Beyond the Single Story: Dancing With Shadows
Carl Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections was among the first texts to summon me during my Sparks Fellowship year—my long dark night of the soul. I was parched for that whose shape had only dimly begun to flit across my awareness, and, encountering Jung's own account of descent unlocked something in me. It made me accept the yet unknown ways in which my path ahead would depart from the conventional.
Following three moist, shining threads—including one that Jung held—I came to the PhD program in East-West Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Shortly thereafter, however, I was struggling with certain universalistic and early 20th century male european aspects of his psychological theory. I got to study with some renowned Jungian and depth psychologists, but eventually came to see these frameworks as limited in their capacity to hold processes of embodied remembering and undoing binaries. The stakes for me, it turned out, were transgenerational: I needed to step down the rabbit hole of ancestral memory and medicine, earth-based ritual, divinatory and oracular pathways, and women’s mysteries.
Moving further into the borderlands of decolonial healing, I kept finding wisdom teachers and medicine elders who showed me where the heart of my own medicine glowed. Jungian and depth psychology was a portal, but it was only the start of the journey.
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How do women, BIPOC and Earth communities stake their own claims to a narrative—to autonomy of being—in a father-worshipping culture? How do we hold the fathers accountable? Not recognizing or naming the racism of the fathers is how (and why) racism continues to move unrecognized, undigested through the institutional pathways BIPOC people traverse.1 Is the word “father” even universally appropriate? How do we honor these complex figures and acknowledge the gifts they did bring, in the face of white supremacy and coloniality insisting that we subsume our lineages and knowing within theirs? What about figures that have worn the mask of benevolence and kept us and our sisters and peoples oppressed?
James Hillman, whose “Notes on White Supremacy” I brought forward in a faculty context while presenting on privilege and bias, wrote: “The fantasy of supremacy is archetypally inherent in whiteness itself.” Hillman himself is one of these fathers for some. How willing are the fathers to step down? How willing are we to make space for and to hear ‘others’—with and instead of the fathers? What is at stake?
A 2016 book, which records Hillman’s 2009 conversation on racism with bell hooks, is largely inaccessible.2 My university’s library has two copies that are checked out/not in circulation.
The impetus behind hooks founding, in 2014, the bell hooks Institute (which published the book) was legacy. hooks said, “People act like, 'Well, your books will be around.’ You can’t count on this White racist world to keep anything of ours with the care and the commitment that we would like for it to have.” hooks was a visionary; despite her forethinking, what she called imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy did efface parts of her legacy and make some of her writing inaccessible.
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Another ‘father’ for many is Joseph Campbell, whose The Hero With a Thousand Faces I have had a copy of since dc gifted me with it about sixteen years ago. My own storytelling, as those familiar with my first book Kala Pani may know, is very far from being a monomyth.
Still, I often see Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey being uncritically regarded as the “universal narrative framework.”
It was useful for me to find Bond and Christensen’s critique (cited in Aston3), which “sees Campbell’s work as being a particular take on myth, constructed in a post-World War II North American context, focusing on one character and serving the interests of a singular point of view.” Aston presents alternatives to the Hero’s Journey drawing from the work of Donna Haraway (making kin), Ursula Le Guin (The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction), and Trinh T Minh-ha (difference paired with harmony, not conflict) as well as from Kishōtenketsu, a story structure used in classical Chinese, Korean, and Japanese narratives. Gough-Brady also discusses what she sees as cultural imperialism in Campbell and offers other narrative modes, based on the work of Ngugi wa Thiong’o and citing Glenda Hambly, for instance.4
I myself have been theorizing about indigenous storytelling from an epistemological lens in a class I have been teaching this quarter on Indigenous Cosmologies. I invited the class to reexamine and relearn how the indigenous scholars they were engaging with were offering or gifting them stories—story not as something outside life, collected and anthropologized/mythologized, but something that continues to feed and be fed by the rivers of living on Earth. It was interesting to see which of the class resonated with decolonial epistemologies and for whom and how these presented a challenge.
Each space and vantage has its own medicine to bring in these times. We are being called to lean into our medicine. The path of myth and story can focus sight on and unlock—for those that are called and respond—a depth of being particularly attuned to creating the futures we need.
It is my view that this work—especially now—cannot remain oblivious to assumptions embedded in the mind that keep one entangled with coloniality.
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Among the forms I see defensiveness take sometimes are whataboutism and what Cutcha Risling Baldy calls “colonial parallelism.” For instance, drawing epistemological parallels between the work decolonial thinking and western-centric critical thinking call within their purview. But these projects are different: Bhambra says the very categories, concepts, and claims of the latter have been shaped by colonial histories.5
What’s at issue here is how knowledge is made and whose ways of knowing and knowledge are seen as valid.
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And, I am not unaware of the significance of being the first woman of color to become a core faculty in and then chair of my program. The term “woman of color” is based not on a politics of identity, but on a politics of solidarity that emerged out of the racialization, by colonial legacies and white supremacy, of women belonging to a range of ethnic-national-cultural-racial heritages. It is a perspective.
As Loretta Ross said, “This is a term that has a lot of power for us.” It holds the histories of our pain, struggles, survival, and creativity. It holds the seeds of our interconnected liberation and decolonization. I invoke the term as a spell to dispel the silencing and tokenism imposed through and within white academia, and to remember the long lineage of foremothers and sisters whose breath, resistance, and magic have kept alive the fires of transformation that I hope to continue tending.
At the same time, I am being asked to show up for the hard conversations with softness and conviction, and to continue to lean and deepen into coalitional thinking, not as a mode of compromise, but grounded in a spirit of dialogue and cultivation of shared understandings. This is my own growth. I am further inviting colleagues to consider how the information coming from the minoritized/less privileged voices among students may contain keys to making the syllabi more inclusive—less canonical—and to ensuring that BIPOC voices/perspectives do not have to remain alone or lonely. It is good work. It is happening.
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Upcoming class: Rewriting the Myths of Time (Jul 16-Aug 6)
bell hooks and James Hillman. 2016. Illumination: a Living Voice. Berea, KY: Bad Baby Bell Books.
Judith Aston. 2021. “There’s More to Life than the Monomyth: Multiperspectival Approaches to Teaching Narrative and Story in University Film and Media Departments.” Media Practice and Education 25 (2): 123–36. doi:10.1080/25741136.2024.2331342
Catherine Gough-Brady. 2024. “The heroic character, the neo-liberal productive citizen, and the feminist filmmaker.” Media Practice and Education, 25(2), 149–159. https://doi.org/10.1080/25741136.2024.2324076
See Gurminder K. Bhambra. 2021. “Decolonizing Critical Theory?: Epistemological Justice, Progress, Reparations.” Critical Times 4 (1): 73–89. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/26410478-8855227
All the jazz snaps 🎶 🫰