Between, Elsewhere, and Otherwise

Curricula and Other Contexts in the Academy

Upcoming Event: Remythologizing to (Re)mediate Our Presents (April 15, 5pm)

In this webinar, I’ll talk about how:

Even as our cultural and political narratives are being mythologized to build a normative present in which certain ways of being human are delegitimized, we can stand between the realms of the seen and the unseen to call upon and recover ways of mythologizing that disrupt orthodoxy and help us awaken authentic participation. Myths can be not only a way of knowing, they can also continuously shift us out of linear thinking into border realities, weaving ancestral and cultural memory outside patricolonial representations back into the contemporary world. This makes the task of remythologizing critical to a decolonial reconstruction of our presents.

Register free here. (Hosted at Pacifica Graduate Institute)

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In many ways, this is a time between worlds. We see the old world ending around us and are being tasked to “find our work and do it,” as Audre Lorde put it, even as we don’t quite know what the future will look like. Sometimes, the work is to shed our own old skins as we wait. Sometimes, it is to begin sensing into the ask of the future, and to begin to become that.

In a few weeks, I will step into a role that carries more responsibilities within the program where I teach. This has been in the wings for almost a year and I have had a while to cultivate a relationship with the ask and who it might need me to become, and to integrate some of the lessons along the way. Purpose, I’ve found, emerges for me often through the unexpected asks—how I say yes to them—how I learn and refine my gifts through them—and this is all choreographed beautifully by spirit. It’s usually not what the ego self within me could conceive of. The stumbles, too, are gifts.

At an indigenous repatriation event I attended recently, Edward Halealoha Ayau shared his deep commitment to the work of return of Hawaiian kūpunas (ancestors). He held this in priority over everything else. “Someone had to be willing to do this,” he said. For me, prolonged single-mindedness is not the way—my path is more nonlinear, scrubbier. Commitment is built through rhythm, not scorching, singular focus.

These last few months, I have been contributing, slowly, to creating a programmatic shift in the program where I teach, so it is less homogenous and eurocentric in terms of its curricula and people. In a recent document, on behalf of the program I said, “We hope we can begin to speak to non-mainstream students, in particular diasporic and immigrant students and students of color, including those from Black, Indigenous, and mixed heritage backgrounds.”

Being a token/tokenism imposes a heavy burden. Having experienced more of it in these last seventeen months than I want or need, I’m keen to change the rules of the game. What makes this painful, as Claudia Rankine puts it so well, is that “we love to love where we are.” I do love where I am, which is a magical place, in many ways—and to “bear witness to the institution’s pathology” is not easy. Yet I see it as something akin to a charge—to help shift the definitions of ‘normal,’ to address the inequalities structurally embedded—not only for myself—not out of a white saviour industrial complex—but out of love—we are all inextricably tangled!—even those who insist upon the exception of whiteness. Rankine writes:

This investment in whiteness does take work and collusion... The insistence that white supremacy doesn't continue to be our dominant frame takes work. The belief that white lives are not political lives with political privilege and protections takes work. The failure to push back against systems that subjugate others takes work. The constant unwillingness or inability to retain diverse faculty takes work.

Just as work has gone into building and sustaining the “structures of alienation,” it will take work to take apart the lies. And, it will take willingness. There certainly is well-intentioned-ness and some willingness, I have discovered—in the process of creating problems for the structures of whiteness by asking difficult questions. I have also heard: “Not everyone wants to be political. Or is interested in a decolonial lens. This is your agenda. What about our founding fathers? What about the ideas I love? My freedom to create what I want? The foundations of my discipline? This makes me fear I am no longer relevant. It’s enough, isn’t it, to add one or two “diverse” writings? I’ve included gender—now can I say this is decolonial? The students don’t want it!”

The students do want it. Or, to put it in another way, where is the change in perspective (and the seeing through of the agendas of eurowhiteness and coloniality) that students want…. even need? Or, to phrase it differently, again, where are the students who want it? The work of re-enchanting the euoroamerican academy cannot happen, I have seen, without sincerely engaging with the unfinished task of decolonization. Speaking about re-enchantment without contending with colonial practices and harms is likely to be mere whitewashing.

The arguments I hear have been heard over and over again anytime the work of anti-racism or decolonization is introduced in pedagogical spaces. Yes, we remember our roots to grow, I say—all of them. We learn and we grow. I get weary at times, and, at times, angry. There is also some comfort in knowing that I am not alone, I am not the first, I will not be the last who steps up to do the work.

I still don’t want to be a sacrificial lamb! It is one thing to get okay-er with being judged for failing to meet standards and norms set by whiteness, or with not being universally liked. It is a whole other thing to not take good care of myself in the process. I realized this towards the end of a week that was particularly hard. A white female colleague I barely know almost physically stopped me as I was going about my day and instructed me that I was to go see another white female colleague immediately—“She needs to speak with you!” It didn’t occur to her that the person who needed to speak to me could reach out to me or come to me. It was almost as if, to her, I wasn’t her/their equal. She could tell me to set aside what I was doing and reroute my day in service of what they needed: what I was doing was not as important.

But I did help them. (After the person who needed me reached out to me.) I went out of my way too, since the connection I was making could also benefit a black female scholar I wanted to uplift. Then, that evening, the story repeated itself—only, the cast of characters had changed—a different white woman, a different woman of color—yet the needs and personhood of the latter still did not seem to matter much. Other things were clustering together that day and the next. The problem is “them” not “us,” the dynamics are “out there” not “within.” White innocence (see James Baldwin for more) wanted me to not make it too uncomfortable, only a little. Power wanted to hold on to power even more tightly.

I could feel the anger within me growing. At some point, the urging of Audre Lorde came back to me: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” Caring for myself as taking care of my spirit—sweetening it again—sipping on the cool, cool waters of Oshun’s healing—until the anger changes: magma into purpose.

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Within myself, I would like to become more okay with failing, failing in public, as I take more risks. And, grow my capacity to speak to what I see. And, love (into movement) even the lassitude and indifference, especially in opening to the ‘otherwise’ and ‘elsewhere.’ And tend, continually, to my own wild pathways of return to Her. (I do not want to become a mimicry of myself.) And, make space for my many different parts, growing in wisdom and grace, growing in diplomacy and skill and steadfastness, even as I discern the applesauce clearly.

Those ones also reminded me through a timely message, as is their wont, that giving my energy only makes sense when someone sees their own potential and is ready to work towards it—otherwise it is likely to deplete me. I hope I can remember this.