Tag Archives: event

June Jordan’s Radical Pedagogy and the Decolonization of the University

By Rafael Vizcaíno

As the opening event of the new “What is Decoloniality?” speaker series, organized by the Rutgers Advanced Institute for Critical Caribbean Studies, on September 13, 2018, Dr. Danica Savonick (Asst. Prof. SUNY Cortland and a Rutgers Comp Lit alumna), gave a presentation titled “How to Begin is also Where: June Jordan’s Place Making Pedagogy.” Grounded on the radical pedagogical experiments of the 1960’s and 70’s, Savonick’s presentation focused on how the teaching methods of the Caribbean-American poet, essayist, teacher, and activist June Jordan, empowered her students to become not recipients of knowledge, but co-creators of a knowledge that would allow them to be critical thinkers and their own communities’ leaders. Analyzing syllabi and student’s written materials from Jordan’s courses at the City College of New York, Savonick explained how Jordan allowed her students to shape the content and form of her courses to make these more useful to the pressing needs of her students, most of which were Harlem’s Black and/or Latinx youth. These and other actions are part of a student-centered pedagogy that Savonick seeks to make relevant for our own historical context in the era of the neoliberal corporate university.

One concrete example that materializes Jordan’s radical student-centered pedagogy is the publication of anthologies gathering her student’s written assignments. Doing place-based research in their own social contexts, e.g., on public housing conditions, health, or economic inequality in New York City, students were not encouraged to write the standard final paper for the professor to read alone. Instead, Jordan pushed her students to write for a broader audience, effectively treating them as writers capable of creating original and important contributions to research and public opinion. Jordan would collect these pieces and publish them as an anthology with an introduction written by herself, which made the anthology publicly attractive given her well-known status as a writer. This entire process, from classroom discussions where students shaped the method of her courses to the students’ research and the subsequent publication of their work demonstrates the potential that all students have in creating another educational model, and by extension, another world. In this sense, Jordan’s pedagogy shows the incoherence of the argument (widely held in the 1960s and sadly not entirely gone today) that explains the underperformance of Black and Latinx students due to “individual deficiencies.” The problem instead is the structural failure of educational institutions to connect with the lived-experiences and worldviews of these students.

During the discussion part of Savonick’s presentation, a rich exchange took place that put the burden on us as professors and scholars (especially those of us in-training, i.e., graduate students) to not continue reproducing problematic methods and pedagogies in the classroom. While mindful to the differences in embodied positionalities as teachers across gender, race, ability, nationality, and other markers of social difference, the exchange that took place led to a need to challenge today’s privatization of knowledge and to be more thoroughly self-reflective about the ways in which the university as an institution and also ourselves as individuals inside the university often reproduce the social inequalities that on paper we purport to contest. This is part of the many discussions and actions currently going on under the heading of the “decolonization of the university.” Savonick’s answer to this question is a positive one: what kinds of worlds could be created if students are actually heard?

Anticipatory Nostalgia: Queering the Hong Kong Handover

By: Penny Yeung

A little more about Penny: Prior to coming to Rutgers, Penny spent four months working for a non-profit, Very Hong Kong, an explorative community project that combines art and urban development by inviting local creatives to transform underused public spaces. She is now eager to continue her research interests in geocriticism and Romanticism, and hopes to further explore the relationship between literature and politics, as well as transnational dynamics of the novel in a Sino-French context. Penny also holds an M.A. in Comparative Literature from King’s College London.

On Thursday, March 2, Professor Carlos Rojas of Duke University spoke to a roomful of audience on the topic of “Anticipatory Nostalgia: Queering the Hong Kong Handover,” as part of the China Lecture Series organized by the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at Rutgers University. This upcoming July 1, 2017 being the twentieth anniversary of the handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China, Professor Rojas noted, the occasion is sure to invite critical reflections on how the historical transition will be commemorated and remembered.

Professor Rojas opened his lecture by way of a discussion of Dung Kai-Cheung’s Atlas: The Archeology of an Imaginary City. Atlas was published in 1997, the year of the handover, and reprinted along with three of Dung’s novellas in 2011 as part of what is now known as the V-City series (V-City being the shorthand for Victoria City, a fictional stand-in name for Hong Kong). The preface of the V-City series provides a suggestive perspective to rethinking time: using an imaginary vantage point in the future to reassess the present and the past, and taking an imaginary vantage point in the past to assess the present and the future. The upshot is a troubling of the present as a stable reference point.

Rojas then turned to the notion of “déjà disparu,” put forth by Ackbar Abbas in his elegant and seminal monograph Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (1997). “Déjà disparu” posits that in Hong Kong’s case, culture and identity are articulated—paradoxically—at the brink of their disappearance. Their formation always already entails a belatedness; their manifestation, in this sense, borders on the spectral—as something already lost, or in the process of becoming so. In Rojas’s theorization he coupled this with Freudian conceptions of fetishization and deferred action. The temporal dimensions in both Abbas and Freud allow for a theorization of the forms of remembrances, both anticipatory and nostalgic, set into motion by the 1984 signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration, which laid out the provisions for Hong Kong’s handover to China. As Rojas pointed out, the signing of the 1984 declaration triggered a concern with imminent loss, which in turn, ended up generating what would then be lost.

Drawing on the notion of queer futurity and utopia in Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive and José Esteban Munôz’s Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, Rojas further argued that a queer perspective of the handover may offer ways to think about alternative potentialities and possibilities of the future. Professor Rojas illustrated this through close readings of three works created right around or shortly after the handover: Wong Kar-Wai’s film Happy Together (1997) (paired with a reading of Italo Svevo’s Confessions of Zeno); Fruit Chan’s film Made in Hong Kong (1997); and Dung Kai-Cheung’s novel Works and Creations (2005). Rojas argued that in all three, depictions of futurity are delinked from heteronormative visions of youth and childhood. Diverging from narratives of conventional reproduction, these depictions challenge notions of linear time and seem instead to align with queer futurity. There is a turn to the past to critique the present, while being simultaneously resonant with desire for the future. Optimism exists, Rojas asserted, albeit one that is mediated through a meld of fear, anxiety, and frustration.

Professor Rojas’s talk provided provocative insights into how trauma may be revisited, reenacted, and possibly transcended. Prior to the lecture, Professor Rojas graciously shared his time with a group of graduate students, during which the conversation ranged from contemporary gender issues in China, comparative literature and methodology, to the vexed yet productive intersections between postcolonial and national discourses.