Conquergood, Dwight. (1998/1995). Beyond the Text: Toward a Performative Cultural Politics.
In S.J. Dailey (Ed.), The Future of Performance Studies: Visions and Revisions. (pp. 25-36). Washington, D.C.: National Communication Association.
Denzin, Norman K. (2005). Emancipatory Discourses and the Ethics and Politics of Interpretation.
In N.K. Denzin & Y.S. Lincoln (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research (3rd ed.). (pp. 933-958). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc.
Indigenous knowledge systems are too frequently made into objects of study, treated as if they were instances of quaint folk theory held by the members of primitive cultures.
The decolonizing project reverses this equation, making Western systems of knowledge the object of inquiry.
We engage the generative quality of auto ethnography to stimulate and make co-present the reflexive processes of audience members in the very act of audiencing.
We seek to evoke a turning of the gaze toward making
interweaving our stories into an invitation to critically question the structures that validate certain knowledge practices as 'literate' even as they reject uncertain live(d) experiences.
By staging our own markedly different bodies across and with each other in this performance, we seek to stimulate how a spark of expression by a performer often triggers in the audience a similar experience translated through difference.
Each of us brings to the page-stage a variety of telling modes, evoked and inspired by the previous performer, blurring the boundaries between:
IMAGE
JOY
SYNTHESIS
STORY
POEM
QUOTE
PAIN
ANALYSIS
MEMORY
RAGE
SONG
THEORY
breathing performance into our lives as a "heterogeneous ensemble of ideas and methods on the move."
(Conquergood, 1998, p. 34)
(Denzin, 2005, p. 936)
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(Alexander, 2000)
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where is this story going?
I am afraid of where this story will take me.
— half-remembered voices —
— fragments of stories told by other people —
— fragments that feel like shards in my own life —
"… an illiterate woman!"
(My Indian grandfather, to my Indian mother.)
"… you dare to correct my English?"
(A white British male factory worker, to my Indian father, in Yemen.)
"… your English is so good!"
(Said by a white U.S. female immigration officer, testing my English.)
— fragmenting my own voices now with rage and sorrow, hope and despair, pain and paranoia.
"… these anchor babies, these little terrorists …"
(Said by a white female legislator on TV, about babies like my daughter: born in the U.S. to foreign parents.)
Whether it will take me through
memories that may or may not allow
themselves to be told into being (again),
and if so what form they will demand to take (this time)—
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where is this story going?
Voices that still demand to be told and co-performed in everyday encounters
that do not know to sit still and be quiet when a fellow student
in a graduate seminar
expounds at length on the importance of proper MLA-style citation
that are not patient enough to cloak themselves in academese
when a professor glibly remarks that personal voice has to be
bracketed out of academic writing.
And yet this story will take me there, and elsewhere beyond.
Because I know, as Stacy Holman-Jones knows,
that this story is not alone,
cannot be alone,
is not being told alone.
where is history taking us?
(Holman-Jones, 2005, p. 764)
References on this screen:
Holman-Jones, Stacy. (2005). Autoethnography: Making the Personal Political.
In N.K. Denzin & Y.S. Lincoln (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research (3rd ed.). (pp. 763-791). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
… it asks for a performance, one in which we might discover that our autoethnographic texts are not alone.
~ Stacy
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where is this story going?
Because I have been there before; experiences of blame and shame that are seared not only in my memory but on my body, like scars from where my literacy has been disciplined; disciplined because I dared to use the “I” that situated my experience as “contingent,” as a “perspectival quality of [my] truth claims” as inconsequential to the labor and documentation of academic writing—
I am not afraid of where this story will take me.
Even as I write this opening position statement, I have been disciplined to cite others—trained to engage in the politics of citation (Richards) as a politics of evidence (Denzin and Giardina), and even as Othello’s need for an ocular evidence (Shakespeare)—that which needs to be seen to be believed, like a stained handkerchief of fidelity or infidelity of the loved and beloved.
And like my high school math teacher Mrs. Chadderdon’s cracking the ruler of necessity; regardless if the answer is right, I must show my work. Translated into academic writing as a literature review of who had influence on my logics—even if my logics derived from my experience.
So after many cracking of whips with notes written in the margins of papers:
"Who said this first?"
"Others have written on gender!"
"Others have written on race and pedagogy."
Cite Dwight Conquergood.
Cite Judith Butler.
You must cite Giroux and McLaren and Shor!
(Richards, 291)
(Denzin and Giardina, 2008, p. 12)
(Shakespeare's Othello III.iii.365)
References on this screen:
Richards, S. (2006). Who is this Ancestor? Performing Memory in Ghana's Slave
Castle-Dungeons (A Multimedia Performance Meditation). In D. Soyini Madison & Judith Hamera (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Performance Studies. (pp. 489-507). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
Denzin, Norman & Giardina, Michael. (2008). (Eds.) Qualitative Inquiry and the Politics
of Evidence. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast.
where is history taking us?
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where is this story going?
And I know that I am not alone in this struggle.
And I know that questions of my literacy— my ability to read for knowledge and write coherently and think critically within the already privileged scriptocentric standards of the Ivory Tower is far from the daily challenges, both practically engaged and socially stigmatized, that visits the real experiences of those marked as illiterate—based on a hegemony of circumstance, culture, and class.
But I haven’t unlearned yet, as I continue to insert the requisite voices to retain the right to continue to practice my own voice in the still rigidly sanctified space of academia and scholarly production.
where is history taking us?
I am now beginning to learn to remember the things I have learned to forget.
References on this screen:
Dillard, Cynthia. (2011). Learning to Remember the Things We've Learned to Forget:
Endarkened Feminisms and the Sacred Nature of Research. In N.K. Denzin & M. Giardina (Eds.), Qualitative Inquiry and Global Crises. (pp. 226-243). Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
(Dillard, 2011)
Learning to Remember the Things We've Learned to Forget: Endarkened Feminisms and the Sacred Nature of Research.
~ Cynthia
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References on this screen:
Freire, Paulo. (1998). Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage.
(Trans. by Patrick Clarke.) Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
I am not quite sure where this story, my history, is going to take us…
Illiteracy? I am horrible.
I don’t submit my work to the performance division at NCA.
Not after being trashed for more than 11 minutes
By the performance
Scholar of the year when I presented my piece named
"My Bad English."
Illiteracy? I am not performance enough
Functional? Survival!
where is history taking us?
(Freire, 1998, p. 62)
where is this story going?
I am still the (Il)literate Janitor!
My fucking bad English
The one I am capable of
Reviewer 1: “Made time to read this today rather put it on a very long to do list :).
One word: Horrible. Nine pages into this supposed ‘autoethnography’ about ‘eating as a form of resistance,’ and it’s clear I’m wasting my time. No! Dislike? No not dislike...stronger...It’s all over the place in terms of thesis, quotes that don’t fit, missing direct quote citations, lines that don’t make sense, etc. etc the chicken breast references are uninteresting, it jumps out of one narrative into another —and none of them are interesting...if the idea here is to write a collage of mistakes and leave it to the reader (anyone who can get through it) to make meaning out if it—then it’s great. I’ve read a ‘lot’ and written my fair share of autoethnography . . . and . . . anyway, you get my drift.”
It’s impossible to talk of respect or dignity that is in the process of coming to be, for identities that are in the process of construction, without taking in consideration the conditions in which they are living and the importance of the knowledge derived from the experience, which they bring to school. I can in no way underestimate such knowledge. Or what is worse, ridicule it.
~ Paulo
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Illiteracy? I am not academic enough
Illiteracy? Runs in the layers of my body
Skin,
Muscles,
Viscera,
Shit,
In my ahistory almost quasi (dis) functional
Family! Heritage?
How much I despise the construction of such word!
In my ahistory almost quasi (dis) functional
Accented tongue and the
Shitty stories I have to, I have to
Write!
where is history taking us?
where is this story going?
(Il) literacy
(Il) literate
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References on this screen:
Freire, Paulo. (1985). The Politics of Education: Culture, Power, and Liberation.
Trans. by Donald Macedo. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey.
A writing that hurts
A writing that may not be interesting at all
A writing that is tired of being exotic and always at the end of the gaze
Oh writing, tired writing of coming to be what it already is!
where is this story going?
where is history taking us?
Violation! Of my body, my English, my Portuguese.
I do not try to be interesting!
Illiteracy? I am not smart enough
Illiteracy? Runs in my skin!
Thank you brothers for
(Freire, 1985, p. 116)
The more you have freedom to criticize, the more necessary is the sacredness of the domesticating social order for its self-preservation. In this sense, schooling at whatever level plays one of the most vital roles, as an efficient mechanism for social control. It is not hard to find educators whose idea of education is ‘to adapt the learner to his environment,’ and as a rule formal education has not been doing much more than this.
~ Paulo
~ Paulo
giving me some skin
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For me, I have to shake years of conditioning by teachers who told me
that I couldn’t write, read or speak properly.
Both, in Brasil and here!
Both, in Brasil and here!
Until this day, I have a phobia of writing on the chalkboard or hand
grading papers because I am afraid that I will misspell a word or have
The incorrect grammar—and eventually be seen as an academic fraud.
Because I am not resisting the Fraud, rather
Because I am the resisting Fraud!
where is history taking us?
References on this screen:
Freire, Paulo & Macedo, Donald. (1987). Literacy: Reading the Word and the World.
South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey.
where is this story going?
(Freire & Macedo, 1987, p. 118)
The colonizers spent centuries trying to impose their language. The colonized people were told either verbally or through message systems inherent in the colonial structure that they did not possess effective cultural instruments with which to express themselves. This language profile imposed by the colonizers eventually convinced the people that their language was in fact a corrupt and inferior system unworthy of true educational status.
~ Paulo
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the sound of silence . . .
God.
Has it really been two months since I got that last entry from Claudio?
Maybe when we eventually perform this we should have a long pause between these two rounds.
I need to begin this second round with a pause anyway.
I need to catch my breath, let my heart settle a bit.
I want some music in this pause, something that fits,
something blue
and deep.
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the sound of silence . . .
I want to hear the following words
from James Baldwin
set to music.
References on this screen:
Baldwin, James. (2010 [1979]). Of the Sorrow Songs: The Cross of Redemption. In Randall Kenan (Ed.),
The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings. (pp. 118-124). New York: Pantheon.
Moondog. (2004 [1969]). "A Bird's Lament." The German Years. Roof Music GmbH. MP3.
(Baldwin, 2010, p. 151)
Brothers, sisters, bear with me,
in this pause, I hear a lament,
but the words are Baldwin’s
as he says, insists, declares:
If you know—
as a black American must know,
—that the world which calls itself “white”
and which has the further,
unspeakable cowardice
—if you will dare imagine that I,
speaking now as a black witness to the white condition,
see you in a way that you cannot afford
to see me,
if you can see that the invention
of the black condition creates the trap
of the white identity
you will see that what a black man knows
about a white man stems,
inexorably,
[Beat. Breathe. Exhale. Sigh.]
And because this is Baldwin writing in 1979,
writing about a ghastly book on jazz,
writing against the knowledge produced
in that book, about Charlie “Yardbird” Parker,
“a sociopath … who managed … to destroy his career—and finally himself”
the music I hear behind his words is the tune
“A Bird’s Lament”
composed by street musician/composer Moondog
who was deeply moved by Parker’s death.
So.
discovers at his mother’s breast,
and then in the eyes of his father
of calling itself “free”
from the white man’s description of who,
and what, he takes to be the other—
in this case, the black cat:
me.
the sound of silence . . . is jazz
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My English department is hiring a professor in Composition-Rhetoric, and the four finalists are coming to campus, giving job talks open to us graduate students, and all of them are talking about multilingualism, diversity, literacIES (of course), and I wonder if that’s the focus of the position or if that’s just what’s hot these days.
The first three candidates to appear are white women
(or at least they appear so, to my essentializing and reductive eyes)
and they all say the right things about the right things
and they all have copious amounts of the right data
to back up their right things.
Data from student writing
from student assessments
from student essays
from student interviews.
And we all nod and I look around during the talks and I see how white my English department is.
the sound of silence . . . is jazz
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The fourth candidate is a black man
(please don’t judge my eyes, brothers and sisters)
who also says the right things about the right things
but he tells us stories of students (and of himself) in and out of class,
in communities and other contexts about the experiences of
young black male students (like he was, once upon a time)
in a predominantly white university (where he works, now)
within the academic spaces where
they (and he, still) are suspect subjects.
And we are listening and nodding and we start asking the right questions about the right things.
And I look around the room and I am startled
by how many people of color have showed up to this talk
until a professor asks him, fascinated,
“I never knew that minority students experienced the University in these ways!
Are there more studies out there featuring student experiences of the academy?”
And this makes me wonder: just what is this space doing to us?
the sound of silence . . . is jazz
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Please bear with me, dear brothers and sisters
there is a point to all this,
I think.
Why do such moments make me
so incredibly
sad/mad/bad?
God.
Why can’t I think coherently
and write critically
about THIS?
I haven’t thought of my uncle in a long time.
When he died, there were whispers
that he had been severely depressed
and that he might have committed suicide,
but I was very young and
by the time I was old enough to ask
they were just rumors.
the sound of silence . . . is jazz
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Can’t they see? Don’t they know?
And in moments like this I feel that
maybe they really can’t see
or maybe they don’t want to really know
the experiences of minorities and (il)literacies
in the academy.
Just who is (il)literate?
And I’m thinking that I’ve often heard
that suicide is a form of cowardice.
And I’m thinking THIS is what I must hear
now:
References on this screen:
Holman-Jones, Stacy. (2005). Autoethnography: Making the Personal Political. In N.K. Denzin
& Y.S. Lincoln (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research (3rd ed.). (pp. 763-791). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
Madison, D. Soyini. (1998). Performances, Personal Narratives, and the Politics of Possibility.
In S. Dailey (Ed.), The Future of Performance Studies: Visions and Revisions. (pp. 276-86). Washington, D.C.: National Communication Association.
Spry, Tami. (2011). Body, Paper, Stage: Writing and Performing Autoethnography.
Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
Moondog. (2004 [1969]). "A Bird's Lament." The German Years. Roof Music GmbH. MP3.
(Jones, 2005, p. 206)
… our autoethnographic texts are not alone.
~ Stacy
(Madison, 1998, p. 277)
… this is a performance of possibilities.
~ Soyini
(Spry, 2011, p. 210)
Hope resides in unruly bodies.
~ Tami
I am NOT afraid of where this story will take me.
I have to, I have to WRITE!
… to retain the right to continue to practice my own voice.
the sound of silence . . . is jazz
And who gets always marked as (il)literate?
This world that calls itself “academic”
and which has the further,
unspeakable cowardice
of calling itself “literate”
doesn’t know the first thing
about the lives of the
bodies
I thought of my uncle the first time I became
suicidally depressed myself
when I was in grad school for the first time
15 years ago.
And I’m thinking of him again now
as I wrestle with suicidal depression again
for the second time in my life
while in grad school for the second time
15 years later.
it so casually marks,
and re-marks,
and re-cites.
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(Madison, 1998)
References on this screen:
Madison, D. Soyini. (1998). Performances, Personal Narratives, and the Politics
of Possibility. In S. Dailey (Ed.), The Future of Performance Studies: Visions and Revisions. (pp. 276-86). Washington, D.C.: National Communication Association.
I too want some music in this pause, something that fits and flirts.
Something that moves with a spark of hope and a performance of possibility.
Being alarmed by Hari’s allusion to depression and suicide in his last turn, and after immediately sending him a message confessing my mad love for him and . . . threatening to leave Los Angeles to show up at his office door in Amherst to look him in the eyes,
and waiting for the confirmation that he is well.
After this last turn and before I make this entry, I begin to wonder about the linguistic articulation of suicide as a response to the illiteracy of depression.
the sound of silence . . .
I wonder about the body as a weighted space of emotion, and writing as a helium of uplift; a giddiness of pitch and a euphoria of rise.
I tearfully pause and momentarily recognize my own battles with depression in locations not unlike Hari’s—(No matter what they say my friends, academia is never a safe space!)—and in others spaces that bleed the borders of my identities—that once forced me to contemplate my own being and . . . not being.
the sound of silence . . . is jazz
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References on this screen:
Baldwin, James. (1985). The Price of the Ticket. New York: St. Martin's Press.
John Coltrane & Kenny Burrell. (2006 [1958]). "Why Was I Born?" Kenny Burrell & John Coltrane.
Concord Music Group. MP3.
But like Hari I too hear a lament from James Baldwin, and also like Claudio a lament that signals my complicity in the processes of academic (re)production. In “The Price of the Ticket” Baldwin writes:
the sound of silence . . .
(Baldwin, 1985, p. 291)
But, obviously, I am speaking as an historical creation which has had bitterly to contest its history, to wrestle with it, and finally accept in order to bring myself out of it. My point of view certainly is formed by my history and it is probable that only a creature despised by history finds history a questionable matter.
On the other hand, people who imagine that history flatters them (as it does, indeed, since they wrote it) are impaled on their history like a butterfly on a pin and become incapable of seeing or changing themselves, or the world.
~ James
~ James
In a funny way, I believe Baldwin to be writing about autoethnography, a critical charge for individual voices to contest history and to wrestle with it on personal terms, in a cultural context; to acknowledge ones place and complicity within it; to recognize that because history has despised me:
Me,
Black,
male,
American,
queer,
resistant,
recalcitrant,
who became enculturated by sucking knowledge from his mother’s breasts;
filling my belly with a cultural literacy that is specific and contingent.
Hence, I must find history a questionable matter, and consistently resist becoming the object of history’s desire like a butterfly impaling itself on a pin as a ritual suicide, as an act of resistance to alternate and equally valid ways of seeing and being in, and reading the world.
So, I want to resist.
I need to resist as a quest for freedom.
the sound of silence . . . is jazz
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the sound of silence . . .
Still the son of the functionally literate garbage man, passing, wrestling with the father tongue of my origins against the academic mother tongue that assumes it has given birth to me—yet offers no suckle.
Academia is not my mother’s black breast on which I must necessarily feed.
It is a different appendage,
a mammary of necessity that directs a different desire.
the sound of silence . . . is jazz
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the sound of silence . . .
Passing.
I, the resisting fraud,
"Who said this first?"
"Others have written on gender!"
"Others have written on race and pedagogy."
Cite Dwight Conquergood.
Cite Judith Butler.
You must cite Giroux and McLaren and Shor!
Why can't I think coherently
and write critically
about THIS?
have been told by people who love me and by people who don’t know me that I should not use long quotes in my writing…
From the messiness of my life, encapsulated in my (Il) literate body I, again and repeat again, feel that even my functional illiteracy is looked at in a vacuum, without the pedagogical understanding of how an (Il) literate body learns how to….write.
My writing form, not only express the limitations of my accented tongue, but also the differences of my (a)historical body, always in the margins of the school system.
How to pass?
the sound of silence . . . is jazz
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the sound of silence . . .
My use of long quotes comes from my yearning of learning of a world, in which my being doesn’t belong. It comes from how I bodily interact (no, reading is not only a mind exercise) with the bodies authoring the texts.
Reading that hurts, includes and excludes, empowers and make me feel dumb…reading that speak to me or not…reading that sometimes I feel was written for me.
When I bring a quote to my (Il)literate functional text, I bring the author’s body close to my own. It’s more than imagining it. It has to be more because I feel…rage, love, frustration, hope! I feel flesh to flesh interaction in the both versions of paper—the fake in the scream of my computer and the one I can touch in the many of my notebooks.
When I read Freire in my teens, I believed, and still do, Paulo wrote for me, even when I know that Freire did not know who the fuck I am. But see, I also believe that the reason that Freire could write what he did, is because he knew me…
No need to call me crazy. I know I am that crazy. I state it here, in the pages of an academic journal: Paulo Freire wrote for me! Paulo wrote what he did because of me! And don’t you dare to question my (in)sanity!
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References on this screen:
Spry, Tami. (2006). A 'Performative-I' Copresence: Embodying the Ethnographic Turn
in Performance and the Performative Turn in Ethnography. Text and Performance Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 4, October 2006.
the sound of silence . . .
Schizowritingphrenic being that I am…
I bring Tami Spry’s body close to mine:
(Spry, 2006, p. 340)
Writing was the only ritual I could enact, words the only thing my body could feel. Having broken into little pieces, my subject position went from a destabilized ‘‘me’’ to a chaotic but oddly comforting ‘‘we.’’ Pieces of selves became others manifesting language and constructing a plural and kinesis sense of self that seemed to navigate the interrelations between self/other/bodies/language.
~ Tami
(Moreira, Spry, and Wyatt, 2011)
And so now, Tami is here with me, helping me to express what I don’t think I can do…alone. I am so many! And my writing is raw with big chunks of quotes, because the scars of my schizowritingphrenic being are raw, and they bleed! I am empowered because I am not alone in my pain! I am empowered because, now with Tami, I perform community! And no, paraphrasing does not do it for me.
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the sound of silence . . .
The paradoxes we live in.
IMAGE
JOY
SYNTHESIS
STORY
POEM
QUOTE
PAIN
ANALYSIS
MEMORY
RAGE
SONG
THEORY
Claudio, bring to your texts the bodies on whose shoulders you now stand. The bodies that make it possible for you to be here, now, having a conversation with me.
~ Norman
~ Norman
In the functional (Il) literate world of my schizowritingphrenic being, in the writing that hurts!
And exactly what was I doing?
Explaining the shortcomings of my body in the hope of receiving the livestock branding hot iron burning my buttocks with Academia ownership stamp?
Desiring the academic legitimacy that excludes different bodies under the disguising of good scholarship standards?
Nah, I prefer to believe that I am using a politics of citation that I learned from Norman Denzin many years ago, when, in the familiarity of his office, he said to me:
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the sound of silence . . .
Let’s save our lives! We write back!
We research back!
Where have I been living? What planet am I, the alien, from?
Where I’ve been living, joy and frustration walk hand to hand, and I feel at certain moments the desperation of having writing,
Writing,
Writing, the same thing over and over again with the tiredness of dealing with walls and of being defined by what I am not!
(Clough, 1994, p. 6)
…writing to save lives. And if it is the writer’s life that is especially to be saved in writing, nonetheless the soaring of its poetry, the passion of its evocation, the power of its performances allow feminist theorizing always to lift up others as well.
~ Patricia
~ Patricia
(Smith, 2012, p. 8)
“Researching back,” in the same manner of “writing back” or “talking back,” that characterizes much of the postcolonial and anticolonial literature . . . has involved a “knowingness of the colonizer” and a recovery of ourselves, an analysis of colonialism and a struggle for self-determination.
~ Linda
References on this screen:
Clough, Patricia Ticineto. (1994). Feminist Thought: Desire, Power, and Academic
Discourse. Oxford UK & Cambridge USA: Blackwell.
Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. (2012). Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous
Peoples. 2nd Edition. London & New York: Zed Books.
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Not scholar enough! Where repetition is not a good rhetorical tool
Not performance enough! anymore
Not literate enough! and I still use it,
Not white enough! and use it!
Not Latino enough! I unmoving recur!
And this may be the reason I embrace the Janitor, but you see I don’t want to clean the feces in bathrooms no more…
I am too tired of cleaning academic shit glued in my being even when I want the smell of it, not clearly knowing if there is and end of this…shit.
Too tired of being, being of the world,
being,
off the world being,
the being,
the beings!
We need to bless the beings of human kind because we are too tired,
and sometimes I fear,
God may be too busy blessing only
the “real” America!
the sound of silence . . .
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the sound of silence . . .
References on this screen:
Moreira, Claudio. (2008). Life in So Many Acts. Qualitative Inquiry, 14 (4). (590-612).
(Moreira, 2008, p. 602)
And no brotherman Hari, they cannot see and much less “smell”
Motherfuckers have no nose and I am too mad for music, but it will come, because
No matter what they say my friends, academia is never a safe space!
As I feel I’ve being played, by the high powers in the Ivory Tower, with the idea of “a job security” rubbed often in front of my nose!
As beautifully said by my friend Aisha Durham, “a job security” that …kills us, in a kinda game I am so (un) willing to play? And succeed? Ain’t this my own form of suicide? My visceral articulation of an un-kind of academic whore that I am? Ain’t this my own response to the illiteracy of depression?
I tearfully pause
I just love you more refusing the history that has despised us!
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a need to tearfully pause
Friday. 11.35.
I gotta get going. I gotta move. Now.
Gotta catch the 11.38.
Gotta move.
Can’t. My body just won’t.
It’s trying to sabotage me.
11.35. Gotta move.
Told Bryant yesterday
that I was doing okay.
Told him I was sending him
the next round this weekend.
Tomorrow. Maybe Sunday.
11. 36.
Can’t. Open. The. Fucking. Door.
Gotta move.
Dammit. How hard can it be to catch this damn bus?
Comes by every fifteen minutes. I’m failing, four times an hour.
Can’t believe it’s almost noon and I haven’t made it to campus yet.
Can’t. Go there.
Maybe I’m not okay after all.
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a need to tearfully pause
Gotta tell a story.
Gotta write/perform to embrace
myself into being. Into health. Into enduring.
Y’see, there’s this scene I know.
Been told to me many times.
Never sure if it’s true.
Happened before I was born.
It’s a scene where my grandfather, my father’s father, calls my mother an “illiterate woman.”
In the scene she’s angry, shocked.
She’s got a college degree. She writes poetry.
She is an officer at a bank.
She is very politically involved.
But she doesn’t know English. She loves Tamil.
She studied in Tamil.
My grandpa is an elite old-school Tamil Brahmin Iyer. But he has worked for the British most of his life. He knows his English REALLY well, y’see.
And he was forced to retire when his son was still in college. When his three other children were still in school. And his son had to drop out of college to work in a factory, to support the family. And now his son has brought this college-educated banker home, but she doesn’t know English.
She loves his son. She also loves Tamil.
Can’t tell this story.
Still 11.36. Gotta move. NOW. Can’t.
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My brothers are here. Close.
With me
In this tearful pause
Maybe I’ll tell a different story.
Something that will help me “learn to remember what I have learned to forget.”
Something that will help me make “history a questionable matter”
help me “resist becoming the object of history’s desire”
especially a history that colonizes and then despises me.
Something that brings us close.
Helps us talk back, write back, research back, against history.
a need to tearfully pause
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Hey brothers, check this out, so I gotta teach rhetoric to my students, right, and I used to tell them the usual story about rhetoric, you know, that Greek stuff, and all that ethos/pathos/logos shit, right, and argument and logic and shit, right, but then one day I decided I was fucking DONE telling that story, you know, so now I tell a different story, right, like,
a need to tearfully pause
We're here!
Yes!
“hey folks, now we’re gonna talk about rhetoric, but you should know, even though the syllabus says we gotta discuss, like, Aristotle and stuff, there were a whole lotta people before the Greeks figured this shit out, maybe even better shit!
Damn fucking BIG world out there!”
right, but even as I’m saying this, I mean, here I am, just a grad student teacher, y'know, and I’m in like a program with like a hundred other grad student teachers, right, all teaching from the same syllabus, and we all gotta teach the same basic rhetoric, right, like, argument, thesis statement, and like, fucking MLA citation and organization, like, intro-body-conclusion shit, and y’know, I’m like, whoa, I’m such a fucking hypocrite, right, ‘cuz like, I WANT to write other shit, right, so why am I teaching shit that either (a) I never learned myself; or (b) don’t make sense!
I mean, like, shit, I never learned about damn thesis statements or topic sentences or fucking MLA citation, and, like, the whole ‘argument’ thing kinda freaks me out, like, why do I gotta attack some other shit and then like make and defend my own shit, I mean, I thought we’re kinda trying to move beyond all that macho aggression stuff, right, but the other day, like, I’m sitting in this room full of grad students, right, and this other grad student teacher says, like, how she gets angry when she sees other grad students not using MLA correctly, like it literally makes her MAD, she says, that grad students in ENGLISH can be so LAZY, she says, and I’m like, WHOA, like who the hell are you, right, to judge someone else’s writing just because, like, they didn’t put a damn number inside a parenthesis in a way that you’ve been colonized to see as the ONLY standard for SCHOLARSHIP, y’know,
. . .!
. . .!
. . .!
. . .!
. . .!
. . .!
. . .!
and then I’m like, shit, is she gonna think I’m a dumbass if she sees MY writing, y’know, and, like, is she gonna say, like, what the hell is this brown foreign guy doing teaching English here, and then I look around at the other bodies and I’m like, damn, I’m just passing here, ain’t I, just passing, just passing thru, folks, just moving on through the system, just another body that doesn’t belong, just a brown bearded body that CANNOT afford to look MAD in America, better just shut up and teach good white middle-class kids how to write ‘academic’ shit, like, argument, introduction-body-body-body-body-body-body-body-body…
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References on this screen:
Mr. Scruff. (1999). "Get A Move On!" Keep It Unreal. Ninja Tune. MP3.
a need to tearfully pause
Baldwin.
And the price. Oh the price.
(Baldwin, 2010, p. 120)
Europe does not, or cannot see… the European musical scale cannot transcribe—cannot write down, does not understand—the notes, or the price, of this music.
… you begin to sing and dance; for those responsible for your captivity require of you a song.
(Baldwin, 2010, p. 124)
… the tightrope tension of bearing in mind, every hour, every second, drunk, or sober, in sickness or in health, those whom you must not even begin to depend on for the truth, and those to whom you must not lie.
(Baldwin, 2010, p. 124)
References on this screen:
Baldwin, James. (2010). Of the Sorrow Songs: The Cross of Redemption. In Randall
Kenan (Ed.), The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings. (pp. 118-124). New York: Pantheon.
BODY
BODY
INTRODUCTION
CITATION
ARGUMENT
THESIS
BODY
IMAGE
JOY
SYNTHESIS
STORY
POEM
QUOTE
PAIN
ANALYSIS
MEMORY
RAGE
SONG
THEORY
BODY
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Y’see. I remember another scene.
Don’t know if my body will let me tell it.
A scene where my mom is teaching me English.
I’m four years old.
We’re in North India.
My dad is a factory worker, y’see, we went where the jobs are.
Teacher sends me home with my mother. Says I need to read better.
Mother is angry.
Buys a paper on the way home.
English paper.
Same paper that grandpa reads down south.
“India's National Newspaper.” Heh.
My mom makes me read the headlines.
One day I’m trying to read the word ‘banana.’
And I can’t stop. I say “banananana”.
My mom says “ba-na-na!”
I say “ba-na-na-na-na!”
She gets angry. MAD.
And she starts yelling. “B-a-n-a-n-a!”
She’s learning to read the paper too, y’see.
But I don’t figure this out until just now.
Dammit. Can’t tell this story either.
a need to tearfully pause
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Okay. Right. Where was I?
a need to tearfully pause
(Lipson & Binkley, 2004, p. 2)
Feminists have particularly objected to the agonistic focus of Aristotelian rhetoric, as have those interested in creating space for a range of alternate ways of being. If classical Athenian rhetorical principles continue to be reified as the rhetorical principles, then those whose grounding involves differing approaches remain seriously disadvantaged.
~ Carol & Roberta
(Royster, 2003, p. 150)
Western rhetorics, at least the legacies of them that we have inherited through scholarship, are demonstrably dominated by elite male viewpoints and experiences. […] disciplinary practices have built up a high intolerance […] to any site, focal point, theory, or practice other than those whose contours are already sanctioned historically […]. These habitual systems easily filter out aberrations, making it abundantly clear that such deviations from normed understanding are […] alien, distracting, unproductive, and likely the result of insanity, that is, non-rationality.
~ Jacqueline
References on this screen:
Lipson, Carol & Binkley, Roberta. (2004). Rhetoric Before and Beyond the Greeks.
Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Royster, Jacqueline Jones. (2003). Disciplinary Landscaping, or Contemporary
Challenges in the History of Rhetoric. Philosophy & Rhetoric, 36.2, 148-67.
Mr. Scruff. (1999). "Get A Move On!" Keep It Unreal. Ninja Tune. MP3.
Writing.
Performing.
Embodying!
Embodying!
Oh, yeah, right!
Well, I been kinda mad at MLA citation ever since, y’know, might as well toss in APA and Chicago in there too, all those fucking handbooks say things like ‘people will take you seriously as a scholar if you use our citation style!’ Like come ON, right, but now I gotta pass my PhD area exams, right, and oh yeah, I gotta PASS again, but this time I’m DONE telling that same-old story, right, so I go looking for bodies/allies, and guess what, whole damn field has been calling for ‘alternate’ and ‘marginalized’ discourses for damn long time now, so what the hell, right, I mean, there’s this book on world rhetorics, right, and Carol Lipson and Roberta Binkley say this:
. . .!
. . .!
And I’m like, no shit, right, I mean we’ve got a whole bunch of people right here in this journal who’ve been saying and DOING this for so many years, y’know, but how come when it gets to the place where grad students are teaching first year writing to college students, suddenly those ‘agonistic’ argument-based ways of Aristotelian rhetoric become THE standard, right, and I draw strength from another ally, Jacqueline Jones Royster, who said in 2003:
And I say, yeah, rock on Jackie! And then I’m like, oh wait, ain’t I one of those elite males, too, cuz yeah my body was colonized & despised by Western history way before I was born, like the history that gets my Tamilian grandpa to despise my Tamilian mother for not being literate in an alien Western way of being in the world, like the histories that despise my mother and my four-year-old self when our southern bodies were trying to be functionally literate, learning how to damn pass in a white male world even in fucking North India? But when we get mad and speak back, our work is “likely the result of insanity”? Damn Western history is insane!
. . .!
. . .!
. . .!
. . .!
. . .!
. . .!
. . .!
. . .!
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Insane. Shit.
Can’t believe I revealed my depression. Gonna get dismissed as irrational. Incoherent.Ain’t safe.
To be a crazy angry brown bearded body in the academy.
To dare to be any kinda emotional BODY in the academy.
But wait. My brothers are here.
They know about my depression. And they love me still.
Gonna talk back together.
Gonna do more than talk back. Gonna live back. Together.
Baldwin again.
a need to tearfully pause
(Baldwin, 2010, p. 120)
… not only … redeem a history unwritten and despised, but … checkmate the European notion of the world.
(Baldwin, 2010, p. 124)
It is harder … to despise so many of the people who think of themselves as white, before whose blindness you present the obligatory historical grin.
References on this screen:
Baldwin, James. (2010). Of the Sorrow Songs: The Cross of Redemption. In Randall
Kenan (Ed.), The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings. (pp. 118-124). New York: Pantheon.
Yeah. Gotta move. Move beyond despising the blindness.
Of those who think of themselves as . . . academic . . . literate . . .
Gotta look to the structures instead. Gotta turn the gaze back to the structures.
11.38. Gonna catch that bus.
Gonna live back.
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And I am wondering about the legacy of my father’s functional literacy—the ability that his 4th grade education afforded him to negotiate the dailiness of being:
a need to tearfully pause
like scribbling his name on a contract,
knowing his figures to count money as necessity,
recognizing his letters to decipher choppy meanings in texts generated outside of his knowing.
I remember the years of seeing my father taking sneak peaks at me as I did my homework at the kitchen table (K-12 and even college), as he sat staring at the daily newspaper in his hands.
And with the knowledge at an early age that he could not read very well—I remember thinking about what he comprehended in the newspaper as he stared for long periods of time.
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The Daily Advertiser was the local newspaper in Lafayette, LA. Most often it included pictures to accompany written stories (more so then than now), maybe as homage to photojournalistic reporting in that way that images report . . . maybe the images were catering to the high illiteracy of southern bodies like my father’s body relative to newspaper sales.
The pictures often provided a visibly recognizable context—reinforcing the particularity of writing but never capturing the nuances of a happening in the same way.
The scholarly essays that I read and write very seldom have pictures; maybe this is a schizoscriptophrenicism that I have ascribed to as well. I long for more pictures in scholarly essays.
Maybe I should add one here, of something that gives me joy, to be read against the grain of the written word, or an image that challenges the reader to read differently the message of the text—“forcing an analog way of thinking . . . filling in the missing themes” or the ghosts that I willingly invite to haunt the text—as a visual or sensual pedagogy, as a reminder of loss and what I am striving to gain—as I believe performative writing does as well.
a need to tearfully pause
(Bosman, 2010)
References on this screen:
Bosman, Julie. (2010.) "Picture Books No Longer a Staple for Children." New York Times
October 7, 2010.
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But the images in the newspaper that my father would fixate on were not of joyous images (like he and my mother dancing); somehow he gravitated to images of folks in compromised positions—pictures that could be easily read as the dramas and traumas of dying coupled with the images of everyday living that showed the entanglements of encounter; arrests, mug shots, accident scenes, destructions/deconstructions, problematic happenings and aftermaths—moments in which pictures substituted for the limitations of words in the magnitude of trauma . . . telling stories that academic or clinical reporting couldn’t capture or didn’t want to tell.
References on this screen:
Crary, Jonathan. (1990). Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the
Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
(Crary, 1990, p. 6)
a need to tearfully pause
My father would do intense readings of these pictures as cultural landscapes, often “see[ing] within a prescribed set of possibilities”; often speaking to the trajectories of engagement and the variables at play in the images; he would identify the situatedness of the happening from the pictures and then layer in the racial influences of locations and the speculative effects of human social encounter relative to his lived experience of knowing. He would put parts of himself in his readings—or tease parts of himself out of the images; saying things like:
“I think” or “I feel” or “I remember when” or “This reminds me of . . .”
He would fill in the semantic gaps of the written words with realisms from experience or imaginative possibilities that he could detect within the narrative structure of the storied images in the pictures as he saw them. His thick description and narration of the pictures often rivaled the actual accompanying story.
In this way my father was very adept at reading.
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So in some ways . . . I was glad when my father passed away before my mother did. I know that sounds strange.
I was glad that he did not have to read the image of the accident scene in which my mother was killed by a drunk driver on a motorcycle at 5:30 a.m. in the morning as she was heading to church to read/lead the morning rosary; a picture that appeared in the Daily Advertiser as evidence of news to be seen, and as such to be read.
I was glad that my father with his intense reading of visual rhetoric did not have to read that particular picture; a depth of seeing and reading for him that I could not imagine—as in the violent release of an embrace—and the story that he would tell, that (traditional) academic writing and reporting would not, or can’t tell.
I too must tearfully pause.
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(Fox, 1994, p. xiii)
References on this screen:
Fox, Helen. (1994). Listening to the World: Cultural Issues in Academic Writing.
Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.
Sometimes I was able to see my father’s lips moving as he tried to sound out the letters, reading the headlines in the newspaper—but most often he would engage me in conversations about what he was “seeing” in the newspaper. And despite his limited linguistic comprehension—he would unravel deep understandings of social happenings—like piecing pieces of a puzzle—portions of images that would match portions of words, and portions of cultural knowings linked with something that he had heard on the evening television news, or on the radio, or from one of his buddies earlier in the day—he would collate these meanings into a functional literacy of knowing to engage his book educated son in a conversation that was not about testing knowledge/or citational forms, but making sense in a cultural exchange between father and son—mediated by blood and the desire to connect.
As a rehearsal for these conversations I got into the habit of reading the newspaper before he did.
I learned to practice a strategic pedagogy with my dad that respected his desire to engage, recognized by his limitations in reading but his abundance of knowing, and mediating the difference in a conversation that filled in the gaps—sometimes moving close to him to reference what he was seeing/reading, confirming the gist of the story and carefully pointing to the details of knowing that only comes from looking to the structures of language—but learning more about the deeper processes of my father’s sense making; a life of piecing knowledge and understanding “communicating indirectly and holistically, learning through absorption” in order to effect the possibility of his own being—which made manifest the potential of his children to listen and read the world.
And when I reflect on my own struggles with academic negotiations and the strategies of my own subversion or sense making, I realize that it was my father who taught me how to read and write as (what Hari might refer to as) “this black body in the academy,” and (as Claudio would echo) evidencing “the paradoxes in which I live.”
a need to tearfully pause
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a need to tearfully pause
Methodologically speaking,
I too need the pause to tearfully start.
2011 NCA was when Bryant first approached me with the idea for this project. Back then, Bryant told me the history of his father reading the newspaper. Back then, I could see my school story, in Bryant’s life.
Not the acting of reading per se.
The more advanced I got in the school system, the more (il)literate I felt. Somehow, the body knows how to read; how to understand the situations a body is; and how to respond, rightly or wrongly, to the cultural environment it is surrounded by. How to (in)appropriately write . . .
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The reading body, in the school setting, my body, recognized its impossibility of fitting the binaries of normalcy; Binaries that are very resilient in their own, being systematically reconstructed, every day in the category of what is acceptable and what is not, inside the walls of the school system. Being able to “read the world,” as suggested by Freire, is dangerous to systems of power and yet no surprise here. That was what my reading did for me: the ability from an early age not to escape the suffering, but to start identifying its origins. To see suffering and injustice not as a “God’s will;”
The ability to refuse the simple and yet very powerful explanation that suffering is ‘natural’ this is how life is…
The ability to understand my poverty;
The ability to recognize my broken family and ‘reality;’
The ability to feel that I did not belong in the school;
The ability to ‘smell’ the holes in the system that allowed me to do more than survive…reading the world gives the power to resist, to fight, to transform!
From being able to see the complex ambiguity of Jorge Amado’s writings and Chico Buarque and Caetano Veloso’s music, that otherwise wouldn’t be able to escape the censorship in the 70’s, so essential to my capacity to just keep it going…
To just hang in there…
a need to tearfully pause
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And where is the music? Caetano never lost his voice.
a need to tearfully pause
A voice of the blacks, whites almost black, mulatos, the poor… And this is the rap I want my writing to be…from the intellectual thug to the vernacular scholar, where I have no desire to be explanatory, and I am not frightened to be misunderstood and not afraid at all of the place
Where this story will take us! Me, the thug with a PhD degree
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References on this screen:
Caetano Veloso. (2002). "O Haiti." Caetano Veloso: Noites Do Norte Ao Vivo. Universal International. DVD.
And so
Methodologically speaking,
I slightly change Bryant’s words of his father:
a need to tearfully pause
See? It is me again and also us, isn’t it?
“He would fill in the semantic gaps of the written words with realisms from experience or imaginative possibilities that he could detect within the narrative structure of the storied images in the pictures as he saw them.”
“He I would fill in the semantic gaps of the written words with realisms from experience or imaginative possibilities that he I could detect within the narrative structure of the storied images in the pictures academic books as he I saw them.”
See? It is also me, isn’t it?
“And despite his limited linguistic comprehension—he would unravel deep understandings of social happenings—like piecing pieces of a puzzle—portions of images that would match portions of words, and portions of cultural knowings linked with something that he had heard read in on the evening television news, or on the radio, or from one of his buddies earlier in the day—he would collate these meanings into a functional literacy of knowing to engage his book educated son in a conversation that was not about testing knowledge/or citational forms, but making sense in a cultural exchange between father and son—mediated by blood and the desire to connect.”
“And despite his my limited linguistic comprehension—he I would unravel deep understandings of social happenings—like piecing pieces of a puzzle—portions of images that would match portions of words, and portions of cultural knowings linked with something that he I had heard read in on the evening television news, or on the radio academic texts, or from one of his my buddies colleagues earlier in the day—he I would collate these meanings into a functional literacy of knowing to engage his book educated son my brothers, Hari and Bryant, in a conversation that was not about testing knowledge/or citational forms, but making sense in a cultural exchange between father and son friends and marked bodies in the academic space—mediated by blood and the desire to connect.”
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Still, the similarities do not end here, do they? Aren’t we all, brother Bryant, in writing this manuscript, reflecting on our own struggles with academic negotiations and the strategies of our own subversion or sense making?
And if yes, it begs another question, in my own craziness: would it be possible Bryant that your father also taught us how to read and write in the paradoxes in which we live?
I too must tearfully pause, in solidarity in your loss Brother Bryant, in a kind of a silent prayer for your parents . . . and for us.
And may God—if there is one—bless all people! I love you more.
a need to tearfully pause
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So I am no longer afraid of where this story will take me. Because this story has never been only mine to tell. Because this story has never been alone. And because this story has company, this story refuses to become yet another exotic subject of the ocular politics of the academy. Instead, this story turns around and gazes back at those structures of knowledge production, not alone but as a trio, determined to retain the right to practice our own voices, to engage a writing that hurts.
References on this screen:
Bell, Elizabeth. (2008). Theories of Performance. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
Conquergood, Dwight. (1998). Beyond the text: Toward a performative cultural politics.
In S. J. Dailey (Ed.), The future of performance studies: Visions and revisions. (pp. 25-36). Washington, D.C.: National Communication Association.
Greene, Maxine. (2000). Lived Spaces, Shared Spaces, Public Spaces.
In Lois Weis & Michelle Fine (Eds.), Construction Sites: Excavating Race, Class, and Gender among Urban Youth. (pp. 293-304). New York: Teachers College Press.
(Conquergood, 1998)
I am not afraid of where this story has taken me. Because I have been there before; there—in that way that performance and performative writing is both process and product, productive and purposeful, traditional and transformative, a location and a destination from places of cloistered indifference to places of infinite potentialitity. I also know that in going there, this has been a process of crystallization.
I am not afraid of where this story will take me. Because, you see, it is mine . . . and ours to tell. Yet, never alone, I am claiming this history for us! In claiming, I re-imagine our writing similar to Maxine Greene’s description of how artists from the margins come to re-imagine public spaces:
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. . . through resistance in the course of their becoming—through naming what stood in their way, through coming together in efforts to overcome—people are likely to find out the kind of selves they are creating.
~ Maxine
We, embodied, overwrite the public spaces of academe. We (Il) literate write what is not silencing! Us!
(Bell, 2008)
(Greene, 2000, p. 231)
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We write and bring Dwight Conquergood close, very close to us. We write because we cut across!
We write because the efficacious ephemerality of language keeps us afloat. We write personally, to wrestle with history on personal terms for each of us, because we resist becoming the dead objects of a colonizing history that has despised us. So when we write, we bring many other bodies . . . close . . . to our selves, in words,
writing to save our lives,
writing our schizoscriptophrenic selves
back into wholeness,
back into our bodies as a struggled self-determination.
A process of crystallization in which we write together — hari (an Indian-American man), Bryant (an African-American man) and Claudio (a white-Brazilian man) — in a shared veri/similitude of experience in a presumed difference of embodied and cultural knowings, cognitive knowings and expressive modalities that are always socially marked as other. And despite the academic evidence of worthiness—we “stand as strangers at the gate” with “a scriptural map” of critical citations of who said what, when and where—like a biblical documentation of who begat who, carrying the word on our tongue as evidence of our belief, and our read/iness to engage scholarly talk. In our work we find a unification of spirit in our collective and powerful otherness. And even as we acknowledge the tensions and tensiveness in writing, we also embrace the knowledge that how we “writ[e] touches the heart of [our] identity, drawing its voice and strength and meaning from the way [we] understand the world” and make sense of experience—that we willing profess.
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References on this screen:
Clough, Patricia Ticineto. (1994). Feminist Thought: Desire, Power, and Academic
Discourse. Oxford UK & Cambridge USA: Blackwell.
Conquergood, Dwight. (2002). Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical
Research. The Drama Review 46 (2). (pp. 145-156).
Fox, Helen. (1994). Listening to the World: Cultural Issues in Academic Writing.
Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.
kumar, hari stephen. (2011). Decolonizing Texts: A Performance Autoethnography.
Master's Thesis. University of Massacusetts Amherst.
Madison, D. Soyini. (2012). Critical Ethnography: Method, Ethics, and Performance.
2nd Edition. Los Angeles: SAGE.
Pollock, Della. (1998). Performing Writing. In Phelan, P. and Lane, J. (Eds.)
The Ends of Performance. New York: NYU Press.
But de Certeau’s aphorism, “what the map cuts up, the story cuts across,” also points to transgressive travel between two different domains of knowledge: one official, objective, and abstract—“the map”; the other one practical, embodied, and popular—“the story.”
~ DwightIt may be as simple as that. Promiscuously using many different knives, we cut across, and cut across. As simple as that: writing, cutting! And sometimes, we make a quilt using the fading map.
(Clough, 1994)
(Pollock, 1998)
(Madison, 2012)
(Conquergood, 2002, p. 145)
(kumar, 2011, p. 78 & 111)
(Fox, 1994, p. xiii)
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So like Baldwin we pause and remember the price of this ticket; not just the frequent reminders of student loans in emails and indiscrete packagings but the price of being outspoken about our own particularity, about the tensions of our identity that roughly rubs against the social realities of our academic and professional encounters; racial, cultural, ethnic, linguistic entanglements that both incite and excite critical discourses of engagement and pedagogies of compliance on the felt and measured yardstick of academic disciplining. We engage such critical reflection in a mode and medium that challenges the social construction of our potential, at times with an exclusive autoethnographic voice; at times with the habituated practice of citationality; at times with a scathing contempt; and at times with a humbling acknowledgement of our own complicity. Yet always engaging the labor of reflexivity that “self-consciously embraces a purpose toward a greater material freedom for others, beyond and extricable to the self, to enter a caravan of border crossings and discursive risks—beautifully, poetically, rhetorically and politically.”
So we pause and remember the price of this music, a music that began on auction blocks created by Europe's global desires and hence a price that European history just cannot transcribe, a price that marks so many bodies into learning and performing and teaching ourselves a tearful everyday sense-making literacy that Western epistemology can only see as illiterate, and in re-turning that condescending gaze we point to the colonial sickness in the unsafe academic structures of Western literacy itself, making it a sick literacy, an ill-literacy that we all must resist, by writing back, by researching back, by living back, together.
(Baldwin, 2010, p. 123)
So we pause to remember the music and the price of this ticket and the colonial eyes, always as Caetano showed us, voltados para o largo onde os escravos eram castigados. And keeping Caetano close, very close to us, we are tired of soldados dando porrada nas nossa nucas. Our necks hurt. Our writing hurts. And yet here we are, the blacks, whites almost black, mulatos, the poor . . . Yes, schizowritingphrenic beings, we keep cutting . . . across the map. Writing our (Il) literate bodies into/out of history; our memories as/in moments of danger; refusing to be despised and, creating worlds of hope.
References on this screen:
Baldwin, James. (2010). Of the Sorrow Songs: The Cross of Redemption. In Randall
Kenan (Ed.), The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings. (pp. 118-124). New York: Pantheon.
Baldwin, James and Margaret Mead. (1971). A Rap on Race. New York: Dell.
Diamond, Elin. (1996). Performance and Cultural Politics. New York: Routledge.
Madison, D. Soyini. (2011). The Labor of Reflexivity.
Cultural Studies ⇔ Critical Methodologies 11 (2). (pp. 129-138.)
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If history were past, history wouldn’t matter. History is the present . . . you and I are history. We carry our history. We act our history.
~ JamesWe are hope! We are here! We did more than survive!
And see? We dare to be, simultaneously “a doing” and “the thing done” . . . and yet I don’t believe we will ever be—or will ever have the desire to be—the academic “hot shot.” But brothers, no doubt in my mind, we are the hot shit! This is our act. I love you more!
(Baldwin & Mead, 1971, p. 25)
(Madison, 2011, p. 136)
(Diamond, 1996, p. 1)
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Speaking and performing —
— writing and producing —
— embodying and reigniting history —
Not afraid of where such endeavors and explorations will take us
So we end where we began
Not afraid of critically revisiting the past as a point of transforming the future
Not afraid of owning and resisting history at the same time, as we rewrite ourselves into being.
And at the same time triggering in you the impulse to write your own stories
Writing and reading stories across the borders of time and place, across the borders of linguistic competency,
to find ways to narrate knowledge in a homeplace of our own comfort.
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cultural knowing and showing . . .
transforming writing in the practiced place of the academy,
. . . cultural knowing and showing,
a place where we all struggle . . .
. . . a place where we all struggle
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legacies of functional (il)literacies
triple autoethnographic explorations on
finding voice(s) in academic and everyday life
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