Category Archives: Workshops and Events

“Teaching Practices in the Era of BLM” Follow-Up Q&A with Dr. Carolyn Ureña

The program in Comparative Literature and the Rutgers Advanced Institute for Critical Caribbean Studies sponsored a student-led event on February 5th, 2021, under the title “Teaching Practices in the Era of BLM.” The event, organized by María Elizabeth Rodríguez Beltrán, Paulina Barrios, Mònica Tomás, Milan Reynolds, and Amanda González Izquierdo had over 100 people attend. We were honored to have Dr. Carolyn Ureña, a Comparative Literature alumnus and now Assistant Dean for Advising at University of Pennsylvania. Along with Dr. Jonathan Daniel Rosa and Dr. Angel Jones, Dr. Ureña spoke on the ongoing importance of incorporating pedagogy that addresses systemic racism and white supremacy in educational spaces. We thank Dr. Ureña for the opportunity to share her responses to the questions that came out of that workshop and for providing such necessary theory and practice for antiracism in the classroom.

Watch a recording of the workshop here!

Dr. Rosa and Dr. Ureña, how do you see your presentations overlapping and/or diverging? What ideas sparked for you as the other presented?

Thank you for encouraging us to think about our presentations in tandem. I was particularly struck by Dr. Rosa’s illuminating example of Black Cuban-American actress Gina Torres being interviewed by the Telemundo anchor in English. This inability-to-recognize Torres as Spanish speaking, the host’s claim that they had allegedly “both” succumb to stereotypes immediately drew my mind back to my recent re-readings of Fanon on “The Black Man and Language” (of which I spoke in my presentation). I am very much interested in language as a tool of colonial violence, as a tool for accessing power, but also as a weapon for policing who and who does not belong to a particular culture. When Fanon writes about the white French doctors who talk down to their Black and Arab patients in an invented patois/gibberish, they are invoking their position of power as physicians, which shields them from sounding ridiculous since they claim to be meeting the colonized subject “where they are,” so to speak. I’m wondering what it means for the Telemundo host to have spoken her accented English in order to do the same with Torres. How is this complicated by the fact that in some ways, the star is more “powerful” than the host, since her words and image are what sell in this case?

While Dr. Ureña’s presentation centered hope and the stubbornness of idealism, this reveals the ways in which students are often so oppressed that it can be emotionally, physically and structurally devastating pulling them further away from hope. How do we think about joy, foster and encourage in a way that doesn’t rob students of the fullness and validity of their feelings?

Thank you for your question! I would like to clarify that “idealism” in Fanon is not necessarily (or not always) a happy thing, and in my writing on Fanon my aim is to show that hope does not always appear in the places or ways we expect. So when I talk about being stubborn in asserting the presence of the body, I mean this as a proactive stance in opposition to the “business as usual” attitudes that would have us ignore the complexity of the body in favor of the so-called “rational” mind. When I speak of hope in Fanon, I am drawing attention to the moment when he resigns as chief psychiatrist in Algeria, when he writes an impassioned and damning letter to the Resident Minister to reject the colonial structure (I urge everyone to read it!). Many might view this moment as Fanon “giving up,” but I argue this moment of rejection is what opens up new and unexpected opportunities (to this effect, my most recent article on this subject is titled “Hopeful Resignation”). This understanding of hope and idealism, I propose, does not rob students (or anyone who embodies it) of the feelings of anger, indignation, sadness and even momentary despair. What it does, I find, is show us a new way to understand what it means to take a stand, that anger can be quite productive — sometimes saying no, leaving a situation, literally quitting (as in Fanon’s case) can actually push against narratives of “grit” and resilience and allow us to challenge the standards for what it means to succeed, to hope, to be fulfilled.

Link to the article I mentioned: https://brill.com/view/journals/bjgs/6/2/article-p233_233.xml

I am wondering how to factor in how my body experience changes in contexts, for instance, I might feel out of place in a white American classroom, but my body experience is a privileged one in a different context internationally because of caste and class. How do I think through the first experience to listen and respond better to students who come from less privileged backgrounds?

Thank you bringing your own bodily awareness to this discussion. One of the many aspects of existential phenomenology that I find compelling is precisely that it allows us to acknowledge that our bodies are not static because we are always in relation to something/someone else. In other words, we do not exist in a vacuum, so, as you pointed out, we feel differently in our bodies depending on the environment, depending on the presence of other bodies as well. I think the activity I mentioned, the Social Identity Wheel from University of Michigan, might yield especially interesting insights if you were to complete the task with each environment in mind: which identity to do you pay most attention to in situation 1? what identity do you think others notice most, etc? Then repeat for environment 2. The idea here is that one’s growing awareness of the complexity of the experience can help us become more aware and attuned to our students’ complexity as well. Above all, as educators interested in adopting a Freirian model of problem-posing pedagogy, I would say we need to ask our students about their experiences, past and present. I would also ask your students a version of the question you asked me. As with the experience you described, the first-gen, low-income college experience can be very disorienting, and gaining a particular kind of education can make one feel alienated from one’s home (I’m reading Fanon’s “The Black Man and Language” through this lens). Likewise, for me, attending a primarily white institution as a Latina was certainly a reminder that I was one of just a few, whereas back home in the primarily Dominican neighborhood of Washington Heights in NYC, I was one among many, from an ethnic perspective.

As part of the problem-posing pedagogy, do we seek particular pedagogical structures/strategies that would also gradually bring students to their own? Do educators avail themselves of particular methods for structuring questions in the classroom?

I love that your question points to the possibility of students developing thier own pedagogical strategies — when I teach Freire, I actually tell students that just because I am aiming to build a Freirian classroom does not mean they will encounter this everywhere they go. Therefore, I want to help them become Freirian student-teachers, so that whatever classroom they enter, whatever syllabus they encounter, they feel empowered to ask themselves and their friends “what is the goal of this class? what about this is important or relevant for me, for my growth?” My point being, they don’t need anyone’s permission to bring their questions to their learning. That being said, I always talk about the importance of being strategic, as I am not throwing out the rule book that may say “these are the grading standards, this will be on the test,” since certain kinds of academic success, even traditionally construed, can open important doors; the question is, what do we do when we open them? Still, there is much more to learning the materials than memorizing and producing the right answers.

In terms of methods for structuring questions, I often find myself encouraging questions that denaturalize the presence of the text or object in the class, by which I mean, encouraging the student to put themselves in the role of the syllabus writer (i.e. teacher!) — why do you think we are STILL talking about this old/strange/boring (if that’s how it’s being received) text? What can we gain from it? What can we set aside? If it’s somehow mandated by the discipline/class/high school…. why might that be so? Answers range from utilitarian to utopian, and that’s part of the point — nothing is obvious, nothing is static, which reminds me of when Fanon writes, “Society, unlike biochemical processes, does not escape human influence.”

Oh! And I mentioned during the Q&A that literature is a great place to discuss race and difference more broadly, even simply by starting to ask questions about why particular characters were made to speak by particular authors in particular ways, and I have a recommended text for this — Toni Morrison’s short story “Recitatif,” about two young girls, one white, one black, and their repeated encounters throughout their lives. The thing is, Morrison never tells us who is white and who is black. Check it out, you won’t regret it. But you don’t have to take my word for it! (here is LeVar Burton, of Reading Rainbow and Star Trek: The Next Generation fame, reading and discussing it: https://www.stitcher.com/show/levar-burton-reads/episode/recitatif-by-toni-morrison-part-1-200144090)

What would you suggest / recommend to professor (white/black) to feel comfortable in raising racial questions in class—how to be intentional in incorporating racial issues.

For handling these kinds of discussions — whether for the first time or each new time — I am so grateful for the wealth of resources to be found at college Centers for Teaching and Learning. As educators, we really never need to do this alone. We can seek help and guidance from other educators, others who know how to start these discussions. I’ve mentioned the University of Michigan Inclusive Teaching resources (https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/inclusive-teaching/). UPenn’s Center for Teaching and Learning has some great, evidence-based resources and strategies as well (https://www.ctl.upenn.edu/Node/160, and has sponsored events about trauma-informed teaching that included representatives from Counseling and Psychological Services. If you search for resources on how to discuss the 2020 Election results, you’ll also find helpful advice that is applicable in this context.

Even after reading through these kinds of materials, we may continue to feel unsure, and my thinking at the moment is that true learning happens when we stretch ourselves beyond our comfort zone. I believe the commitment must come before the comfort. I think of our students, those who are not yet comfortable speaking in class — we encourage them to try, we find ways to let them know that we will not let them falter, that we will help them through that first comment and also give them feedback on how to improve. Oh, and you better believe their classmates will give feedback (nods, building on the comment, eye rolls, silence). I would say to you and all professors, speak sincerely, humbly (even announce it — I’m not sure how to have this conversation, this is the first time I am trying, and I need you help), and above all, ask questions. Students overwhelmingly appreciate being heard, being included, as well as our willingness to be human in front of them.

Once again, we thank our presenters Dr. Ureña, Dr. Rosa, and Dr. Jones for thoughtful and pertinent talks, and the Comparative Literature Program for supporting this workshop.

Brown Bag Lunch: AI and Genre

By: Virginia Conn

Lauren M.E. Goodlad, professor of English and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University, asked the following provocative question at Comp Lit’s inaugural Spring 2020 Brown Bag Lunch: how did a study of genre and the longue durée end

 

up addressing artificial intelligence in the present day? She began by postulating that the pronouncement of billionaire investor Mark Cuban is typical of the zeitgeist today: “AI is going to change everything. There’s nothing that AI won’t impact.” Whether AI so conceived is just the latest speculative bubble—or rather the end of life as we know it—is a question Goodlad ponders at the close of her essay, “Genres that Matter: The Long Afterlives of Nineteenth-Century Fiction,” which is forthcoming this fall and upon which her talk was based.

To historicize and situate the impact of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and big data on the question of genre, Goodlad referred to four touchstones for her work: Fernand Braudel’s claim that the work of the longue durée historiographer is to cultivate awareness of temporal plurality; Franco Moretti’s effort to theorize genre by drawing on evolutionary biology to conceive genres as coherent types that vie with one another in a bid for survival of the fittest; Wai Chee Dimock’s claim for deep time, which conceives generic transtemporality by analogy to fractal geometry; and Ted Underwood’s move towards genre analysis through machine-generated scatterplots. Notably, all these longue durée analyses conceive genre as a relatively fixed and transparent object: for Moretti, a macro-category for tracing the DNA of dominant types of cycles, for Dimock, a neutral vehicle for fractal forays into the past, and for Underwood, a fundamentally lexical object ideal for statistical analysis. As such, none of them offer the nuanced genealogy or transtemporal comparativism that might encourage rapproachment between the formal and historical methods that is the focus of Goodlad’s work.

She recuperates the idea of genre as something that doesn’t exist in a vacuum, as there can be no “horizon” without circulation, nor “expectation” without perceiving subjects. Genre, therefore, is as much about the legibility of conventions for particular readers as about authors’ intentions or critics’ taxonomies. Her point during the talk was not so much that these works create problems for distant reading as that distant readers who single out this one scale of analysis create problems for themselves. A strong genre theory, much like an influential genre itself, operates at multiple scales. As such, genres so theorized not only operate supratextually as the articulation of types and intertextually (as in the influence of old forms on new), but also intratextually.

What does this ultimately mean for literary and digital humanists? Goodlad suggests that DH modelers clarify their statistical assumptions: not because quantitative tools are necessarily untrustworthy, but because DH computationalists cannot be both conventional data scientists when arguing for robust results and postmodern experimentalists when rejecting the mantle of statistics, empiricism, or positivism. Plainly put: overstated claims on the part of computational theorists play into the hype and confusion about AI, data, and enhance the tremendous economic and cultural power of those who most benefit already. As humanist researchers and teachers in the 21st century, we have more important things to do than protect tech bros from their own hubris.

 

On Black Motherhood: Reporting on the Social Justice Teach-In by the “Mothers of the Movement” at Rutgers

by María Elizabeth Rodríguez Beltrán

On Thursday, November 14th, 2019, the Douglass Residential College at Rutgers University hosted the Mothers of the Black Lives Matter movement, ten black women whose sons were victims of gun violence. The mothers present on the stage were, Marion Gray-Hopkins (Gary Hopkins’ mother), Gween Carr (Eric Garner’s Mother), Lesley McSpadden (Michael Brown’s mother), Wanda Johnson (Oscar Grant’s mother), Valerie Bell (Sean Bell’s mother), Kadi Diallo (Amadou Diallo’s mother), Greta Williams (Kevin Cooper’s mother), Gwen Wesley (Cliff Wesley’s mother), Hawa Bah (Mohamed Bah’s mother) and Montye Benjamin (Jayvis Benjamin’s mother). The venue where it was held, Vorhees Chapel, seemed more than an appropriate location as these women expressed how their different religious beliefs and spiritual practices motivated them to search for ways to honor their sons through community work and activism.

Associate Dean Elizabeth Gunn, as the moderator, started the conversation by asking them to share qualities about these young black men that did not come out in the media. The mothers shared things ranging from how one of their sons was very skilled in many things but very bad at swimming (Kadi Diallo, about her son Amadou), to how their sons were mentors, peacemakers, and leaders in their communities. Gween Carr, for instance, chronicled how the media has portrayed her son Eric Garner’s murder in a way that attempts to justify the unjustifiable but that she knows, and many witnesses have attested, that Eric “was there breaking up a fight between [two of his] friends” and not selling cigarettes in the streets as has often been said.

Through different testimonies, the mothers expressed how they are not “anti-police but against brutality.” Moreover, when asked by the audience about practical things to do to support the movement they called to action in these ways:

*Ask your community leaders to hold a town meeting with the police officers in your community as a way to create a closer relationship with them. The police body should get to know the people they are policing, and “we should know who is policing us.”
*Inform yourself (do your research!) about the present laws and proposed bills coming up in congress about policing and gun laws and call your representatives to ask them to stop or push them forward.
*Go to jury duty, do not try to get out of it! “We need a group of our peers.” The mothers expressed how, in many of their cases that made it to court, the jury was not representative of their peers.
*“Get your phones out” when you see any injustice, but especially when there is any interaction with the police. They warned, “stay at a safe distance, but make sure you record it.”
*If stopped by the police, try to memorize their badge number and info, but more importantly, “try to get home safe.”

At the end of the section on the “practical recommendations” the mothers were emphatic about this last part: that in order to continue the fight and before taking any action, people need to “get home safe.” They repeated that all measures need to be taken to survive any interactions that can place one’s life at risk.

When asked another harrowing question about when it is appropriate to have “the talk” with black and brown children about police violence against people of color, the speakers shared some of the conversations that they and their families have had about the police and potential dangers. They remembered how some were having these conversations with their kids as early as seven years old. These activists also reminded the audience that even when the parents of white children should also teach them about police brutality and its effects on society, they should be aware that the parents of black and brown children are having a completely different conversation. These conversations –more often than not— rest on a question of life and death, and that this is not the case for all children.

The audience was also able to learn more about these women when they were asked about things that they do outside their activism that they enjoy. Their answers covered things like walking barefoot on the grass, dancing and spending time with their families, as well as cooking (and not cooking!), traveling, talking to youth in their communities, and “doing my nails and looking cute!”

Closer to the end of the event, the mothers were asked that if they could describe their sons in one word, what would that word be, and they said (in the order they were seated):

For Kevin Cooper-Loving
For Gary Hopkins- Humorous
For Sean Bell- Strong
For Eric Garner- Generous
For Cliff Wesley- Precious
For Amadou Diallo- Wisdom
For Mohamed Bah-Helpful
For Michael Brown- Courageous
For Oscar Grant- Leader
For Jayvis Benjamin- Loving

And thus, responding to the call of these mothers, I invite you to remember these young men as the loving, wise, humorous, and strong leaders they were, to be courageous and stand against injustice and help generously in any way we can.

For other reports on this event, see here, here and here.

Two Sessions on Black Feminist Critique: Decoloniality Workshop Fall 2019 Programming

by Rafael Vizcaíno and Jeong Eun Annabel We

In fall of 2019, the Decoloniality Workshop entered its third academic year as an interdisciplinary space for junior scholars to share work in progress in a relaxed environment committed to the transformation of the academy. For the first time in its short history, this semester’s Workshop saw two thematically related sessions that speak to one of the research strengths of humanities research at Rutgers: the literary and critical production of Black women writers, in Africa and in the Caribbean.

 

On September 16th, Comparative Literature PhD Candidate Grabriel Bámgbóṣé presented a paper titled “In My Mother’s House: African Women, Poetic Literacy, and Radical Translations of Négritude Humanism,” which was loosely based on his dissertation project of the same title. Bámgbóṣé’s project makes an intervention into recent studies on the discourse of négritude by “investigating the active roles of African women in the radical translations of [negritude’s] humanist poetics.” According to Bámgbóṣé, African women have been traditionally excluded from historical and critical accounts negritude poetics. Their poetry, however, is “a powerful vehicle for critiquing the coloniality of life through radical translations of négritude that problematize its historical equivalence to a fixed geotemporality of thought.” In this sense, for Bámgbóṣé, African women’s contributions to negritude poetics enact several political, epistemological, and aesthetic shifts from what is conventionally taken to be the domain of négritude poetics. Engaging their literary and poetics works, Bámgbóṣé questions “the pervasive silencing of African women’s voices in the négritude debate.”

 

Alexandria Smith, Women’s and Gender Studies PhD Candidate, initiated the session’s conversation by acting as the official discussant. Smith encouraged Bámgbóṣé to make his own scholarly positionality explicit as he investigates the roles of African women in the advancement of negritude’s poetics. Smith also pressed Bámgbóṣé to further articulate how the suppression of these women’s voices happened: who did this and why? The remaining of the conversation with audience participants centered on the relationship between poetics and politics, the colonial production of racial and ethnic differences, as well as the very concrete ways in which women poets engage the silencing of their voice.

 

On October 7th, Bámgbóṣé and Smith switched their roles of presenter and discussant. This time, Smith presented her work, entitled “The Woman From Carriacou: Audre Lorde and Dionne Brand Respond to the 1983 US Invasion of Grenada,” and Bámgbóṣé served as the official discussant. Part of Smith’s dissertation, the paper engaged the writings of Audre Lorde and Dionne Brand on Grenada to articulate the relationship between body politic (diasporic, Black, lesbian, Caribbean women’s embodied experience) and geopolitics (the U.S. invasion of Grenada and  its imperialist and anti-Black violence). The paper considers how the strategies of writing from and on the human body effects diasporic reflections on the violence that Lorde and Brand witnessed, setting this writing apart from the dominant reportage on the invasion in news media. Smith suggests that their responses link “the Caribbean, Africa, Canada, and the United States as sites interlocked in a global, exploitative colonial and imperial network.”

 

Bámgbóṣé began the Q&A section by asking Smith on the literary dimensions of her paper’s analysis: for example, how does the authorial choice of the essay form shape Smith’s analysis of Lorde and Brand, considering the two authors’ prominent role as poets? And how might an allegorical approach to Brand’s text—“Nothing of Egypt”—lend itself to Smith’s analysis of the relations among individual and collective bodies? The ensuing discussion cohered around the question of allegory as a strategy of writing about collective trauma, clarifications on the relationship between body politics and geopolitics, and further avenues for engaging the Black feminist theories of the flesh through these texts.

 

Visit the Decoloniality Workshop’s website for news on its future programming, as well to catch up on any of its past events.

 

 

Varieties of Decolonial Thinking and Organizing

by Rafael Vizcaino and Paulina Barrios

Over February and March of 2019, the Rutgers Advanced Institute for Critical Caribbean Studies “What is Decoloniality?” speaker series held two events sponsored by the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies and the Program in Comparative Literature. Audiences from both Rutgers and New Brunswick were exposed to a wide range of ideas concerning the decolonization of theory, activism, and institutions from the Dominican activist-scholar Yuderkys Espinosa, the French-Algerian political activist and writer Houria Bouteldja, and the decolonial organizers from the movement Decolonize This Place.

On Friday February 1st, RAICCS welcomed Yuderkys Espinosa for a talk in Spanish titled “Decolonial Feminism in Abya Yala” and a workshop on “Black Decolonial Feminist Epistemology”. During her talk, Espinosa first recognized the disconnection between communities, grassroots activism, and academia. She argued it is precisely decolonial feminism that builds these connections and systematizes knowledge produced by communities and spaces that are generally left out of academic discussions. She invited us to reflect on what a young indigenous activist said when asked if she thought of herself as a feminist: “I am not a feminist because I do not save myself on my own”. This young activist went on to explain that she had no investment in an individualist project, which was how she saw feminism. She further explained that although she felt compelled by some of the feminist scholars and activists, she could not fully align with a movement that she felt separated her from her community. Espinosa emphasized that decolonial feminism must listen to these voices and that it could avoid individualistic leaderships by amplifying its focus and emphasizing collective action and scholarship. As a specific example she spoke of co-authorship and mentioned the book by Catherine Walsh, a scholar-activist based in Universidad Andina Simón Bolivar, and Juan García Salazar, an Afro-Ecuadorian elder keeper of oral tradition, “Pensar sembrando/sembrar pensando con el Abuelo Zenón” (Thinking as we sow/Sowing as we think with Grandfather Zenon). Espinosa ended her talk by arguing that decolonial feminism must analyze when and where it is replicating power dynamics and modern projects based on authenticity and truth.

 

After her presentation, Espinosa held a workshop focused on black decolonial feminist epistemology within the production of knowledges and practices in activism and the academy. She established two main aspects as the most important:

  • A focus against the androcentrism of scientific knowledge. This androcentrism is based on male heterosexuals who come from a space of privilege and argue for objectivity and universality that aren’t ‘polluted’ by experience. She argued that this pretension of objectivity and universality doesn’t really exist. Further, a decolonial black feminist methodology implies being self-critical and coming to terms with one’s privilege and positionality. This leads to the possibility of establishing and producing one’s own knowledge and categories, moving beyond the idea of universal concepts.
  • Following feminist knowledge production methodologies. This is based on self-experience and the understanding that all knowledge comes from subjectivity, which leads us to abandon the preference of objectivity. This includes also adding value to what happens outside the academy, including different strategies, dialogues between different knowledges, intergenerational dialogues, as well as with indigenous and afrodescendent universities. She also emphasized that this process involves negotiations and clear communication among people who are generating collectives and decolonial ways of producing knowledge.

Following these two events, on March 14th and 15th, RAICCS welcomed Houria Bouteldja, a well-known French-Algerian political activist and writer focusing on anti-racism, anti-imperialism, and Islamophobia. Bouteldja began with a lecture (in French, with live English translation) titled “About White Innocence in General and French Innocence in Particular.” In this lecture, Bouteldja offered a devastating analysis of the ways in which current French left politics advance a white supremacist project. Bouteldja discussed how the progressive vision of leftist politics in France only encompasses white people, continuing the racist imaginary and state apparatus from centuries of colonial practices that were never properly decolonized. For instance, the French political status quo often deploys Islamophobia in the name of secularism. This practice targets largely Muslim migrants from France’s former colonies, who are not treated as political subjects but people to be saved at best (for the liberal) or as poison for the French nation at worst (for the fascist). Against this racist status quo, Bouteldja put forth a decolonial anti-imperialist politics of “revolutionary love” by spearheading the political organization of the Parti des indigènes de la République.

 

The next day, Nelson Maldonado-Torres moderated a discussion titled “The Spirit of Bandung Continues: Roundtable on Decolonial Organizing with Houria Bouteldja, and with Nitasha Dhillon, Amin Husain, and Marz Saffore from MTL+ and Decolonize this Place, as well as Teresa Vivar from Lazos America Unida.” The gathering brought together organizers from different conjunctures to share reflections on failures, successes, tactics, and goals. Vivar, a community organizer from New Brunswick, expressed her concerns on developing natural leadership skills of Indigenous migrant women in New Brunswick, a task that is made difficult by the everyday oppressions coming either from police repression in the community (ICE) or from the community’s own internalized racism and misogyny. Dhillon, Husain, and Saffore spoke about the many efforts that have led to the work they are now doing in New York City under the auspices of Decolonize This Place, “an action-oriented movement centering around Indigenous struggle, Black liberation, free Palestine, global wage workers and de-gentrification.” In their model of organizing, direct actions generate what they call “movement-generated theory” that targets institutional power. Bouteldja likewise shared the pre-history that led to the founding of the Parti des indigènes de la République. For Bouteldja, liberalism’s complicities to white supremacy are seen in the greater volume of criticism that decolonial thinking is currently receiving in the French academy than that of the criticism of the resurgent far-right racist/fascist politics.

 

These events, as part of the ongoing “What is Decoloniality?” speaker series, addressed the varieties of decolonial positions, tactics, and approaches that exemplify the breadth and possibility that decolonial thought and praxis offer across social positions and in different institutional settings. The speakers exemplified how decoloniality can be a strong analytic lens to be implemented in our research and teaching. Perhaps most importantly, however, their activist orientations let us know that decoloniality is also a practice that targets patterns of oppression in ourselves and the institutions that we inhabit.

Decoloniality Workshop: “Fucking with [The] Family: The Queer Promise in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions”

by María Elizabeth Rodríguez Beltrán with notes by Haruki Eda and Rafael Vizcaíno, and pictures by Rafael Vizcaíno

At the beginning of the Spring semester, on February 19th, 2019, Comparative Literature PhD student Thato Magano shared with the Decoloniality Workshop audience their soon-to-be published paper[i],“Fucking with [The] Family: The Queer Promise in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions.”  In it, Thato highlighted the importance of Nervous Conditions as a critical feminist text that “negotiates the seemingly inescapable bind of inter- and intra- cultural patriarchal prescriptions,” and emphasized its significance within Black studies, African Literature and postcolonial studies.

Thato builds up on the work of Susan Andrade and Tendai Marima, and challenges previous readings that describe the main character and narrator of the novel, Tambu, as heterosexual and as representative of the nation. Thato instead argues that Tambu and her cousin Nyasha, with whom she holds an intimate relationship, exist as “queer subjects not synchronous with national reproductive time.” The article places them as figures that “rearticulate sexual politics” and radicalizes queer politics. Thato centers the queer subject within the often-restrictive political discourse of black experience, and analyses how lesbian desire within Nervous Conditions opposes the family as social norm. Through its exploration of Tambu and Nyasha’s relationship, “Fucking with [The] Family” proposes a reading of “incest as a queer emotion, affect and aesthetic that can be instrumental in destabilizing heteronormative nationalist desires in postcolonial literatures.”

In the Q&A section, audience members were interested in exploring with Thato the cultural limitations of incest, the distinction between queer identity and queer politics, and the relationship between queerness and spirituality. Students who work on Caribbean Literature asked about the relationship that Thato sees between African epistemologies and those of the Caribbean where literary queerness is usually analyzed through a spiritual lens. To this inquiry Thato answered that spirituality is often used as mediation (or mediating tool) for talking about queer intimacies, “my investment is to try to produce two subjects who can stand in their own terms… my resistance is against the premise that queer sexuality can only emerge in a cultural context (e.g. mythology, culture, spirituality), but that cultural context privileges heterosexual production and national time…so these sorts of mediations that queer subjectivity can only hinge upon is what I am resisting.”

The conversation continued outside of the meeting room, as Thato’s fascinating paper brought up more questions and conversation topics. Thato’s paper and the presentation successfully met its goal, to examine Nervous Conditionsas a text that “negotiates escaping heteronormative conventions of Black female subjectivity”, and “make[s] legible alternative modes of caring and belonging within the nation” outside the heteronormative construction of the family. This paper allowed a richer understanding of queerness and brought to light many of the assumptions that exist when reading about relationships among black women. Congratulations to Thato Magano on a wonderful presentation!

[i]It has been accepted for publication by the Research in African Literatures Journal (RiAL).