José Manuel Santillana Blanco, Kidiocus King-Carroll, Naimah Zulmadelle Pétigny, and Kong Pheng Pha

Almost all educational spaces and institutions in the United States are embedded within a long history of settler colonialism, chattel slavery, and racial capitalism. Many universities and colleges were founded as land-grant institutions through the Morrill Land-Grant Acts of 1862 and 1890. The Morrill Land-Grant Acts initiated the development of land-grant universities and colleges (now commonly and more accurately referred to as Land Grab Universities and Colleges) through the violent dispossession of Indigenous people in the United States. It is estimated that 11 million acres of Indigenous land belonging to 250 tribes, bands, and nations were forcefully obtained by way of over 160 violent treaties and land seizures. ^[1]Robert Lee et al., “Land-Grab Universities,” 2020, https://www.landgrabu.org.

Concomitantly, the social, political, and economic foundation of education was thoroughly intertwined with the Atlantic slave trade. The earliest American academies were financed, developed, and maintained through ill acquired profits from slave economies across the South. As Craig Steven Wilder notes, “It was the security that human slavery provided free man, the wealth that traders and slaveholders could generate, and the social networks of plantation economies that brought…the American academy and that carried the American academy into modernity.”^[2]Craig Steven Wilder, Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities, First U.S. edition. (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2013), 111. These historical legacies of colonial violence are what erects and propels the contemporary neoliberal university.

Today, an array of universities and colleges remain complicit in the brutal Israeli occupation of Palestine and the genocide of the Palestinian people. For example, the University of Minnesota (UMN) is one of many academic institutions that manages its financial assets through the multi-billion dollar investment firm BlackRock. On campus, student organizers have drawn attention to UMN’s connections to the occupation vis-a-vis corporations such as Caterpillar, Raytheon, Elbit Systems and G4S. ^[3]The Minnesota Republic, “Students Ask UMN to Divest from Companies It Doesn’t Invest In,” Campus Reform, February 29, 2016, https://campusreform.org/article?id=7338.At UMN and across the country, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and allies continue to be at the forefront of speaking out against Israel’s genocide of Palestinians as well as the targeting of scholars, students and educational institutions in Gaza and the West Bank. Time and time again, student activists have called for radical organizing on campus to resist border imperialism and neoliberal violences locally and across the world.^[4]Harsha Walia, Undoing Border Imperialism. (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2013). Throughout the last several decades, students have led various campaigns to divest from the tobacco industry, South Africa during Apartheid, and the prison and immigration detention industries in the United States.

Still, the struggle and solidarity movements for a Free Palestine continues to garner unwarranted suppression through strategic censorship, manipulation, and retribution. Within universities and colleges, students, faculty, and workers who express concerns over the livelihoods of the Palestinian people and land are subject to punishment. Since October, student organizations including SJP, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), Coalition Against Apartheid, and MEChA at American University, Arizona State University, Rutgers University, MIT, Case Western Reserve University, George Washington University and Columbia University were suspended. In April 2024, three students were expelled, one suspended, and twenty put on academic probation after students protested the Vanderbilt University administration’s removal of the student approved Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) initiative, Columbia University suspended and evicted six students for their involvement in planning a pro-Palestinian panel on campus grounds and Pomona College arrested and suspended eighteen students for protesting against the removal of pro-Palestinian artwork on campus. Among many others, University professors Jairo Fúnez-Flores (Texas Tech University), Abdulkader Sinno (Indiana University), Ameer Loggins (Stanford), Amin Husain (NYU), Rebecca Lopez (University of Arizona) and Abeer Abouyabis (Emory University) were suspended for speaking openly about settler violence in Gaza. In sum, universities have unabashedly performed the repressive and violent work of the state from the very founding of the U.S. settler nation to the present. 

Other recent struggles have contested the attacks on ethnic studies, critical race theory, and the unionization of students, postdoctoral scholars, and adjunct faculty. In 2010, Republican governor Jan Brewer signed a law banning Mexican American studies programs in Arizona. Right wing lawmakers accused educators in the field of teaching “racial resentment” and advocating for the “overthrow of the government.”^[5]Hank Stephenson, “What Arizona’s 2010 Ban on Ethnic Studies Could Mean for the Fight Over Critical Race Theory,” Politico, 2021. More recently, Florida governor Ron DeSantis’ administration proposed several bills targeting African American studies and critical race theory. The proposed bills blocked Advanced Placement African American studies curricula in high schools as well as any race-based discussions in businesses and public schools. 

While state-sponsored measures that seek to limit academic freedoms are ongoing, student-led movements of resistance struggles continue to intervene. In California, thousands of University of California (UC) graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and academic researchers secured new worker contracts through strikes and advocacy, while several college and university workers across the country began new efforts to address unfair labor practices and demand fair wages. Across campuses, student organizing continues to address the legacies–and ongoing effects–of slavery, settler colonialism, war, and imperialism and their entwinement with knowledge production in the contemporary neoliberal university. 

Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of Minnesota

The formation of the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) graduate writing group at UMN is a continuation of the legacy of radicalism and activism for social justice on America’s college campuses. We trace CRES’s establishment back to the January 14, 1969 “Morrill Hall takeover” at UMN. On that day, nearly a year after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., seventy Black students from the Afro-American Action Committee (AAAC) occupied Morrill Hall at the central quad of the campus for over twenty-four hours to demand the creation of an African American Studies department. Their takeover was part of a long series of protests against the racist campus climate that isolated and excluded Black students from participating in university life.^[6]Tina Burnside, “Morrill Hall Takeover, University of Minnesota,” MNopedia.  In response to this demand and the Morrill Hall takeover action, UMN established the Department of Afro-American Studies in 1969. It was one of the first Afro-American Studies departments in the nation, and later became the Department of African and African American Studies. 

By 1970, Chicanx and Latinx students in Minnesota began formulating conversations about the lack of resources for their community, as well as the possibility of establishing a Chicano Studies department in the Midwest. Dissatisfied with the University’s inaction to their call for creating spaces in the institution for rigorous engagement with Chicanx histories and ways of knowing, twenty Chicanx students occupied Morrill Hall on October 26, 1971. They demanded the establishment of a Chicano Studies department at the university within seventy-two hours. The university agreed to the students’ demand, and the Department of Chicano Studies was established the same year. In the fall of 1972, UMN offered the first Chicano Studies courses and accepted its first cohort of students.^[7]Jessica Lopez Lyman, “Department of Chicano and Latino Studies, University of Minnesota,” MNopedia.  The department later transformed into the Department of Chicano and Latino Studies. 

Nearly 40 years later, a radical movement for racial justice was brewing on the UMN campus. In 2010, several undergraduate and graduate students, along with a faculty member, began convening to address what they argued was a fundamental contradiction between the rhetoric of “diversity” at UMN and the actual investment in fostering diverse student populations and learning environments on campus. Naming their movement as Whose University?, the group sought to preserve institutional memory about the lessons learned from student-led struggles at UMN. Whose University?, at its core, demanded the radical transformation of the university in order to democratize education. It named the violences of neoliberal multiculturalism, and traced their inner workings across various levels of the university. They drew inspiration from the 1969 Morrill Hall takeover, the 1971 Chicano student occupation, as well as the General College Truth Movement— the activism against efforts to dismantle the General College, an undergraduate college at UMN that prepared primarily first-generation and students of color for higher education. 

Whose University? and Whose Diversity?

Whose University? critiqued the institution by posing a series of questions: Who is admitted? Who is supported? Whose knowledge is valued? The movement’s messaging and critiques emerged from “numerous debates over the merits or political salience of words like ‘equal access,’ ‘excellence,’ ‘exclusions,’ and ‘underrepresented.’”^[8]Quotations taken from Whose Diversity? minutes. Whose University? began working on a film to document the movement and organized a series of events for its Day of Education on April 20, 2011, that included a theatrical performance, a teach-in, and a panel discussion with four undergraduate students and the faculty directors/chairpersons of UMN’s four ethnic studies units (African and African American Studies, Chicano and Latino Studies, American Indian Studies, and Asian American Studies). Nearly 20 undergraduate and graduate students organized the events and over 700 individuals, including high school students, attended the Day of Education events.

In the fall of 2014, the Whose University? movement was revived by a new cohort of graduate students who established the collective Whose Diversity? Many of the founding members of the CRES graduate writing group were active organizers and members of Whose Diversity? The central critiques animating the activism of Whose Diversity? were: What does it mean when diversity reflects not substantive diversity but, instead, an institutional management of minority difference (i.e. the incorporation of minorities into the university’s mission)? How does the university acknowledge and transform cosmetic diversity into a more substantial engagement with diversity? Whose Diversity? argued that UMN cannot ethically continue to espouse its commitments to diversity without wrestling with these questions and implementing policy changes to improve outcomes for diverse and historically oppressed student populations. Ultimately, Whose Diversity? argued that “subscribers of cosmetic diversity are beholden to existing power structures and the interests of university administrators, the majority of whom are not representative of historically marginalized students” rather than ensuring the success and well-being of historically marginalized students.^[9]Quotation is taken from Whose Diversity? minutes.

Whose Diversity? was a dynamic movement that organized consciousness-raising sessions, and engaged in highly visible activism, most notably the sit-in at UMN President Eric Kaler’s office at Morrill Hall in 2015. This sit-in was intentionally reminiscent of the 1969 Morrill Hall takeover. On Monday, February 9, 2015, sixteen students, predominantly graduate students of color, entered President Kaler’s office to present a set of demands. These demands included: ending racial descriptors in crime alerts, hiring more faculty of color (specifically in the Department of Chicano and Latino Studies), requiring all students on campus to take at least one course in ethnic studies, creating all-gender bathrooms in every building, and establishing a program to recruit students of color and low-income students from surrounding communities. The seven-hour sit-in ended with the arrest of thirteen students. A few days after, the university announced a cluster hire of four faculty members to be placed in the various ethnic studies departments, in addition to the departments of American Studies and Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies. 

CRES the Writing Group

In the immediate aftermath of this intense organizing, activism, and fighting against the university’s criminalization of our protests, we turned towards each other. We felt the need for a space to write and think with each other about our roles as scholars, workers, and students within a neoliberal institution. The  formation of the CRES graduate writing group in fall 2015 provided the necessary intellectual and political community for us to come into ourselves as radical scholars and educators. We needed to interrogate how the corporatization, neoliberalism, and violences inherent in American educational spaces produced feelings of exclusion for graduate students of color, resulting in modes of isolation that discourage us from forming intellectual communities in the university. CRES was imagined as a relational space for graduate students of color to rely on one another for emotional and intellectual support, and strategize about how to reduce our sense of isolation in the university. Essentially, CRES was, and continues to be, an intentionally collaborative and relational space that seeks to challenge the ethos of a neoliberal university that encourages competition and hyper-individualism at the expense of collaboration and co-production of knowledge.

CRES primarily operated as a writing group. We held bi-weekly meetings and circulated papers for feedback. The space had a two-fold mission. First, CRES was intentionally designed as a space to interrogate the university and its approaches to interdisciplinary work. Graduate students of color from various departments convened to write openly and courageously in interdisciplinary ways that challenged disciplinary dogmas and approaches to scholarship. We worked collaboratively to understand and ground our scholarship in intellectual traditions which centered Black and Brown liberation and healing, and required an “un-learning” of dominant epistimes. When we left campus, we held dinners and potlucks at our homes and went singing and dancing at local bars, all the while organizing, agitating, and learning from each other during after hours. We understood these acts occurring off-campus as challenges to the formal space of learning in the neoliberal university. Our work of collaborative knowledge reproduction was cultivated through pleasure and relationship building, things that are actively discouraged in official university spaces.

In sum, CRES was a direct affront to the whiteness of the university and the disciplinary modes of knowledge production that re-center and reproduce whiteness. Through CRES, we sought to reframe how we can create relationships with each other through creative methods of providing feedback, conducting research, crafting integrity, and holding each other accountable for support. CRES’ eight points of unity–submitting timely work, submitting work that matters to the author, attending meetings, providing written feedback on writing, not sharing others’ work, sharing workloads and responsibilities, and creating an intentional space–were central to how we as graduate students of color created spaces that affirmed our lived experiences. As a collective and radical writing group, we sought to create and embrace spaces rooted in our commitments to love, radicalism, and worldmaking. 

Seditious Acts: The Symposium 

CRES members organized the Seditious Acts: Graduate Students of Color Interrogating the Neoliberal University symposium in Spring 2017 on the UMN campus to convene like-minded graduate students of color from across the nation to share and present their scholarship. Dozens of graduate students of color and Indigenous students from across the nation, including from the University of Washington, UC-Berkeley, UCLA, UC-Irvine, UC-Santa Barbara, Queen’s University, Miami University, UMass-Amherst, and Michigan State University, presented their scholarship at Seditious Acts. The overwhelming, participatory interest in Seditious Acts evidences the shared feeling of isolation among graduate students of color across the country from The University of Minnesota and beyond. 

The symposium sought to advance emancipatory scholarship and activism that combats all forms of systematic violence. The symposium was an explicit act of resistance. We wrote in the symposium program, “This symposium is the result of the protest, scholarship, and experiences of working-class, first generation, feminist, and queer graduate students of color at the U of MN, who have experienced multiple marginalizations within the academy. Some of these marginalizations include being invisible and being left out of scholarly conversations, or more overt marginalizations such as students of color being arrested for expressing dissent, or faculty of color being denied tenure.”

It is instructive for us to reflect on publishing this issue nearly seven years after the Seditious Acts symposium. We all completed our study at UMN and have begun tenure-track positions elsewhere, but our political and intellectual commitments remain deeply connected to one another. That is, we are committed to publishing these works as an act of support for and investment in graduate students of color in the academy. While our new roles in the academy as faculty members are distinct from our roles as graduate students, we also understand the similarities that persist for academics of color. Faculty of color continue to be marginalized and targeted in the academy, and we carry some of the trauma and experiences of these violences with us into the tenure-track. We envision this issue as a mobilizing force which sustains our political commitments. In this vein, we view this issue as continuing the legacies of radical movement building within and outside of the neoliberal university. 

Seditious Acts: The Issue

While the state continues its attacks on Indigenous, Black, queer, trans, Muslim, Palestinian, immigrant, refugee, and communities of color, radical voices across the board continue to resist by drawing attention to, and grappling with, new ways of addressing and confronting the state’s varied systematic violences. In the spirit of radical traditions cultivated inside and outside the academy, graduate students of color and Indigenous students are constantly interrogating what it means to be “in, but not of” the university.^[10]Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions, 2013). They understand that being in the academy is a serious risk. The potential to reproduce the very violences they seek to dismantle is heightened by the fact that they are living, learning, and laboring in systems constructed on stolen land, subsidized by chattel slavery, and that thrive on racial capitalism and empire. Hence, some graduate students of color and Indigenous students are acutely aware of the inseparable violences within and outside the neoliberal university and how they are impacted and implicated within them.

Many graduate students of color experience tremendous distress over the pressure to “perform” for students, professors, and administrators. Some may even liken these academic theatrics to be a series of acts, composed of constantly evolving scenes, performances, and resistances, where one is coerced into performing. To “act” within the plot of the university requires adherence to particular roles and scripts, and maintenance of their spheres of power. The “acts”’ that make up this issue, however, are not part of any performance. These acts are seditious. Such acts refuse to be hailed by the university, and instead, turn toward other spaces of thinking and organizing. 

Students of color threaten the university with more than just our existence. Through our scholarship and activism, we transgress the very institutions that transgress us. When struggling to survive in inhospitable “climates,” both on campus and elsewhere, it is imperative to think and act, seditiously. Seditious Acts began as a thought for a symposium, but we offer it here as a concept that moves beyond that moment: as a practice and pedagogy of being in, but not of, the university. This practice of being in, but not of, the university is steeped in a rich history of activism and organizing as exemplified by the Morrill Hall takeovers and the Whose University? and Whose Diversity? movements. 

Acts of sedition  are collective moments of rebellion against ongoing colonial power. The long legacy of student resistance among Black, Indigenous, Chicanx, Latinx, Asian American, and communities of color which led to the establishment of ethnic and feminist studies departments across the United States and the intellectual traditions they gave us have profoundly influenced our understanding of sedition. Our vision aligns with the Black radical tradition of “fugitivity” that Stefano Harney and Fred Moten outline in The Undercommons–a vision that is about “connection” and “making common cause with the brokenness of being” within neoliberal governmentality.^[11]Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions, 2013), 5. Their work is ultimately a reminder that engaging in seditious acts or adopting a seditious stance means entering into a fugitive relationship with the neoliberal university. 

Seditious acts are material embodiments against power, and require us to reposition ourselves. In the feminist of color tradition, sedition represents moments of rupture where our home knowledges transform pathways of education and action. They are found in Cherrie Moraga’s “theory in the flesh,” which encourages us to embrace theory and practice as an articulation of an embodied politics of resistance. ^[12]Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (New York: Kitchen Table: Woman of Color Press, 1981), 24.  Similarly, Audre Lorde’s “uses of the erotic” provides an episteme that centralizes the significance of sensuality as a “political, social, and academic tool of deconstruction, subversion, and imagination.”^[13]Nikki Young, “Uses of the Erotic for Teaching Queer Studies,” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 40 (2012): 301. Fleshly and sensual matters are important feminist of color teachings that critique power, and provide foundations for disrupting the violences of the neoliberal university. 

This issue is the result of several conversations amongst graduate students of color from the Seditious Acts symposium. The works in this volume reflect the intersectional identities, experiences, and positionalities of its producers, who are working-class, first-generation, feminist, queer, and international students of the Global South. All of these locations contribute to the devaluation of their knowledges and experiences in institutions of higher education in the United States. As such, this issue is a series of self-reflections, interrogations, disruptions and (re)imaginings related to the substantial problems of knowledge production and academic culture. This issue also operates as a call and guide toward community building for those in academia impacted by systematic oppression. 

This issue of writings explicates the role of the academy in projects of disciplining knowledge production, whilst also exploring how graduate students of color, engaged in critical ethnic studies scholarship, approach questions of race, gender, sexuality, indigeneity, disciplinarity, and scholarly insurgency. This issue centers not only scholarly formats but personal narratives and non-traditional writing styles. It contains personal reflections, testimonies, manifestos, collaborative pieces, creative writing, and radical scholarship analysis from those who hold visions of decolonizing knowledge production.

Seditious Acts found a home at AGITATE! because of its unwavering commitment to unsettle the boundaries of scholarship, art, activism, and creative expression. AGITATE! shares our politics of utilizing our social locations “to catalyze new conversations, visions, and narrative practices in multiple genres and languages, in order to advance struggles for sociopolitical and epistemic justice.”^[14]“Our Ethos,” AGITATE! Journal, https://agitatejournal.org/our-ethos/.  Additionally, this issue is fundamentally grounded in collaboration, first through the space of CRES, second through the Seditious Acts symposium, and third through this collaborative process of writing and publishing the issue. The editorial collective at AGITATE! operate as an anti-hierarchical collective who advances anti-disciplinary approaches to community building and scholarship. As such, our collaboration with AGITATE! constitutes the manifestation of our shared commitments to unsettling dominant politics and practices of knowledge production.

New Futures

Sedition is speculative. Even as our collected writings chart a possible way forward–in and through the various forms of dispossession enacted by the institution—there are no guarantees.  And yet, we gather, organize, and write to mark particular moments in this struggle. 

We want this issue to demonstrate the wide-ranging fields of study that we are situated within, and are continuing to transform. We write to imbue our disciplines with criticality, care, and a deeper orientation towards freedom. Through centering personal narratives and non-traditional writing styles, we are highlighting these forms of scholarship as critical examples of knowledge production, especially well-suited to critique institutional power and systemic violence. We hope that this writing finds you. The you who have growing concerns about academic freedom. The you who believe writing is movement building. The you who has traversed spaces of higher education and who too feels at odds with academic culture and its complacency with violence. 

Through this writing, we want to reach out to graduate students of color who feel isolated and conflicted in their roles as educators in higher education. Graduate students of color critiques and readings of university life are often dismissed as personal and ungrateful. However, we argue that these critiques contend with serious matters of political life, knowledge production, sociality, and institutional power. And while this dismissal of voices has resulted in graduate students of color being silenced, criminalized, and isolated from community, we know that speaking out and finding each other is well worth the risk. We affirm that building networks of aid not only challenges the myth of individualism, but helps us remember the centuries-long legacies of collaborative and liberatory struggles for freedom which we have inherited as scholars in the neoliberal university.

As this issue agitates and archives, it hopes to incite new modes of thinking and critique which challenge pervasive ideas about the university as the center of knowledge and power. Our future is not invested in giving tips to the university on the management of minority differences or the institutionalization of diversity understood in its most narrow sense. We reject such a use of our histories. We have no use for cosmetic diversity work untethered from organizing movements  or inclusion imagined as a checklist. What we are agitating for is justice and freedom. 

Sedition is our toolbox. We work to build spaces that welcome our full humanity—the disjunctures, tensions, suspended realities, colonial afterlives, erotics, and abundances of it all. Although posturing as a pathway to freedom, the university has proven itself repeatedly to be a space of contention, power struggle, silencing, and violence. We as critical race and ethnic studies scholars dare to invest in each other, build situated solidarities, and sustain the creativity of our research within and beyond academia. We move seditiously toward futures capable of holding the fullness of our demands—liberation, solidarity, shared knowledge production, connection, and rest.

Suggested citation:

J.M. Santillana Blanco, K. King-Carroll, N. Z. Petigny, & K. P. Pha. 2024. “Seditious Acts: Being in, but not of the Neoliberal University.” In eds. José Manuel Santillana Blanco, Kidiocus King-Carroll, Naimah Zulmadelle Pétigny, and Kong Pheng Pha in collaboration with AGITATE! Editorial Collective. Seditious Acts: AGITATE! Special Volume with CRES: https://agitatejournal.org/article/seditious-acts-being-in-but-not-of-the-neoliberal-university/

O those who pass between fleeting words
From you the sword — from us the blood
From you steel and fire — from us our flesh
From you yet another tank — from us stones
From you tear gas — from us rain
Above us, as above you, are sky and air
So take your share of our blood — and be gone
Go to a dancing party — and be gone
As for us, we have to water the martyrs’ flowers
As for us, we have to live as we see fit.

Mahmoud Darwish “Those Who Pass Between Fleeting Words,” Middle East Report 154 (September/October 1988).

Seditious Acts has emerged from a  journey that members of the CRES writing group and AGITATE! committed to in 2019: a commitment to celebrate resistance, sedition, and dissent in spaces of learning, even in the face of ever-increasing institutional repression. Since then, we have lived through many life altering events. A global pandemic has wrecked unfathomable loss of life and community and coincided with the powerful resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis, just a few miles away from the University of Minnesota campus where many of us learned and labored at the time. In higher education, the recent years have witnessed a concerted right-wing campaign against academic freedoms and attacks on fields of study such as critical race theory and gender and queer studies. We have also seen an erosion of initiatives and policies aimed at making higher education more accessible and inclusive. Most recently, the genocidal war in Gaza and the responses to student uprising for justice in Palestine have revealed many truths and lies about the institutionalized transnational systems of annihilation, oppression, and violence that we are breathing in. At AGITATE! as in CRES, these times have required us to prioritize organizing and activism in our communities and in our intellectual, pedagogical, and creative work even as we have made professional, personal, and geographic transitions while grieving and mourning many losses. Through all these challenges, however, we have kept our vision for Seditious Acts alive and moving forward. Amidst planetary violence, as Darwish asserts memorably, “we have to live as we see fit.” Co-creation is never easy, but it becomes deeply rewarding when it emerges from a shared vision and gains its meaning and momentum through co-traveled paths. This volume is such a co-creation.

Seditious Acts amplifies the voices and experiences of students of color in higher education while highlighting the violences that academia inflicts on those marked as ‘others.’ It recognizes the role that communities of care play in making it possible for students from marginalized backgrounds to survive and thrive in academia. Seditious Acts is a witness testimony of higher education from the margins. 

Seditious Acts comes at a time of a global uprising against the war, genocide, and continued occupation and calculated annihilation of Palestine. Students at university campuses across the United States and beyond are protesting the ways in which neoliberal universities, which operate more like corporations than places of learning and put profits above justice, are complicit in the settler colonial genocide in Gaza. They are challenging and questioning the white supremacist and racial capitalist foundations of the university. They are holding academic institutions accountable in ways envisioned by the authors of Seditious Acts, who courageously call for an exposing of the university and its neoliberal investments while building relationships of care, mutuality, and community that exceed such violent structures.

This volume reflects the shared experiences of many Indigenous, Black, Brown, Asian, and other students of color, and of Queer, first-generation and working class, immigrant and refugee students who are consistently invisibilized, marginalized, and tokenized in the name of diversity, equity, and inclusion. We hope that it will open up ways for our readers to grapple with what is unfolding on university campuses today. Collectively, the essays in this volume show that the violent crushing of student protests and the punitive actions against students and faculty demonstrating solidarity with Palestine is only another episode of repression in the history of higher education in the US. They help us locate the current student-led movement in solidarity with Palestine in a long and rich history of student activism against war and imperialism, settler colonial institutional practices, and gender and racial discrimination in a transformative search for justice, equality, and liberation. 

This volume is made possible by the labors of many, beginning with the members of CRES who organized the Seditious Acts conference in 2017 at the University of Minnesota. CRES created a space for students who otherwise felt out of place in the university to articulate their experiences of alienation and to imagine strategies of being in the university by engaging in epistemic practices and agitations that defy its neoliberal diktats. Most of the essays in the volume began as conference presentations. In the last five years, all the members of the AGITATE! Editorial Collective have played a part in co-making the final versions that appear here. It gives us deep joy to share the results of our labors with you in the form of Seditious Acts: AGITATE! Special volume with CRES. 

—AGITATE! Editorial Collective

Efadul Huq
Emina Bužinkić
Keavy McFadden
Madelaine Cahuas
Nithya Rajan
Richa Nagar
Sara Musaifer

Suggested Citation:

AGITATE! Editorial Collective. 2024. “Introducing ‘Seditious Acts’: AGITATE! Special Volume with CRES.” In eds. José Manuel Santillana Blanco, Kidiocus King-Carroll, Naimah Zulmadelle Pétigny, and Kong Pheng Pha in collaboration with AGITATE! Editorial Collective. Seditious Acts: AGITATE! Special Volume with CRES: https://agitatejournal.org/article/introducing-seditious-acts-agitate-special-volume-with-cres/

“This piece was collectively conceived of by the members of the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Interdisciplinary Graduate Group, whose tireless work to support one another and our larger community as academics of color is unparalleled. The banner slogan “I have been to the future – we won,” was designed by Florida-based, worker-owned and run t-shirt company Rebel Threads, whose work “represents the revolutionary agenda of young people of color.” In August 2015, the University of Minnesota lost one of its fiercest scholars and activists, Jesús Estrada-Pérez. Jesús was one of fifteen students who conducted a sit-in in the university president’s office, and one of thirteen who were subsequently arrested. These students demanded representation for students and faculty of color at the University of Minnesota, insisting that the president engage in substantive, and not cosmetic diversity, including the recruitment and retention of students from historically marginalized backgrounds, and reforming curriculum to include comprehensive education for all. This piece is a testament to his and his peers’ brave protests, and honors the resistance that undergirded his person and his work as a scholar-activist.”

~ Simi Kang, 2017

Suggested citation:

Kang, S. 2024. “I Have Been to the Future—We Won.” In eds. José Manuel Santillana Blanco, Kidiocus King-Carroll, Naimah Zulmadelle Pétigny, and Kong Pheng Pha in collaboration with AGITATE! Editorial Collective. Seditious Acts: AGITATE! Special Volume with CRES: https://agitatejournal.org/article/i-have-been-to-the-future-we-won/

State repression has intensified across the United States. Anti-immigrant and anti-abortion laws are on the rise, both Republicans and Democrats are suppressing the pro-Palestinian movement, and students and faculty teaching ethnic and gender and queer studies face a dangerous terrain in many states. Legislation proposed, written, and passed in states like Florida, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Arizona, and Texas have all sought to prohibit discussions on race, gender, and sexuality. They target the teaching of critical race theory in the public education system, gender and sexuality inclusive texts in schools, and drag performances in certain public spaces. Other states have passed laws to prohibit the access of trans affirmative healthcare. 

Yet, scholars, artists, and activists continue to resist these increasingly fascist and totalitarian politics by centering ethnic and queer and feminist studies as critical tools to educate and transform the country. These interdisciplines emerged from the liberation struggles of the twentieth century, including the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, feminist and AIDS activism in the 1980s, Chicanx, Asian American, and Indigenous movements from the 1960s to the 1980s, and disability justice activism from the 1990s to 2010s. The state repression, attacks on academic freedoms and free speech, and the infiltration of corporate agendas and interests into university spaces should all be seen as responses and a backlash against the gains made by these movements. In that vein, these histories are also a reminder that student-led struggles and radical thought traditions like critical race and ethnic studies remains one of the central bastions of resistance to state oppression. 

Critical race and ethnic studies functions as a tool and framework with which scholars, particularly faculty and students of color, can address the ongoing harms of state violence, which permeates the neoliberal university. This conversation between three practitioners of critical race and ethnic studies, Kong Pheng Pha, José Manuel Santillana Blanco, and Roderick A. Ferguson, was conducted virtually in April 2023. Together we explore a host of themes relevant to contemporary politics in the neoliberal university and U.S. society at large. We begin by asking Ferguson about his early activism, and how that shaped his scholarly work in critical university studies to demonstrate how we can foster greater networks of resistance and care in the university in a time of increasing state repression. The conversation explores how students can produce knowledge and practice resistance that is germane to social justice even in neoliberal university spaces. 

Roderick A. Ferguson is currently the William Robertson Coe Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. He is the author of One-Dimensional Queer (Polity, 2019), We Demand: The University and Student Protests (University of California Press, 2017), The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), and Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (University of Minnesota Press, 2004). He is the co-editor with Grace Hong of the anthology Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization (Duke University Press, 2011). He is also co-editor with Erica Edwards and Jeffrey Ogbar of Keywords of African American Studies (NYU Press, 2018). 

Suggested Citation:

Ferguson, R. A., K. P Pha & J.M. Santillana Blanco. 2024. “Building Relations, Critical University Studies and Student Activism: A Conversation with Roderick A. Ferguson.” In eds. José Manuel Santillana Blanco, Kidiocus King-Carroll, Naimah Zulmadelle Pétigny, and Kong Pheng Pha in collaboration with AGITATE! Editorial Collective. Seditious Acts: AGITATE! Special Volume with CRES: https://agitatejournal.org/article/building-relations-critical-university-studies-and-student-activism-a-conversation-with-roderick-a-ferguson/

Brown.ness (n.) Being Brown; The state of being reduced to storing corpses in ice cream trucks;
Or pleading for help in English at a “press conference” in front of Al-Shifa Hospital (held by children);
Or trying to convince the world that you are dying by showing the corpses of loved ones on camera

Teta Liza was born in Jaffa, Palestine, in 1938. She says she went to the Rosary School for Girls, and after class she would go to the beach and pick oranges from the trees in the park on the way back. She says the beaches in Jaffa are the most beautiful in the world. I believe her. She also says that Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived happily together. She says they lived under the British Mandate but would still travel across the country and celebrate holidays, even Halloween. She was only ten years old when the settlers stole their house and when her family escaped to Jordan. She says they left all their belongings at home and only took the key; they knew they would come back. Teta Liza then moved to Canada and has not returned home ever since. She passed away last week.

This piece is for her.

I was editing my conference paper on Brownness and Being in the Twenty-First Century with the news on in the background. I was revising my thoughts on reading theory in an English department as an Arab woman, on how I struggle to insert myself into the discussion, and how—when I fail to do so—turn to storytelling to talk about what the theory I was reading refused to tell me.

Glances at limbs of unrecognized corpses shattered on the ground did not catch my attention, as I was contemplating where to put a comma in a seemingly never-ending run-on sentence. The red signs of breaking news on TV did not bother me either, it is almost the norm now.

Breaking news does not break me anymore.

No. Nothing will ever be more important than my people’s suffering. I was not unbothered, I was acting unbothered, like many people around me. The truth is, the images of the shattered limbs have not escaped my mind since the beginning of October. The cries of the survivors who escaped death, yet continue to suffer from its consequences, carrying the limbs of their loved ones in plastic bags, have not left my dreams since the beginning of October. It is almost funny that I keep on repeating—since the beginning of October—as if breaking news has not been breaking me since I first set my eyes on a TV.

This is the reality of being Brown, of Brownness and being in the twenty-first century. I am not the only one who is not sleeping and I am not the only one who is pretending to be unbothered. I am not the only one who has survived with an inheritance of loss and grown up hearing stories of death and destruction. I am not the only one who is pretending to live while she knows that her people struggle, even as they encounter death everyday.

Brownness in the twenty-first century is being in a state of war. First, is the war of being out of place, or what Edward Said calls, in his memoir, the “shattering collective experience of dispossession” (1999, 118). Said tells the story of his mother’s undesirable Palestinian identity card:

My father would routinely tell the story (echoed by [his mother]) of how her document would be placed underneath our stack of smart green US passports in the futile hope that the official would allow her through as one of us. That never happened. There was always a summoning of a higher ranked official, who with grave looks and cautious accents drew my parents aside for explanations, short sermons, even warnings, while my sisters and I stood around, uncomprehending and bored. When we did finally pass through, the meaning of her anomalous existence as represented by an embarrassing document was never explained to me as being a consequence of shattering collective experience of dispossession. And in a matter of hours, once inside Lebanon, or Greece, or the United States itself, the question of my mother’s nationality would be forgotten, and everyday life resumed. (1999, 118)

Unfortunately, Said’s mother’s experience only intensifies in the twenty-first century. In the post-9/11 world, every Brown person runs the risk of becoming a suspect of or a subject related to terror. Little do they know that they are, in fact, terrorizing us.

The second war waged on Brown people is that of language and expression, an attempt at humanization after histories of demonization. In the afterword to his poetry collection Rifqa, “Lest There Be Unclarity,” Mohammed El Kurd calls it a “vocabulary void of accusations” (2021, 93). He writes,

When I started writing […] I trained myself to use ‘unbiased’ words. What I’d refer to in Arabic as an ‘entity’ would become a ‘state.’ I wanted my vocabulary void of accusations, so I replaced ‘arrogate’ with ‘confiscate,’ ‘dispossess’ with ‘evict,’ and ‘lie’ with ‘allege.’ This phenomenon is common among writers writing about Palestine, writers who worship the mythology of objectivity instead of satirizing it. There’s a naïve belief that Palestinians will acquire credibility only once they’ve amassed respectability. We do this to appear rational and unhostile. The truth, however, is very hostile. (2021, 93)

This war is closely tied to the third: a war of identity—for the lack of a better word—or what Nada Elia calls “the burden of representation” (2011, 145). She writes,

When the world’s bullies continue to blame the victim, using any available pretext to avoid addressing the crimes they are committing, we need to keep in mind Audre Lorde’s ever pertinent observation, that we are never meant to survive, that our silence cannot protect us, because ‘the machine will try and grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak.’ Lorde explains  that only death can come from silence, whereas death, pain, fear, but also, hopefully, change can result from speaking out, and it is that last possibility that makes speaking out imperative. (2011, 145)

Both El-Kurd and Elia call for unsoothing protesting voices. We have battled with, instead of battling for how we look, what we say, and who we are. This has gone on for so long that we have accepted the hostility of the world’s bullies as our reality. It is time to be loud enough to shake the world out of its slumber.

Lullabies are not loud enough.

Amid actual wars on the ground, and the ones fought on the basis of belonging, language, and identity, being Brown in the twenty-first century brings hope. Hope lies in the realization that there will always be a story to tell. Maybe theory will never tell the story of my being, yet I can always try to find mine in it. If not, I bring my story to life. I tell my own story.

Being brown in the twenty-first century is a constant state of storytelling.

I wish to end by inviting you to speak up, or to listen, then speak up. If you are still unsure what is happening in the world, ask, then speak up. I extend my invitation to speak up through the words of Palestinian digital storyteller, Jenan Matari, who recently wrote:

Inhale deeply, hold for five. Exhale three, two, wait. 300 more children die, as I do my breathing exercise. Look out my window, admire the trees. Snap out of it. That means more Palestinian mothers brought down to their knees. Nauseous but can’t throw up. Sad but cannot cry. Get back to work. Exhale again three, two. Don’t you dare let out that sigh. The father. The brothers. The men. Why doesn’t anyone mourn for them? “Lucky” to be here. Watching my people die. Would that have been us, if we stayed in Palestine? They’ll never understand. Will they ever see the truth? How many of us dead must be used as a show of proof? This world. It cannot be real. How can it keep turning? How will we ever heal?

References

Elia, Nada. ‘The Burden of Representation: When Palestinians Speak Out’. Arab and Arab American Feminisms: Gender, Violence, and Belonging, edited by Rabab Abdulhadi et al., Syracuse University Press, 2011, pp. 141–58.

El-Kurd, Mohammed. Rifqa. Haymarket Books, 2021.

Matari, Jenan. Inhale Deeply, Hold for Five. 2023

Said, Edward W. Out of Place. Vintage Books, 2000.

Suggested Citation:

Mazahreh, J. 2024. “Brownness and Being in the Twenty-First Century.” In eds. José Manuel Santillana Blanco, Kidiocus King-Carroll, Naimah Zulmadelle Pétigny, and Kong Pheng Pha, in collaboration with AGITATE! Editorial Collective. Seditious Acts: AGITATE! Special Volume with CRES: https://agitatejournal.org/article/brownness-and-being-in-the-twenty-first-century/

Poet: Faiz Ahmed Faiz

Suggested citation:

Kirk, G. K. 2024. “Three poems for Palestine by Faiz Ahmad Faiz.” In eds. José Manuel Santillana Blanco, Kidiocus King-Carroll, Naimah Zulmadelle Pétigny, and Kong Pheng Pha in collaboration with AGITATE! Editorial Collective. Seditious Acts: AGITATE! Special Volume with CRES: https://agitatejournal.org/article/three-poems-for-palestine-by-faiz-ahmad-faiz/

Sedition

The present volume of AGITATE! Unsettling Knowledges has its origins in the dissident creativity and radical imagination first embodied by Seditious Acts: Graduate Students of Color Interrogating the Neoliberal University, a conference organized by the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Interdisciplinary Graduate Group, or CRES, at the University of Minnesota in April 2017.^[1] I am grateful to Nithya Rajan for her careful engagement and excellent suggestions on an earlier version of this introduction. It was an honor for me to learn from, and be moved by, this conference, whose envisioning coincided with, and gained its revolutionary energies from, the student activism whose fires lit the global stage in 2016 and 2017. University students in Brazil, Chile, India, Kashmir, South Africa, and the United States (hereafter, the U.S.) mobilized in large numbers to reshape the political trajectory of the twenty-first century in ways that could not be contained within the borders of the nation states. Many of these protests were precipitated by issues pertaining to a systematic and institutionalized denial of access and justice in education. In Brazil, students occupied schools and public buildings to oppose the diversion of funds from their public school lunch programs. In Chile, students protested the government’s failure to implement its own promised educational reforms. In India, “the institutional murder” of the Dalit scholar Rohit Vemula at the University of Hyderabad, erupted into collective fury that highlighted the brutality of the reigning Hindu nationalism and the fault lines rooted in centuries of institutionalized domination by Brahmins and other savarna castes.^[2]Vemula’s suicide letter, “a powerful indictment of social prejudices,” shook his readers and galvanized protests in multiple forms throughout, and beyond, the borders of the nation state of … Continue readingIn South Africa, students’ collective demand for justice took the form of the Fees Must Fall movement.^[3]Some glimpses of this powerful movement can be found in: “RMF: [Pre]Conceptions Of A Movement & Interview With Zaynab Asmal” and “We Are Students Thanks to South Africa’s … Continue reading At the same time, protestors offered searing analyses to both connect, and revolt against, the political shifts and tyrannies that have subjugated those who have been multiply colonized and oppressed by the dominating castes and systems. For example, in the U.S., the campaign leading to the election of Donald Trump birthed massive agitations against a new and dangerous era of organized threat to the rights of women, sexual minorities, and immigrants.^[4]See, “Not My President: Donald Trump’s Victory Leads to Protests across America as High School Students Stage Walkouts.” In India and Indian-occupied Kashmir, students’ revolt against the saffronization of higher education by the right-wing government evolved into an insuppressible rage against the Brahmanical, anti-Muslim, and settler colonial patriarchal ambitions, policies, and anti-constitutional practices of the Hindutva nationalists.^[5]See, “Resistance is a Way of Life for Kashmiri Youth; “Students Protest in Kashmir Amidst School Closures and Mobile Internet Blocking”; “Student Activism Rears Its Head in India”; “Why … Continue readingIn South Africa, the dissenting cries centered the continued oppression of Black students in a post-apartheid nation. It should hardly be a surprise that many of these activists were charged—formally or informally—with sedition.^[6]See, for example, “Why an Indian Student Has Been Arrested for Sedition,” “Student Revolt: Inside India’s Volatile JNU campus,” “What ‘really’ happened inside JNU on … Continue reading

Seven springs after their initial conference, as the authors and editors of Seditious Acts put their final touches on this volume, we are once again in an unprecedented historical moment of transnational solidarity where U.S. university and college students have been among the bravest drivers. The worldwide movement for justice in Palestine grows in the face of Israel’s horrific genocidal war in Gaza, even as organized repression of academic freedom continues with a vengeance on university campuses across the U.S. With South Africa’s filing of a case against Israel in the International Court of Justice in December 2023,^[7]South Africa’s case against Israel at the ICJ argues that Israel has committed, and is committing, genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and that this is a contravention … Continue reading the global campaign for boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel has received a major push.^[8]The BDS movement is organized and coordinated by the Palestinian BDS National Committee. The movement upholds “the simple principle that Palestinians are entitled to the same rights as the rest of … Continue reading Inspired by the use of BDS in South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle, the BDS movement is gaining more and more ground in the leadership of students, despite violent attacks by Zionist lobbies and harrowing suppression by university administrators and the police.^[9]Since the beginning of the attack on Gaza in October 2023, students at universities and schools across the world and the U.S. have been protesting, calling for a ceasefire, and for the liberation of … Continue reading

Infractions

In this seemingly unending season of cruelty and repression, it is significant that the editors and contributors of this volume have chosen INFRACTIONS as an initial set of entry points for their Seditious Acts. In common parlance, an infraction is understood as a violation or infringement or breaking of a law, rule, or agreement. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary explains further through everyday examples: “A nation charged with an infraction of an international treaty will usually have to pay a penalty. In Federal law, an infraction is even smaller than a misdemeanor, and the only penalty is a fine. Most of us occasionally commit infractions of parking laws and get ticketed; speeding tickets are usually for infractions as well, though they go on a permanent record and can end up costing you money.”

The essays in the opening section of Seditious Acts draw us into the institutional landscape of infractions. They ask us to witness a series of violent acts committed by institutions of higher learning in the U.S., wherein the neoliberal research universities invite variously marked ‘minorities’ to step inside their institutional walls under the much celebrated and supposedly progressive guise of diversity, equity, and inclusion. What we see, however, is the manner in which these corporate institutions are paralyzed by their white supremacist, capitalist, and imperialist histories, logics, and imaginations. The only ways they know to accommodate the ‘diverse’ racialized bodies is by categorizing, labeling, and punishing them; by reducing, invisibilizing, and crushing them. This trend of categorization, labeling, and punishment is by no means limited to minoritized populations from within the U.S.; it also applies to international students from across the world—including political refugees—who have sought education in U.S. universities since the 1950s.^[10]See, International Students in the United States, Migration Policy Institute. International students—especially those arriving from the countries which once embraced with pride the political name, Third World—have contributed vision and insights from their own histories and movements for justice, thereby playing a key role in transnationalizing and radicalizing political sensibilities of U.S. student movements. Indeed, the fire of these initial essays of Seditious Acts volume invites us to embrace a historically grounded reflection on the shared inspirations and cross fertilization of ideas, energies, and strategies across such movements as the Civil Rights Movement and the Anti-War Movement in the U.S., the Anti-Apartheid Movement in South Africa, and Anti-Colonial Movements in Central and South America.^[11]See ed. Heather A. Vrana, Anti-Colonial Texts from Central American Student Movements 1929–1983, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. As someone who arrived on the University of Minnesota campus as an international student from India—months before the collapse of the Berlin Wall and Madiba Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela’s release from twenty-seven years of imprisonment in South Africa—my own consciousness and commitments were transformed by these powerful political energies and vocabularies, the ways in which they were reflected in what I learned then, and how they continue to find an expression in my own ongoing education in the U.S. As such, I feel that it is our responsibility to embrace the aforementioned reflection to appreciate the meanings of the infractions that are at the heart of CRES’s ongoing subversive work in highlighting and resisting our universities’ complicities in upholding violent structures as well as their calls for freedom from all forms of oppression, injustice, and inequity.

Critique, Hope, Fluidity

With scars of grief and a rage that burns, the authors agitate to reorganize and recast this unjust terrain. They illustrate and theorize the manner in which the same students who are subjected to institutional cruelties invent and execute seditious acts. Sedition, for these agitators and authors, is not a scheduled event or time and place bound action. It is a political and spiritual methodology, a mode of living and being, a commitment to tear apart institutionally inscribed and legally prescribed oppression. Sedition demands that we feel the pain of lies and contradictions that constitute the landscape of infractions. It requires us to see the layers of (often blanketed) brutality and to appreciate how those who are most humiliated and harmed by it also persist and resist the brutal institutions, all the while claiming their collective and individual embodiment on their own terms. This seditious methodology of being declines the terms of the violated agreements even in the face of harshest punishment; it rejects erasure and invisibilization; it dreams and struggles tirelessly for a full-bodied, full spirited, and always overflowing learning and thriving.

In the first essay, Ana Cláudia dos Santos São Bernardo highlights the critical understandings that she formed while engaging in student activism that fights the violent structures of a neoliberal R-1 university in the U.S. Reflecting on relative positions of privilege and under-privilege as an international student from Brazil, she discusses how ‘exceptional’ bodies from the global south are selected for higher education in the U.S. and subsequently turned into a specie that is other than human (i.e., non-citizen aliens), while being expected to feel grateful for the same. In order to be re-humanized, they must fit into special categories and participate in processes which are required by the authorities for their re-humanization to happen.

William Amado Syldor-Severino advances Dos Santos São Bernardo’s critique by mourning the brutal and still unsolved murder of Marc Thompson in 2014 in Northern California. Marc and William met as 25-year-old cast members in Lee Mun Wah’s film, If These Halls Could Talk, and as black men from similar neighborhoods, they bonded over their shared passion for antiracism and liberatory dreaming. The desperate grief and rage from Marc’s loss makes the author yearn for life beyond yearning, and for all that is possible through instability and disorientation. This yearning for possibilities is energized by Muñoz’s (1996) idea of “ephemera as evidence” which allows for alternate modes of textuality and narrativity, as well as by Cruz’s (2011) insistence on responding to life’s indignities by creating beauty from chaos. This kind of deep tuning-in with “knowledge of my body, my experience” (Cruz, 2011, p. 57)—alongside black feminist/sovereign erotic, transcommunality, animism, and chaos theory—leads Syldor-Severino to the praxis of seditious intuition. With flesh-bone-heart-and-bodies of engagement at its core, seditious intuition becomes the substance from which hope and justice can spring and flow.

The final essay on INFRACTIONS centers on the ways in which institutional spaces erase Southeast Asian American students who do not neatly fit within the model minority stereotype. Kaochi Pha, Dee Pha, and Kong Pheng Pha explore the violent invisibilities in U.S. higher education, a system that remains both white supremacist and deeply xenophobic. They argue that as refugees—and children of refugees—from the American imperialist wars in Southeast Asia, Hmong, Cambodian, Lao, and Vietnamese American students are not neatly situated within dominant paradigms of “success” and are subject to a host of racist experiences and microaggressions. Writing as Hmong American children of refugees, the authors recount the unjust and arbitrary termination of JL, their longtime mentor who fought tirelessly on behalf Hmong and Southeast Asian American students at the UMN and whose practices challenged the corporate landscape of “diversity.” They situate the racialized educational experiences of Hmong and Southeast Asian Americans in the neoliberal university within the context of JL’s termination from, and the reorganization of, the Multicultural Center for Academic Excellence, a unit within the larger Office of Equity and Diversity which oversees the various student centers at the UMN.

Together, the essays that constitute the first section of Seditious Acts argue for a critique that is animated by: insurgent flowing and grounded homecoming; a hope that is anchored in historic understandings and ongoing community-based activism; and a river-like fluidity and momentum that is always in a vibrant dialogue with that which lives outside of its channel. It is this fluid confluence of critique and hope that fires Ana dos Santos São Bernardo to claim her decision to stay in the U.S. as a seditious act. She refuses to be dragged in or out of a place, a country, or a community once again. In her words, “I want to stay [in the U.S.] because I do not want to become the colonizer agent they want me to become and  from which I cannot escape after this experience.” Far from regarding staying in the U.S  as a  betrayal of those she has left behind in Brazil, dos Santos São Bernardo insists that it is the “going back” that would be a betrayal.

For William Amado Syldor-Severino, the entanglement of critique-hope-fluidity emerges from living/feeling/mourning “the physical wearing out of a population in a way that points to its deterioration as a defining condition of its experience and historical existence.” As a social justice educator and restorative justice practitioner, the author is moved to cultivate pedagogies where critical aspects of some people are not rendered incommensurable to the dominant modes of learning. These pedagogies reject “structural containers” that are prescriptive, replicative, and rigid, and that focus on their own existence/survival while being rooted in settler colonialism and white supremacy. Instead, these pedagogies imagine, explore, and create “functional containers” that are generative and in flux; they nourish the potentialities of the participants by engaging the disruptive, the irrational, and the powerful; they imagine liberation from oppression by making room for the erotic.

A similar convergence of critique, hope, and fluidity makes it possible for Pha, Pha, and Pha to imagine a future in and through the same institution that has repeatedly crushed the dreams and spirits of their peoples. They refuse the university’s stifling framework in relation to its “minorities,” a framework that is incapable of grappling with the complex histories and needs of Hmong students and students from other refugee communities who have a complicated relationship to the U.S. The authors highlight the importance of developing external outreach beyond the University and of strengthening programs and resources that can advance organized political education surrounding Asian American and Pacific Islander communities. They celebrate the establishment of the Asian Pacific American Resource at the University of Minnesota through the labor of faculty and staff across various University units—an organized effort that has birthed the incredible possibility of engaging diverse, historically marginalized, and first generation Asian American and Pacific Islander students. An unapologetic and student-centered entity, Asian Pacific American Resource confronts the cosmetic diversity and colorblind approach to student success, and it builds community by listening to the needs—and the courageous striving for change—articulated and led by none other than those who constitute that community.

Suggested citation:

Nagar. R. 2024. “Introduction to Section One: Infractions.” In eds. José Manuel Santillana Blanco, Kidiocus King-Carroll, Naimah Zulmadelle Pétigny, and Kong Pheng Pha in collaboration with AGITATE! Editorial Collective. Seditious Acts: AGITATE! Special Volume with CRES: https://agitatejournal.org/article/section-one-infractions/

In 2016, Atosha Zerbine, Rahsaan Mahadeo, and I accepted an invitation to speak in a Political Science class representing the Differences Organized! collective. We had held a protest against tuition increase a few days before at the public R1 university that we attended at the time. Our goal was to highlight the history of activism on campus while exposing connections between different struggles. We also wanted to attract the students to our struggle becaused we believed that fighting for a transgressive, transformative, accessible education, especially for marginalized students, is everyone’s work. We intended to show that R1 universities in the United States actively use racialized bodies to portray themselves as “diverse.” At the same time, these institutions ignore the impact that forcing the coexistence of identities and differences in a highly commodified and competitive space might work to the disadvantage of those already experiencing marginalization. To ease the conflicts, universities make rhetorical commitments to inclusion and free speech, even as their administration keeps increasing tuition, thereby curtailing access of underprivileged students to higher education. Students continue to be arrested for openly opposing problematic practices and discourses.

When we opened the presentation for questions, the first query came from an international student who seemed uncomfortable with our remarks. They asked who among us were citizens of the United States. I was the only one who answered that I was not. This student then asked me in a distressed way: “Did they drag you here? Did the university force you to get out of your country and study here?” The question was not new. Indeed, it has come up in more subtle ways in many of my conversations, especially when I have expressed my disbelief to the fact that education in the United States is seen as a commodity and not a right, and that a huge number of U.S. students must borrow money to pay for high tuition and other costs of attending college. The question has come from U.S. citizens as much as from the aforementioned migrant. As a Brazilian and an educator, I recognize that education in Brazil faces several challenges, including quality and accessibility. However, it is important to note that most Brazilians still value public education as a right, a belief that has translated into a constant battle against commodification of public education and against state surveillance on campuses. Marginalized groups in Brazil also fought for and won the right to have affirmative action in education. Today, federal universities have 50% of their seats reserved for Black and Indigenous students, students with disabilities, and low-income students (Lehmann, 2). In contrast to the United States, for the most part, public university administrations in Brazil do not use educational resources to pay for unnecessary police units on campuses. 

My own experience is telling. As a mixed-black female from a financially disadvantaged family, while doing my undergraduate program in Comparative Literature (Letras), I had access to fully state-funded tuition-free education. I could also live for free in one of the houses that the Sao Paulo State University (Universidade Estadual Paulista—UNESP) built for students who cannot afford rent, in addition to receiving a small stipend from the institution to help me pay for food and transportation. My only obligation was to produce research, which actually prepared me to undertake a graduate program in an international institution. Once I finished my program, I started teaching in high school, but went back to get a certification that would allow me to teach English a few years later. Although at that point I could pay for tuition, I did not have to. Later, I decided to attend a university program in another city on Library Economy, which although I did not finish, I did not have to pay for either.  

In Brazil, under the government of the far-right president Jair Bolsonaro (in office from 2019 to 2022), education suffered many attacks, including budget cuts and renewed calls to abolish affirmative action and state-funded tuition-free higher education. Unlike those (usually the rich and profit-hungry) who believe that people who can afford to pay for education should do so, the majority of students and faculty in public higher education institutions in Brazil understand that education is a public good. As such, it should never be commodified, so it remains available to everyone. There is also a generalized belief that, once one group starts paying for education, it becomes easier to make other groups pay too. Such a belief system, subscribed to by many Brazilians, is opposed to mixing education and financialization to such an extent that even the library of my alma mater banned the monetary fee for late returns of books. Yet, although these resources at UNESP made higher education possible for me, huge inequalities marked my academic development in relation to my all white, upper middle class, well-traveled colleagues in Brazil. 

These facts informed my response to the student who asked me if I had been dragged to the United States. Indeed, some international students are susceptible to messages of grandiosity disseminated by U.S. universities that we receive even before we arrive here. Questioning or rejecting this discourse is a grave infraction for migrants in the USA. The general expectation is that we should be thankful that U.S. institutions allow people like us who are seen as less than their citizens into its spaces. Many international students fear the consequences of not expressing enough appreciation for the opportunity. Others embrace the exceptionalist idea that we are better than those in our home countries who are not fortunate enough to be selected for pursuing higher education in the U.S. 

I understand the question posed by that student to be a reflection of what Anita Tijerina  Revilla and Evelyn Rangel-Medina call citizenism in “The Las Vegas Activist Crew” (2011). They define it as “the ideological practice of inherent citizen superiority, the right to dominance of citizens over noncitizens, and a system of unearned advantages and privileges based on citizenship granted at birth. These systems discriminate, disenfranchise, exploit, dehumanize, and subordinate noncitizens living within mostly ‘developed’ nation-states” (Revilla & Rangel-Medina, 168). As my experience exemplifies, other systems of oppression, particularly racism and sexism, readily intersect with citizenism. There is no comparison between the oppression inflicted on undocumented migrants and that experienced by international students of color, who are targets of citizenism, and discriminated, disenfranchised, exploited, dehumanized, and subordinated in the U.S. The general acceptance of citizen superiority (and even their sense of entitlement towards Indigenous land) disallows international students, especially those who are non-white and low-income, to question oppressive systems in the U.S., to protest, and to demand better conditions for marginalized citizens or non-citizens. These different levels of marginalization are also used by administrations to keep us separate. For instance, resources directly allocated to the wellbeing of students are so scarce that it becomes easy to create competition among marginalized groups. They must also compete for access to higher-education institutions when education should be available to everyone. This context raises questions about the limits of citizenship and how it works in accordance with citizenism. Despite acknowledging the incongruousness of borders and the concept of citizenship, I believe that both citizens and foreigners should have guaranteed access to basic rights wherever they are, and no one should have to compete for their right to fully exist inside or outside academia. 

To some people, the inquiry I received would make a lot of sense: Why would I come to a place that does not appreciate the presence, contribution, or knowledges of migrants and their own citizens of color; that actively perpetrates violence against our existence? Why would I give up on free education to participate in a system where expensive classes are bought online using virtual shopping carts? In conversations with Brazilian colleagues when I brought up my departure to the U.S., they questioned my reasons to participate in the U.S. imperialist project. In my answer to the international student in that Political Science class, I explained that being in a foreign land does not imply that we should be acritical and complicit with oppression. However, later on, when I reflected back on the question, I realized that my answer should have been a simple “yes.” Yes, a U.S. institution dragged me here as it keeps dragging other racialized bodies to the Global North. When a big institution/company waves money and a diploma in the face of a woman of color from a materially poor background in the Global South, her only alternative is to say yes. When a small number of nations control destructive political, social, and economic systems that exploit and kill land and populations in the Global South, staying might not be an option. Did they drag me here? Yes, they dragged me here and they do profit off of my existence in this territory. By maintaining a citizenist system of exploitation and inequality that targets other countries, the U.S. becomes a space that, allegedly, can take us out of poverty if we behave well. The U.S. is selling salvation—or maybe just selling back the lives that they are taking—to us and our loved ones. How can we say no?

What it means to be here 

What does it mean to be in a U.S. educational institution?  “Alien” is the noun chosen to address people from other countries in the United States. Having lived here for four years and being forced to choose “resident alien” to identify myself in numerous forms, I know this characterization is not just offensive because it constructs me as an “other” while highlighting my “outside” position. This categorization contributes to distancing us from the category of “human” and it erases other perceived human characteristics. The word “alien” means that immigrants do not belong, that we are different, and that we will always be marked as outsiders. This nomenclature is a statement against our existence as human beings and our portrayal as “not quite-humans” or “non-humans” depends on how close to whiteness our bodies are. In addition to skin color and hair, I found that it is the language that wields the most power on international students. Our accents and grammatical inaccuracies become disabilities as soon as we open our mouths, especially if we are non-native English speakers. We are frequently dismissed as dumb, and our experiences include shame and bad grades. Professors and students in U.S. academia routinely spend a significant amount of time going over complicated paragraphs written by prestigious scholars (sometimes even foreign thinkers) but they refuse to understand our ideas because of our perceived (dis)abilities with English. 

The contradictory aspect in all of this is that few people know that North American universities select those seen as the brightest foreigners. Here we are nothing; but back in our countries, despite the constraints posed by various forms of discrimination, most of us have created a career that is valued by the Global North. In other words, the ones who are likely to be dragged to the U.S. are the ones who can fit an imperialist project that needs international insiders to function. However, some of us can trick the process into believing that we will unquestionably abide by it. 

Being a foreigner in this country amounts to a refusal of our existence as well as of the knowledges that we can bring to this space. Indeed, our presence in this territory can be described as belonging to a sphere of neoliberal multiculturalism—the idea that inclusion and, as a result, “diversity” will end discrimination based on difference without addressing discriminatory structures of inequity (Melamed, 138). A neoliberal multiculturalist perspective privileges imperialist powers. In other words, the inclusion of “minorities” seeks to contain any form of insurgency by taming the frustrations of those who do not have a place in this system while simultaneously strengthening the prevailing white supremacist and heteronormative system of privileges. Diversity is then used to improve the image of the country as a multicultural nation, while the bodies that are used to demonstrate how benevolent U.S. citizens are, continue to be exploited, discriminated against, and forced to fight for their existence in most of the spaces they occupy. Universities, as for-profit companies, make foreign bodies hypervisible for those outside this space: we can be featured in ads that will drag other people like us here, we can have our “foreign” names attached to departmental websites and conference programs. However, our subjectivities in these spaces are invisible. Except for very few professors, colleagues, and friends who are committed to rewriting knowledge, others will see me as a threat, an alien in the streets, in classrooms, and other spaces. Others will just forget everything they learned about interlocking systems of oppression and reenact the same violences whenever it is convenient for them and to their benefit. It is also worth remembering that in U.S. higher education spaces, foreign, low-income, brown bodies are treated as surplus people. As Audre Lorde, explains,

Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy that needs outsiders as surplus people. As members of such an economy, we have all been programmed to respond to the human differences among us with fear and loathing and to handle those differences in one of three ways: (1) ignore them; (2) if that is not possible, copy the attributes of those who are dominant; (3) destroy the attributes of those who are subordinate (Lorde, 1984, 115)

While some might just be interested in learning firsthand experiences of marginalization and hardships from the Global South, educational institutions have further interests: they want to turn everyone in academia into agents of neoliberal capitalism and U.S. imperialism. Let’s not forget about the requirement that we go back to our country once we finish our programs. This requirement is attached to student visas and most fellowships open to international applicants. Because these organizations know we need the money, they will force us to go on and on about how we are going back home to spread U.S. greatness, share our supposed empowerment, become superhumans, and save our country from itself. 

Here, it is useful to recall Homi Bhabha’s notion of the in-between space (2004, 2). Once we are turned into something other-than-human when we first enter the U.S., our desire is to be humanized and there are specific categories one must fit into for this to happen. Similar to the so-called model minorities, the good international students are the ones closer to whiteness and those who will erase themselves to mimic what is being portrayed as human (Bhabha 2004, 86). It must be a very painful process to kill oneself so you can exist as an other. The in-between space then becomes the space occupied by those who went from non-humans to not-quite-humans. It is important to remember though that the enacting of mimicry and the occupation of this in-between space are tools for survival for international students and should not be pathologized. The problem is in the system that forces us to assimilate in order to exist. As argued by Elizabeth Hordge Freeman, Sarah Mayorga, and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, “The assimilation model acknowledges difference without addressing power relations and the dominance of white logic” (2011, 99).

There are other forms of surviving the North American institution as an international student. It seems that the most common is to exist among the ones who inhabit the same place of hypervisibility/invisibility by creating a safe space for each other. However, these groups  tend to reenact the class and race barriers of our home countries that happen to travel with us to the U.S. The other way is to own, parade, and act on our pain and anger—to make ourselves visible on our own terms, and to highlight the characteristics they want us to hide. This can take the form of sharing how problematic this whole situation is and asking each other why we are all buying into these systems. Resistance can also take the form of helping the ones who demonstrate civil disobedience without jeopardizing their ability to finish their degrees. Resistance is to write an entire dissertation on Afro-Brazilian women writers and their literature, it is to schedule a meeting with the president of the university and hand him a subpoena on behalf of students who were arrested, it is to force our presence in spaces that are trying to keep us out, where we are usually the only ones whose native language is not English. 

Where should I go now 

One of the questions most frequently posed to international students is: are you returning to your country after finishing your program? This question is an almost daily reminder that this is not our place. They dragged us here and they are eager to throw us back where we came from. When I first heard this question in Brazil during my U.S. visa  interview and, then again, as soon as my feet touched North American soil, I had an immediate answer: “I will go back to Brazil not only because my family is there and that land is my home but also because I imagined I could be more useful there than in the U.S. A few months later, however, I would expand on this answer to include that the U.S. does not need or want me. Gradually, I understood better the importance of occupying a space where I and others who look and speak like me, whose bodies are a reminder of the destruction brought onto other countries, are not welcome. And if I bring into picture my selfish reasons, I have to ask: Why should I return to poverty? 

Today, I see staying in the U.S. as a seditious act, a way to refuse to be dragged in or out once again. I want to stay because I do not want to become a colonizer agent in my own country, something that will be difficult to avoid after this experience. Considering that, going back home would be a bigger betrayal than staying.  

References

“On a daily basis I fear for my culture, my future, and at times my very life. So I then began to ask the question, ‘if I fear them, and they fear us, how will we ever come  together to understand each other,’ a question it seems that would haunt me even to this  day.”

—Marc Thompson

Two key principles guide this piece. First, the critical importance of anchoring your discernment process through “Seditious Orientation” when determining every possible variable that can be acted upon within the context of developing and executing a tangible experience, such as an agenda, curriculum, training, etc. Second, that Seditious Orientation becomes seditious during and after application; never before. My body or somatic existence knows how to delineate the line or realm between institutionally safe and unsafe more precisely than my consciousness can. I identify the realm through feeling fear, and this fear often delineates the boundary that sedition is engaged with through crossing. It is within the process and review of application—executing the plan/process you have attempted to develop via Functional Containment—through which Functional Containment and Seditious Orientation is confirmed. Functional Containment is before praxis, articulated through praxis, but not praxis itself.  

Marc Thompson

In September 2014, Marc Thompson was murdered in Butte County, California. He wrote the lines quoted above about a month before his death (Garza-Withers, 2015). Marc was shot multiple times and found in his burning car, located in a clearing off of the main road (Apodaca, 2021). His murder remains unsolved to this day. At that time, we were both 25 years old, and initially bonded over our shared histories as black men from similar neighborhoods, and passions. We met as cast members in Lee Mun Wah’s If These Halls Could Talk, and outside of those intensive multi-day sessions, we were able to see each other a few more times, often spending most of whatever day and night we connected, together. It’s difficult for me to describe why Marc was one of the few people I trusted, who I could be my whole self with. Marc was someone who meant a great deal to me because I felt safe with him in ways I did not with virtually anyone else, and because he was daring, brilliant, caring and his impact on me and so many others cannot be overstated nor can the gravity of his loss. I hope this work honors him in at least a small way, and I also apologize and seek accountability for whatever harm may come.

In this article, I use the ephemeral traces of my understanding of and experiences related to Marc’s murder and its impact on me, to imagine a framework towards pedagogical and professional seditious engagement. Through chaos, Functional Containers came into being: a framework for finding ways to embrace and survive that chaos of coming undone while supporting others in feeling more whole.

Conflicting Temporalities

I was in my kitchen when my partner called me over to the laptop in our bedroom. They asked me to read an email from Lee Mun Wah, which indicated that Marc had been missing for days and that something may have likely happened to him, which was further underscored when his car was later found burning with a body inside. The body could not be immediately identified—it took a few days to confirm it was Marc—but I knew it was him, as I believe others knew as well. After reading the message, I texted, called, and messaged Marc through social media. I remember vividly expecting him to respond and knowing he wouldn’t. In those moments, he was alive and dead at the same time. Berlant (2011, p.10) writes of “[t]he ordinary as a zone of convergence of many histories, where people manage the incoherence of lives that proceed in the face of threats to the good life they imagine.” At that moment, Marc existed in an unstable stasis. Marc was my “object of desire,” and the “cluster of promises” he represented revolved around a perceived future I thought we would have (Berlant, 2011). I formed and reformed multiple and conflicting worlds with rapidity, each one representing different attachments, desires, and performances concerning the impact and perceived reality of his violent death.

I was at once with him and without him, believing that he was alive but knowing he was dead at the same time. Linear time became a dangerously restrictive limiter; I was ripped from linear time and in that outside place I felt a terror of time being fundamentally different from what I had known up to that point. It was an unwilling descent into temporal chaos. This is why a critical element of this seditious framework is the queering of time and embrace of a temporal non-linearity that makes space for Functional Containment, Seditious Intuition, and people who experience time as fluid, where sometimes the present is the past, and the past is the future. 

With these contradictory worlds taking form, my sense of linear time collapsed into itself as debilitating and destructive trauma that would severely persist as PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) for three years, manifesting in regular and unexpected breakdowns, alongside an aggressive progression of mental disabilities I was not fully aware I had. His murder and my grief colored the entirety of my Master’s program—he died the first week of my program, a few days before it was slated to begin—and my subsequent employment at various colleges. While I’m much more stable, it has never truly abated to this day. Hence the feelings, moments of brief but intense grief, and exhaustion that come up for me every time I read and revise this article.

Black Death, Slow Death

Initially, as time passed, the grief I felt concerning Marc’s death intensified. I understand it now as a reaction to “black death,” or a web of circumstances, mostly structural, that leads to Black people—specifically in the US—dying “prematurely” (Smith, 2016), which is a prematurity not based solely on a projected futurity that prescribes a life past the moment of death. The prematurely I prescribe evokes Berlant’s slow death: “the physical wearing out of a population in a way that points to its deterioration as a defining condition of its experience and historical existence” (2011, p. 95). bell hooks writes of a “‘special’ knowledge…black folks have…of whiteness gleaned from close scrutiny of white people” (1997, p. 165). This “special knowledge” posits whiteness as terror in the black imagination (hooks, 1997, p. 172), or, as Iyko Day states, conceptualizing antiblackness as a “terror formation” (2015, p.115).  

The same year Marc’s burning car was found, a white man was sentenced—arrested and tried before Marc’s murder—to life in prison for the killing of three African Americans in Butte County. He murdered Roland Lowe (age 15), his mother Colleen Lowe (age 46), and Richard Jones Jr. (age 17) (Olson, 2014). In 2013, Butte County had 13 homicides. Three of those murdered were African Americans found in burning cars like Marc (Garza-Withers, 2015). This is in a county where roughly 2% of the 224, 241 residents are Black (United States Census Bureau). 

Ephemera as Evidence

I use the ephemeral traces of my understanding of and experiences related to Marc’s murder to imagine a framework towards Seditious Orientation. I pull from José Esteban Muñoz’s (1996) “ephemera as evidence,” or that which “does not rest on epistemological foundations but is instead interested in following traces, glimmers, residues, and specks of things” (p. 10). 

While my life leading up to my time as an undergraduate student was filled with loving parents, affirmations, friends, and mentors who came into my life in critical moments, my life is also one of abuse, anxiety, relentless self-hatred, and a constant sense of isolation even when I’m surrounded by people. I eventually found some solace as an undergraduate and graduate student, in spaces that centered critical pedagogy. More specifically, a liberatory pedagogical technique called Intergroup Dialogue (Zúñiga et al., 2007). Within these spaces, I was able to explore and begin healing different experiences connected to my sociopolitical identities, such as being Black, mentally disabled, or queer. While finding a sense of liberation in these spaces, I also often felt pain and isolation, and I could not understand why. 

In the fall of 2010, during a session of an undergraduate course that engaged with critical pedagogues such as Paulo Freire and bell hooks, we had just finished reading hooks’ Representing whiteness in the black imagination (2007). We went around the room of nine undergraduate students and two undergraduate student facilitators to share “key learnings”. One of the students wrote them down on flipchart paper taped to a wall—a practice we engaged in every session. When my turn came, I shared that my key learning was: whiteness is terrorism, which is something that bell hooks actually writes in the article. There was an awkward pause, and then the student at the flipchart wrote down something else entirely different from what I had said, and very, very far from “whiteness is terrorism”. We continued the round without acknowledging what happened. This occurred in the first undergraduate course that exposed me to the theories and ways of being/teaching that I have since dedicated my life to. Still, I remember nothing from that class or fall semester as clearly as I do those few minutes when my existence was quietly and politely erased. That moment 14 years ago acted as the onus for the way I operate in my professional role and as a facilitator/consultant. I became obsessed with moments and variables, the said and the unsaid, and how every second held the capacity for spectacular moments of possibility and destruction.

In those 14 years since, I’ve encountered thousands of students, staff, community members, and faculty, on journeys to lessen the pain and suffering of erasure and social violence, yearning for deeper and more healing understandings of harm, trauma, and presence. Like myself, sometimes those participants encountered spaces—some that were developed and facilitated by me—that provide some of that healing experience and understanding, while also being harmful, either through manifestations of oppressive tendencies like racism, ableism, and cis-sexism, or an approach that does not meet or even try to meet their access needs. For many, not all, of those participants, experiencing anything other than the more explicitly oppressive classrooms and environments they were usually accustomed to, felt essentially beneficial, i.e. less harmful, even while leaving some of those spaces with significant harm. Functional Containment, Bodies of Engagement, and Seditious orientation are responses to that tension between affirmation and dismemberment. 

Seditious Orientation

Functional Containers and Bodies of Engagement are tools for discernment; frameworks through which discernment is refined and applied “before the before”. To understand Functional Containment as defined by this article, it is necessary that this discernment process is thoroughly guided and anchored via Seditious Orientation, which is defined and determined against the specific institutional context through which you’re applying Functional Containment, i.e. the institution of higher education you are currently a student, staff, or faculty in or are acting within as an outsider (alumni, consultant, facilitator, artist in residence, community member, etc.).

I’ll expand upon “before the before”. The first “before” is mostly conscious, and captures the root or even soil-level actions and processes determining the development of plans and agendas such as a curriculum for a course or agenda for a workshop. It also captures what informs that root and soil-level process, and this form of engagement, in my experience, often requires extensive study and praxis, preparing ourselves to navigate and respond to the myriad of variables, and the context/history of those variables, impacting the process of developing more just, humanizing, and less traumatic curricula, agendas, classroom environments, work cultures, etc., with a particular focus on always reaching towards the eradication of oppressive tendencies related to socio-political identities such as race, ability, gender identity, sexuality, class, etc. The second “before” is subconscious, articulated via external limiters applied to such a degree as to be rendered almost invisible i.e. natural, necessary, and predetermined, such as Community Agreements/Intentions/Guidelines, etc., and what it may mean to control a space via a stated communal outcome that is not communal, and does not include everyone in that space, even if every participant is individually given the opportunity to share/contribute; how destructive and sometimes traumatic that can be, to be told you’re involved in a communal process you are not involved or wanted in. The second “before” is the space where questions are answered before they are imagined or asked, and conclusions are determined prior to the process of planning toward specific conclusions. 

Discernment, “before the before,” and towards the purpose of seditious engagement, requires an intentional orientation, or an anchor of sorts to ground and guide your discernment process. In the particular context of these frameworks and this article—which pertains primarily to educational institutions but can be applied to other spaces as well—sedition means striving to successfully undermine and render obsolete an institution that you’re a part of/acting upon and within. It is important to underscore that there is a primary tension within this definition of sedition between working to render your institution obsolete, while concurrently working and hoping to remain at that very institution. 

For me, being terminated, or forcefully removed from employment, would be potentially disastrous for myself, my partner, and my child. At the same time, I regularly take risks that I know my institution does not allow, and that threaten my employment. To reiterate, I’ve only come to understand what is seditious to my current institution of higher education by regularly and intentionally acting in spite of, and directly in response to the fear of disciplinary action, or termination; the unknown known which informs that fear—the realm between institutionally safe and unsafe—that my somatic existence knows how to delineate best. I cross that boundary beyond my fear, hoping to survive but not really knowing if I will, review that potential survival and cross/threaten that survival again, and again. After surviving multiple crossings, the realm between safe and unsafe has slowly become more tangible and identifiable, and seditious engagement is now more strategic, intentional, and efficacious. it’s about getting better at identifying often-hairline fractures and cracks in an institution’s apparently concrete and impervious foundation, coming to know, through practice, when to erode and expand upon that weakness via drops of water, a gentle stream, a chisel, a pickaxe, or a jackhammer.

Sedition, in this and other definitions, is necessarily illegal—which pertains to law and also what’s institutionally sanctioned—when it comes to the parameters essential for an institution to maintain itself as such. I assume that most institutions are inherently and eventually hostile, focused more on survival—which is the very purpose of people organizing others and themselves into institutions in the first place, i.e. I doubt that your college or university is doing everything it can to undermine itself and its financial, economic, and—in the context of the United States—its capitalist interests on a fundamental level for the liberation of the people within it, regardless of your institution’s stated intent. While this hostility may be more clear in assessing institutions such as a prison defined via the United States’ legal system, or a U.S. high school organized on similar architectural, environmental, and guiding principles as said prison, it may be less clear for those institutions of higher education that purport to be the opposite of hostile, or dehumanizing. Perhaps there’s a mission statement that mentions antiracism, or degree opportunities focused on social justice, critical pedagogy, etc. Maybe there’s a rich and extensive history of resistance, and ground-breaking accomplishments that authentically shift the possibilities inherent in “social justice work” on spectacular and global levels. Still, at least in my direct experience, there is always a line, or a point of regression to base and aggressive survival mechanisms.

Structural and Functional Containers

“Undoing invasion in my own life has called me to question how appearance and identity are tricksters, ki’kwaju (wolverine), the illusion of safety…We get distracted by ki’kwaju who keeps us tangled in cycles of coping with invasion rather than using our humongous creative forces to transform landscapes, inside and out.”

—Louis Esme Cruz, Medicine Bundle of Contradictions

In my Buddhist practice, which specifically pertains to Vipassana as taught by S.N. Goenka, a common metaphor that’s used to mention the chaotic rapidity and consistency through which change occurs, is a person in a river. Imagine you’re in a river, with your head above the water. You dip your head under the surface for a second, and reappear. The river you have emerged from is fundamentally different from the one in which you were just submerged: the water around you, the riverbed beneath you, the atmosphere surrounding you, the riverbed’s edges; the very reality of the river itself is one seemingly constant, but always changing on a fundamental, and often imperceivable, level.

Moving towards employing either Functional or Structural Containment, we stay in that river which changes chaotically and continuously. We—the people in positions of power to determine the essential nature and formation of spaces and experiences through actions such as developing agendas, setting environmental expectations, or with the institutional authority to discipline or hold people accountable for transgressing against said expectations or institutional requirements—need to engage with a particular part of the river, like one needs to engage with a classroom, curriculum, workshop, training, semesters, etc. To the best of my knowledge, it is generally understood, especially when attempting to create humanizing and less traumatic development opportunities, that some kind of containment is necessary to clarify a point of focus, or the parameters of the realm in which engagement will occur, since the overall context is too chaotic for us to do much of anything in the amount of time and resources we’ve been allotted. 

We take a spherical container, with a solid boundary, in two parts, and we submerge and then close that container in the river. This is a Structural Container. The river changes rapidly and at the same time, everything in the Structural Container remains essentially the same. It has been completely disconnected from the river, and no longer responds to the river’s rapidly shifting existence and context. Even if the container is removed from the river entirely, the water inside will essentially remain consistent and will not react. Possibility is prescribed and stifled by the container’s inherent content, and any changes—no matter how diverse, complex, multifaceted, or seemingly full of novel practices and manifestations—are eventually restricted by the container itself, regardless of whether this harms, traumatizes, or dehumanizes participants and/or facilitators. Structure before function; function always subservient to a predetermined structure. 

For example, take Mia Mingus’ (2011) concept of Access Intimacy, or “that elusive, hard to describe feeling when someone else ‘gets’ your access needs.” If a person in your space is told that your space is accessible, but has needs that are not included in your definition of accessibility, then the question of functional versus structural arises. The point is not how you respond, but what you’ve done before. Did you give participants an opportunity to share access needs ahead of time? Have you worked on your own internalized ableism, and how it has impacted every element of your space? Are you accounting for other elements of access, such as antiblackness, misogynoir, or transphobia? How much did you believe, even in spite of that person the space is inaccessible to, that you understood what equitable access meant for the people in your care that you couldn’t possibly fully understand? How does this dissonance disguised as consonance impact how participants approach sharing their access needs when they’re not compatible with your definition of access?

For Functional Containment, we take a spherical container, with a boundary checkered in holes, in two parts, and we submerge and close the container. Yes, we have defined a point of focus, and yet as the river changes, so does the water inside said container, quite simply because of the water flowing in and out of the holes (which can be altered in terms of diameter and frequency). It has not been completely disconnected from the river itself, and so in many ways, it still shares and can access some of the changing nature of the river. If the container is removed from the river, then the water will spill through the holes, rendering the container essentially dysfunctional. Our process, while restricted by the container for purposes of practice and utility, is tied to the river’s process. Function before structure; structure subservient to function. Functional Containers are fluid, generative, and in flux. Functional containers are always in dialogue with what’s outside.

A Functional Container seeks to make room for the erotic realm (Lorde, 1984) as it makes sense of and utilizes the disruptive, irrational, and powerful, as a basis for engaging in why and how we feel. Functional Containers can change and respond to the potentialities their participants bring, imagined through the fluid and responsive restraints and possibilities of our bodies. At the same time, it must have some structure that may be able to survive the rigors of existing in a large and sometimes hostile institution, or a river that rages.

Muñoz (2010) writes of two forms of time: “straight time”, and “queer time”. Muñoz (2010) defines straight time as “an autonaturalizing temporality…Straight time tells us that there is no future but the here and now of our everyday life” (p. 22). Whereas, “Queerness’s time is a stepping out of the linearity of straight time. Queerness’s ecstatic and horizontal temporality is a path and a movement to a greater openness to the world” (p. 25). Functional Containers operate closer to what Muñoz (2010) marks as “queer time”. They encourage instructors/facilitators and students to move away from the often restrictive linearity of straight time. There is no fully prescribed futurity, despite forced institutional linear temporality. Future is repeatedly defined through the bodies and experiences in, out of, and through the container. This move to “queer time” enables a different and queerer construction of “we” (Muñoz, 2010). Muñoz (2010) states that “the ‘we’ is not content to describe who the collective is but more nearly describes what the collective and the larger social order could be, what it should be” (p. 20). Functional Containers create the awareness that always responding to the changes in relationship and context, on micro and macro levels, supports those in said container to move towards a more radically inclusive conception of community, membership, and identity. 

An example: Let us look at The University of Massachusetts, Amherst, my alma mater for both my Bachelors’ and Masters’ (Social Justice Education) degrees. In May 2024, UMass set the University of Massachusetts Police Department (UMPD) upon students protesting against Israel’s genocidal and especially brutal campaign in Gaza. That decision to use UMPD is not an aberration, but the overriding and eventual ideology that controls or at least influences nearly every second in that institution. In a Structural Container, the act of dragging a student protester across a lawn, exists via and is beholden to the same parameters as a Restorative Practice Circle, or a Community Agreements exercise before a dialogue or social justice-oriented workshop. Instead, to orient towards sedition, is to orient towards each other, regardless of the institution you find yourselves in. Seditious Orientation speaks to Martin Luther King’s concept of “creative maladjustment”, or “practices of refusal or resistance against socialization into a pathological system that [is] antithetical to long-term individual and collective well-being” (Adams, Salter, Kurtiş, Naemi, & Estrada-Villalta, 2018, p. 338).

Bodies of Engagement

“Bodies of Engagement” is essentially an overarching method to structure and navigate facilitation, intervention, and curricular manifestation of seditious spaces, in order to maximize the utility of, and yet also responsively retain, to a certain extent, intense emotional engagement and seditious function; or carefully scaffolding and layering the development of Functional Containers, acknowledging the distinct arenas through which Functional Containment often must be applied simultaneously. Flesh refers to the development of the initial Functional Container, focused on making room for the varied lived experiences and expectations of the participants you’re caring for at that time. Bone refers to a seditious adherence to rigid and often immovable structures and limitations, and Heart refers to the constant and living attempt to center principles and values directly or indirectly, and seditiously and consistently invalidating the institution you’re operating within. Bodies of Engagement are comprised of Flesh, Bone, and Heart, with each layer existing distinctively and in essential relationship, to maintain the act of living, or creating environments that actively respond to what’s happening in the room.

The More I Bleed 

Marcos and Taibo state: “ [s]ome wounds just don’t heal even if you talk them out. On the contrary, the more you dress them up in words, the more they bleed” (2010, p. 17). Being deeply traumatized by Marc’s murder intensified my sensitivity to those moments in my graduate experience in which I felt that critical aspects of myself and others were rendered incommensurable to the dominant pedagogical and interpersonal approaches at hand. Even though I and others used a host of “radical” and “social justice” driven critical pedagogies, authors, and practices, there was little to no engagement with “before the before,” leading to prescriptive, disconnected, and sometimes harmful approaches and experiences rendering us as incommensurable, while concurrently ensuring those incommensurables that they are included, and it is a fault of our own for not feeling included. This matters to me because of the people lost in between, who were often queer, disabled, and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color). Their exclusion was at once unacceptable, incomprehensible, denied, defended, and by design. Those unexamined Structural Containers and processes run the risk of creating cruel experiences by naturalizing, replicating, and retaining destructive assumptions. If the original formation within a Structural Container does not allow for the flourishing of certain parts of who a student/participant is, then that person exists in that Structural Container metaphysically dismembered. The struggle of existing through dismemberment is collapsed into the struggle to change the terms of the often-oppressive values in which their life-making activity has been cast (Berlant, 2011). The student/participant works towards a structurally prescribed future of dismantling systems of oppression, while navigating, supporting, and often unintentionally condoning their own dismantling in the process. My consistent experience of metaphysical dismemberment and years of debilitating grief and isolation in spaces I deeply loved and could not do without fuels my attempt to support other, more Functional approaches. 

Towards the end of my graduate program, a faculty member scheduled us to attend  an evening community viewing of Fruitvale Station in a neighboring city. This was over two years after Marc’s murder. There was a discussion scheduled after the film. After watching the film, something broke within me, and I had to leave the room as the discussion began. Outside, I cried in a way that felt uncontrollable, curled up under a tree when I wasn’t pacing back and forth, chain smoking cigarettes and calling my mother because I didn’t know what was happening or what to do. I was outside for the entire discussion, which could have been ten minutes or two hours long. Time once again collapsed into itself, and once again I felt the world shatter into incomprehensible and jagged edges, cutting me as I tried to breathe and remember myself. Breeshia Wade, Grieving While Black, best captures how I felt and sometimes still feel, and what I hope Functional Containment can support participants through. (2021, p. 29). Wade quotes Haruki Murakami’s reflection on experiences of grief and trauma manifested as separation from his community: “They are up there, on the face of the earth; I am down here, in the bottom of a well. They possess the light, while I am in the process of losing it…Down here there are no seasons. Not even time exists” (2021, pp. 29-30).

References

Adams, G., Salter, P. S., Kurtiş, T., Naemi, P., & Estrada-Villalta, S. (2018). Subordinated  knowledge as a tool for creative maladjustment and resistance to racial oppression.  Journal of Social Issues, 74(2), 337-354.

Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.  

Cruz, L. E. (2011). Medicine bundle of contradictions: Female-man, mi’kmaq/acadian/irish  diasporas, invisible disabilities, masculine-feminist. In J. Yee & Canadian Centre for  Policy Alternatives (Eds.), Feminism for real: Deconstructing the academic industrial  complex of feminism (pp. 49-60). Ottawa, ON: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. 

Day, I. (2015). Being or nothingness: Indigeneity, antiblackness, and settler colonial critique.  Critical Ethnic Studies, 1(2), 101-121.

Freire, P. (1970/1993). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York, NY: Continuum International  Publishing Group. 

Garza-Withers, J. (2015). A season of homicides: What happened to Marc Thompson? Ethnography.com

hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. New York, NY:  Routledge. 

hooks, b. (1997). Representing whiteness in the black imagination. In R. Frankenberg (Ed.),  Displacing whiteness: Essays in social and cultural criticism (pp. 165-179). Durham,  NC: Duke University Press.  

Marcos, S. & Taibo II, P. I. (2010). The uncomfortable dead: What’s missing is missing. New  York, NY: Akashic Books. 

Mingus, M. (2011). Access intimacy: The missing link. Leaving Evidence.

Muñoz, J. E. (1996). Ephemera as evidence: Introductory notes to queer acts. Women &  Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 8(2), 5-16.

Muñoz, J. E. (2010). Cruising utopias: The then and there of queer futurity. New York, NY:  New York University Press.

Smith, A. (2011). Queer theory and native studies: The heteronormativity of settler colonialism.  In Q. Driskill, C. Finley, B.J Gilley & S. L. Morgensen (Eds.), Queer indigenous studies: Critical interventions in theory, politics, and literature (pp. 43-65). Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. 

Smith, C. (2016, July). Racism, stress, and black death. The New Yorker.

US Census Bureau (n.d.). ACS demographic and housing estimates (Butte County, California).

Wade, B. (2021). Grieving while black: An antiracist take on oppression and sorrow. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books.

Zuniga, X., Nagda, B. A., Chesler, M., & Cytron-Walker, A. (2007). Intergroup dialogue in  higher education: Meaningful learning about social justice. ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Report, 32(4). Hoboken, NJ: Jossey Bass.

Suggested citation:

Syldor-Severino, W. A. 2024. “Seditious Intuition: Functional Containers and Bodies of Engagement.” In eds. José Manuel Santillana Blanco, Kidiocus King-Carroll, Naimah Zulmadelle Pétigny, and Kong Pheng Pha in collaboration with AGITATE! Editorial Collective. Seditious Acts: AGITATE! Special Volume with CRES: https://agitatejournal.org/article/seditious-intuition-functional-containers-and-bodies-of-engagement/

Asian Americans are situated in a precarious, but violent, position within the U.S. racial system (Tuan, 1998; Wu, 2002; Hong, 2020). Their so-called status as “model minorities” occlude the many struggles that they experience in a white supremacist, anti-Black, and xenophobic society. In particular, Asian American students who do not fit neatly within the model minority stereotype are rendered invisible within discourses about Asian American experiences in higher education. This is inarguably the case for Southeast Asian American students, including Hmong, Cambodian, Lao, and Vietnamese American students who, being refugees and children of refugees from the American imperialist wars in Southeast Asia, are not neatly situated within dominant paradigms of “success” (Lee, 2005; 2009; Lee et al., 2017). Furthermore, the lack of Hmong and Southeast Asian American representation in academic institutions means that these student populations also experience a host of racist experiences and microaggressions. For example, Hmong American students in college classrooms are asked to explain who Hmong people are to their non-Hmong peers. When students say that they are Hmong American, “What is that?” would be a common reply. The word “Hmong” is often also willfully mispronounced through the question, “What is H-Mong?” Additionally, academic studies of Hmong have relied on stereotypes of them as timeless objects bounded in a static culture. This objectification of Hmong as simply objects of study rather than living subjects elides their marginalization and heightens their invisibility (Kwan, 2015; Smolarek et al, 2021). 

In this article, we, as three Hmong American children of refugees and previous graduate and undergraduate students at the University of Minnesota (UMN), detail the ongoing violent systems of racial inconspicuousness that Hmong and Southeast Asian American students continue to experience at UMN which perpetuates our invisibility within the neoliberal and corporate university. In particular, we recount the firing of our longtime mentor JL, who has fought tirelessly on behalf of Hmong and Southeast Asian American students for twenty-four years at UMN. JL’s unjust and arbitrary termination in the summer of 2015 represents the larger struggles of Hmong and Southeast Asian American students in higher education. This article situates the racialized educational experiences of Hmong and Southeast Asian Americans in the neoliberal university in the context of JL’s termination, the reorganization of the Multicultural Center for Academic Excellence (MCAE), a unit within the larger Office of Equity and Diversity (OED) where JL was employed, and the activism of Hmong and Southeast Asian American students during the fall semester of 2015 responding to JL’s firing and the reorganization of MCAE.

Given the ongoing Hmong and Southeast Asian American marginalization within the university, we argue that mentorship from Hmong American staff constitutes a form of resistance that works to negate the violence of invisibility. This article argues that JL’s practices challenged the corporate landscape of “diversity” within the university, which envisions diversity as a form of predatory inclusion rather than social transformation. This in turn led to his firing. We argue that MCAE’s reorganization and JL’s dismissal aligns with neoliberal regimes of “corporate diversity” within the broader context of the corporatization of higher education in the U.S., which, we maintain, is ultimately a barrier to Hmong and Southeast Asian American success in higher education. 

A Firing and a Fight

JL was a staff member at the MCAE and an instructor at UMN. Historically, MCAE existed to provide mentorship, tutoring services, community-building events, and an overall “safe space” for first-generation, low-income, historically underrepresented, and marginalized students of color at UMN. In his role as a staff member at MCAE, JL provided day-to-day support for students of color, particularly first-generation Hmong and Southeast Asian American students. JL also taught the first and only class on Hmong youth at UMN, which was groundbreaking for its time. Many first-generation Hmong and Southeast Asian American students relied on JL to establish communication with their parents who possessed little understanding of higher education. Thus, JL was a bridge connecting generations of Hmong and Southeast Asian American communities to UMN. He fostered and cultivated relationships between parents, staff, and students at UMN by serving as advisor to student organizations such as the Hmong Minnesota Student Association (HMSA) and Hmong Men’s Circle, while acting as an accrediting expert and language proficiency proctor for the Hmong language. JL’s approach to working with students focused on slow, careful, and in-depth processes of relationship-building, teaching, and mentorship that connected staff, students, and parents to each other. JL’s position as a staff member in MCAE functioned as a family member rather than a manager (Jenkins, Conerly, Hypolite, and Patton, 2021). In essence, his unapologetic belief in nurturing the personhood of marginalized students enabled Hmong and Southeast Asian American students to thrive at UMN during the two decades that he was employed there. 

In August 2015, amid structural changes to MCAE initiated by OED, JL was unilaterally fired (although the official term deployed was “non-renewal”) by OED’s Vice President (VP) and Assistant Vice President (AVP) for Equity and Diversity. JL requested his contract to be transferred to another academic unit instead of being “non-renewed,” but his request was denied, and he was terminated from UMN altogether by the two chief diversity officers. While JL was not the only Hmong American staff member at UMN, his leadership, advocacy, and mentorship at the MCAE substantially touched the everyday experiences of Hmong and Southeast Asian American students at the university. Undoubtedly, students lost an important voice when JL was terminated. Thus, terminating a long-time member representing one of the largest communities of color in Minnesota served as a reminder that UMN did not find it important to have an administrative voice for Hmong and Southeast Asian American students in any capacity within student affairs. It further reveals that the university’s commitment to “equity” and “diversity” is merely lip service. Moreover, OED chose a route of “non-renewing” JL’s employment during the summer, a time when the students who could question this unjust administrative decision were not on campus. For OED, JL did not fit their new “MCAE Forward” plan, which we detail in the next section. However, as Hmong and Southeast Asian American students, we understood JL’s “non-renewal” as a tactic to silence our voices on campus as well as perpetuate our invisibility in the larger U.S. society. How can UMN move forward without having a Hmong and Southeast Asian American voice at an office (MCAE) whose sole responsibility was to ensure the success of first-generation, low-income, students of color on campus?  

With support from graduate students and the larger Twin Cities Hmong American community who have benefitted from JL’s work over the last two decades, we formed the collective—Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (APIs) for Equity and Diversity—as a response to JL’s unjust termination. Our collective of Southeast Asian Americans students, led primarily by Hmong, Vietnamese, and Filipino American undergraduate students, organized protests and made media appearances interrogating MCAE’s new direction. Our decision to co-opt “equity and diversity” as part of our collective’s name was intended to highlight the irony and cosmetic usage of such terms within OED and to gesture toward a more substantial usage of these vocabularies. 

U.S. universities have adopted the language of “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion,” in the last several decades as a façade to promulgate their status as supposedly conscious of and committed to social justice issues. However, OED’s deployment of “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion,” does not substantively engage the struggles of Hmong and Southeast Asian Americans who have historically lacked access to higher education in the U.S. OED’s paradigm of change and “student success” is predicated on a shallow deployment of diversity and equally damaging practices of invisibilization that further marginalizes Hmong and Southeast Asian American students (Alcoff, 2003; Wu, 2002). When Hmong and Southeast Asian American students arrive in college, there is a lack of mentorship to retain and help them succeed in higher education. Thus, diversity within the corporate university seeks to insert differential and racialized bodies into the institution without acknowledging that these same bodies need mentorship for them to thrive. JL’s methodology of slow and careful mentorship and cultivation of students and their parents challenged the fast-paced and quick-fix-solutions approach employed by the corporate university in addressing social inequality. In sum, the deployment of diversity in the university is predicated on the erasure of students’ material personhoods, in this case, Hmong and Southeast Asian American students. 

APIs for Equity and Diversity created a Facebook group to organize as many students, staff, alumni, and allies as possible to strengthen our resistance against OED. Our first meeting as a group during the fall semester of 2015 brought in many Hmong and Southeast Asian American students who were concerned and confused about JL’s termination. This was the first time we as Hmong and Southeast Asian American students, staff, and alumni on campus assembled to debrief JL’s termination that took place the previous summer. However, it was not only students, staff, and alumni who attended our first group meeting; the AVP for Equity and Diversity also surprisingly attended to “listen” to students’ concerns about the situation. His main intention, however, was to finagle the introduction of a “revamped” MCAE by introducing to students a plan OED had implemented called “MCAE Forward.” MCAE Forward is a plan that entailed the revamping of MCAE to move its operations closer to administrative governance and management. In essence, this plan fundamentally entails the firing of existing staff members and replacing them with new workers. The presence of the AVP for Equity and Diversity created a hostile space for students, especially because he was unwilling to answer student questions around JL’s mysterious termination. Moreover, our meeting was not an open invitation and was only intended for individuals affected and concerned by JL’s “non-renewal.” The AVP’s decision to invade our space reinforced the idea that UMN is never ours to begin with.

As part of our efforts, our collective wrote a letter to OED that garnered over fifteen signatures from campus, local, and national organizations or institutional bodies, including the Asian American Student Union, Midwest Asian American Student Union, Cornell Asian Pacific Americans for Action, University of Maryland Asian American Student Union, East Coast Asian American Student Union, National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum – Twin Cities Chapter, OCA – Asian Pacific American Advocates, African American & African Studies Department and the Asian American Studies Program at UMN, UMTC Colony of Delta Phi Omega Sorority, Inc., UMTC Colony of Pi Delta Psi Fraternity, Inc., Vietnamese Student Association of Minnesota, Hmong Minnesota Student Association, Hmong Men’s Circle, Hmong Cultural Center, and UMTC Colony of Alpha Phi Gamma Sorority, Inc. In our letter to OED, we critiqued JL’s unilateral termination, while also critiquing the new direction of MCAE. We wrote:

“We believe that the new theoretical model ‘MCAE Forward’ is in line with the university’s paradigm of institutional change founded on a crippling colorblind diversity and an equally damaging black-white binary that further marginalizes Hmong, Southeast Asian, Asian American students, as well as other communities of color who don’t fit neatly into those two binaries.

Ultimately, we firmly believe that the leadership of the OED is thoroughly disconnected from the everyday experiences of Hmong, Southeast Asian, and Asian American students at the University of Minnesota. We have yet to see any concrete plans or discussions on how to develop Hmong, Southeast Asian, or Asian American-specific initiatives, and this is a problem.”

Moreover, we initiated a petition on the platform MoveOn.org to call for greater engagement with Hmong and Southeast Asian American students at the university and increased transparency within OED. Our petition amassed 687 signatures.

We organized two demonstrations against OED during the fall of 2015. The first demonstration occurred outside of UMN’s Coffman Memorial Union (a building that houses the offices of various student cultural groups) where the AVP for Equity and Diversity was set to publicly reveal the new MCAE Forward plan in the Black Student Union’s (BSU) cultural center. With BSU’s allyship, along with student organizations such as La Raza, Asian-American Student Union, and others that utilized the second-floor space in Coffman, we assembled a multiracial group of organizers and supporters and attended the AVP for Equity and Diversity’s presentation on MCAE Forward at the BSU cultural center. During the presentation, the AVP for Equity and Diversity essentially blamed students for not understanding the changes happening at UMN, within MCAE, and in higher education at large. The AVP for Equity and Diversity argued that the new MCAE Forward plan was going to benefit students of color, even though the plan was created over the summer with zero input from students. 

Our second action occurred during OED’s annual Equity and Diversity Breakfast held at the McNamara Alumni Center on November 11, 2015. The event brought in alumni, donors, faculty, and corporate entities who often donate to OED as well as other leaders from the university to recognize students receiving the Scholarly Excellence in Equity and Diversity (SEED) awards. Our goal in protesting at this event was to demonstrate that OED was not engaging equity and diversity in ways that nurtured Hmong and Southeast Asian American students’ academic success at the university. We staged a “silent” protest by taping our mouths to reveal how OED perpetuates the silencing of Hmong and Southeast Asian American students. Although the local news covered our demonstration, we did not receive any response from OED or the larger university administration.

In the next section, we perform a close reading of the MCAE Forward plan to reveal its neoliberal logics to argue that the restructuring transforms MCAE from a student-centered engagement entity to one of administrative governance.

Neoliberal Visions and the Racial Politics of MCAE Forward

Neoliberalism is a system of complex ideologies that favors free-market capitalism and privatization. Among its basic tenets is the notion that “success” must lie within the individual acting in the free  market (Harvey, 2005; Ong, 2006). However, the notion of individual success has also infiltrated other domains of U.S. society, including higher education. As higher education becomes more neoliberal, its ideologies are shifted toward individualism which neglects and outright disregards the social dimensions of student mentorship and learning. Only the most privileged thrive under neoliberal policies, namely wealthy white students who already possess the resources necessary to be individually successful. Hmong and Southeast Asian American students are harmed under ideologies and structures of neoliberalism that privileges self-reliance and individual responsibility. This neoliberal and capitalist shift in higher education is evident in the new MCAE Forward plan envisioned by the OED.

The MCAE Forward plan delivered by the AVP of Equity and Diversity used buzzwords such as academic excellence, leadership development, global citizenship, alumni making, career advancement, student engagement, and identity development and support, which upon closer examination reveal themselves to be a strategy to transform students of color into neoliberal and corporate subjects. That is, while previous programming such as student social events, peer tutoring, and close mentoring from staff were aimed at fostering retention of and community-building between students of color, the new vision seemed to be aimed solely at making students competitive in the job market. MCAE was restructured, and its staff such as JL were terminated, to create room for new staff members with the title “Multicultural Associates.” According to the MCAE Forward presentation provided by the AVP for Equity and Diversity, the new Multicultural Associates were expected to “demonstrate intellectual curiosity about higher education administration and intercultural competence,” “develop executive presence,” and “increase emotional intelligence.” Such vocabularies of diversity align neatly with capitalistic and corporatized regimes of neoliberal education whereby these Multicultural Associates are tasked with disciplining future students for market-driven occupations. Innocuous sounding phrases such as “curiosity about higher education administration and intercultural competence” and developing “executive presence” in fact seem to align closer to corporate jargon than terminology associated with a liberal arts education within an institution of higher learning. It is even more removed from a center that professes dedication to first-generation, low-income, students of color. 

Furthermore, MCAE Forward would establish a corporate hierarchy within the center with the AVP for Equity and Diversity himself as the head to further create a culture of top-down leadership that ultimately disempowers students, despite claiming that students will have a voice in their own success. Thus, the MCAE Forward plan displaces horizontal solidarities and relationship-building envisioned and fostered by JL that sought to position students and mentors on an equal level field. Instead, it implements a vertical organizational structure within MCAE, and solidifies a rigid hierarchy to achieve a narrow version of student “success.”

The fact that two administrators who were Black and had served at UMN for less than three years, unilaterally terminated a Hmong American staff member and advocate who had worked at the center for twenty-four-years speaks volumes about the complex racial politics of the situation. In fact, scholars have demonstrated how administrators of color—especially the position of the “chief diversity officer”—have operated as an extension of the corporate and neoliberal university (Tuitt, 2021). People of color are recruited to perform the work of whiteness in the institution in order to achieve tangible results (graduation and job market success rates) rather than intangible ones (empowerment of students of color). Discourses of race in the U.S. also situate Hmong and Southeast Asian Americans as model minorities, subsuming them under the umbrella of “Asian Americans” in ways that can perpetuate colorblindness and invisiblize imperialist histories and class differences. Thus, JL’s firing was not perceived as racist or as an act of harm to Hmong and Southeast Asian American students. Instead, JL’s termination was subsumed under the colorblind neoliberal logic of program restructuring that is seemingly devoid of race. Hmong and Southeast Asian Americans are harmed within this racial paradigm because they are ideologically constructed as not needing (or deserving) educational assistance, and the dismissal of their experiences and the elimination of their support systems are not understood as racial injury. 

In particular, Hmong Americans living in the U.S. are subjects of a legacy of American imperial warfare in Laos where an illicit operation that violated international law brought Hmong to the U.S. as political refugees in the mid-1970s (Vang, 2010; Vang, 2021). This legacy of secrecy and racial violence, we argue, manifests itself in current iterations of American higher education in ways that creates conditions of nefarious invisibility for Hmong American and Southeast Asian American students (Vang, 2021). The secret war in Laos serves as a context for the high levels of poverty within Hmong American communities, specifically because Hmong Americans entered the U.S. as refugees. Furthermore, this historical characterization of Hmong as refugees living in the past works discursively to render Hmong American students as incompatible with narratives of neoliberal and capitalistic futurism. In OED’s vision of MCAE Forward, JL did not fit within the ideological apparatuses of “academic excellence” or “global citizenship.” His engagements with and commitment to a very particular student population (namely Hmong and Southeast Asian American) meant that his work in the university was “local” or “niche,” and not “global.” Furthermore, JL’s methodology of student engagement, mentorship, and relationship-building in the corporate university was too slow, too careful, and too in-depth. Such approaches were antithetical to market-driven capitalism which is predicated on fast-paced, results-driven capital production. JL took up the space of a Multicultural Associate who could better transform students of color into corporate, futuristic subjects. Thus, there is a two-fold process occurring. At one level, JL’s firing was racial, while on another level, his firing was ideological. Race thus shapes ideology, and vice-versa, to frame education as a form of financial capital rather than a process for social transformation, mentorship, and community engagement, particularly for Hmong and Southeast Asian American students.  

Conclusion

In a meeting in February 2016, members of APIs for Equity and Diversity reflected on the events of the summer and fall semestes of 2015 surrounding JL’s firing, the protests, letters, and actions that students undertook to bring to light the struggles of Hmong and Southeast Asian American students. We also highlighted what we accomplished, what we learned, and how to improve the work that we had started building. It was a powerful and bittersweet moment for us as a collective to reconvene and revel in what made APIs for Equity and Diversity both incredibly demanding, fulfilling, and everything in between. 

Overall, our involvement in APIs for Equity and Diversity was different from our involvement in other “cultural” student organizations. While student “cultural groups” are expected to exist in the university as apolitical entities, our group explicitly utilized our racialized identities as political weapons to elucidate the violent colorblind structure of the American university and its neoliberalized deployment of diversity. We understood our collective as a Hmong, Southeast Asian American, and Asian American and Pacific Islander political group rather than a cultural group. It is a core belief of ours that being politically engaged is an important part of improving the experiences of Hmong and Southeast American students. As our meeting progressed, we outlined several points to contemplate that would nurture all Asian American and Pacific Islanders, including Hmong and Southeast Asian Americans:

• Listen to our community’s needs. Beyond what happened with JL, what drives our communities to strive for change? 
• Develop external outreach beyond the University. How do we start building Asian American and Pacific Islander political unity across the state of Minnesota? 
• Bring awareness to Asian American and Pacific Islander communities. Does our work exist if people don’t know about us? 
• Strengthen and develop further political education. What programs or resources are needed to ensure that students are able to advocate and organize for themselves? 
• Build community. How do we work together if we don’t know each other? This work isn’t easy. There are great moments, and there are shitty moments. But we have to share in those moments together.

In the spring semester of 2016, not long after our protests for which we had not received any direct response from the university administration, UMN received a “Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institution (AANAPISI)” designation, a recognition under the United States Department of Education. This designation is bestowed upon universities whose Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) population comprises at least ten percent of their student body with over fifty percent receiving federal aid. The following year in the spring of 2017, UMN was awarded a $1.75 million AANAPISI grant from the Department of Education, leading to the establishment of what is now known as the Asian Pacific American Resource Center (APARC). This grant was achieved through the labor of faculty and staff across various university departments, particularly the Asian American Studies Program. The goal of APARC is to uplift AAPI students through peer mentoring, leadership, programming, and tutoring. This new phase of UMN has the potential to bring substantive changes in engaging diverse, historically marginalized, and first generation AAPI students. Ultimately, APARC has the potential to confront the cosmetic diversity and colorblind approach to student success implemented by the MCAE Forward plan by returning to slow, careful, and intentional relationship and community building and student programming that will honor JL’s legacy.

Although the AANAPISI grant had opened up more pathways for AAPI student success, these funds were granted from the federal government, not from UMN, OED or MCAE. We are paying attention to the resources and funding from UMN and OED that is funneled into serving AAPI students on campus, and particularly Hmong and Southeast Asian American students. The question that remains is, what will happen to these programs once the federal funding is no longer available? Does UMN plan to invest its own resources in APARC to continue these programs? Our activism that resists, critiques, and challenges the neoliberal university and its erasure of Hmong and Southeast Asian American experiences taught us that we need to be wary about diversity efforts within the neoliberal institution, especially when these efforts claim to help us “succeed.” While we remain wary of diversity efforts predicated on federal grant money, and the ways the American university can easily appropriate the labor which was employed in the securing of this funding, we remain optimistic at the potential for us to utilize the funding in ways that are anti-racist, and which will actually enable Hmong and Southeast Asian American students to truly thrive in higher education.  

References

Alcoff, Linda Martín. “Latino/as, Asian Americans, and the Black-White Binary.” The Journal of Ethics 7, no. 1 (2005): 5-27. 

Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Hong, Cathy Park. Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning. New York: One World, 2020.

Jenkins, Toby, Rosalind Conerly, Liane I. Hypolite, and Lori D. Patton. “The Campus Underground Railroad: Strategies of Resistance, Care, and Courage within University Cultural Centers.” In Plantation Politics and Campus Rebellions: Power, Diversity, and the Emancipatory Struggle in Higher Education, edited by Bianca C. Williams, Dian D. Squire, and Frank A. Tuitt, 199-224. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2021.

Kwan, Yvonne. “Microaggressions and Hmong American Students.” Bilingual Research Journal 38, no. 1 (2015): 23-44. 

Lee, Stacey J. Up Against Whiteness: Race, School, and Immigrant Youth. New York: Teachers College Press, 2005. 

Lee, Stacey J. Unraveling the “Model Minority” Stereotype. Listening to Asian American Youth. New York: Teachers College Press, 2009.

Lee, Stacey J. Choua Xiong, Linda Marie Pheng, and Mai Neng Vang. “The Model Minority Maze: Hmonng Americans Working Within and Around Racial Discourses.” Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement 12, no. 2 (2017): 1-17.

Ong, Aihwa. Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Soverignty. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.

Smolarek, Bailey B., Matthew Wolfgram, Mai Neng Vang, Choua P. Xiong, Lena Lee, Pangzoo Lee, Myxee Thao, Kia Vang, Pa Kou Xiong, Odyssey Xiong, and Pheechai Xiong. “Our HMoob American College Paj Ntaub: Student-Engaged Community-Based Participatory Action Research (CBPAR) as Counter-Invisibility Work. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education (2021): 1-21. 

Tuan, Mia. Forever Foreigners or Honorary Whites? The Asian Ethnic Experience Today. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998.

Tuitt, Frank A. “The Contemporary Chief Diversity Officer and the Plantation Driver: The Reincarnation of a Diversity Management Position.” In Plantation Politics and Campus Rebellions: Power, Diversity, and the Emancipatory Struggle in Higher Education, edited by Bianca C. Williams, Dian D. Squire, and Frank A. Tuitt, 171-197. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2021. 

Vang, Chia Youyee. Hmong America: Reconstructing Community in Diaspora. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010.

Vang, Ma. History on the Run: Secrecy, Fugitivity, and Hmong Refugee Epistemologies: Durham: Duke University Press, 2021. 

Wu, Frank H. Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White. New York: Basic Books, 2002. 

Suggested citation:

Pha, K. P., K. Pha, & D. Pha. 2024. “Violent Invisibilities: The Battle for Hmong and Southeast Asian American Legibility in Higher Education.” In eds. José Manuel Santillana Blanco, Kidiocus King-Carroll, Naimah Zulmadelle Pétigny, and Kong Pheng Pha in collaboration with AGITATE! Editorial Collective. Seditious Acts: AGITATE! Special Volume with CRES: https://agitatejournal.org/article/violent-invisibilities/

When I entered the University of Minnesota in the early 1980s, Latinos were less than 1% of the state’s population. We made up even less of the institution’s student body, faculty, administration, and staff. While our population exploded in the 1990s, and the number of Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) continued to increase over the next three decades, our representation at the state’s flagship research university did not significantly improve.^[1] The academy still does not reflect the diversity of the surrounding population. At Minnesota, resistant individual students and graduate instructors finish their degrees or leave for other … Continue reading Despite some visible progress, and a legacy of student protests, structural transformation remains illusionary. Yet, transgressors continue to speak, to recognize and challenge such determined stagnation.    

These voices remind us that although some faculty have made active attempts to change the institution, it still reflects the dominant culture and functions as an agent of global capital. Existing orthodoxies not only maintain the status quo, they often incite regression, ignite neo-confederate ideals, and covertly sabotage any thought or action that promises transformation. The notion of “education as the practice of freedom” falls prey to corporate logic.^[2]“Education as the practice of freedom,”is  a central concept in the field of critical pedagogy. See originator or early proponent Paulo Freire’s book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970). Among its more harmful practices are: hiring elite administrators with no moral commitment to, or understanding of, diversity initiatives; the continuation of the social, economic, and political power of traditional faculty in large departments; the transfer of final decisions in hiring from departments to Dean’s offices; the shift from tenured positions to contract labor; and capitulation to the pressure from public donors and legislative funders who are uncomfortable with or feel threatened by diversity and truth-telling.  

As leftist as it may seem to some, the essays in this section testify to the fact that the normative institution remains recalcitrant. Thus, today’s transgressors must continue to exemplify, and to argue for, some combination of thought and action, (or praxis), as an ongoing and necessary vocation,^[3]I am using praxis in the Marxist and Freirean sense of the word, describing an ongoing process in which theory and action are eternally combining and informing one another, rather than as a synonym … Continue reading especially for those at the margins.

After forty years on campus, I believe that student and community protests have been the primary catalysts for any operational shifts that have occurred. Though they often take the biggest legal, personal, and career risks or bear the emotional and physical burden of voicing what can no longer be tolerated, activist students often leave the institution before benefiting from their courageous actions. Much of what happens in terms of administrative response is performative, paid for by short term funding, and thus likely to be dismantled by new budgets or co-opted for marketing purposes. Yet important and lasting shifts can be observed over time.  

As we engage with contemporary writing, we are mindful of what has changed and contemplate the meaning of what has remained the same. What patterns are entrenched? What purpose do isms or the common elements of oppression still serve?^[4]Pharr, Suzanne.  Homophobia: A Weapon of Sexism. Inverness, CA: Chardon Press, 1988. How and why might they be repeated across time and space, taken up by those who benefit from the status quo and by those who seek justice? What can we learn from reflective writing that might not be evident in existing theories, accepted research methods, or Artificial Intelligence? 

The essays in this section, in which diverse voices discuss their experiences in the neoliberal university, address these questions and more. Though each piece originates in a subjective experience they share several themes: survival at the margins; developing and asserting transformative ideas; and creatively claiming space without losing oneself. Because we are from vastly different generations, we do not have a common epistemological base, and I am aware of our differences. Yet I am also struck by the similarities between our experiences in higher education. How is it that despite decades of civil rights movements and scholarly research on the benefits of diversity, that young scholars are still feeling alienated and judged by standards incompatible with their understanding of the world?

Despite similarities, one stark difference between us exists. I had no expectation that I would fit in anywhere on campus. No reason to think that the epistemologies with which I arrived would be taken seriously, that my ideas would be respected as equal to the existing orthodoxies, or that the social and cultural lenses through which I analyzed or conducted research would be accepted as either legitimate or valuable. I had no reason to anticipate meeting any professors who might understand what it meant socially, culturally, or politically to be identifying as a working-class Chicana.^[5] I was, of course, lucky enough by the late 1980’s to have found Dr. Rose Brewer and Dr. John Wright in Afro and Afro-American Studies, Dr. Dionicio Valdes in History, and Lecturer Ronald … Continue reading  Someone who had witnessed the violence of the justice system; who had suffered under the hands of racist white teachers; and continuously struggled against layered forms of (hetero)patriarchy. I knew my angriest critiques of whiteness (as a socially constructed category with political and economic power) would be denounced. That my mestiza/xicana/tejana ways of knowing would be seen as colloquial and thus easily subsumed under the weight of “objective” evidence.^[6] I knew that metaphor and storytelling would not be seen as legitimate scholarly activities. My experience, working minimum wage jobs in white America for almost fifteen years, had taught me … Continue reading Yet, I knew I had a right to be there and a duty to keep demanding change. The following essays demonstrate that this sentiment of righteous struggle has only strengthened across generations.  

By the second decade of the 2000s, marginalized students had come to expect all the things that I did not, and more. They entered the academy with a better understanding of socially constructed hierarchies, greater access to dissident biographies or alternative histories, and a distinctly non-Western or decolonial view of themselves in relationship to power. This more knowledgeable entry, however, cannot fully make up for the lack of overall changes within the academy. Neither does it mitigate continued alienation, daily microaggressions, and a sense of betrayal. Nor alleviate the stress of constantly questioning whether to stay in the academy.   

It does mean that today’s scholars are entering the search for answers and solutions further along in the conversation than I did. They are part of a generation that, (despite a populist, hard right turn toward fascist lunacy), is already more widely critical of racial capitalism than were most scholars or people in the general public in the 1980s. They have an intersectional understanding of oppression and a larger vocabulary for describing discrimination’s neoliberal purpose. In research studies around racist policing, and caught-on-camera evidence, they also have irrefutable proof of systemic and racist violence in the justice system.^[7]Known anecdotally for generations in Black and Brown communities, as well as being understood as a salient feature of LGBTQ life, personal testimonies around violent policing were not widely believed … Continue reading

Whereas I once took chronic mainstreaming as an unchangeable facet of higher education, these writers are less convinced. Less willing to tolerate the inevitability of professors and administrators who primarily see themselves as guardians of long held academic traditions against unfamiliar voices. Protectors of orthodoxy who see the academy as being in danger from the outside, mundane world. Or polluted by a naïve underclass. Defenders cannot recognize or will not admit that such protectiveness is not grounded in irrefutable standards of excellence. It originates in the desire to preserve existing hierarchical systems, and in the fear of being dethroned. Because even the most liberal overseers cannot explicitly acknowledge their role in maintaining inequality, they obfuscate evidence to the contrary and hope the marginalized either don’t notice or will come to identify with the tenets of those in power. 

Yet many people, whose subjectivity has been informed by diverse epistemologies, do arrive at some level of disidentifying with the existing system.^[8]“Disidentification”(Muñoz, 1999)  here refers to the result of a process in which one becomes conscious of their relationship to power, recognizes the way in which they have been coerced … Continue reading Even as they may enter the professoriate, resistant scholars continue to suggest and develop strategies for transformation.  They engage in creative writing practices and presentation styles. As pedagogues, they do not believe in replicating curriculums and content that only represent the interests of the privileged classes. They no longer accept being judged by credentialled people with no capacity for understanding alternative ways of knowing. Though they may want to continue in the academy, they do not want to serve, or maintain, neoliberalist ideologies. Nor do they want to oblige as mere translators, making diverse ideas and ways of being understandable to dominant audiences while losing the very cultural competency on which the original knowledge is based.

The writers in this section recognize a need for students to be able to use the conventional languages of the academy strategically. Such acuity need not signal a capitulation to convention. It is more akin to tactical acculturation rather than forced assimilation. These writers understand the difference. But they also assert their awareness that a facility with theoretical language is not more important than diverse or resistant inventiveness, than asking new questions or analyzing from a different world view. They further argue that if existing theories and research methods are done just for the sake of mimicry, they are meaningless. ¡A volar con esa cancioncita!^[9]Hard to convey in English. Loosely, “Get lost with your pointless words.”

Competition for scarce resources is real and imaginary. It remains one of the most valuable concepts for social manipulation and is fertile ground for sowing division. As marginalized bodies are included in normative campus cultures, they are often asked to inhabit decision-making spaces in problematic and ineffectual ways. We become aware that our continued presence seems to depend upon some combination of individual ambition, free labor, and an apolitical potential for adding to institutional reputations. As is the case in other environments, economic precarity (real or imagined) keeps that sense of competition ever-present, even in relatively fortunate environments.

In the essays that follow, we see authors who struggle to remain in academia while also refusing to become mimics of it. As caring and thoughtful documentarians, Joubert, Mitamura, and King-Carroll use the anecdotal to convey instructive memories and emotions. They call upon existing scholarship and the authority of diverse epistemologies to formulate new strategies for challenging institutional violence and surviving the misery of stagnation. As transgressors, they develop pedagogical practices to push against the “conventional wisdom” of the institution and engender transitional practices. 

Dr. Ezekiel Joubert references W.E.B Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness,^[10]See, W.E.B. Du Bois’ book, The Souls of Black Folks; Franz Fanon’s, Black Skin, White Masks; and Paul Gilroy’s, The Black Atlantic:Modernity and Double Consciousness. to raise questions about the contradictions between what BIPOC students and faculty experience in the neoliberal institution and what they envision as a progressive learning environment. Carefully identifying historical economic shifts within higher education, Joubert demonstrates the way in which diverse epistemologies and political desires among marginalized scholars are managed and co-opted by the university. How vigorously different ideas may lose their power and come to signal impotency as traditional structures remain firmly ensconced.  

Like the other authors in this section, Joubert’s essay describes the added burden of constantly feeling torn in competing directions, of questioning one’s need to resist neoliberal desires and one’s need to survive them, and of repetitively having to shoulder this internal struggle in relative isolation as it happens. Joubert proposes using critical pedagogy as a “transitional” strategy. Because we must always be hyper aware of our own presence within the neoliberal university, Joubert sees our engagement with innovative teaching practices as a way of transforming the purpose of classroom instruction from teaching at, to learning with students.

Well-aware that being a member of a marginalized group does not always coincide with political consciousness, Joubert warns that we should not expect automatic solidarity from diversity alone. The author nevertheless advocates for the collective creation of spaces within the university as potential sites where radical thought can be learned and exchanged in less harmful ways. Where genuine relationships may develop, and work can be shared away from the constant gaze of the dominant culture. Joubert echoes other writers who revile normalizing environments where all-too-common neoliberal arguments arise, and mundane repetition blocks progressive discussion. Peripheral participants are often frustrated by being unable to have necessary conversations that cannot occur in surveilled or managed spaces. Thus, Joubert sees the continued importance of consciousness-raising for BIPOC scholars; Of creating radical spaces where new ideas for meaningful scholarship, social justice work, and personal growth co-mingle.  Where participants can be accurately validated as generators of transformation. In recovering and practicing what C.J. Robinson called the “poetics of struggle,”^[11]See Cedric J. Robinson’s, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983). Robinson believed that all capitalism is structured by racialism, and that any institution arising from it … Continue reading Joubert sees a path for those at the periphery to ethically remain within, yet critical of, the institution.

Cleverly using an alternative writing format to construct her essay, Emily Mitamura engages in her own “poetics of struggle.” She calls her essay “a series of joined meditations.” In it, she describes the many acts and methods of violence that she experienced within the neoliberal university as a graduate instructor. Aware of herself as a gendered, sexualized, and racialized subject, Mitamura deftly links painful personal encounters to what she identifies as “colonial knowledge practices.” Practices that have turned certain forms of argumentation into unnecessarily demoralizing barriers to alternative ways of knowing. She provides readers a contemporary example of how writing styles can be mixed and redeployed from the margins to counter settler colonial forms. Exploring the relationship between intellectual and emotional violence within historically and still predominantly white universities, Mitamura calls our attention to the objectification of those in marginalized positions. She finds Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism and Frantz Fanon’s ideas around “racial thingification” useful as she shows us how images and existing narratives work to highlight one’s objectified presence. Or, how thingification is used to “secure Western dominance” and to contain any knowledge or critical expression that might morally undermine it.

Engaging with the work of Christina Sharpe, Mitamura explores the academy’s intellectual myopia. The way that scholars are forced into mimicry to have their work recognized or accepted. She argues that existing methods drain new ideas of their inventiveness and conscript them into unintended service to neoliberalism. Such coercion, she says, may also do irreparable harm by affecting how those being objectified think, write and envision. Almost subconsciously we may become what we know enough to fear. “Despite knowing otherwise, we are often disciplined into thinking through and along lines that reinscribe our own annihilation…”^[12]Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016, p. 17

Mitamura’s essay reveals an important and recurring conundrum: the way that academics value newness and yet cannot seem to recognize truly revolutionary thought. Especially when presented as an actual challenge to Western assumptions. Dominant scholarly covenants determine newness through conventional methods, languages, and forms. New ideas, flowing from diverse epistemologies are filtered through what is already known and accepted. Thus, the practice has little capacity for accommodating or recognizing revolution.^[13]For example: Dr. Norma Alarcón once publicly confessed that she had not known what to make of an early version of Borderlands/La Frontera, turned in by then graduate student, Gloria Anzaldúa. It … Continue reading

Kidiocus King-Carroll, begins his essay with the question: how can Black scholars occupy institutional spaces and geographical locations that are so clearly hostile to them?  Echoing the previous writers, King-Carroll effectively uses the subjective to show us the everyday methods by which “the neoliberal university enacts violence.” Understanding that the institution is not separate from its local environment, King-Carroll also shows us the relationship between common academic practices and peculiar types of harm associated with the local cultures in which a particular university exists and how the harm done to Black students in any institution can be multiplied by a hostile environment outside a given campus. 

To illustrate the variation between schools, the author carefully names important differences in the historical and economic development of the surrounding landscape to describe the interaction between institutional norms and local expressions of racialized hostility.  King-Carroll helps readers to understand, for example, why the University of Minnesota offers a quite different experience from urban campuses in other cities. For Black students who have grown up or lived in places like Milwaukee, Chicago, St. Louis, or Detroit, (and think they understand racism in the Midwest), coming to Minnesota can be especially disconcerting.

The state of Minnesota and the Twin Cities have a long national history of relatively progressive politics tied to (white) union activism, rural cooperative culture (or Scandinavian socialism), and DFL led support for Civil Rights. But most of the (white) population, even in urban areas, has very little generational experience with demographic diversity and very little knowledge of Black history.^[14]Similarly, the state is home to eleven federally recognized tribal reservations, (seven Anishinaabe and four Dakota), and the University is built on stolen Native land, yet very few Minnesotans have … Continue reading Smaller cities in Minnesota have been built on (white) mining, family farming, and the lumber industry. Growth in the metropolitan area has depended on (white) investment banking and insurance, the exportation of agricultural commodities, medical research, and small manufacturing. The state has not had the types of industrialization that helped to create not only homogenous Black neighborhoods, but also a Black middle class. As King-Carrol notes, neither did the Twin Cities suffer as badly from deindustrialization, which drove so many people into poverty in other cities.^[15]This general description of development in Minnesota is not meant to erase the substantial historical and economic contributions made by Black people in the state. Nor is it meant to ignore the … Continue reading

While violent racism and other kinds of economic, social, and political segregation have long existed here, and certain areas of the metro region are known to have more Black residents than others, there is no neighborhood that is not permeated by the dominant culture. No large area that feels exclusively Black, that provides refuge from being racially thingified. Even the Near Northside of Minneapolis, believed by many white Minnesotans to be the center of Black life in the state, cannot be compared to what exists in other large cities in the Midwest, and certainly not in the South or Northeast. 

With the help of June Jordan, King-Carroll evokes a sense of dread and complete isolation in describing this inhospitable landscape. The poet/teacher’s evocative documentation of her alienating experiences as a visiting scholar in Minnesota clearly resonates with King-Carroll. Though written decades before his arrival, Jordan’s intense language does not feel like poetic exaggeration or hyperbole to King-Carroll, but simply the truth. Jordan described the Twin Cities as an oppressive place of whiteness, where the dominant culture combines with the weather to create an all-encompassing “abominable apocalypse.”^[16] June Jordan, Civil Wars, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 171. King-Carroll points out that for all the acclaim and academic success they may have earned, Black scholars will not be protected by institutions built on stolen Native land who continue to profit from a corrupt economic system. Thus, Black scholars find themselves in two environments that offer no refuge from pervasive, racialized hostility.

Using Harney and Moten’s concept of “fugitivity,”^[17] Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions, 2013), 26. and Black Feminist theories around the danger of silence, King-Carroll suggests a survival strategy for remaining in, but not losing oneself to, the academy. This involves embracing one’s marginalized position, disidentifying with the dominant culture’s vision of itself as just or moral, and always exposing the violence that has been done or is ongoing. King-Carroll convincingly calls attention to this condition of fugitivity as having always been a salient feature of Black Radical Thought. One that remains relevant for, and usable by, contemporary Black scholars.  

As the other writers have done, King-Carroll uses research and theory to support his arguments. He also exposes his vulnerability in an intentional act of rebellion. As a way of thinking through the meaning of individual experiences and commonly shared feelings of alienation. The writers provide an effective counternarrative to the isolation that racial capitalism demands and develop theories around why and how the institution cannot or will not change.  But they also continue to claim space for divergent scholarship. As a collective, Joubert, Mitamura, and King-Carroll are showing us how to embrace and build upon our non-binary, ambiguous, and infinite selves. As did Latin American scholars and activists before her, Emma Pérez characterized being caught in these “interstitial spaces” as a fecund location for decolonial thought and fomenting resistance. Transgressors must use our subjective locations or experiences with double consciousness, thingification, and fugitivity to not only understand how we exist in relation to power, but also to actively provoke, resist, and deliver righteous mandates.    

Change is always happening even as some forms of oppression are stubborn and may span centuries. Factual and symbolic storytellers always retrieve old and leave new concepts to be found by others. When I first started teaching there were so few texts available that I found myself creating course readers that were made up of articles only tangentially related to what I wanted students to learn. I drew upon local presses and activist publications for literary, cultural, and political materials. Included dry statistical or social science research papers that posed conventional questions and did nothing to counter white supremacist, anti-(brown)immigrant, and heteronormative assumptions. I confess that I even wrote some of the pieces under pseudonyms. ^[18] Using pseudonyms gave students more freedom to critique the readings. I traded some pieces with Chicanas in other institutions. We did not do this as propaganda for a particular position, but … Continue reading There is simply no comparison between the material available in the 1980s and 90s and what has been published in the 2000s.

Every major academic publisher, as well as many popular presses have realized the importance of diverse voices. Even if this is primarily an economic realization on their part, it is a remarkable and usable change for becoming educated and teaching about inequality and its relationship to the ever-widening gap between the hyper wealthy (or their wannabes) and most of the earth’s population. Much of this new material has entered the lexicon through the work of graduate students, tenure track professors, public intellectuals, activist organizations, and creative writers in many marginalized communities across the globe. Diverse voices have had a profound impact.

The essays in this section reflect rising critiques of neoliberalism and global/racial capitalism, but they also anticipate an era of post-neoliberalism. While speaking from identifiable and intersectional subject positions the writers envision strategies for combating intolerable conditions, for building communities where seemingly disparate ideas and ways of knowing can be linked or built upon. They use memory and a sense of emotional or familial connection to people and places outside the university to ground their way of thinking and knowing. Such genuineness opens the possibility of connecting with others in the academy who have their own home-grown sensibilities and desires for actual transformation. A place where praxis overcomes stagnation. Is this the politics of the possible?^[19]See Luis Alvarez’s, Chicanx Utopias: Pop Culture and the Politics of the Possible. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2022). Or is it something more immediate? When Mitamura pleads for movement and declares that “there is more to be,” she is not dreaming of utopia. She is fully conscious and asking us to keep thinking, questioning, hoping, and imagining. Now!

There will always be those among us, those who simply want to achieve for themselves what the existing system promises. But Joubert, Mitamura, and King-Carroll clearly have much more in mind. We deserve institutional transformation. But it has never been the only or primary requirement for maintaining our dignity. Whatever it is in the oppressed that cannot be disciplined or brought into submission by unjust power is not mere contrarianism, it is the preservation of decency.^[20] Paraphrasing farmer, poet, and philosopher, Antonio Portio. A slow but determined gesture toward love. “Ahora va la tuya. Dale gas.”^[21] Lo siento mucho, pero no hablo español bien. As a long resident of Minnesota, my Spanish is frozen in time and space. What I “speak” is what I remember from my childhood in South Texas in … Continue reading(Now it’s your time. Give it your all.)

Suggested Citation:

Torres, E. 2024. “Introduction to Section Two: Transgressions.” In eds. José Manuel Santillana Blanco, Kidiocus King-Carroll, Naimah Zulmadelle Pétigny, and Kong Pheng Pha in collaboration with AGITATE! Editorial Collective. Seditious Acts: AGITATE! Special Volume with CRES: https://agitatejournal.org/article/introduction-to-section-two-transgressions/

The world has changed since the last time I engaged with this essay. By the grace of God and community support, I obtained a tenure-track assistant professor position. During the second semester of my first year, the coronavirus pandemic demanded educators of every kind to adapt our pedagogical practice. The remote response revealed the inequality at the core of our education system. Anyone who has taught during this time can tell you about the dehumanization and stratification they have witnessed. Now that we have returned to campus where the aftermath lingers, we have been asked to forget what we have seen. This happens often to those of us who envision the possibilities of the university—the place that told us we were not fit to be there, the place where we found belonging despite feeling unknown, a place anchored in the machinery of settler colonialism and racial capitalism, a place where shared criticism and action against racialized violence and accumulation is often nurtured. As graduate students of color preparing for our role in the orchestration of the neoliberal university, we first become entangled in its refrain. We play our parts, all while imagining ways to transform the tune. Another duality we learn to live with.

In The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois builds on his mediation about what it feels like to be a problem by proposing that African Americans possess a double consciousness—two opposing lenses for viewing the world. For Du Bois, these “unreconciled strivings” not only engender a “peculiar sensation,” “a two-ness,” “two souls,” they also foster a “gift of second sight,” that gives oppressed communities the social analyses to observe and confront the hierarchies and inhumanity produced within society. The second sight of racial, ethnic, gendered, and class minorities has been historically invisibilized. However, the social and political economic turn toward neoliberalism, specifically in education, sees value in multiculturalism (Melamed, 2011) and strangely sometimes in critiques of capitalism (Fisher, 2009). In this context, second sight, particularly in universities, is threatened by appropriation, co-optation, and commodification for public and private consumption and too often the transformational potential of second sight is managed by institutional structures that chain students of color, women, and queers to the ideologies of corporate anti-racism/capitalism/sexism. Nevertheless, struggle arises because the desire for democracy and liberation outweighs the goals to privatize, financialize, and marketize our lives and education.

My contribution to this special issue centers my developing understanding about second sight, drawing from my experience as and with graduate students of color, particularly those in the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) Writing Group at the University of Minnesota (UMN), whose camaraderie and friendships are at the center in this special issue. For it was their stories of marginalization and commitments to social transformation that helped me form a pedagogical vision for something other than what the neoliberal university offers. Following critical education scholar Julio Cammorata: “second sight is only a vantage point for observing injustice and does not guarantee that young people of color will attain the critical consciousness necessary to identify social and economic forces fomenting oppression and initiate action generating change” (2016, 234). Rather second sight “must be raised to a conscious level, cultivated, and directed…The insight of the oppressed is neither innate nor inherent; it must be worked for, struggled for” (Holt 1990, 306 cited in Cammorata, 2016). To say with Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study—an essential text read and often cited by CRES members—critical consciousness and social action are developed through pedagogical engagements that help students study the formation of power and privilege as well as set out plans to change it.

While studying at UMN, I met and learned with and from graduate students of color in CRES and elsewhere who raised their second sight to a conscious level, cultivated it collectively, and directed it toward anticapitalist, antiracist, decolonial, and rehumanizing research and scholarly projects. Drawing from critical race theories, ethnic studies, and women of color feminisms— approaches that disrupt the social reproduction of race, class, and gender stratification that occurs in education—as graduate students of color in the neoliberal university we aimed to develop methodologies and pedagogies that challenge the pervasiveness of settler colonialism and racial capitalism, globally. In this conceptual essay, I explore the social and ideological function of the neoliberal university, in the contemporary context of a patriarchal racial capitalist state and how graduate students of color play a significant role in its educational project. Reflecting on what I witnessed, experienced, and studied, I outline the possibilities of a transitional pedagogy, a critical embodied materialist approach to sharing and engaging with community (in and out of the university), our lived experiences, research, scholarship, and our desires for social transformation.

What (if anything) is wrong with the Pedagogies of the Neoliberal University^[1] I borrow from Social philosopher Rahel Jaeggi’s (2016) What (if anything) is wrong with Capitalism, where she discusses the need to view capitalism as more than a system, but a form of life.

To be honest, before graduate school I lacked a clear understanding of neoliberal capitalism. Despite growing up in the deindustrial Midwest and teaching at an urban charter, witnessing firsthand the ways neoliberal government and governance dispossess working class communities and their schools, my education did not put forward discourse to name the logics behind this destruction. When entering graduate school, almost ten years ago, I learned that after the 2008 recession the critique of neoliberal capitalism had steadily grown, in response to the unabashed expansion and dissemination of wealth and power by the state and corporate elite. Since I was already committed to an analysis of race, class, gender formation, structural inequality, and institutional discrimination, I sought spaces for further education and collectivity.  In reading and writing groups, classroom discussions, and (non) institutional organizations, I studied with other graduate students of color the ways in which neoliberalism as a guiding ideology of the state, prevents the advancement of poor working-class, Indigenous, people of color through privatization, financialization, marketization, austerity and by defaming and even coopting radical social movements. As a graduate student, I learned that the neoliberal university is inextricably linked to the long history of racial capitalism and settler colonialism, and together they function to maintain and preserve global white supremacist patriarchal capitalism (hooks, 2000). It is important to trace this historical development to conceive the neoliberal university’s pedagogical vision. In what follows, I briefly describe this vision, layering on and connecting them to the university context where I studied as a graduate student.

Investments in the modern university have long been tied to the racial capitalist system of slavery. Private east coast universities such as Georgetown, Harvard, and Yale have begun to acknowledge, through recognition and reparation, how slave owners used their capital to help found and sustain higher education institutions. Even midwestern universities like UMN have had to acknowledge its social and economic ties to the enslavement of Africans.^[2]Swarns, R. L. (2016). 272 slaves were sold to save Georgetown. What does it owe their descendants?. New York Times, 16. And The University of Minnesota’s Historical Ties to Slavery. (2019, November … Continue reading

Not so long after the end of slavery in the U.S., racial capitalists again decided to help finance the university. During the period known as Reconstruction, where the paternal plantation system was transformed to the paternal industrial system, investors such as John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie saw an opportunity to cash in on a new crop of “free” workers—Black Americans in the South who attended Historically Black Colleges and Universities such as Hampton and Tuskegee. Northern corporate industrial elites like them used philanthropic support of southern Black education to establish industrial capitalist socio-economic ideology and to assist in the recruitment of labor in their industries in the north (Watkins, 2001). The use of science and medicine was an important vehicle for expanding industrial capitalism. Scientific racism—the ideology that race is a biological feature that determines a person’s physical and mental abilities—gained currency in social and medical fields, not only as a way for explaining racial progress but also justifying new forms of racial exploitation. UMN’s former President Lotus D. Coffman^[3]Campus Divided. (n.d.). https://acampusdivided.umn.edu/how-leaders-of-the-university-of-minnesota-used-and-abused embraced eugenics and scientific racism.^[4]While I was in graduate school, this link was uncovered and challenged by student school groups and his name was removed from the student union in 2018.  Backed by corporate funding, their research agenda was thought to provide “genetic evidence” for explaining social issues such as ignorance, poverty, infirmities, and criminality. Their “findings” became central to racial discourses and practices that legitimized racism and white supremacy in university admissions, research, and state propaganda, and to this day exists in the rhetoric of the university.

Over time, racial capitalism and settler colonialism in U.S. universities have become less visible to the naked eye. During the long murderous twentieth century, indicated by mass global racial violence, the neoliberal approach has been to minimize its role and function in the exploitation and expropriation of racially marginalized groups (Gilmore, 2002). The embrace of liberal multiculturalism is used to persuade society that the university takes a strong stance against all discrimination and inequality. However, this discourse and practice buries the university’s participation in the theft and violence against minoritized peoples, in the U.S. and around the globe.

In this anything-goes social and economic system, one which we are most concerned with in this special issue, many universities not so secretly invest in prison and military industrial complexes. As all students of critical race and ethnic studies understand, prisons are not only designed to criminalize marginalized bodies, but are also the most aggressive and violent form of contemporary racial capitalism. Universities participate in racialized exploitation by teaming-up with state and corporate organizations to gain cheap labor for constructing some of campus’ most “state of the art” buildings, football stadiums, and recreational centers—three spaces essential for expanding institutional capital and power.^[5]Hines, O. (n.d.). Prison labor responsible for some UMN furniture. The Minnesota Daily. https://mndaily.com/276180/news/prison-labor-responsible-for-some-umn-furniture/

U.S. universities are dedicated to upholding the demands of and profit from the military-industrial-complex as well. Private investments in weapons development and training are crucial to the process of accumulating wealth for the U.S. government and capitalist elite. When universities are given funding from government and private corporations to develop military technologies, they are preserving a global racial capitalist system, which has always viewed parts of the world demarcated as “third world” or “ghetto” and the racialized subjects who live there as exploitable and disposable.

Last but not least, the neoliberal university sustains itself through the colonial logics of land expansion. La Paperson in A Third University is Possible (2017) writes “Land accumulation as institutional capital is likely the defining trait of a competitive, modern-day research university. Land is not just an early feature in the establishment of universities. Land is a motor in the financing of universities, enabling many of them to grow despite economic crises.” As such, camouflaged in the rhetoric of community-based research, affordable housing development, and educational access, the neoliberal university, particularly located in urban centers, is involved in revitalization and gentrification, both modern forms of colonization, territorialization, and dispossession.

Scholars across many fields have shown us that gentrification and other systematic social spatial restructuring has always had negative social, economic, and emotional effects on poor and racialized communities (Fulllilove, 2016). In effect, minoritized communities that exist at the peripheries of university campuses are restructured spatially, such as Black neighborhoods having freeways run through them, in order for the university to accumulate wealth in terms of property and social capital.

Universities and the racial capitalist and settler colonial state engender pedagogies that are rooted in ideology and practice that deepen structural inequality and that make neoliberalism a form of living and learning. Graduate students of color, especially those with commitments to rejecting and dismantling neoliberal educational projects, face the insurmountable task of working within, and even embodying a system that is invested in regulating the thought, labor, and land of communities we research with and care most about.

Seeing Double: Refusing the Pedagogical Vision of the Neoliberal University

When I arrived as a graduate student, I was awarded a four-year fellowship that included a safe space for professional development and community with other Black graduate students. This gave me additional time to study and build community outside of the university; enabling me to minor in African and African American Studies, the intellectual experience I deemed necessary to root my scholarship and pedagogical vision in non-western epistemologies. For most of my peers of color, who I wrote and studied with, this was not the case. Instead, every semester I witnessed them spend hours, days, and weeks, applying to university scholarships and assistantships and private foundation fellowships. This was a part of graduate students of color labor, mostly because we were getting our doctoral degrees in the social sciences and humanities rather than the hard sciences—disciplines valued and funded by the neoliberal university. CRES was a generative space to work collectively to complete these applications, giving each other critical and loving feedback that addressed the clarity of context, theory, and methodologies, negotiating our commitments and values alongside the neoliberal university’s adherence to western epistemology, positivism, and essentialism. I can distinctly remember being told that critical narrative research was in fact not research, not only by some of my peers in my research courses but also officially by the Internal Review Board. Although my critical narrative study on Black rural education was funded by the university, I understood this to be anti-relational (Gilmore, 2002), in that it was setting up the conditions to replicate the market driven competitive ethos at the heart of the institution. And under these antagonistic conditions, state policy, corporate funding, and even police are the tools used to manage and monitor research and pedagogical approaches that actively refuse the neoliberal vision of the modern university.

Invisibility, Multiculturalism, and Markets 

It is well documented that students in higher education from underrepresented communities face academic, financial, and social challenges. Amongst the many hurdles graduate students of color contend with is negotiating the politics of recognition. While student resistance pushes the university to attend to the needs of marginalized students, diversity, inclusion, and equity offices and committees, with use of their budgets and positional power, initiate and implement policies that determine university response to representation on campus. This includes policies that compel the university to change its discursive practices related to minoritized groups and that dispense additional funding opportunities for individuals from marginalized communities. Despite these ongoing and necessary initiatives, graduate students of color experience physical and intellectual invisibility.

To better understand how university’s liberal multicultural pedagogy reproduces racialized discursive and material invisibility, I remember engaging in readings with fellow graduate students of color, including Jodi Melamed Representation and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (2011), adapting her concept “neoliberal multiculturalism,” to critique racial liberal responses to educational inequality; Fred Moten and Stephano Hareney’s Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, taking up the call to be “in but not of the university”; and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1942) to think through the ways in which critical graduate students of color are invisibilized. These texts and many others mentioned throughout this essay had a profound impact on our thinking, and we often concluded—bridging the metaphors from Ellison—that to feel socio-politically invisible is to actually be hypervisible to the racial capitalist and settler colonial state and its repressive and ideological institutions, such as the neoliberal university.

Since graduate students of color are entangled in this process, simultaneously challenging and benefiting from it, they sometimes embody both the representational politics and market-based solutions of the university. The neoliberal state is interested in marketizing everything, to the extent that a key part of the messaging we receive today is to “market oneself.” We understand and often discuss the uneven conditions and competitive nature of the job market. However, we rarely interrogate, either within or beyond academia, the alternatives to this framing that may not involve marketing or selling oneself. Selling yourself is contradictory and dehumanizing, but it is also the norm. Women, queer folk, and people of color learn that selling and branding your marginal identities make you and your work marketable. In academia, marginalized groups become experts at identity-based discourse, tying them to current contexts and academic trends to build the case that their research is more novel or significant than their first-generation and historically marginalized peers.

The neoliberal university creates and reproduces institutional structures and practices that make competition between minorized individuals normative. In a sort of academic battle royale for jobs, assistantships, and funding, critical graduate students of color must find ways to reflect upon their invisibility and how liberal representational politics enables the university to institutionalize market-based ideologies, which in the end reifies educational hierarchies and institutional capital.

Panopticon, Movement capture, and Privatization  

Many students of color pursue careers in academia with hopes to transform their disciplines and fields and to actively engage in movements for social change, fully aware that the university is constantly figuring out how to architect institutional norms that can help it elude social change. Malamed (2016) writes, “we might see the disgust in the continuity of the university—the fact that the institution can recognize its racial capitalist colonial conditions of possibility, renormalize itself without denying, forgetting, or restructuring those conditions, and simply continue—as registering a shift in the institutionality of the university, or rather, a shift in the dominant mode of institutionality at play broadly, in the university and beyond.” In other words, the university acknowledges how it takes on the physical and metaphorical embodiment of the ivory tower by espousing critique of how it is cut off from the neighboring communities and how it must do better at creating community partnerships, while at the same time expanding its fortress, carrying the ideologies of the state into these communities and supporting increased campus security. As a form of doublespeak, it is easy to see how the university operates less like the noble in ivory tower but more like guard tower in a panopticon.^[6]My understanding of the panopticon draws from Foucault’s (1975) articulation in Discipline and Punish

Reframing the ivory tower metaphor here allows us to see the ways in which the logics of the neoliberal police state are embedded in the fabric of the university, and how surveillance technology is pervasive there. During my graduate school experience, there was much debate and challenge to campus police alert emails because of the potential to racially profile students and nonstudents on campus. The architectures of the neoliberal universities still resemble western fortresses, and its security infrastructure is not only for policing bodies but also to manage and surveil intellectual thought. The latter primarily occurs at curricular levels by tenured professors who identify with and work to sustain the university, protecting and perpetuating courses that reproduce neoliberal ideology and practice, and western epistemology.

The neoliberal university has been in the business of policing intellectual thought related to radical social movements (Ferguson, 2012). The state, regardless of the party in power, agrees that there should be no alternative to neoliberalism. In fact, neoliberals have actively defamed state socialism and other alternatives (Fisher, 2013), in order to demonstrate how investments in global financial capitalism, meritocracy, and entrepreneurship will help everyone in our society prosper. The complete opposite has proven to be true. The economic and social ideology of neoliberalism causes the largest wealth gaps between the rich and poor, white and non-whites, and it continues to direct mass military violence and the exploitation of labor and land on a global scale. Since the university values privatization, it works closely with private foundations like Gates, Mellon, and Ford, just as it did in the past, to manage and surveil the intellectual work of marginalized students by funding the projects of minoritized scholars. Many of us applied to these funders because they offer fellowships that provide us resources to further our research and because they give us the time to work and collaborate in our communities. This support is not without ideological compromise and institutional concession.

Corporate philanthropy has been long noted as a political and economic vehicle that aims to incorporate people of color as middle-class laborers or even advocates for global racial capitalism (Watkins, 2001). Since the Civil Rights Movement, corporate philanthropy has invested heavily in the intellectual development of people of color. Megan Ming Francis (2019) identifies such investment as “movement capture—the process by which private funders use their influence in an effort to shape the agenda of vulnerable civil rights organizations” (276). Movement capture is one way that the neoliberal university silences the past (Trouillot, 2015) and conducts modern forms of epistemicide (Grosfugel, 2013). Critical graduate students of color should be wary about the ways our politics, projects, pedagogies are thwarted by corporate philanthropy.

Market driven competitive ethos and movement capture are not the only attributes of the neoliberal university that graduate students of color negotiate. However, these two aspects have the potential to drive a wedge in our efforts to build solidarity with each other and with our communities. Solidarity, in particular across minoritized and disenfranchised groups, cannot be expected under these conditions. It takes the development of strategies that reject meritocracy, individualism, and competition, which are values entrenched in the structures of the university. Creation of solidarity relies on spaces to reflect and build alternative ways of living and learning otherwise. As such, counter spaces for reading, writing, and working groups like CRES, that bring together graduate students of color from across the university to interrogate the pedagogies that shape our intellectual life and for exploring our desires to work with and in community are essential. This work requires an intentional engagement with our second sight. When we see how power is weaved throughout the pedagogical approaches of the university, we better understand how it trains us to reproduce oppressive rather than liberatory structures and discourse.

My reflection in this section does not mean to suggest that the neoliberal university is totalizing, all powerful. I wholeheartedly believe in student activism and organizing and have witnessed its possibility and successes. Nevertheless, there must be efforts to refuse the politics of recognition by developing pedagogies that prevent the neoliberal educational projects that are designed to deviate from the educational dreaming foundational to critical race and ethnic studies and to silo the thinking and research of scholars of color. The process of becoming a scholar of color in the twenty-first century involves the constant labor of unlearning neoliberalism. Since the neoliberal university is in the business of indoctrinating graduate students in the ideologies of the racial capitalist and settler colonial state, collective study and solidarity are necessary for retooling the pedagogies passed on to us.

Toward Transitional Pedagogies

I came across writer, activist, and ethnic studies educator Robert L. Allen’s Black Awakening in a Capitalist Society (1969) on a random visit to a local used bookstore. I was going through my own awakening regarding my perspectives on the political economy of racism and my commitments to critical race and ethnic studies pedagogy. I am so grateful that the ancestors led me to this book; it continues to have a presence in my writing. Related to this essay, Black Awakening provides insight into the enduring and pervasive nature of capitalism and how the Black radical activism that took place after the Civil Rights Movement was co-opted and de-radicalized by corporate and white interest groups, including the Ford Foundation. Allen’s study is a bridge to contemporary works by Megan Ming Francis and Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, whose conceptions of movement capture (Francis, 2019) and elite capture (Táíwò, 2022) effectively articulate how the rich and powerful arrest and tamper current racial justice movements. Their writings are worth constantly engaging with because they offer critical lessons on how the development of alternative pedagogical visions are captured and entangled in the structures of and desires of today’s neoliberal landscape.

I am drawn to the concluding chapter of Black Awakening titled “Toward a Transitional Program.”  Here, Allen, building on Du Bois’s autobiography Dusk to Dawn, like myself, is both hopeful and pessimistic. He writes the “masses of Black people are not going to be integrated into the economy in the foreseeable future, as the reformers would have one believe, and since there are few signs of an imminent revolution in this country, contrary to the hopes of some radicals, it is necessary for the Black liberation movement to devise a transitional program, which will operate until such time as conditions develop that will make possible full liberation through social revolution” (274). Similarly, in the context of ongoing stratification, marginalization and dispossession, it seems wise that graduate students of color might work to generate their own transitional program. A program where the critique of current formations of racial capitalism and settler colonialism is not separate from the routine demand for the development of radical theorizing and movement building. Of course, this work emerges from what Robin D. G. Kelley (2002) calls the “radical imagination.” He states: “progressive social movements do not simply produce statistics and narratives of oppression, rather, the best ones do what great poetry always does: transport us to another place, compel us to relive horrors and, more importantly, enable us to imagine a new society” (9). Given this, I cannot help but think about what pedagogies might guide a transition program led by critical graduate students of color and what praxis is needed for moving between the world we live in and the world we imagine?

Throughout all my collective work with graduate students of color, especially in my participation in CRES, I realized how important our cooperation and collectively has been to the development of my critical pedagogical vision and praxis. Such spaces for imagining, healing, and joy are hard to recreate after we leave graduate school. The “free” job market forces us to move to where the jobs are, often away from our research and community contexts, in desperation and with little say in the process. Returning to this work has demanded deep reflection on my educational development in the academy, nonetheless efforts to archive and articulate the pedagogies of the university is a necessary task, particularly in times when the neoliberalization of education is intensified through austerity measures and attacks on radical pedagogy.

To this end, I propose we adopt a transitional pedagogy, that aims to build off our second sight, that helps us cultivate critical consciousness, and directs us toward rehumanizing movement building inside and outside of our classrooms. In this, we need to assess the social and political underpinnings handed down by the neoliberal university but also the relational dynamics which we have the authority and ability to change in our daily work, as both teachers and learners. As future and current tenure-track professors, adjuncts, graduate instructors, teaching assistants, public intellectuals, researchers, and organizers, it is worth developing embodied materialist pedagogies that help clear the muddiness that spreads across our eyes, which disables our second sight from working to its full potential. In order to see what is in “plain sight,” I offer these pedagogical frames inspired by the wisdoms of graduate students of color.

A transitional pedagogy begins with a commitment to the development of a critical  consciousness. The process of awakening the mind to injustice and inequality is heavy and burden laden. Becoming aware sometimes feels totalizing, and can even cause us to withdraw from our desires for social change. Paulo Freire (2014) in Pedagogy of the Oppressed explained that there is “fear of freedom” hidden within us that “makes us see ghosts” (35). These ghosts are vestiges of struggle and resistance, the afterlives of African enslavement, Indigenous genocide, and decolonial rebellion. Conjuring these ghosts puts us in communication with our shared and converging histories, triggering our fight and flight senses, reducing our ability to engage with our second sight. Learning from these histories requires a practice of continuous dialogue. Dialogue is not just communicating, it is a form of self and collective reflection that broadens our view of the material world. It is an alternative to debate and discussion, the normative and dominant forms of sharing intellectual thought and lived experiences in the neoliberal university. Debate is unidirectional and competitive and sees the ghosts as an enemy. While discussion generally invites all perspectives, it also avoids internal and external conflict to the degree that ghosts are never addressed. Dialogue is an intentional strategy, engaging with others and the self, for the purpose of theorizing and problematizing how relations of power in particular contexts inform and impact the development of critical consciousness. It builds relationships with ghosts in order to better read the material and ever changing world.

Second sight as a pedagogical principle encourages reflection upon how our lived experience informs our consciousness. Building upon this approach and taking notes from critical race and ethnic studies students, transitional pedagogies view learning as occurring in the mind, body, and spirit. Refusing the body, mind, and spirit split (hooks, 1994) is crucial for the development of liberatory teaching and practice. Social, political, and historical relations are formed and produced through, in, and on the body. We need a critical practice for seeing the ways our bodies move across geographies and how systems of domination use the body to govern social value, and how this historical value determines a sense of place that weaves the regulatory pedagogies at the core of, for example plantations and prisons (McKittrick, 2011), the logics of which appear in the praxis of the neoliberal university. The body, as a geography, reveals how the epistemologies, ontologies, methodologies developed in minoritized community struggle are remapped by state institutions. The dehumanizing embodiments of meritocracy, competition, and individualism cannot be assumed as natural and necessary. Creating relations and relationships, structures and practices that are nurturing and liberating requires a deep understanding of our bodies and how our labor interacts with the norms of institutions.

No movement for social change is done alone. An effective educational movement brings together political struggles across geography and social identity. International and intersectional movements are grounded in direct action and intellectual labor. While graduate students of color participate in movements and draw upon these histories for their scholarship and research, there is always attention needed to how social movement informs our desires to create liberatory structures and relationships in our future classrooms. Alongside movement building, imagining ways in which we can develop a collaborative critical praxis (Case and Joubert, 2019) is crucial for educational change. This involves engaging in critical reflection collectively to advance our thinking and imagining of what is just and transformative. It is the practice of centering study and planning (described by Moten and Harney, 2013) as educators in minoritized bodies, for the good of ourselves (collective care and coalition building) and our students, some of whom cannot see us beyond our race, gender, class, sexuality, nationality, ability, and geography. It is to center a pedagogical envisioning that guides how we might work collectively with students and our communities to build an alternative and counter university.

Therefore, I maintain that we turn to transitional pedagogies to improve our ways of seeing, and thus knowing and being in the world. As we take the short trip on the path to become scholars for social change, the question of teaching and learning in the university demands an embracing of dualities. While there are darkness and shadows within a neoliberal racial capitalist and settler colonial system, as scholars of color, the ability to transition from light to dark, and in reverse, is one way in which we can transform ourselves, the work with our students, and the world.

References

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Case, A. & Joubert, E.  (2019) Teaching in Disruptive Bodies: Pedagogies of Resistance and Embodied Knowledges. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education.

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Suggested Citation:

Joubert III, E. 2024. “Moving Toward Transitional Pedagogies: The Second Sight of Graduate Students of Color in the Neoliberal University.” In eds. José Manuel Santillana Blanco, Kidiocus King-Carroll, Naimah Zulmadelle Pétigny, and Kong Pheng Pha in collaboration with AGITATE! Editorial Collective. Seditious Acts: AGITATE! Special Volume with CRES: https://agitatejournal.org/article/moving-toward-transitional-pedagogies/

References

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Image Credit(Thumbnail): The barley monoprint
Hordeum Vulgare / A Plan for Jaffa by Lamia Abukhadra (2018),
Trace monotype on paper, included with permission of the artist
https://lamiaabukhadra.com/ABOUT

Suggested citation:

Mitamura, E. 2024. “Toward a marginal understanding of object being in the neoliberal university.” In eds. José Manuel Santillana Blanco, Kidiocus King-Carroll, Naimah Zulmadelle Pétigny, and Kong Pheng Pha in collaboration with AGITATE! Editorial Collective. Seditious Acts: AGITATE! Special Volume with CRES: https://agitatejournal.org/article/toward-a-marginal-understanding/

In the beginning, I was certain that I was imagining the alienation that I felt as I began my first year of graduate school. The racial violence that I encountered was tangible—I could hear and see it—but the advent of winter concurrently masked and heightened the sense of dread I felt that first year. I began my Ph.D. program in the fall of 2016 when the presidential election began to foment all kinds of conspicuous antiblackness. I could account for the slurs that were thrown my way as I went about daily life, but it was the other feeling that I expected but could not altogether account for—a feeling that lived in conjunction with the white men who screamed at me from the windows of moving vehicles. I imagine that other graduate students of color experience this when they begin graduate school—a feeling for some that might arrive at the nexus of below zero temperatures, the daily life of the neoliberal university, and the experience of the persistent and often violent whiteness of inhospitable places. For me, that arrival culminated in an atmosphere of dread. This atmospheric-psychosocial-racial-geographic conundrum is the thrust of this meditation. How can Black people live within and resist the neoliberal University and its hostile environs? In ways this is a question of space: living in the environs of the neoliberal university in Southern California or New York may be a different experience than living in Iowa or Minnesota, but I would venture to argue that the fact of the neoliberal University and its inability to protect the Black people that live within its world are much the same. What follows are a set of notes or jottings that are autobiographical, analytical, historical, and deliberately incomplete, but labor to articulate my understanding of the University and the world that surrounds it as an antiblack, neoliberal space that Black graduate students must exist in a fugitive relationship to.

A Sweet Song

1. In the spring of 2016, I drove the 350 miles from my home in Milwaukee to Minneapolis to attend a recruitment visit for a Ph.D. program. The department was my first choice, but I was increasingly anxious about committing myself to five or more years of perpetual winter. I’d spent most of my life in the Upper Midwest, but I was weary of academia and ached for the heat. Yet, there I was driving through the insistent whiteness of rural central Wisconsin—entertained by a preponderance of dead deer on the side of the roadway, Shockwave Adult Superstore billboards, and homemade “Vote Trump” signs that were sometimes the height of small houses. In Minneapolis I attended the requisite recruitment events, but a highlight of the visit was a catch-up with a college friend. We met for lunch at an outdoor patio on the West Bank of the Mississippi and as we ate, drank, and reminisced, a truck full of young, white, college boys sped past and screamed in our direction. We had a moment of hesitation. Were they referring to us? Of course, they were referring to us—we were the only niggers there. The white people on the patio turned to stare at us and we laughed. Later, my friend wrote a post on social media describing their words as a serenade—I’d been officially welcomed to Minnesota by “the dulcet tones of a group of white boys in a pick-up truck.” It did sound something like a song—a joyful reminder that they found the idea of us ridiculous.

2. That fall I made the journey to Minneapolis again, this time in a U-Haul, similarly entertained by rural paraphernalia, as my parents followed behind. They helped me move into my apartment in South Minneapolis, and after a weekend trip up North to the iron range, I returned to Minneapolis to begin my first year as a graduate student. I’d imagined an easy transition—Minneapolis was not far from Milwaukee, and I was still ensconced in the Upper Midwest; yet, somehow, Minneapolis felt like a different world. The geographical distance is relatively small but the cultural and racial differences were distinct. The truth is that Minneapolis doesn’t have the same history of deindustrialization and hyper-segregation as Milwaukee. Then there is the fact of Blackness itself—70% of Wisconsin’s Black population lives in Milwaukee and nearby cities in the southeastern part of the state. In other words, Milwaukee feels like a Black city whereas whiteness is seemingly omnipresent in Minneapolis despite the presence of native peoples and a relatively large East African and Latinx immigrant population. This is not to say that whiteness is not de-rigueur in Milwaukee, but the fact of whiteness and the presence of Blackness felt different in Minneapolis.

3. Minneapolis is different. Deindustrialization doesn’t blanket the city’s landscape. The segregation exists but it doesn’t seem as pronounced as the segregation at home; a type of segregation that is so marked that you never see white people in parts of the city. In Minneapolis, I was surrounded by bikes and grocery co-ops and seemingly well-meaning, smiling white people in Patagonia jackets who sometimes called me a nigger as I went about daily life. That might be the privilege of living in a Black city—there are all kinds of structural and economic disparities and violences that Black folks encounter, but the fact that I’d never been called a racial slur in Milwaukee made sense in a macabre sort of way. Regardless, the word was a reminder that I should remember who and where I was and that they felt I was not welcome despite the fact that this was occupied Dakota lands. The word was a reminder that I may have managed to infiltrate their carefully crafted space of whiteness but that they would not go down without a fight.

4. And the word seemed to exist even in those unsaid moments of racial aggression that I encountered. There are those moments of racial hostility that bubble beneath the surface, they are not as blatant as being called a nigger, but the word existed every time some white man refused to cede space on the sidewalk. And the word was there when the white man at Cub Foods screamed at me because my groceries were too close to his on the conveyor belt. The word was also there that time a woman ran me off the road in a fit of rage. A former friend and I named her White Supremacy Nancy and, in the mythology, that the two of us created, White Supremacy Nancy was a strong white woman of Scandinavian stock who drove around with a tater tot hotdish in her backseat, dispensing justice and vengeance against every nigger that dared to exist, every dark-skinned person who dared to penetrate her world. Ultimately, Nancy became a stand in for every act of antiblackness that I experienced. Verbal or otherwise, there seemed to be a million little terrors that threatened to gnaw me to the bone.

5. I subconsciously allowed myself to believe that my proximity to the University was a protection from racial hostility and a cold climate. The ivory tower looms large, but its reach does not mitigate the fact that the University can’t protect Black people. How do you express the suffocation that you feel as you trudge through several feet of snow while white men verbally assault you from their car window before speeding onto Minnesota 55? It was a recurring scene of terror that I was unable to elaborate upon in the classroom or  adequately explain to my peers. I situate the personal as a means of illustrating the quotidian ways in which the world of the neoliberal University enacts violence. It is quotidian because my experience of white racist aggression is not unique. Black people inside and outside of the academy experience such interpersonal violence on a daily basis, but what does it feel like to learn, create, and teach knowledge in an institution that was not built for you while experiencing a world that is hostile to you on both the interpersonal and structural levels? Moreover, what can the University do about the hostility that exists beyond its physical walls? Beyond the neoliberal idea that student’s lives become separated from their bodies once they enter a classroom, the reality is that the University is not invested in the health or protection of Black people, whether they be in the classroom or living in the shadows. There are no distinct borders between the University and its environs, their borders are not coterminous—one does not end and the other begins. What does this mean for Black people within the University who must simultaneously navigate the daily violence of University and the world?

In the Heart of Whiteness

1. I would argue that navigating the daily violence of the University is a matter of the atmosphere—there is the neoliberal atmosphere of the University and there is the atmosphere of the world that is beyond it but is also of it, and both are hostile to Black life. I imagine that it is particularly a matter of the atmosphere when one is navigating the whiteness of the University in a place like Minnesota where temperatures can drop significantly below zero. What I am describing is a feeling—the feeling of studying and teaching in the neoliberal University whilst also experiencing the hostility of the world outside of the University—the literal atmosphere, the configuration of space, and presence of whiteness. I am describing an environment that June Jordan calls “The Abominable Atmosphere” in her essay “Beyond Apocalypse Now.” Jordan recalls her experience as a Visiting Poet at a small liberal arts college in Saint Paul in the early 1980s and the feeling of experiencing the cold in combination with the hostility of whiteness while living in the shadow of an academic institution that would not and could not protect her.

You could say that Minnesota represents the heart of whiteness for this visitor, this Black woman who grew up inside the center city neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, in Brooklyn. You could say that, for me, 45 degrees below zero plus blizzard snows blowing about my face and feet, you could say that the melodramatic severity of this place signifies apocalypse.

What should I do? You think I should organize a search-and-destroy series of missions out on the slippery streets? You think I should colonize every available Scandinavian and conscript him or her into carrying my groceries as well as my other personal supplies? You think I should drill through the ice, for oil? You think I should let myself go bananas and then blame it on the snow? You think I could get away with a claim of Overwhelming Evil Environment that will excuse me if I kill a score or two of whitefolks? What should I do?^[1]June Jordan, Civil Wars, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 171.

For Jordan, the whiteness and the environment coalesce to form an “apocalypse” that feels violent to her presence in the space. The snow only seems to heighten the sense of anxiety she feels as she is surrounded by a whiteness that is a continuous assault on her identity. The assault is such that she ponders the ways in which she might go about combatting it. She could let herself go mentally or she could kill a bunch of white people. Then there is the college that she is in residence at—a 99.6 percent white institution—which is also complicit in the assault, and she wonders what sort of violence she might enact in retaliation. For Jordan, the answer is not clear.

In this heart of whiteness where I see separate runners and separate couples and separate houses and one person in a car that seats five and ice and so much snow and ice and where I shake myself from the cold air stinging me to tears and where I brace myself to manage so much ice so much zero inhospitality to the concept of a warm and beating human heart, the heart of the social animals we have been rumored to be, what should I do?^[2]Ibid.

Jordan describes a feeling of being left out in the cold—a world away from her homeplace in Bedford-Stuyvesant. It is a cold alienation in which separateness and the cold exist at the expense of warmth and sociality. She consistently returns to the question of what should I do?

2. Marlon James also describes this feeling of living in and experiencing Minnesota as a professor at a small liberal arts college in his essay “Smaller, and Smaller, and Smaller.” He articulates it as an experience of “Get big but don’t get close.”^[3]Marlon James, “Smaller, and Smaller, and Smaller,” June 18, 2017. James maintains that white folks in the North can tolerate the idea of you as long as you are far away, separate, an abstraction. But the tolerable becomes intolerable when you are up close and personal—it manifests in a myriad of ways, one of which is overt racial antagonism. So, what do you do? You could retaliate as Jordan suggests or you “small yourself up.”^[4]Ibid. You curl up (sometimes physically) and you make yourself small so that you no longer take up so much space. Maybe they won’t recognize you, maybe you will make yourself more palatable. James writes that:

Get big but don’t get close means that I’m more famous than most people of colour in Minnesota, and yet in ten years I have only four close friends who were born here. In ten years, I have only seen the homes of five people. And I like to think that I’m insulated by academic privilege, but Skip Gates was fucked with in the North as was every person Claudia Rankine writes about in Citizen. I would bike to work in full academic regalia if not for police assuming that I probably stole it anyway, and of course, shooting me.^[5]Ibid.

James reminds us that despite our positions in the ivory tower, academic privilege cannot protect us from an unwelcoming and hostile environment. Moreover, the University that is built on the back of indigenous dispossession and Black chattel slavery and that profits from that legacy can never be a place of refuge for Black people.

3. Craig Steven Wilder articulates this history in Ebony & Ivory. European powers founded colleges in the New World as a means of regulating colonialism—African enslavement was used to fund European colonialist endeavors in which the destruction of Indigenous lands and people was a guiding principle. The relationship between the University and the proliferation of African chattel slavery was symbiotic and parasitic; slave traders and slave owners founded colonial colleges and were the trustees of those institutions.^[6]Craig Steven Wilder, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and The Troubled History if Americas Universities (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2014), 10. The University was economically dependent on the proliferation and continuation of African slavery and continues to benefit from that legacy. We must remember that an institution built and sustained by Black bondage cannot protect Black graduate students or be a place of refuge—particularly with the ongoing investment in neoliberalism which emphasizes the dominance of capital over the wellbeing of people and is a racist project at its core.

4. Jordan and James direct our sights to an important point: How do you make life in a cold place built upon separation and your ontological demise? The question recurs: What should I do? What is there to do? In the first 18 months of my Ph.D. program, I imagined that making myself small would be my course of action—I could waste away ontologically and physically, and maybe the continuous assault would abate. Yet, smallness and silence are not sustainable practices and may be at odds with what it means to live Blackly. You can’t resist the neoliberal University and its environs by acquiescing to the silence and the smallness that it demands. I want to seize upon several modes of being that are fundamental to existing, to living Blackly in the University—Black fugitivity as delineated by Moten and Harney in The Undercommons and the Black feminist practices of breaking silence and coming to voice.

Fugitivity: Breaking Silence and Coming to Voice

1. In The Undercommons, Harney and Moten theorize the University as neoliberal “writ large” and contend that it is a place in which white supremacist logics govern all (settler colonialism, liberal democracy, and racial capitalism).^[7]Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions, 2013), 26. Thus, Black people can only ever exist in a fugitive relation to the University. To exist in a fugitive relationship to the University is to steal from it. To exist in a fugitive relationship with the University is “to abuse its hospitality, to spite its mission, to join its refuge colony, its gypsy encampment, to be in but not” of the University.^[8] Ibid., 26. Harney and Moten contend that:

Students must come to see themselves as the problem, which, counter to the complaints of restorationist critics of the university, is precisely what it means to be a customer, to take on the burden of realization and always necessarily be inadequate to it. Later, these students will be able to see themselves properly as obstacles to society, or perhaps, with lifelong learning, students will return having successfully diagnosed themselves as the problem.^[9] Ibid., 29.

To be the problem, to exist in a fugitive relationship with the University is a subversive act that has always been key to the Black Radical Tradition because “…blackness operates as the modality of life’s constant escape and takes the form, the held and errant pattern, of flight.”^[10] Ibid., 51. Naturally, that fugitivity and flight extends beyond the physical walls of the University to its environs. I imagine that fugitivity as taking form in realizing that one is the problem and being comfortable with being the problem. To be more succinct, it might just take form in being comfortable with being a nigger because just being is an act of fugitivity within itself. Beyond the act of being, I’d argue that this fugitivity also rests in resisting the call to silence that the neoliberal University calls for.

2. In her 1977 speech, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” Audre Lorde argues that the above titled “transformation” is an “act of self-revelation… that always seems fraught with danger.”^[11]Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press, 2012), 42. Lorde maintains that silence is immobilizing, and that we must question and seek truth by breaking the silence. Lorde asserts that:

For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it. For others, it is to share and spread also those words that are meaningful to us. But primarily for us all, it is necessary to teach by living and speaking those truths which we know beyond understanding. Because in this way alone we can survive, by taking part in a process of life that is creative and continuing, that is growth.^[12]Ibid., 43.

I’d argue that for Black graduate students who make life within the parameters of the neoliberal University, it is critical to not only speak truth to power about the antiblack violence of the University and its environs, but to also examine the way in which we speak that truth to power. As Lorde reminds us, it is the only way that we can survive and grow. Coming to voice is the natural continuation of breaking silence. Indeed, I’d maintain that this is what Lorde means when she contends that we must not only scrutinize the truth, but also “the truth of that language by which we speak it.”^[13] Ibid., 43. In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks argues that when marginalized bodies within the academy share our voices, “we subvert the tendency to focus only on the thoughts, attitudes, and experiences of those who are materially privileged.”^[14]bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (Routledge, 2014), 189. hooks contends that by coming to voice, we challenge the constructions (race, sex, and class) that privilege and grant “authority” to certain voices. hooks illustrates the fact that coming to voice is not merely an act of breaking silence; “Coming to voice is not just the act of telling one’s experience. It is using that telling strategically—to come to voice so that you can also speak freely about other subjects.”^[15] Ibid., 148. Breaking silence and coming to voice are not simple acts—they are strategic acts of Black feminist practice that provide the groundwork for existing in a fugitive relationship to the neoliberal University and the world that it governs.

Suggested Citation:

King-Carroll, K. 2024. “A Cold Place: Notes on Antiblackness and the Neoliberal University.” In eds. José Manuel Santillana Blanco, Kidiocus King-Carroll, Naimah Zulmadelle Pétigny, and Kong Pheng Pha in collaboration with AGITATE! Editorial Collective. Seditious Acts: AGITATE! Special Volume with CRES: https://agitatejournal.org/article/a-cold-place-notes-on-antiblackness-and-the-neoliberal-university/

And once you’re in the apparatus…
Yes. And it doesn’t matter that a Black woman heads the
national police. The technology, the regimes, the targets
are still the same. I fear that if we don’t take seriously the
ways in which racism is embedded in structures of
institutions, if we assume that there must be an identifiable
racist…

—Angela Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle, (2016, 18)

…I’m an anti-capitalist…Everybody’s got the right words but what’s going on is in the hypocenter. And some people are like, “we don’t go down there. But that’s where the struggle is.  

–Joy James, In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love (2022, 30)

Introduction

I open with the above quotes given the contradictions of insurgencies in the Neoliberal University. These are hard, difficult spaces that we have no ready resolution of, but they must be sites of struggle. And sometimes, the enemy looks like the dispossessed but are inculcated in the system where “the technology, the regimes, the targets are the same” as Angela Davis astutely observes. A similar theme is advanced by Joy James. The words of anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism flow from the lips but not from the practice of so-called academic activists. The question becomes what kind of struggle, and how are we engaged in catalyzing change? The essays by José Manuel Santillana Blanco, Rahsaan Mahadeo, and Marcel-Garzo Montvalo take on a number of these contradictions of resistance within the Neoliberal University.  

They provide powerful portals into the hows and how nots of insurgency in the Neoliberal University. This means traversing some of the treacherous and often genocidal terrain of the Neoliberal campus. This demands seditious acts and more. As Joy James (2022) asserts, assessing critically academic activists who say, “we don’t go down there.” “But that’s where the struggle is,” asserts James. Santillana Blanco, Mahadeo, and Montvalo understand all too well that that’s where the struggle is. They ground their insights of insurgency in the down there of the community, of the people. Santillana Blanco is strikingly clear that the “University will not Save Us.” And this is the point. Ultimately, social transformation must be rooted with the people in struggle on the ground. The earliest students who fought for Black and other resistive studies understood this. They understood that the Western Eurocentric University “was never created for us or our communities” as the three authors weave into their analyses.  Santillana Blanco, Mahadeo, and Montvalo ground insurgencies that are ultimately centered in community. Mahadeo rearticulates the idea of “imposter syndrome” by being very clear that the greatest tragedy would be to be treated as an imposter within his community. And Montvalo chillingly lifts up the genocidal reality of the Neoliberal University. Ancestor wisdom must be called upon when operating within a modality that kills, a university that does not recognize that knowledge. What is validated as knowledge in disciplines such as Sociology is highly problematic as Mahadeo profoundly points out. Too often this is what he calls “scholarshit.”

This thing: The Neoliberal University

The Neoliberal University is a capitalist formation. In fact, neoliberalism is the current articulation of a global capitalist system. I contend that locating the neoliberal university deeply within its capitalist moorings is a necessity. It is important to think of capitalism as a world system with a neoliberal ideological logic and practice advanced by transnational institutions of capital. Core characteristics of the system are: 1) privatization and advancement of  market supremacy; 2)  trade policies rooted in liberalization; 3) an ideology and discourse of the end of racism; 4)  austerity rhetoric and state practices involving the dismantling of public supports from Medicare to Social Security; 5) the cultural attention to race, class, and gender (Duggan, 2003).

The economic system in which the Neoliberal University is rooted is foundational. The US state/society are capitalist and provide the ideological and material underpinnings. As the essays in this section clarify, society in the United States was founded on white settler colonialism. It continues the settler project and with it is the ongoing removal, genocide, and land expropriation of Indigenous peoples. The Indigenous removal from ancestral homes, land theft, and the enslavement of African peoples created wealth for this white settler project. Santillana Blanco, Mahaheo, and Montvalo make clear that the settler project is ongoing. 

It is in this context of racial capitalism that we teach. It is in the pedagogy of the university classroom that the political economy of neoliberalism and its convergence with the long history of white supremacy in the US haunt our professorial practice. This must be named, rendered visible, and its history articulated. Santillana Blanco shares recounting experiences in a Women, Gender, and Sexuality studies classroom only to find that it was not an innocent nor safe space, but one that rearticulated the assumptions of what it means to be a capable graduate student. This, of course, was predicated on the normative, white male PhD student’s use of language and analysis.

I’m reminded of my own journey, traversing the need for revolutionary change while maneuvering a space absolutely opposed to such a project. History is a powerful teacher. Even before the Neoliberal University as a site of struggle, the seeds of my revolutionary consciousness were planted early and often, under circumstances already existing, given and transmitted from the past, a history forged in blood. This is the white supremacist, heteropatriarchal, racial capitalist, colonial US state.

I grew up in a city that was bombed and burned by US state terrorism, white supremacism, class and racial apartheid at its apex. North Tulsa, Black Tulsa, Oklahoma was set ablaze, burned to the ground in 1921. At least 300 people were killed, countless homes were destroyed and the Black population removed from the city. This was State terror at its most horrific. The lessons learned were: 1) The Black community did fight back even in the midst of ethnic cleansing and murder, 2) This resistive spirit was passed on to subsequent generations, and 3) I was nurtured in this spirit—expected to resist, challenge, and fight against those forces that were bent on destroying me and my community if not physically—psychically. My community understood that oppositional education mattered. Indeed, it was an imperative for those of us who were poor, working class, and gendered female. I was expected to live the mandate and pass it on.

Passing it on was the beginning of a decades long engagement with struggles for change. My generation soon discovered that we needed revolutionary praxis. But we needed more, and the demanding lessons of coming of age during the late l960s and early 1970s mattered as the Black revolution was in full effect. The mistakes were many but the times honed the fight in me.  Indeed, those times deeply shaped my radical coming of age. I engaged in study and struggle inside and outside the academy. Revolution was in the air, and it mattered. But, over the longer haul, more would be needed.  

While my involvement in the Black Student Movement powerfully shaped me, it was joining the struggle against US imperialism, the Vietnam War, and the fight against domestic colonialism and patriarchy that shifted my consciousness deeply. It was the coming to consciousness regarding the deep interrelationality of these systems firmly rooted in the US empire that made me a socialist and revolutionary Black feminist. 

Multiple convergences were in play during the period that deeply shaped me. Most important were the courage and commitment of everyday people, the League of Revolutionary Black workers and their deeply resistive revolutionary unionism, and Black feminist radicals  from the Combahee River Collective and Black Women in Defense of ourselves. It was in the wake of the murder of Communist Worker Party members in Greensboro, NC, who were organizing in solidarity with the Black community for Black political power, that a few years later I became a founding member of Project South: The Institute for the Elimination of Poverty and Genocide. This was a defining moment for me. I’ve lived through state violence. I’ve witnessed the destruction of organizations of resistance through Cointelpro, internal sectarianism, and multiple conflicts and the lives gone too soon. But this is not the end of the story as is made clear by the essays in this section. The struggle continues as the great revolutionary, Franz Fanon makes clear, “Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.” (Fanon, 145).  

The Radical Black Studies Tradition: Circa l968 and 2015

I would be remiss if I did not highlight the importance of the history of the struggle for Black Studies in informing how we think about insurgency in the Neoliberal University. The 20^th century Black Studies movement should inform our interrogation of radical antiracism. There is also the reality of the institutionalization of these struggles, noted by the section authors. The erasure of the radical content as departments have been “normalized,” is a hard truth that must be wrestled  with. Yet, at its best, the fight for Black Studies, and the movement’s formation, were centered in the radical practice of study and struggle. The scholar and student activists of the period understood that you cannot confront racism strictly in the halls of academe. Dr. Nathan Hare, the chair of the first Black Studies Program at San Francisco State established in l968 through a long student strike, called it education producing persons capable of solving problems of a “contagious American society” (Karenga, 2). “The core idea is dismantling systemic and not just individual prejudice.” The Black student struggle would place engagement and commitment to social change at the center of the academic and social mission of the field (Karenga).

The practice was to work in conjunction with those in struggle on the ground, with communities, as well as create a body of knowledge which would contribute to the intellectual and political emancipation of a people (Marable 2000). The field would restructure a curriculum and a university replete with Eurocentrism. From this perspective, theory is most effective when grounded in praxis. It means if we don’t struggle around the difficult and messy relationships between the academy and the community, and the community within the academy, we cannot build the just institution and society that are so sorely needed. Thus the crux of antiracism in the academy is preparing students to deal with issues of power and privilege—the core of structural racism.  

Circa 2015

I’m also reminded of the struggle of Black students at the University of Missouri. The University President, Tim Wolfe, who was hired by the University of Missouri explicitly for neoliberal purposes was brought to heel and forced to resign by Black student resistance at Mizzou (as the University is known). Indeed, Wolfe was a corporate executive brought in largely to cut costs in the state system (Brewer, 2016). The protestors lifted up Mizzou’s “long history of injustice toward black people.”  In the wake of the Mike Brown insurgencies after his police murder in Ferguson, Missouri, the Black student organization, Concerned Student 1950 joined with over a 100 other Black student college groups to articulate a National Demand Manifesto. This Manifesto, in a direct way, linked 21^st century Black student resistance to the corporatization and 21^st century racialization of the university and to an older legacy of Black student struggle coming out of the 1960s. 

This theme runs through the observations of Santillana Blanco, Mahadeo, and Montvalo regarding the historical grounding of Black Studies. But there is more than an economic dynamic at play, as Montvalo argues. A genocidal dynamic is in motion; an epistemic form as the University of Missouri Black students implicitly understood although they did not directly name the dynamic. They were clear about this erasure in the curriculum. Santillana Blanco, Mahadeo, and Montvalo understand that the “Neoliberal University operates as an institution of power and knowledge production predicated on white supremacy, settler colonialism and global capitalism in ways that criminalize, punish and discipline already marginalized students within it” (Santillana Blanco).

What is to be done?

Indeed, for those of us who are activists and scholars, who dare to be powerful, who use our strength in the service vision (Lorde, 1984), fundamental social transformation is the imperative. For those of us from communities that have been historically oppressed, it is an ongoing lesson for all who have fought for justice, to be less and less afraid, as Audre Lorde (1984) asserts. The charge is for radical resistance in and out of the Academy, says Montvalo. I contend that radical antiracism/antisexism and class struggle are our charge in and out of the University. Mahadeo situates himself in the radical tradition. The radical here, for me, is radicalism defined as those philosophies and practices which articulate deep level social transformation in the lives of the oppressed, requiring the dismantling of systems of oppressions of colonialism, imperialism,  capitalism, racism,  patriarchy, and heterosexism. Nonetheless, this is not an easy space from which to argue for a gender, race, and class analysis. Indeed, from its inception the driving forces behind Black radical theory and practice have been a concern with the racism, white supremacy, and capitalist economic exploitation. My position is that “race” and class must be understood in the context of complicated gender, race, and class scripts. 

This demands a radical stance against racial capitalism in its neoliberal expression. The struggle against racism is a linked one (Kundnani, 2023). The academy can be a core site of antiracist theory and practice but this must be connected to antiracist struggles in the broader social order, and capitalist social order, Arun Kundnani might add. Racial capitalism is a structured racialized, gendered and class logic that cannot be evaded. It sets the context for articulating the necessity of a radical  praxis in and out of the University. This is the kind of insurgency that transcends the snare of a “too liberal logic”— tellingly critiqued by all the essayists in this section. More directly as Kundnani (2023) incisely states:

Antiracism is not a politics of diversity. It operates beyond the individual psyche through economic and political forces. Racism is a projection  onto the skin of structures of inequality.  It is mediated through individuals but tied to economic structures. That which is rooted in property and can’t be undone by persuasion. Nonetheless, racial inequality is not just an illusion masking class inequality but becomes a material reality of its own.  And, of course, individual racism exists. (p. 65)

No doubt, the issues are complex, centered in a complicated set of social and political realities. Struggle requires simultaneously turning inward and out regarding the nature of social transformation. Montvalo is quite right that the struggle inward is tough. We all have absorbed some of the system’s poison. The University in its construction today and historically is an expression of this disturbed social order. As noted, the domination of corporate interests in the larger society and transnational economy are deeply expressed in and through today’s Neoliberal University (Tuchman, 2009). Neoliberalism’s logic of markets and privatization mark the campus. It is a site of intense individualism, negation of collectivity, and genocidal erasure, as Montvalo articulates.  

We must build emancipatory movements, deeply and more broadly than has ever been attempted. They must be local and global, in and out of the University. When Black Studies challenged the University to be meaningfully engaged with communities, this was a revolutionary charge. The students involved in the Third World strike at San Francisco State in l968 understood all too clearly that the academy was deeply complicit in the perpetuation of racism—that the ivory tower is an institutionalized expression of what most needs to be changed in U. S. society—exclusion, elitism, sexism, racism, economic exploitation, and state violence. 

These lessons explain much of what we’re facing today. The dates are different but the structure of power remains in place. The call to both scholarship and activism is real. Scholarship is always political in one way or another, supporting one set of interests or another, and we must name and understand how. I say when institutionalized practices are so resistant to change, part of the very fiber, warp and sinews of the everyday world, the normalized taken for granted world, the demand for radical change is an imperative. The actualization of that change is our challenge and charge. This is the deep side of radical transformation. When deep levels of disrespect, inhumanity, and genocide, are business as usual, we must struggle for revolutionary change.

I’m reminded that this is powerfully so in the cities of Minneapolis and St.Paul. These are the homes of the Neoliberal University of Minnesota research campuses. Indeed, there is no after-George Floyd given what it means to confront on a deep level a racialized capitalist city and neoliberal higher education. Minneapolis liberals have talked about racial justice for decades now, as has the University of Minnesota. In the Neoliberal city and University, it is evident that the current structure can’t/won’t accommodate the deep level of social change necessary. Indeed, in the wake of the seemingly endless list of Black deaths by police, the mystification of the city is gone and what it has professed to be and what it is—now revealed.

Yet, this is not the end of the story: young freedom fighters, Black, Brown, Indigenous, Queer, radical Black feminists, revolutionary socialists, and abolitionists are here. I proudly witness, participate, and salute them for lifting the veil of hypocrisy, and the struggle continues. And what more might we say about this moment, this conjuncture of profound urgency? It is a system in deep trouble today. During a period of so-called post-COVID recovery, over a million people have died in this country, millions remain underemployed or unemployed, houseless and contending with poverty and deep austerity. Right, center, and liberals too articulate a resolution through state violence expressed through policing, mass incarceration, war and occupation. And, given the current realities, violence often turns inward. The consequences for the working class are harsh—nationally and internationally. Prisons, indeed, are silos of hyper exploitation. We are confronting the consequences of a rapacious profit driven system, dangerously teetering toward a fascist response to resolve its contradictions. Indeed, we are in a particular crisis in which contradictions are sharpening between the corporate, extractive economy and human needs and the Earth’s own limits. The Neoliberal University is enmeshed in this set of realities.  

We’re in a moment of great urgency and possibility. The system will not transform itself.  This work must come from us. So the old and the new must move forward in deep interconnectivity through vision, strategy, and consciousness changing as Ruth Wilson Gilmore powerfully continues to remind us. José Manuel Santillana Blanco, Rahsaan Mahadeo, and Marcel-Garzo Montvalo all understand this Gilmore wisdom. They also understand that the spirit calls for justice, and there is the material reality of the ground shifting beneath our feet, the clarion cry for our humanity and for the people to rise.

References

Brewer, R. “Feminism, Black” (2016). The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies, First Edition. Edited by Nancy A. Naples. New York:  John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 

_______2018). “Capitalism, Racism and the Neoliberal.” K. Haltinner and L. Hormel (eds.), Teaching Economic Inequality and Capitalism in Contemporary America. Springer.

Bush, R. (2009). The End of White World Supremacy. London: Verso Books.

Carruthers, C. 2018 Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements  New York:  Beacon Press.

Davis, A. (2016). Freedom is a Constant Struggle. Chicago: HayMarket Publishers.

Duggan, L. (2003). Twilight of Inequality.New York: Penguin Random House.

Enough is Enough: A 150 year performance review of the Minneapolis police department (2020). MPD150 Report. 

Gilmore, R.W. (2022). Abolition Geography. Essays Toward Liberation. New York: Verso.

hooks, b. (1984).  Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Boston: South End Press.

Hobgood, M. (2000). Dismantling Privilege: An Ethics of Accountability. Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press.

James, J. (2022). In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love. Brussels: Divided Publishers.

Karenga, M. (2010). Introduction to Black Studies. Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press.

Kundnani, A. (2023). What is Antiracism? And Why it Means Anticapitalism. London: Verso.

Lehman, C. P 2019. Slavery’s Reach: Southerner Slaveholders in the Northstar State. St Paul:  Minnesota History Society Press.  

Lorde, A. (1984). Sister Outsider. New York: Penguin Press.

Marable, M. (2000). Dispatches from the Ebony Tower. New York: Columbia University Press.

Robinson, C. (1983). Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. London: Zed Books.

Smith, L. T. (1999). Decolonizing Methodologies. London: Zed Publishers.

White, E. F. (2001). Dark Continent of Our Bodies: Black Feminism and the Politics of Respectability. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Suggested citation:

Brewer, R. 2024. “Introduction to Section Three: Insurgencies.” In eds. José Manuel Santillana Blanco, Kidiocus King-Carroll, Naimah Zulmadelle Pétigny, and Kong Pheng Pha in collaboration with AGITATE! Editorial Collective. Seditious Acts: AGITATE! Special Volume with CRES: https://agitatejournal.org/article/introduction-to-section-three-insurgencies/

On June 10, 2016, the Differences Organized Coalition (DO) comprising of over 15 student activist groups on campus entered and occupied the University of Minnesota Board of Regents meeting held at the McNamara Alumni Center. The action came as a response to the university’s poor record in providing sufficient resources for marginalized students, increased tuition hikes, numerous college sports and research scandals, unaddressed gentrification in the areas surrounding the campus and the university’s ties to Blackrock—a multi-billion investment firm that manages and funnels university money into the prison industrial complex. As such, students found it necessary to unapologetically take up space; to be heard. Protestors carried signs that read “debt is killing us,” “don’t sell us out,” and “tuition hikes have got to go.” As they gathered momentum, a core group of six students (predominantly queer and students of color) took center stage carrying a banner that read “nothing about us, without us, is for us.” Each student spoke and recited DO’s list of demands that called for the university to treat education like a public good, provide immediate free tuition for American Indian students, divest from Blackrock investment portfolios, and push for the resignation of President Eric Kaler. 

Consequently, university officials asked students to sit down, be silent or leave the meeting. While others complied, the core group of six students refused to obey, were arrested, and escorted out of the building. After one hour of sitting in police cars, officers released the students to a crowd of chanting supporters. Although the physical detainment was short, the prosecution continued as all students were charged on two levels via the university and the state, and through processes of harassment and intimidation that spanned over nine months. During this timeframe, arrested students were forced to commit their time and efforts on fundraising money for lawyers, attend countless strategizing meetings and court hearings, and prohibited from being in close proximity to the McNamara building where they had staged their protest. Beyond this, they had to contend with the everyday stresses of teaching, taking courses, and studying. As a matter of aggression, they faced layers of multi-institutional contempt through the office of student conduct that effectively sought to repress and discipline their voices and actions. Many of the student activists including myself fell into a cycle of depression and anxiety. In essence, students were criminalized and disciplined for dissent. This is no surprise as the University of Minnesota has had a long history of student social unrest including the 1969 takeover of Morrill Hall,^[1]The Morrill Hall takeover of 1968 was an event by which African American students in the University of Minnesota entered and refused to leave the student records office in Morrill Hall on Jan. 14, … Continue reading  the 1971 Chicano Student Occupation ^[2]In 1970, Chicanx students in Minnesota organized a week-long summer institute to discuss the possibility of establishing a Chicano studies department in the Midwest that eventually led them to occupy … Continue reading and the Whose Diversity sit-in of 2015^[3]The Whose Diversity sit-in of 2015 was the takeover of President Eric Kaler’s office by student coalition group Whose Diversity. The group was made up of both undergraduate and graduate students … Continue reading. Students from minoritized communities have been at the forefront of critiquing and disrupting institutions of higher education. And by the same soundness, they have been the bodies which the University has utilized to reconfigure its power.^[4]I capitalize University to signify its historical power and dominance over black, indigenous and communities of color.  So, how do we make sense of the ways Black, Brown, and Indigenous students have attempted to critique, disrupt, and resist the violences of the University? And how has their placement within it, as well as historical and material realities, shaped the (im)possibilities of resisting the university? 

As a first-generation student and son of Mexican immigrant parents, I grew up knowing of the precarious positions we occupied within this country. By default, those of us who grew up in migrant farmworking enclaves profoundly understand the false promises of the education system, and it is by this virtue that we come to gain the language to fully understand that it was never created for our communities. These are the lessons that are so integral to our experiences as indigenous people and people of color: the University will not save us. I find power in knowing that I am a reflection of my mother’s six grade education and my father’s high school diploma. The strength and resilience of their life’s teaching informs my work, surpassing the rigidity of Western education systems and infrastructures.^[5]I use the phrase Western education systems and infrastructures as being informed by the long history of white supremacy in the United States. See Deborah M. Keisch and Tim Scott (2015) U.S. Education … Continue reading  My parents were my first literary teachers whose tongue, language, and oral tradition I carry with me to this day. This however means that I am often illegible to the University to the degree that it refuses to see me and find value in my work; may that be through my physical presence or community vernacular. And, when seen, my ideas are often valued on a spectrum of profitability. Working-class people of color and indigenous people are often only successful to the degree that they uphold, engage, and value the University status quo. ^[6]As I have suggested in other places, I identify the University status quo as one rooted in the violent history of colonialism which takes Europeanism as the standardization for all students in the … Continue reading And yet, their commitment to it does not save them from the violences of the academy.

In this essay, I too, like several critical scholars, maintain that the functionality of the Neoliberal University operates as an institution of power and knowledge production predicated on white supremacy, settler colonialism, and global capitalism in ways that criminalize, punish, and discipline already marginalized students (Ferguson, 2012; Wilder, 2014; Hong; 2015; Chatterjee and Maira, 2014; Mohanty, 2003; King, 2017). In this process, students are racialized, gendered, sexualized, classed, and minoritized on two counts in what I call the University Impasse—the paradox of having to be grateful for being granted the opportunity and privilege to attend the University, a space that was created off their backs and denial of humanity. Students of color and indigenous students are often concurrently being disciplined and punished for existing and/or resisting its power. In essence, indigenous and students of color occupy a space of impossibility for having to always be situated within the very parameters that negate their positionalities. As Gutiérrez y Muhs, Flores Niemann, González and Harris remind us in Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia (2012), the University’s establishment has been predicated on routinely reminding women and people of color of their illegitimacy and otherness. In this context, the process of othering is so effective that students begin to internalize what has been termed as ‘Imposter Syndrome’—the belief that they are not worthy and intelligent enough to produce knowledge and obtain a place in the University. They believe themselves to be frauds. Constantly made to feel as though they are inadequate no matter how hard they try; yet unconsciously, sometimes consciously knowing the depth of their oppressed position and need for liberation. 

Alternatively, I would like us to consider these feelings of being unworthy and frauds as a point of departure from which we can dislocate ourselves as proper university citizens. That is to say, that our fraudulent beingness within a historical and material context has shaped our already deceitful status. For example, racialized and other minority students are often deemed fraudulent through the narrative that they were only granted college admissions through programs that upheld Affirmative Action. Students of color and indigenous students by virtue of colonization have always contended with the fact they have been permanently marked among other things as frauds, backward, ill-equipped, criminal, and feebleminded. To deny these historical realities and how it continues to structure the University is a colonial act. A colonial act that upholds the erasure of Black, Indigenous, and other racialized peoples’ histories cannot be the basis of our relationship to the University. Too often conversations about Imposter Syndrome dwell on the politics of deservingness. Our deservingness becomes a central tenet of belonging to the University. The premise “we deserve to be here” and “we belong here” are adapted by many minoritized students to uphold the idea that others do not deserve to be or belong there. In this way, many begin to find validation in the devaluation of others. Meaning, that if we are solely committed to challenging Imposter Syndrome within the premise of deservingness, in many ways, we become loyalists to the violences of the University. 

As an affective matter, the internal feelings, and emotions of racialized student subjects that underline the conversations about Imposter Syndrome are unmistakably valuable. What I am suggesting is a move towards challenging neoliberalist interpretations of historically oppressed peoples in academia that contend with the way racial and other traumas related to colonialism have historically existed and exist. Therefore, perhaps the internal feelings of fear, anxiety, and disconnection, that serve as trauma responses for historically oppressed and disciplined students in institutions of higher education, reveals itself to be more than mere doubt. Instead, these feelings are complicated convulsions that underscore the profound colonial legacies of violence seen and unseen. Moving through the inconsistencies of Imposter Syndrome might allow us to be better attuned to the ways students of color and indigenous students are deeply connected to an intuition that is intertwined with spirituality and ancestral memory.^[7]This is not to say that indigenous people and people of color solely rely on this type of intuition as much as I believe that we must do the work of rethinking the role of memory and ancestral … Continue reading Rather, the feeling of fear that we experience as historically oppressed students within the University is a real physical, spiritual, and ancestral response that attempts to alert and protect us. It ignites what Gloria Anzaldua calls La facultad— “the capacity to see in surface phenomena the meaning of deeper realities, to see the deep structure below the surface, it is an instant ‘sensing,’ a quick perception arrived at without conscious reasoning” (p. 60). Thus, alongside what we might know of the violences of colonialism in theory, deep within us, our bodies know it in psyche and memory.

This semi-autobiographical paper is firmly situated in a Critical University Studies that centralizes historically colonized communities within the Neoliberal University. I am particularly interested in the ways the spirit of student of color and indigenous student activism continues to move us towards resisting colonial education systems that are historically imbedded in chattel slavery, segregation, lynching, state violence, genocide, and land theft both within and outside the University. Rethinking historical trauma and memory as actively functioning against systematic structures allows for a reimagining of ancestral and multigenerational resistance that moves beyond the stagnant location of visible oppression. In positioning Black, Latinx, Immigrant, and Indigenous histories and experiences simultaneously, my hope is that it collectively allows us to build a politics of relationality predicated on critical solidarity. Rather than conjoining all three as a universal configuration for experiencing cruelty, domination, and oppression, I use Black, Brown, and Indigenous as a political category that can intricately count for the multiple intersections that inform how these different groups’ histories are intertwined in the ever-evolving Neoliberal University. 

It remains that academia continues to be redefined by the parameters of neoliberalism in ways that seek to obfuscate the historical. According to Slaughter and Rhoades (2000), Neoliberalism is a set of economic capitalist policies and practices that place value on “free” markets, “private” enterprise, reducing government regulation, and eliminating concepts of “public goods.” Identifying the university as a neoliberal institution acknowledges the ways public colleges and universities have become exemplars of neoliberalism that present themselves as providing increased upward mobility for underserved populations as they serve corporations’ global competitiveness (Slaughter and Rhoades, 2000, pg.73-74). It has become a corporate entity; unable to be recognized outside the parameters of global capitalism. For example, the university’s central concerns with producing profit informs how indigenous students and students of color are recruited, retained, and treated as well as how others in their communities are (non)existent within and outside the ivory towers through the imbrication of violence; this dualism of corporatization always resting on the existence of racialized death and labor as well as Indigenous genocide and stolen land. This commodification process only rewards those who seek to uphold it and reject those who do not fuel it. Paradoxically, critical indigenous students and students of color like all other marginalized students attending the Neoliberal University must negotiate the space in-between.

While neoliberalism across the confines of market-oriented reform more clearly maps the colonialism to corporatization pipeline, it does not fully demonstrate the ongoing shifts and changes in the United States that lead to discursive punishment against students from historically colonized communities. In this paper, I reckon with the role we as resisting subjects play in replicating violence; sometimes in the university, other times outside. For this, I turn to Grace Kyungwon Hong’s articulation of neoliberalism as “an epistemological structure of disavowal, a means of claiming that racial and gendered violences are things of the past” (2015, p. 7). Hong argues that the rise and move towards a new neoliberal order was predicated on the response of earlier movements against white supremacy and Western civilization in ways that structured “selective protection and proliferation of minoritized life as the very mechanism for the brutal exacerbation of minoritized death” (2015, p. 7).  Therefore, inscribed in neoliberalism is the cooptation of people of color struggles, violent histories, and temporary lived experiences that is imperative to uphold its power. If we are not attuned to the realities that the University is an institution that manipulates power for the project of erasure and ongoing colonialism, then we must be honest in our ignorance and how we take part in the setup of this academe-machinery. In the same way, the equally daunting task of exposing, articulating, and challenging the violences of the University from the past to present, calls on us to always maintain a criminal relationship with the University (Harney & Moten, 2013). I built off the work of Harney and Moten that critically calls Black Studies to “sneak into the university and steal what one can. To abuse its hospitality, to spite its mission, to join its refuge colony, its gypsy encampment, to be in but not of—this is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university” (p. 26). 

The acts of producing criminal subjects in the University often mimic and are an extension of systems of carcerality that use mechanisms of discipline and punishment for social control and containment. The objective of the university to this end has always been to punish students whose voices and bodies engage in behavior deemed criminal. For indigenous students and students of color, criminality is inevitable in any disruption of power as their existence in and of itself is already a disruption. However, the act of disrupting physically and epistemologically at the university has different consequences. For example, punishing student activists for civil disobedience is often seen as a suitable response to students engaging in action. While punishing the student-activist-critic discursively by giving them a “bad” grade is seen as suitable for a student who is not up to par with academic standards set by the department or university. Both however, seek to uphold systems of domination by reinforcing the rubrics and foundation of Western-White Supremacist-Capitalist-Heteropatriarchal knowledge.^[8]I utilize the term Western-White Supremacist-Capitalist-Heteropatriarchy as an extension of bell hooks critique and term “White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy” that takes into consideration … Continue reading In other words, criminality is the central tenet for either type of student as they are engaging in the breaking of rubrics, guidelines, and laws that are bonded to the disciplining mechanism of both the University and the state. A mechanism that implicitly and overtly relies on colonial notions of education where students of color and indigenous students’ home knowledges, languages, vernaculars, and behaviors are repressed.

The Neoliberal University’s toxicity, that is, its range in producing and inflicting harm and violence, is not restricted to any particular field, department, or canon. Instead, it morphs according to context, manifesting itself in different forms, space, time, and place. While several interdisciplinary departments were born out of moments of disruption, they are not void of the violences attached to these structures. While ethnic studies and feminist studies departments can hold more potential than their traditional counterparts to be critical and counter these neoliberal violences, they too often uphold and replicate oppressive power structures, even in contestation. These particularities and contradictions are predicated on the grounds that so many critical indigenous scholars and scholars of color have now deep investments in the neoliberal structure. Too often we hear stories of professors of color and indigenous professors who punish their students for not complying with the Neoliberal University. Congruently, (Queer)Women of Color Feminisms have coined, outlined, and resisted their precarious locations in the university that is often contingent on respectability politics (Hugginbotham, 1993; Hill Collins, 2000; Lorde, 2007; Moraga & Anzaldúa, 1983; Moraga, 1993). My work is in collaboration with Women of Color Feminisms’ repudiation of remaining respectable citizens. In doing so, I urge us to push back against elitist logics that conform to professionalism even as professionalism is so central to being in and of the University. 

This work is interested in the continued unmasking of the multi-layered violences in the Neoliberal University as well as exploring the (im)possibilities of resisting it. In line with a Women of Color Feminist praxis, my structural critique is contingent on my own situated knowledge as a first-generation migrant and working-class queer person of color. Additionally, I interweave interpersonal and intercommunal antidotes to unveil the intricacies and configurations of power-structures.^[9]I use the term intercommunal as an attempt to unwrap how the interpersonal is informed by community history, situations, and circumstances. This is to say that presenting an intercommunal antidote … Continue reading I argue for a move towards a politic of infiltration that 1. operates to counteract both the colonial and neoliberal violences of the University, 2. utilizes and redefines trespassing, disorderly conduct, and unruly assembly as modes of actively resisting power, and 3. embraces different worlds of knowing, thinking, feeling, and being. It is a politic of resistance built on a commitment to obtaining knowledge for the process of disrupting the neoliberal University. I do not seek to reclaim, reproduce, or rescue our understanding of infiltration as associated with the varied contraptions that the United States has historically used to suppress political movements. Instead, I look to the insurgent moves used and employed by revolutionaries across time and geographies to manipulate state forces in the direction of liberation. For example, the Black Liberation Army’s (BLA) ability to break fellow BLA member Assata Shakur out of the Clinton Correctional Facility for Women in Union Township, New Jersey, as well as the Black, Brown, Indigenous and other political prisoners of Leavenworth Penitentiary turn to form a radical school of thought at the height of their confinement. By revolutionaries, I do not solely mean to point to the social and political leaders who have been iconized. We must be keenly aware that quotidian infiltration has remained fundamental to the survival and livelihoods of oppressed communities. Put more firmly, historically oppressed communities have always had to be more knowledgeable and strategic of state logics to survive and stay afloat. 

I have structured this essay into three parts that reflect the charges filed against the six student activists during the board of regent occupation: Trespassing, Disorderly Conduct, and Unruly Assembly. All of which I believe are illustrative of the punishing and disciplining practices used against students within the Neoliberal University. Particularly serving as convergent codes that link academia and modes of carcerality. Such codes are not limited to but illustrative of the legacies of slavery and black codes in the South, xenophobic violence and restriction in the Southwest, and Native American genocide and containment across the United States. Thereby, I position these codes as transitory apparatuses that dilute the University visions and rescue the precarious location of those deemed criminal. 

Trespassing

engage in any of the following conduct in a public or private place, including on a school bus, knowing, or having reasonable grounds to know, that it would, or would tend to, alarm, anger  or disturb others, or provoke an assault or breach of the peace: disturbs an assembly or meeting, not unlawful in its character intentionally trespass on the premises of another and, without claim of right, refuse to depart from the premises on demand of the lawful possessor. ^[10] State of Minnesota v. Jose Manuel Santillana, 27VB16172155, Stat. 609.605.1(b)(3) (4^th D. Minn. 2016).

Dominant narratives of higher education would have us believe that the University is a place where all, including historically oppressed people, thrive. This is evident in its investment and packaging of meritocracy and social mobility through the rhetorics of hard work and self-sacrifice (Gutiérrez y Muhs et al., 2012). Educational attainment above all else has been integral in defining American Exceptionalism; promoting the idea that equal access and opportunity trample any struggles people may have. Nevertheless, institutions of higher education remain silent in the ways that acknowledge the violent public-school infrastructure’s on-going establishment. As such, moments and movements of resistance led by indigenous students and student of color activists across the United States signify a refusal to depart without unsettling power and truth; exposing the state’s contradictory predisposition as a settler-colonial nation and the University’s role in perpetuating its logics. 

Fundamentally, a politic of infiltration is deeply rooted in rejecting the social, political, and economic values that uphold the University as a place of ultimate transformation. Yes, even as we inhabit the premises. It is through this demarcation that students can begin to make new claims within the University that decline full acceptance, complacency, and assimilation. Drawing on Harney and Moten’s (2013) strategies to seek refuge, plan, and study, a politic of infiltration moves us beyond simply being in the University to actively doing. By doing, I mean to underscore the ways Black, Brown, and Indigenous student resistors act against the violences of the University. The act of doing relates to moving. We act, we do, we move. In principle, infiltration necessitates both the “undercommons” collectivity of studying and planning as well as the ability to disrupt the University—even in the contradiction; entering and gaining access to become intruders. Solely seeking refuge does not suffice. Those of us who infiltrate do so with conscious reasoning that considers both the historical and ongoing violences committed onto Black, Immigrant, Indigenous, and other historically colonized communities. Since its inception, the United States has consistently used physical and psychological violence against Black, Indigenous and other racialized communities across the United States. Thus, as we move against these violences, awareness is made more tangible about our localities and that of the University. While we should honor and contend with our differences, let us too build movements of relationality that unmap the intertwined legacies of colonialism that led to the present-day Neoliberal University. We must know who we are and what we are fighting for. Moving towards a politics of infiltration is an intentional move towards community liberation that takes place in and outside University grounds. As agitators, we have the ability to rework our position for our communities across geographies. Among many others, let us pay attention to the 2016 student movement at the University of Minnesota that drew attention to the institution’s ties with immigration detention centers, and the 2017 student-led efforts at the University of Michigan to successfully pass a resolution to investigate companies who support the violent occupation of Palestine. 

Through a critical interrogation of carceral vocabularies, we have the ability to unveil and transform the state’s weaponization of language against indigenous students, students of color, and others. Trespassing, as a code of conduct in the United States, relies on settler colonialism. It at once describes the disciplining mechanisms of colonial subjects in our society and its own placement in a history convoluted in colonial violence. Trespassing as utilized by state institutions is a neoliberal code that is used to replicate violence. For example, the University of Minnesota is one of many land-grant institutions that obtained land through the Morrill land-grant acts that forcibly removed indigenous peoples from their territories. Moving towards a politics of infiltration, students including student activists must fully acknowledge the violent displacement of indigenous people to build these colleges and universities. As Dakota scholar Angela Wilson “Waziyatawin” (2008) recounts, “The hunger for indigenous lands by the swelling American population cannot be overstated. In fact, as Minnesota history demonstrates, Europeans and Euro-Americans would commit some of the most heinous crimes in history to obtain Indigenous lands” (Waziyatawin, 2008, p. 28). In Minnesota, genocide, the Pipestone Indian Schools, and Fort Snelling concentration camps allowed white settlers to imagine further structures of containment for its non-white inhabitants. As in most of the Americas, the foundations of all sectors of life are informed by the colonial vestiges of the conquest. The University of Minnesota’s formation on stolen Indian land cannot be separated from the fact that today Native peoples are treated as foreigners on their own lands both through denial of entrance/admission to the University and the blatant violence they face in the city that surrounds it.

As students and scholars within the University, we are implicitly and actively connected to the intricate histories that formed our institutions. For us to acknowledge its dark and violent past, forces us to be present in ways that recognize our own placement within it. As historian Christopher Lehman urges, we must do the work of uncovering the stories that have been erased in history; we must excavate. In recent years, Lehman has unmasked the connections between slavery, education, and the state of Minnesota. He argues that during its early financially troubled years in the late 1850s, the University of Minnesota leaned heavily on the wealth of South Carolina slave owner of 878 slaves Governor William Aiken Jr, who donated approximately $28, 000 to the university which would be worth about $750, 000 today (Brown, 2016). Lehman asserts that Aiken’s contributions were covered up for nearly 150 years through the jurisdiction of Minnesota’s eighth Governor John Sargent Pillsbury (Brown, 2016). These incidents of funneling slave trade money into institutions of higher education did not happen in isolation. Rather, slave owner Aiken’s financial contributions to the University and Governor Pillsbury’s attempt to erase it from public memory reflects one of many ways that black chattel slavery is integral to the foundation of many universities and colleges across the country. Black slave labor must be understood as still maintaining and propelling the walls of the ivory towers. A politic of infiltration is firmly situated in acknowledging the ways anti-blackness is fundamental to the creation of institutions of higher education in the United States. It is through these acknowledgments of historical colonial violences that have the potential to move our consciousness to act. Trespassing, as an infiltrator, is a conscious mode of resistance that moves against ongoing historical erasure.

The colonial history of racialized peoples in the United States was built on denying and restricting education to indigenous children and children of color. For example, Miroslava Chávez-Garcia’s (2012) work draws on the history of California juvenile justice system’s reliance on racist ideologies, and the practices by state institutions to classify youth of color as degenerate between the nineteenth to twentieth century. Chávez-Garcia notes that “scientists identified a disproportionate number of Mexican, Mexican American and African American youths as feebleminded and criminally minded offenders whose genetic or racial stock was the root cause of their deficiencies” (2012, p. 4). Consequently, reformatory schools were “transformed into social laboratories in which to carry out social experiments aimed at dealing with not only juvenile delinquency but also race betterment” (2012, p. 5). Paying particular attention to the creation of reformatory schools permit us to at once see the relational distance of youth of color as innately self-producing criminals in nature and always disciplinable subjects in matter. Distinction becomes fraught between student of color and criminal; being demonized, racialized, and pathologized by the institutions they are forced to or find themselves in. A politic of infiltration disrupts moments in history as places to begin to dislocate ourselves as indigenous students and students of color. By disidentifying with the University’s violent history, students can begin to rupture the neoliberal packaging and promises of institutions of higher education. Educational and penal institutions cannot be seen separately but instead as interlocking structures and systems that construct who is a deserving and undeserving citizen. 

Black Studies scholar Amber Wiley (2015) highlights the role of school architecture within the school-to-prison pipeline to stress the way schools instill conformity, obedience, policing and control of African Americans, Native Americans, and other people of color. Such disciplining practices were rooted in the civilizing ideals of early educators to assimilate ethnic minorities in the United States. Highlighting the defining features of education structures in the 1800’s, Wiley states that “School design promoted utilitarian concerns for order, control, and restriction of movement. Tables, chairs, and desks bolted to the floor discouraged lateral communication and other forms of community among students” (Para 7). This legacy of the contemporary biopolitics of schooling extends itself as an ongoing condition that seeks to debilitate historically oppressed students on multiple fronts. Once on campus, students of color and indigenous students especially from poor and working-class backgrounds face challenges such as being presumed incompetent, illiterate, and criminal. Against the rigid culture and structure of present-day academia, a politic of infiltration uplifts movements based on openness that encourages building community and seeking social transformation. Student infiltrators learn to navigate the University’s culture of restriction, and attempt to replace it with new modes of resistance.

It is no easy task to reimagine new ways of existing. The Neoliberal University continues to rest on violence against Black, Brown, and Indigenous bodies and minds; assaulting, battering, and murdering those who stand in the way. The confinement of historically oppressed students in the ongoing project of disciplining the student and producing the so-called rigorous scholar is how these violences manifest within the University. Subsequently, why have so many people of color invested their life’s work and livelihoods in this process? I would venture to say that many student activists from historically oppressed communities who ultimately make the commitment to stay in higher education are driven by the belief that their presence will result in transforming the University. Yet, solely being part of the university disregards that the problem is no longer one of access to it but of our placement and location in it. As Robin D.G. Kelly (2016) points out in Black Study, Black Struggle, “We must go to the root—the historical, political, social, cultural, ideological, material, economic root—of oppression in order to understand its negation, the prospect of our liberation. Going to the root illuminates what is hidden from us, largely because most structures of oppression and all of their various entanglements are simply not visible and not felt” (Para 33). To accomplish this we must unsettle power in whichever ways we can. In moving with Moten and Harney, the conversation of being in but not of the university must not stop at seeking refuge. We must consider the violences that happen as a point of departure towards action.

To this end, how do we make sense of those who have died at the hands of the University? I do not mean to be metaphorical. I am speaking to ways the University disregards human life. On both a historical and contemporary level, University funds and resources have been utilized to fund wars and occupations, build private immigrant detention centers, and support other carceral projects of violence. In many ways, the University is often responsible for a culture of slow death that looms over Black, Brown, and Indigenous peoples via suicide, inadequate healthcare, overworking employees, and a harsh and disciplining work environment. Those of us within the Neoliberal University are not an exception to the rule. In fact, many graduate students, lecturers, and faculty of color are in a constant precarious position. The pressures and stressors of academic life, as a contemporary colonial condition that manifests within our personal, social, and mental livelihoods and health, reveal a culture of disposability. Through radical grapevines of care, labor, and love for elders in our communities, many have collectively shared and understood the conditions, cautions, and remnants of the violences including the lives and deaths of Black feminist Audre Lorde and Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldúa as well as my queer Brown brother Jesus Estrada. 

Let us not forget that we have an obligation to disrupt the Neoliberal University. It is not enough to say we come from the communities that colonialism tried to destroy. We cannot claim difference here, if we do not actively become trespassers to the University; identifying ourselves strategically in ways that separates us from its neoliberal politics. A politic of infiltration is a call to intentionally trespass—to refuse to leave the premises.

Disorderly Conduct

engage in any of the following conduct in a public or private place, including on a school bus, knowing, or having reasonable grounds to know, that it would, or would tend to, alarm, anger or disturb others, or provoke an assault or breach of the peace: disturbs an assembly or meeting, not unlawful in its character^[11]State of Minnesota v. Jose Manuel Santillana, 27VB16172155, Stat. 609.72.1(2) (4^th D. Minn. 2016).

“Ay mijo, es que yo soy mensa para estas cosas” my mother often said when she would ask me to translate for her in English. Unlike other kids, many children of immigrant parents grow up cognizant of the many systematic barriers in this country. We serve as negotiators and mediators for our parents who come to this country for a better life—building an awareness around power and difference that uncovers our placement in it. It took many years to understand the significance of these moments my mother and I shared throughout my upbringing. These moments of disruption and translation were underscored by narratives of repression, disorientation, and resistance. I understood my mother’s refusal to speak English after living in this country for twenty years as both a result of classist, racist, and xenophobic attitudes towards immigrants, as well as an act of resistance to assimilate into a country who never saw her as a full human being. She negotiated her livelihood in ways that utilizes what José Esteban Muñoz calls disidentification, “a third mode of dealing with dominant ideology, one that neither opts to assimilate within such a structure nor strictly opposes it; rather, disidentification is a strategy that works on and against dominant ideology” (1999, p. 11). As a poor Mexican immigrant, my mothers complicated relationship to this country taught me a politic of refusal that keeps in tension my cultural values. Our language, phonics and storytelling, of poor, working-class, immigrant, and other origins, largely remains an active disruption in many spaces. Disorderly behavior or the refusal to conduct yourself in an orderly fashion, to neither opt in nor out of the options presented to you, signals the internal power to provoke. An infiltrator politic disorients colonial and neoliberal space. 

These encounters have made me well aware that I can never be fully legible to Western academia; always provoking some type of disorder, as with the case of my presence in graduate school. Many constantly reminded me of my illegitimacy through my writing, speaking, and actual physical presence on University grounds. Other well-intentioned allies assured me that such experiences were temporary, and suggested that things would change in my favor. However, it doesn’t matter how much I have written or how many years of experience I have, the work often feels depleting. The University’s disciplining mechanisms have ensured that we feel this way.

During my first year of graduate school, I took a course titled Feminist Genealogies, a core class all first year students took in my department at the University of Minnesota. Given that I came from an ethnic studies background, I was unsure of the classroom and writing expectations, but remained optimistic about the semester. Several weeks into the course, the professor had finally provided written feedback on our proposals. Before handing them out, she professed that she was very disappointed with the lack of coherence of many projects, indicating that she would post four examples of exceptional proposals via our online class site to help us in our writing. To my dismay, all four proposals were written by white students outside of our department. Additionally, most of her feedback to students of color in the course displayed language specifying that we were not up to par with graduate level thinking and writing. To treat and assume that someone’s writing is not up to par with graduate level writing is to commit to a universal rubric of knowledge production. As it usually is, those professors’ commitment to Western academic legibility ensures that stories about our families are not read as real theory, that research about our own communities are not considered rigorous enough, and that our code-switching is not thought of as sophisticated. Dismissing and diminishing the work of students of color while simultaneously highlighting the intellectual work of white students, demonstrates the racialized objective of disciplining writers. The act of disciplining entails the whitening of the writer; forcing indigenous scholars and scholars of color to write like a white man. 

Towards the end of the semester, the professor declined to meet with me as she proclaimed that she no longer had time to address my concerns. While this can easily be excused as interpersonal conflict, in which the professor simply disregards an individual’s feelings, it is representative of an array of elitist practices neatly nestled in internal spaces of intellectual academic engagement; the classroom. The place where dehumanizing pedagogical practices become more difficult to delineate especially if they are in an interdisciplinary department like feminist studies and ethnic studies where emphasis is placed on its critical and social justice roots; where the professor can assign Audre Lorde at the same time they repudiate students who write like her. Paradoxically, such departments founded on the backs of student activism neglect that which made it a powerful force to be reckoned with in the institution. I have seen departments and professors fall victim to paying lip service to the very things they critique. Feminist and ethnic studies departments across the United States often pride themselves on challenging the traditional disciplines and their methodologies, upholding anti-racist and feminist pedagogies, and decolonizing pursuits. Part of the interrogation of critically rethinking the work on feminist and ethnic studies departments involves a reevaluation of its foundations. Fundamentally, it would mean an ongoing commitment and investment in disrupting the order of things; not necessarily confined solely to the University.

A politic of infiltration accepts your personhood outside the confines of Western knowledge subject making; finding comfort in knowing that you can never fully be legible, recognizable, desired, and validated by the University. Both legibility and illegibility matter to the way you hold and work power in the benefit of liberation. Value is placed on disturbing order, that is when you inflict or (un)intentionally call onto the disorder of things, you are actively challenging and resisting systematic power. This happens in multiple ways; when you refuse to speak and engage in class as a practice of self-preservation; when you attend a planning meeting to occupy administrative spaces you are not welcomed in; when you push back against dressing like a “respectable” graduate student; when you use non-English language and non-white vernaculars in your papers as a proactive gesture to being unapologetically you; when you leave University grounds not as a means for giving up but because it is killing you. For student activists, the willingness to trespass and disturb public spaces is a direct counteraction to the Neoliberal University. For example, the act of collective protest on campus is the part of infiltration that names and exposes structural power. These students—the organizers admitted to colleges and universities who are deemed deserving and legible—have the ability to seep into its infrastructures to push for a redistribution of power and wealth. 

Unruly Assembly

assemble in a group of three or more persons and the assembly is held without unlawful purpose, but the participants so conduct themselves in a disorderly manner as to disturb or threaten the public peace.^[12] State of Minnesota v. Jose Manuel Santillana, 27VB16172155, Stat. 609.72.1(2) (4^th D. Minn. 2016).

The growing emphasis of diversity and inclusion within university policies as a response to decades of criticism and activism against the colonial foundation of higher education has given rise to a new set of rhetoric, practices, and policies—that have created the perception that students from all racial, ethnic, economic, gender, and sexual orientations are welcomed. However, once successfully enrolled in the university, minoritized students are confronted and forced to deal with the fact that they are only valued to the degree that they are invested in its hegemonic power structure. Moreover, the popular ideological phrasing of diversity and inclusion currently used by campuses across the country has resulted in the University’s appropriation of earlier student movements who envisioned a different future; one in which the language of their movements did not further facilitate the silencing and marginalizing of students of color and indigenous students. Indisputably, the University has been effective in reinventing itself to fit the needs of the time by consistently manipulating its power for racial capitalist investments. Student activists, above all other agitators in the University, have shown more promise in disrupting its power. For many, it’s not about one ultimate end, it’s about the process, the act of always disrupting. While radical student activists most often get reduced as troublemakers by the University and its loyalists, they have literally laid their bodies on the line for the pursuit of social, political, and economic justice.

Black, Brown, and Indigenous radical student activists along with women, trans, queers, and all others who find themselves on the margins still threaten and intimidate the University. They may have opened the doors for us, but they can never offer our communities full freedom. Our presence, convoluted in criminality, has always assured them of their mission, to stay vigilant and maintain control. They allow us to move within the premises as long as we do not cause disturbance. It is for this reason that we plan our congregations; taking note of those who have come before us but also those who are not here. As Chicana feminist scholar Edén Torres signals, we must be aware that “The establishment of theoretical domains and reinventing ideas take time and energy that could be focused on making revolution. While we can critique certain concepts, or point out the limitations of various claims, our enemy is not ‘essentialism’ or ‘cultural nationalism’ or identity politics…Our enemy is the global expansion of capitalism and consumer culture” (2003, p.71). We radicalize ourselves, we organize, we agitate, we repeat. But this comes at a cost—student activists run the risk of more obstacles and ostracism in their efforts to organize—their grades take a toll as they make bigger commitments to their movements; they become even less legible as student subjects to those with money and power; they often do not get the prestigious scholarships and fellowships. 

A politic of infiltration heavily relies on rethinking the spatiality of unruly assembly. It rejects the idea that the University functions independently, autonomously, and separately from the neoliberal violences of United States and the world. The University is in many ways the apparatus and mechanism that links knowledge, power, and violence across geographies. As I have previously mentioned, one cannot simply be within the University without understanding its horrific establishment and ongoing investments in the detainment, confinement, and murder of Black, Brown, immigrant, and Indigenous people globally. By which I mean, the more contemporary catastrophic outcomes of United States interventionism across the global south. As student activists, we need more innovative ways of insurgency; of knowing, being and acting. An insurgency that collectively moves us to act against authority. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study highlights the inseparability of the University to professionalization, elitism, scientific efficiency, respectability, and violence. The politics of infiltration that I call for here draws inspiration from their call to students:

Students must come to see themselves as the problem, which, counter to the complaints of restorationist critics of the university, is precisely what it means to be a customer, to take on the burden of realisation and always necessarily be inadequate to it. Later, these students will be able to see themselves properly as obstacles to society, or perhaps, with lifelong learning, students will return having successfully diagnosed themselves as the problem. (2013, p. 29)

Harney and Moten are arguing for a refuge in the undercommons that pushes us “To abuse its hospitality, to spite its mission, to join its refugee colony, its gypsy encampment, to be in but not of—this is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university” (2013, p. 26). Most valuably, it is calling for an emphases and commitment to collectivity.

A politic of infiltration is the constant call to act and organize against the material, epistemic, and spiritual violences of academia. It is the difficult call to build networks of critical solidarity across all struggles. To utilize public and private university grounds for building revolutionary alliances. Fundamentally creating a community of co-conspirators. It is a project of motion, always in flux, converging the knowing and being of multiple sites of (im)possibilities. Working and navigating the system for a more just world. Its foundation must simultaneously work against antiblackness, settler colonialism, xenophobia, capitalism, heteropatriarchy, transphobia, homophobia, and all other systems rooted in colonial violence. Aside from seeking refuge—the radical move towards a relational politic of infiltration—is the intentionality of actively and collectively forming movements of resistance that embrace action-oriented possibilities of liberation. Student activism and protest are at the heart of these unruly matters. 

On the (Im)possibilities

The nine months following the University of Minnesota Board of Regents meeting of 2016 was particularly challenging for the six-student activists. After deliberately calling the police and charging us with six preliminary misdemeanors, University officials denied any responsibilities in repressing and criminalizing student dissent even as the University’s Office of Student Conduct and Academic Integrity (OSCAI) now the Office of Community Standards, actively sought to punish and discipline students. According to OSCAI, we were in violation of three codes: Subd. 4 Refusal to Identify and Comply, Subd. 16 Disruptive Behavior, and Subd. 20 Violation of Local, State, or Federal Laws or Ordinances. On an individual level, the complex and layered prosecution took a toll on my already depleting physical and emotional health. I woke up one week unable to move my body without feeling excruciating pain. My teaching as well as my grades suffered, and at the end of the academic year much of our demands remained ignored. So, why, you might ask, do we continue the work of disruption? Why not leave academia? Some of us have. Some of us are always halfway out the door. 

The contradiction—both in the possibilities and impossibilities of resisting the Neoliberal University—lies in the negotiations that we must all make for ourselves individually and sometimes collectively. As students, student activists, agitators and organizers committed to social, political, cultural, spiritual, and economic justice and liberation—especially indigenous people and people of color—there are often no easy answers to why we choose to stay or leave. A politic of infiltration refuses any one formula of being against the violences in the Neoliberal University. Instead, it brings to the fore the radical right to grapple with our own realities as we see best fit. Always encouraging us to gradually move through the University in ways that acknowledges our presence as both a negation and negotiation; Establishing ourselves strategically when needed but ultimately committed to obtaining knowledge for the process of disrupting the Neoliberal University. 

References

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Brown, C. (2016). Minnesota history: Southern slave owner helped revive University of Minnesota. Retrieved from Star Tribune http://www.startribune.com/minnesota-history-southern-slave-owner-helped-revive-university-of-minnesota/383521411/

Cacho, L. (2012). Social death: Racialized rightlessness and the criminalization of the unprotected (Nation of newcomers). New York: New York University Press.

Chatterjee, P. & Maira, S. (2014). The imperial university: Academic repression and scholarly dissent. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. 

Chávez-Garcia, M. (2012). States of delinquency: Race and science in the making of California’s juvenile justice system. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. 

Ferguson, R. (2012). The Reorder of Things The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (Difference Incorporated). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Gutiérrez y Muhs, G., Flores Niemann, Y., Gonzalez, C.G., & Harris A.P. (2012). Presumed incompetent: The intersections of race and class for women in academia. Boulder, Colo.: University Press of Colorado: Utah State University Press.

Harney, S., & Moten, F. (2013). The undercommons: Fugitive planning & black study. Wivenhoe; New York; Port Watson: Minor Compositions.

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King, T.L. (2017). Humans Involved: Lurking in the Lines of Posthumanist Flight. Critical Ethnic Studies Journal, 3(1), 162-185.

Lorde, A. (2007). Sister outsider: Essays and speeches (Revised ed.). Berkeley: Crossing Press.

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Suggested citation:

Santillana Blanco, J.M. 2024. “Unruly Subjects: On Student Activism, the Neoliberal University, and Infiltration.” In eds. José Manuel Santillana Blanco, Kidiocus King-Carroll, Naimah Zulmadelle Pétigny, and Kong Pheng Pha in collaboration with AGITATE! Editorial Collective. Seditious Acts: AGITATE! Special Volume with CRES: https://agitatejournal.org/article/unruly-subjects-on-student-activism-the-neoliberal-university-and-infiltration/

Pursuing my PhD is the most selfish endeavor I have ever undertaken. This was the self-told refrain for most of my first year as a doctoral student, for I knew that every book I read and every paper I wrote (including this one) was largely for personal gain. Not coming from academic lineage or economic privilege, I could not escape the profound sense of guilt of leaving so many behind in the everyday struggle to live, labor and learn in a school that is less of a land-grant institution and more of a land-grab institution; an educational system that is more private, than public; a corporation that presents students with more educational opportunists than educational opportunities; and a tower that is as anti-ebony as it is ivory.

Heeding Hortense Spillers’ (1987) warning about the limitations of language and the dangers of solecism,^[1]“Solecism” refers to both grammatical incorrectness and also the transgression of particular social norms. this paper offers a potential introduction to a new academic “grammar book.” With such an offering comes the possibility of upholding a key task of black studies, namely the need to “rewrite knowledge as we know it” (Wynter 1994: 68).  A new academic grammar book requires substantive engagement with those concerned with the limitations of language and the contingency of what we conceive as “human.” Attending to these prerequisites, I illustrate, vis-á-vis Spillers and Wynter, the intimate connection between grammar and “being human as praxis” (McKittrick and Wynter 2015). Part of developing “the human as verb” (McKittrick 2015: 8) entails (un)learning how to speak.

Without grammatical correctness, insurgent intellectuals are left with the “master’s tools” which “will never dismantle the master’s house” (Lorde 2011). All of my courses include both learning and unlearning objectives precisely because of the enduring legacy of  what Charles Mills (1997: 18) describes as an “epistemology of ignorance,” and academic jingoism committed to silencing dissent and repressing all threats to all alleged truths of the current episteme. Initially, I introduced unlearning objectives to account for the miseducation of a K12 system that celebrates the “discovery of the Americas,” the myth that Abraham Lincoln “freed the slaves,” and that America is a “land of immigrants.” Mills understood that epistemologies of ignorance were not isolated to K12 schooling. In fact, Mills saw the university as arable terrain for producing epistemologies of ignorance. Hence, I offer this paper as a provocation and invitation to co-author a new academic grammar book.

This paper intervenes in research on racism in higher education (Ladner et al. 1973; Feagin et al. 1990; Margolis and Romero 1998; Solorzano 1998; Marable et al. 2000), the “incorporation of minority difference (Ferguson 2012), and the function of “diversity” in the university (Ahmed 2012). For “negatively-racialized”^[2]In the essay, “Strategic Anti-Essentialism: Decolonizing Decolonization,” Nandita Sharma (2015: 175) uses the term “negatively racialized persons.” I borrow the term to illustrate the role of … Continue reading students attending predominantly white institutions (PWIs: pronounced pēē-wēēs),^[3]There are multiple terms used to describe Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs or pee wees). In this paper, I use “pee-wees” and the “anti-ebony tower” as functionally comparable to convey … Continue reading the ivoryness of the tower is ostensibly clear. What remains unclear is how the ivory tower thrives on that which it is opposed to, namely its less apparent ebony-side. The permanence of the anti-ebony tower is not contingent on the admission-denial of a single form of difference. Rather, it is sustained by mutually-constituting, yet distinct forms of oppression. Hence, the anti-ebony tower incorporates multiple differences while remaining anti- Indigenous, anti-brown, anti-Arab/Muslim, anti-Asian, anti-women, anti-queer, anti-trans, anti-disability, and anti-ambiguity/ous.

Using metaphor, ridicule, contradiction, and ambiguity which are often most conducive to multiple possibilities, this paper serves as a “powerful solvent of the pretensions of hegemonic power” (Scott 2014: 62). Because “poetry is not a luxury” (Lorde 1982) and biography is integral to the “sociological imagination” (Mills 1959), the claims I make in this paper are grounded in and substantiated by experiential evidence—a threat to all “reasons-of-state ethics” and thus what is accepted as “common sense” (Wynter 2013: 298). As a student of struggle, organizing and activism remain key sites of knowledge production and knowledge producers. I am referring to the rich and radical knowledge generated from being in struggle with and for others. Through an emphasis on meritocracy and cultivating a possessive individual, the university prohibits this sort of co-creativeness. Thus, working against what we are within (Hardt and Negri 2000) remains a prerequisite for many seeking to reconcile the contradiction of being in and not of the anti- ebony tower.

In the first section, I begin with a proposal that negatively-racialized students reject the notion that learning, laboring and living in the anti-ebony tower is a privilege. There are countless encounters with systems of violence and domination that serve to remind them that they are not in fact privileged. However, the specious allure of fellowships, awards, publications, and academic service (i.e. diversity committees, task forces, etc.) make negatively-racialized students feel even more indebted to a system that owes them more than they owe it. Section two is concerned with the proliferation of euphemisms in the anti-ebony tower and their function in universalizing experiences and naturalizing racialized violence. In search of effective ways to navigate the anti- ebony tower, negatively-racialized students are forced to learn to survive in a setup. Hence, in the third section I ask whether survival in the anti-ebony tower is a paradox or an effective incorporation of minority difference or both. In section four, I illustrate the futile quest for (un)intelligibility within higher education, while offering an alternative reading to the dreaded “impostor syndrome.”

In the fifth section, I ask what happens when “the scholar denied” (Morris 2015) becomes the scholar admitted. In order to mitigate these risks, negatively-racialized students have no other choice but to remain on guard. Defense strategies and reactivism,^[4]I conceptualize “reactivism” as a form of political organizing that hampers self-determination, self-definition, and the overall creativity of various social movements. The anti-ebony tower … Continue reading however, are sustainable only for so long. Thus, the final section is dedicated to insurgent intellectuals committed to maintaining, what Harney and Moten (2013: 26) call, a “criminal relationship” to the university.

Rejecting the notion that we are “privileged”

The anti-ebony tower was designed without negatively-racialized students in mind. However, the opposite is also true. The foundation of the anti-ebony tower is constructed in response to the threat of those classified as an always already racialized, gendered, and classed “other” (Ferguson 2012: 85). Hence, in addition to being designed without many of us in mind, the anti-ebony tower was designed precisely with us in mind. We were exactly those who were not supposed to be granted admission. It is no surprise why “privilege” is then one of the most effective universalisms employed by the anti-ebony tower to homogenize difference and conceal abuse. Whether it be faculty and administrators telling negatively-racialized students “it is a privilege to be here,” campus security monitors who roam the campus after hours and on weekends and harass negatively-racialized students by demanding identification, or actual campus police who arrest them for their activism, there are numerous signs and experiences to remind negatively-racialized students they are learning in a space that was designed without them in mind. The most salient reminder is the immense gap between the place they currently learn (i.e. the anti-ebony tower) and the spaces that taught them the most (i.e. non-academic space).

Many negatively-racialized students experience a profound sense of guilt upon leaving their communities to embark on a career in the anti-ebony tower. Lest they forget about their “privilege,” they are awarded scholarships and fellowships to remind them of the academy’s benevolence. I reject the notion that access to the anti-ebony tower is a “privilege.” It’s not a privilege to be an “exceptional _____________,” to go from dysselected to selected. It’s not a privilege to be so distant from your community that when loved ones are harmed by the same state terror you study, you are overwhelmed with guilt. It’s not a privilege to attend academic conferences abroad and have the TSA cut up the inside of your suitcase and leave a note with a Department of Homeland Security logo as a souvenir. It’s not a privilege to be racially profiled, searched and criminalized^[5]Here, I acknowledge the contingency and limitations of terms like “criminalized.” Criminalization is understood in reference to who or what has been constructed as “criminal” over the course … Continue reading by university police who construct you as guilty before proven less guilty. It’s not a privilege to be maced for trying to prevent fascists and white supremacists from coming to campus. It’s not a privilege to be charged for destruction of destructive property or arrested and jailed for remaining committed to anti-oppressive work. By definition, if it is a “privilege” to be somewhere then certain groups aren’t supposed to be there. In rejecting our “privileged” positions in the anti-ebony tower, we create greater opportunities of being beholden not to the university, but to each other. In doing so, we create a sense of fellowship that requires no competition.

Can we please let D.E.I. D-I-E?

The proliferation of euphemisms is partly responsible for negatively-racialized students feeling “privileged” to be in the anti-ebony tower. “Diversity,” “campus climate,” “multiculturalism,” “inclusion,” and “community engagement” are some of the euphemisms popularized within the neoliberal and financialized university. The function of euphemisms within academic space does not differ much from their use outside of it. Euphemisms stand in for that which is less appealing, making them ineffectual attempts to conceal unflattering language. In addition to masking that which is unsightly, euphemisms also preserve systems of power and domination.

Whenever one encounters euphemism in language it is a nearly infallible sign that one has stumbled on a delicate subject. It is used to obscure something that is negatively valued or would prove to be an embarrassment if declared more forthrightly. Thus we have a host of terms, at least in Anglo American culture, designed to euphemize that place where urination and defecation take place: john, restroom, comfort station, water closet, lavatory, loo and so on (Scott 1990: 53).

Absent from James Scott’s list of spaces used for the release, collection, and disposal of public excrement is the many spaces of the anti-ebony tower including the classroom, faculty and administrative offices, auditoriums and virtually any other part of the university. Euphemisms obscure the dual function of the university as both learning environment and refuse container. Minimal sensory training is required to detect the pernicious toxins exuding from euphemisms. Allergic reactions to such bullshit are common, but can be alleviated by limiting exposure to saccharine discourse, like “campus climate” and “diversity.”

Take for instance, “campus climate.” Drawing on the work of Toni Morrison, Christina Sharpe (2016: 106) uses “the weather” to illustrate how “antiblackness is as pervasive as climate.” Sharpe (2016: 106) describes the weather of being “in the wake,” as part of “the atmosphere: slave law transformed into lynch law, into Jim and Jane Crow, and other administrative logics that remember the brutal conditions of enslavement after the event of slavery has supposedly come to an end.” Though meteorological “weather” may be unpredictable, Sharpe’s ontological forecast suggests that antiblackness is quite predictable and extends well beyond 5-day or even 10-day projections.

In addition to emphasizing the need to divest from fossil fuels, demands must be made for the university to divest from whiteness, colonialism and antiblackness. While limiting greenhouse emissions/carbon dioxide to 350 parts per million, there also exist ways to create a cap on whiteness. For example, students can begin to enroll in more classes taught by nonwhite faculty, and perhaps limiting their whiteness intake to one white professor per semester or one white person seeking to “decolonize” themselves. Here I am referring to the many scholars who claim to do work on whiteness without working on whiteness. By working on whiteness, I mean performing the labor to undo and eviscerate it. In taking these steps, racialized students can feel good about their efforts to leave a smaller whiteness footprint and contribute to what a potentially positive form of climate change. However, other euphemisms within the “campus climate” require attention.

“Diversity” acts as a proxy for substantive engagement with difference and the structural violence linked to the distinct value ascribed to such difference. The anti-ebony tower’s treatment of difference is marked by incorporation, display and disappearance. Here I am thinking with Jodi Melamed, who in Represent and Destroy, describes how within an era of “neoliberal multiculturalism,” the incorporation of minoritized differences requires exceptional nonwhite people to esteem themselves at the expense of other racialized people. “Esteeming some people of color of the same race, according to conventional categories, makes it easier to accept that others of that same race may be systematically treated unequally” (Melamed 2011: 153). So contrary to liberal thought, “representation” is not synonymous with “liberation.” Rather, as the title of Melamed’s book suggests, “representation” functions as a tool not just for destruction, but for the obliteration of certain racialized people. The university uses discretion when deciding how to best showcase or erase difference depending on the “minoritized subject.” Those who get the most shine or display are “colonized intellectuals” (Fanon 1963: 158) whose scholarship legitimates the ongoing material and epistemic violence against negatively-racialized subjects, pioneered by white social scientists.

Many negatively-racialized students at pee-wees are part of a touring exhibition of difference. Similar to installations at museums, they are defined by a transitory existence of difference that is always already “coming soon” to an anti-ebony tower near you. The anti-ebony tower promotes cosmetic diversity using images of negatively-racialized students in admission catalogues, videos, websites, and other marketing materials used to solicit interest from prospective students and their families. What cosmetic diversity obscures is the racialized realities behind the faces that grace the covers of such promotional products.

I use “cosmetic diversity” not to suggest that there is a truer or purer form of diversity that is less problematic. The reality is that “diversity” is itself no better. In fact, Jodi Melamed locates early histories of the term to eugenics movement:

….Liberal political philosophers ranging from John-Jacques Rousseau (1762) to John Stuart Mill (1869) advocated the free play of the “good” diversity of European talents, interests, and beliefs as the means and end of a free society. In contrast, the race sciences of the period were concerned with controlling “bad” diversity, conceived as the biological inferiority of non-white races, through sterilization, termination, incarceration and exclusion. Harry Laughlin, for example, America’s leading eugenicist in the first half of the 20th century, argued in the context of debates over the passage of the Johnson-Reed Act in 1924 “progress could not be built on mongrel melting-pots but is based on the organized diversity of races” (Laughlin 1939). The naturalization of race in relation to the category of diversity is what made credible these otherwise contradictory frameworks for understanding human difference. Concepts of diversity and race worked together to define “the white race” as so superior to others that freedom and self-cultivation were only beneficial and available to them…(Melamed 2015: 85).

Melamed helps us to rethink the function of “diversity” (Ahmed 2012), while questioning its beneficiaries. Whether “mongrel melting-pots” are being civilized by whites or nonwhites are being sprinkled against a predominantly white canvass, namely the anti-ebony tower, diversity is enacted and performed in service of those whose identity would remain hidden (Doane 1997) and “cultureless” (Perry 2001) without it. As “diversity” becomes more salient through a process of whiteness enrichment, it exploits the labor “diversity workers” through extraction, cooptation and evisceration.

Exposing the continuities of incorporation within and exclusion from the anti-ebony tower, Ferguson (2012: 204) notes, “Diversity thus works to manage the redistribution of sensible notions of minority existence—particularly ones that frame minority incorporation as institutionally possible and beneficial, thereby limiting the redistribution of material and social relations involving ‘minoritized subjects’ and thus secreting tactics for minority exclusion.” In other words, the admission of negatively-racialized subjects into the university is a specious measure of “progress.” Rather, “diversity” legitimates the unequal treatment of those granted access to the anti-ebony tower, while fortifying the walls of the academy to protect against further infiltration. Increasing the legibility of minoritized subjects within the university legitimates new forms of violence against members of this dysselected category.

In an analysis of the “Join LAPD” campaign, Dylan Rodriguez makes clear that Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) regimes do more to legitimate racialized violence in policing than eliminate it. Rodriguez (2021: 48) shows how inclusion initiatives like, “Join LAPD” function as “counterinsurgency” strategies used to incorporate minoritized difference, while simultaneously naturalizing state terror against members of the same racialized groups who join the ranks. In turn, “diversifying the force,” becomes a key indicator of “justice in policing” because when a black or brown cop is brutalizing a black or brown person, race can’t be a factor, right? Hence, the inclusion of more black and brown cops will always come at the expense of marginalized black and brown communities. At a time when more and more public sociologists identify as disciples and protectors of DEI, I wonder whether DEI regimes require our defense. Are we courageous enough to let DEI D-I-E? As a site of racial capitalism and academic opportunism, DEI programs remain highly coveted and profitable for all those committed to establishing a false baseline from which transformative change begins.

Given the differences within difference, “students of color,” as a category, is deployed as both a euphemism and universalism within the anti-ebony tower. By privileging already privileged “students of color” at the expense of those who don’t come from academic lineage or socioeconomic privilege, the anti-ebony tower constructs the ideal “safe minority.” Under global capitalism and empire^[6]Through its incorporation of minoritized difference and expansive reach into local, often economically depressed and disenfranchised communities, the university upholds key attributes of what Michael … Continue reading, every difference is an “opportunity” (Hardt and Negri 2000: 151) and the anti-ebony tower finds ways to naturalize the marginalized positions of negatively-racialized students through the tokenization of particular “minoritized subjects” who have subscribed to the title of “exceptional ___________.” However, as Cherrie Moraga ably writes, “social change does not occur through tokenism or exceptions to the rule of discrimination, but through systematic abolishment of the rule itself” (Moraga 2015: xviii). Tokenization does not only involve favoring the exceptional ___________. It also legitimates violence against the un- tokenized, nonwhite person. By dint of the token’s immersion in white space, they satisfy a maximum nonwhite consumption requirement. In turn, whiteness fashions itself in the image of empire, allowing for the horizontal, as opposed to hierarchical, diffusion of power.  The potential to reproduce much of the violence we aim to dismantle reminds us that making the anti-ebony tower and other predominantly white space more ebony is but a start to a much longer process.

Rather than embracing euphemisms like “campus climate,” “diversity,” “inclusion,” “community engagement,” etc., it is more useful to question their function in obscuring negatively-valued subjects.

How to reveal what you are complicit in hiding.

One of the most effective means of incorporating minority difference into the anti-ebony tower is through what scholars have called the “hidden curriculum” (Durkheim 1956; Apple 1990; Margolis and Romero 1998; Smith 2004). According to Buffy Smith (2004: 48), the hidden curriculum refers to the “unwritten and unspoken values, dispositions, and social and behavioral expectations that govern the interactions between teachers and students within schools.” The message, both tacit and explicit, conveyed is that fitness for the academy depends on rigor and a commitment to learning and navigating the hidden curriculum. While some negatively-racialized students do so willingly, and others begrudgingly, the outcome is the same: effective incorporation of minoritized differences.

Incorporation is closely related to assimilation and as a framework that uses white, male, and middle-class norms as a reference category to which negatively-racialized students should comport, the hidden curriculum is as assimilative as it is incorporative.

In order to resolve the hidden curriculum problem, retention programs should not focus on refining college students’ “embodied cultural capital,” that is, the students’ dispositions and behaviors formed during the early socialization process, which influence how they perceive and interact with teachers. Instead, they should concentrate on how to teach students the academic cultural knowledge of the institution (e.g., the most appropriate way to engage in classroom discussions), regardless of what type of embodied cultural capital they bring with them to school (Smith 2004: 48).

The paternalistic tone of this passage presupposes a deficit model, whereby negatively-racialized students are constructed as barren vessels of capital (e.g. social, cultural, human), reducing their potential to succeed. The reality is that many negatively-racialized students from dispossessed communities already know that a hidden curriculum exists in the academy. It is no different than the tacit codes that orient most other predominantly white spaces outside of the academy including the labor market (Anderson 1999; Young 2004), education (Fordham and Ogbu 1986), and housing (Massey and Denton 1993). In a culture that encourages “code switching” (Anderson 1999) and shuns code-sticking (i.e. retention of local and indigenous knowledge), negatively-racialized students are treated as potential sites of academic civilization/colonization.

Not only does beginning from such a deficit model stigmatize always already marginalized groups, but it also elides the countless contributions of negatively-racialized students. In critically analyzing traditional epistemologies of the anti-ebony tower, we unearth the vestiges of alternative sites of knowledge production often disappeared and/or coopted by the academy. That is, the “hidden curriculum” is not solely hidden from negatively-racialized students, but is predicated on the elision or hiding of indigenous forms of knowledge negatively-racialized students bring to the academy. 

While hiding local and indigenous knowledges, faculty and administrators in the anti- ebony tower remain in a relentless quest to find an “exceptional ___________”. However, acceptance into the anti-ebony tower does not make anyone exceptional, but rather, beneficiaries of different opportunity structures. There are plenty of leaders without extra initials behind their name from dispossessed and negatively-racialized communities. Yet, negatively-racialized students are trained to forget these faces and spaces once they begin their academic careers. In return for prestigious scholarships and fellowships, the anti-ebony tower expects negatively-racialized students to put up a “front” (Goffman 1959) by remaining obsequious and reproducing a status quo that devalues lived experience and renders local knowledges unintelligible.

Impostor to whom?

Negatively-racialized students within the anti-ebony tower are constantly wrestling with the invisible/hypervisible paradox (e.g. being the only black student in a class). Black students, including many other negatively-racialized students, recognize the potential to be simultaneously visible and invisible in spaces said to be most conducive to their academic success (Feagin et al. 1990). Michelle Wright (2015) argues that it is not enough to ask, “What is blackness?” Instead, we must ask “when and where is blackness?” Both blackness and black people are sometimes hard to find in the anti-ebony tower. Yet, black students are acutely aware of when they become both legible and illegible within the anti-ebony tower’s reading of “difference.”

Similar to Kathryn McKittrick’s (2006: 93) description of black people in Canada, Black students “are presumed surprises because they are ‘not here’ and ‘here’ simultaneously.” In turn, white students “sight/site” their black counterparts, while remaining oriented to a white habitus.^[7]Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2010: 104) describes “white habitus” as a “racialized uninterrupted socialization process that conditions and creates whites’ racial tastes, perceptions, feelings and … Continue reading While the blackness of the black student never leaves, its legibility to white students may rely on questions of when and where. Does the student’s blackness emerge during classroom discussion about Black Lives Matter? Does their blackness disappear when all graduate students are the “best and brightest”? The legibility of negatively-racialized students depends on space and time. The anachronistic spacetime of the anti-ebony tower, however, produces a constant misreading of this dysselected class. The pressures of illegibility lead some towards a quest for recognition and intelligibility within the anti-ebony tower. This specious quest to be understood is, however, quite futile because once made intelligible, we are susceptible to being rendered invisible through the processes of extraction, exploitation, erasure, and cooptation. Conversely, Stefano Harney (2015: 125) argues that seeking illegibility within the university is also a pointless pursuit: “I think once you’re trying to be illegible, you’re already legible.”

Attempting to form a sense of belonging in the anti-ebony tower, many negatively-racialized students suffer from what some call “impostor syndrome,” which represents a sort of existential crisis based on questioning one’s fitness and qualifications as a student, instructor, etc. Upon learning this definition, I realized that my own was incorrect. I thought impostor syndrome reflected the sense of being an impostor not to most of the performers in the university, but to the dysselected cast of people constituting one’s community outside of the university. I shudder at the thought of becoming an impostor to members of my family and community.

For far too long the agony of negatively-racialized students have been on display for the ivory tower. To quote Renato Rosaldo (1989: 202), “as the Other becomes more culturally visible, the self becomes correspondingly less so.” The “self,” Rosaldo refers to, is the white, Western-self, while the “Other” represents its negation. Rosaldo is highlighting the way “diversity” and displays of difference enriches the lives of the privileged and powerful while also relieving them of any responsibility to be accountable for the construction of the “Other,” and the state of “Otherness.” White people then resign themselves to a comfortable position as spectators of difference, as opposed to active participants in anti-whiteness work. Negatively-racialized students can no longer be the only ones to work on whiteness. Teaching people about difference is an emotionally, psychically, and physically exhausting exercise that negatively-racialized subjects perform every day. Attempting to help the selected understand the struggles of the dysselected sometimes feels like a largely futile quest.

In Towards a Global Idea of Race, Denise Ferreira da Silva critiques postcolonial studies and critical race and ethnic studies (CRES) for an overemphasis on the exclusion of the racial other from modernity and post-Enlightenment knowledge projects. Critiques of the racial subaltern’s exclusion behooves scholars to imagine possibilities for inclusion. But it is precisely such a curiosity that Ferreira da Silva criticizes for producing Europe’s affectable racial “other” in relation to the (white) “transparent I.” As Ferreira da Silva (2007: 162) writes, “…race relations has produced racial subjection as an effect of the fundamental impossibility of certain strangers’ becoming…modern. Not only does this produce blackness as an impossible basis for formulating any project of emancipation; it suggests, that because it always already the exclusive attribute of a transparent I, the racial subaltern’s desire for emancipation for inclusion in the dominant (white Anglo-Saxon society), is fundamentally a desire for self-obliteration.”

When “the scholar denied” becomes the scholar admitted

The abuse of negatively-racialized students by white faculty and students is typically expected in higher education. I am not surprised when white faculty make condescending remarks about my position in the academy. I’m not surprised when faculty ask me to be careful about what I say because of my “visible presence” in my department. I’m not surprised when we are assigned readings that construct first generation and other “disadvantaged” students as scapegoats for the devolution of intellectual rigor in the academy. I’m not surprised when my department asks to pass off my activism as its own. I’m not surprised when white faculty steal my ideas and present them in ways that seem more legible to others. I’m not surprised when white faculty esteem the “safe person of color” while devaluing the unsafe ones. I’m not surprised when I sense that I am viewed as a threat (both intellectually and otherwise) to white faculty. I’m not surprised that white faculty refuse to relinquish their “possessive investment in whiteness” (Lipsitz 2006).

What do we do though when other racialized subjects appropriate the logic of neoliberal multiculturalism^[8] In addition to bringing attention to the scholar denied, I feel there also exists a need to consider the denied scholarship within sociology. For example, what are the implications of making Du … Continue reading to further our sense of marginalization and isolation in the academy? Most negatively racialized students have enough sense to appreciate the struggles of most “faculty of color” in the anti-ebony tower—performing an immense amount of invisible labor under the guise of “service”; offering counsel to negatively-racialized students inside and outside their discipline; being subject to ongoing forms of violence because of their legibility and hypervisibility within the anti-ebony tower. Upon entry, faculty of color are quickly isolated and quarantined from their counterparts to thwart the possibility of coalition building. Pee-wees are designed to promote self-preservation as opposed to cooperation among negatively-racialized persons. By hiring individual faculty of color from disparate disciplines, the anti-ebony tower fosters a sense of isolation and vulnerability. According to James Scott (1990: 128), “Imperial traditions of recruiting administrative staff from marginal, despised groups were designed precisely to create a trained cadre that was isolated from the populace and entirely dependent on the ruler for their status.” While Scott was describing the efforts of rulers to reign through social control and surveillance, the anti-ebony tower also governs through such methods of force and domination. With emotional armor as their main source of protection, faculty of color are inured into a perpetual state of self-preservation under repressive conditions in the anti-ebony tower. There is, however, a thin line between self-preservation and selfishness. With negligible support from their departments and aid for having to work twice as hard to be half as good, subscription to the  “exceptional ___________” persona becomes a convenient identity some faculty of color assume.

In The Scholar Denied, Aldon Morris argues that W.E.B. Du Bois is the founder of American scientific sociology and implores the discipline to acknowledge what many black sociologists already knew. Using rich archival data and methods, Morris makes the case that Du Bois be placed among canonical sociologists—Marx, Weber, and Durkheim. Morris’ compelling work implicates several prominent sociologists in the extraction, exploitation, and intellectual theft of Du Bois’ ideas and research. In addition to imploring sociology to acknowledge Du Bois’ countless contributions, Morris also exposes how the keepers of the canon systematically kept Du Bois out of the discipline’s history. I agree with Morris on this point, while pushing for answers to another important question: What happens when the scholar denied becomes the scholar admitted?^[9]In addition to bringing attention to the scholar denied, I feel there also exists a need to consider the denied scholarship within sociology. For example, what are the implications of making Du Bois … Continue reading Here, the concept of “admission” serves as another double entendre. I explore the “admission” of particular negatively-racialized subjects and also the anti-ebony tower’s lack of admission when it comes to acknowledging its harming negatively-racialized students and professors. Whether admission is granted for prospective students or those entering the ranks of the professoriate, the transition from being denied to admitted requires earnest reflection over the terms and conditions of entry. In a space where there are so few negatively-racialized subjects in general, some of us expect there to be some solidarity expressed for our linked struggle. We expect faculty to remember what it was like as undergraduate and graduate students attending pee-wees.

Appreciating the potential for those most violable to reproduce violence is vital knowledge for any student of color entering the anti-ebony tower with excessive faith in those who bear some resemblance to themselves. As the saying goes, “skin folk ain’t always kinfolk.” My criticism of colonized intellectuals should not obscure the violence of colonizing intellectuals, who are predominantly white, cis gendered, and male. In other words, the mistreatment of negatively-racialized students by faculty of color pales in comparison to the systemic maltreatment by professors who are largely pale and male.

Because of the threat of colonized and colonizing intellectuals, I am forced to sport an emotional armor, even in the company of “colleagues.” Students and faculty have the capacity to reproduce a logic of individualism and self-preservation by appropriating words and ideas for personal gain. When those with existing privileges (e.g. publications, awards) engage in this type of intellectual “boosting,” it is hard to view them any differently than faculty who take credit for the ideas of others. Why would people want to “jack” shit? I am left to assume it is because they know jack shit.

It’s not a surprise that when academics jack shit they tend to produce more scholarshit than scholarship. By “scholarshit”, I refer to research wrought with consistent grammatical errors, including work that overrepresents Man (i.e. white, male, heterosexual, bourgeois, able- bodied) as human (Wynter 2003). Similarly, scholarshit is the product of commitments to “principles of universality,” predicated on the construction and naturalization of “exclusions of racial particularity” (Goldberg 1993: 39). For example, scholarshit makes the mistake of invoking “agency,” when the “ontological problem of blackness is not resolved” (Warren 2016: 63). Here, I am referring to those who study slavery as if it was devoid of “social death” (Patterson 1985) and an “afterlife” (Hartman 2007). Many scholars get stuck in scholarshit when calling for “ethics” (Warren 2016: 65) or “justice” (James and Costa Vargas 2012: 193) as if comprehension of both ideals did not depend on the captivity, enslavement, and brutalization of black people as a point of reference. I am also referring to rampant solecism within criminology, including the study of “mass incarceration.” Given that, as Dylan Rodriguez (2016: 13) convincingly argues, “it’s not the ‘masses’ being criminalized and locked up,” criminological research is wrought with measurement error. “Mass incarceration” is also not merely an issue of too many people being incarcerated. The word “mass” summons calls to “reform” the prison industrial complex by reducing the number of currently incarcerated people or sending fewer people to jails and prisons. The problem with these proposals is that they naturalize the prison industrial complex. As Hartman (2002: 772) notes, “The normative character of terror insures its invisibility; it defies detection behind rational categories like crime, poverty, and pathology” [emphasis in original]. When the criminal-legal system works to decriminalize whiteness and white people, criminological research will inevitably suffer from some form of sampling error. We find scholarshit in research on “terrorism” that consistently abdicates, rather than implicates the state. Similarly, the use of race as an independent variable produces a whole heap of scholarshit precisely because it is not race that results in negative “life chances”—it is the social response to race (i.e. racialization, racism) or what Fanon (1952) describes as sociogenesis. Life course scholars produce scholarshit when studying “time use” without questioning what it means to use time that does not belong to you (Tadiar 2012). Included in the category of scholarshit producers are those who study “human rights” without answering Du Bois’s prescient question.

As W.E.B. Du Bois asked in 1944, if the Universal Declaration of Human Rights did not offer provisions for ending world colonialism and legal segregation in the United States., “Why then call it the Declaration of Human Rights?” (Weheliye 2014: 76).

Sociologists who study “urban” versus urbanized space, who study the ghetto without considering how such space is in mutually-constitutive relationship to the suburbs, who use “social capital” as a proxy for culture-of-poverty discourse, and who examine “environmental factors,” without considering how “antiblackness is as pervasive as climate” (Sharpe 2016: 106) are all complicit in the overproduction of scholarshit under the guise of “scholarship.” Finally, those who study the ivory, rather than the anti-ebony, tower expel an immense amount of scholarshit. The overproduction of scholarshit makes it difficult to determine whether many sociologists are speaking from their mouths or out of their behinds.

The anti-ebony tower feeds on the ravenous appetites of the colonized and colonizing intellectual eager to shine by shading other negatively-racialized students. In other words, gaining clout in the anti-ebony tower often necessitates self-aggrandizing behavior that devalues others. Sometimes it seems as if the ideas of negatively-racialized students are legible only when uttered by colonized and colonizing intellectuals. The construction of negatively-racialized students as dummies reproduces a sort of “academic ventriloquism” (Pavlenko 2003; Bucar 2011; Mayock 2016; Chandra 2017)^[10]Stuart Hall (1981: 448) also introduces the concept of “linguistic ventriloquism” to describe the role of popular journalism in coopting working-class language. leaving many of us questioning our contributions as knowledge producers. This ventriloquism is no different than the way women’s ideas become intelligible when conveyed by men. There is an intimate connection between academic ventriloquism and academic plagiarism. Both refer to the theft of ideas. Those who rely on the ideas of others to further their career could benefit from the following message: If you like it, cite it! Don’t bite it!^[11]“Bite” is a slang term meaning to copy or appropriate.

Is it surprising that negatively-racialized students, who do not come from academic lineage or economic privilege are key targets of academic ventriloquism? Members of this dysselected category know that they are the subjects of their curriculum and who professors refer to in “urban sociology” or “social inequalities” courses. So it should not be a surprise that these students are best positioned to flip the script on all the scholarshit produced by academic ventriloquists. This paper is just one of the many “hidden transcripts” (Scott 1990) in the archives of those whose descent is marked by dissent.

Resistance: Dissent (not decent) is our descent.

I would be doing myself and members of my community a disservice by not stepping up to upset the setup that is the anti-ebony tower. Negatively-racialized students bear a burden of being the first to enter and graduate from college. We are obliged to remember the suffering of negatively-racialized communities we both leave and are extracted from. The value we place on such estimable principles should not, however, obscure the reality that the academic space we currently occupy were borne out of other struggles and fierce resistance against the anti-ebony tower. When we place contemporary contestations within the anti-ebony tower in the context of previous ones, we are forced to keep the pressure on and not let up. For we know that complacency, like conformity, is conducive to hegemony (Gramsci 1971). Systems of power and domination grow stronger when we slack. A key ingredient to hegemony is consent. I refuse to give my consent to those responsible for perpetuating systems of power and domination.

Dissent in the anti-ebony tower has a long history among previous cohorts of negatively- racialized students. Taking over presidents’ offices, disrupting Board of Regents’ meetings, holding teach-ins, walkouts, boycotts, and divestment campaigns are but a few examples of student-led activism. Regardless of the action, students continue to force power to reorganize itself in response to their demands. However, in reorganizing itself, power often becomes more repressive and can potentially chill dissent. Negatively-racialized students are reminded of the risk of dissent when warned “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you!” To this I respond, “When the hand that is feeding you is feeding you shit, you have no other choice but to bite it.” Within the anti-ebony tower, “the hand that feeds you” is often the same hand that abuses you. Thus, when the hand that feeds you shit is the same hand that beats the shit out of you through arrest, incarceration and student conduct sanctions, it is your duty to both fight back and bite back.

For Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (2013: 26), “the only possible relationship to the university today is a criminal one.” However, “theft” is not the only site by which this criminal relationship is forged. The criminalization of dissent, descent, and defense preclude the need to steal from that which is already stolen in order to establish a “criminal relationship.” By criminalization of defense, I am referring to the use of punishment against negatively-racialized students seeking redress for the routinized harm within the anti-ebony tower. Speaking out against such violence is often read as dissent, but seldom recognized as defense. “Defense” better expresses the experiences of negatively-racialized students committed to anti-oppressive work that is always already read as “criminal.”

However, what does it mean to maintain a criminal relationship with a university built on stolen land? How do we steal from that which is already stolen? How do descendants of those stolen steal? What does it mean for sufferers of the empire to steal from an imperial institution? Is it redundant for those whose lineage is already more criminal than academic to maintain a criminal relationship to the university? I offer these questions not to deter insurgent intellectuals from theft. Instead, these questions push the theoretical boundaries of what it means to maintain such a “criminal relationship,” while questioning the potential for one group to make gains at the expense or further harm of others.

Without remaining in communion with Indigenous peoples, the enslaved, and other negatively-racialized and dysselected persons, whose land, labor and life was extracted, exploited, and eviscerated to construct the anti-ebony tower, we risk establishing a criminal relationship with those always already criminalized, as opposed to the university. In other words, to not acknowledge that land on which universities are built were never granted and that many schools are products of slave labor and the many derivatives of “racial capitalism” (Robinson 1983; Wilder 2013) is to risk causing further harm in work intended to be anti-oppressive.

Similarly, without resisting ongoing forms of settler colonialism, the “afterlife of slavery,” and systemic forms of brutality against new cohorts of “negatively-racialized persons,” there exists the risk of reciting violence based on grammatically incorrect texts.

With lineage that is more criminal than academic, being a negatively-racialized subject from an aggrieved community, having labored as a youth worker for over seven years before pursuing my PhD, and retaining a commitment to a form of “study” that is with and for the people (Harney and Moten 2013) requires me and many other negatively-racialized students, to work twice as hard to be half as good. Such disproportionate labor is accepted as one of many sacrifices made upon admission to the anti-ebony tower. Some scholars of color might suggest that access to the anti-ebony tower is the first step towards transforming it. However, as Robin D.G. Kelley (2016) notes:

Certainly universities can and will become more diverse and marginally more welcoming for black students, but as institutions they will never be engines of social transformation. Such a task is ultimately the work of political education and activism. By definition it takes place outside the university.

I am not a medical doctor, but I know you cannot treat a disease (i.e. the anti-ebony tower) with a symptom of that disease (i.e. diversity offices). In the spirit of Audre Lorde, attempting to fix the setup with the tools provided to us by those in power will only support the foundations of the setup rather than dismantle it. We all have the capacity to be better builders. I am interested in organizing from the ground up and invested in change consonant with the etymology of the term “radical” (a derivation of” radix,” meaning “root” in Latin). Far too often, “diversity work” (Ahmed 2012) is a hegemonic tool used to till the soil of oppression without uprooting the sources of such contaminated terrain. Upsetting the setup requires earnest engagement with existing plots of knowledge production planted outside the anti-ebony tower.

Community remains one of the most valuable sites of knowledge production, and there are plenty of intellectuals without formal credentials capable of teaching those within the anti- ebony tower more than they can ever be given credit for. “Being in and not of” means that though we are producers within the anti-ebony tower, we need not be products of it. We can work against what we are within and potentially do without what we are within. Because discourse is power, grammatical correctness is paramount for insurgent intellectuals.

An academic grammar book serves as a resource not only for those concerned with measuring what they intend to measure, but also for those intent on dismantling what they came to dismantle. Destroying the anti-ebony tower and starting anew may seem too great a challenge than any single person can undertake in their time-limited roles as scholars. Rather than seeking a complete overhaul of a fundamentally flawed system, insurgent intellectuals may find greater solace in viewing the anti-ebony tower as a crumbling structure, built on a faulty foundation riddled with fissures of which to expand. Each (direct) action within the anti-ebony tower is then a means of further exposing these crevices with the expectation that what cracks eventually will crumble. Black don’t crack, but ivory towers do.

References

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Suggested citation:

Mahadeo, R. 2024. “Razing the Anti-Ebony Tower: An Academic ‘Grammar Book.’” In eds. José Manuel Santillana Blanco, Kidiocus King-Carroll, Naimah Zulmadelle Pétigny, and Kong Pheng Pha in collaboration with AGITATE! Editorial Collective. Seditious Acts: AGITATE! Special Volume with CRES: https://agitatejournal.org/article/razing-the-anti-ebony-tower/

By Way of Introduction

Planting seeds, sembrando semillas. Entering the university, and also, exiting. I wish to convivir, to give thanks to those who have brought us together in conversation. I am grateful to be part of this collective space, this critical dialogue—listening and sharing as a community of scholars of color (Black, Indigenous, POC); sharing ways to disrupt, transform, or at least survive and aprovechar of the neoliberal, settler research university. Projects that seek to dismantle oppressive structures and cultures—as an everyday, protracted spiritual political lifework—take on a particular shape in an institution such as the university. My hope is to share my own reflections, visions, and complex experiences traveling between multiple languages, cosmovisiones (worldviews), and “worlds” (as Maria Lugones describes them)—as a musician, danzante, cultural worker, educator, and Ethnic Studies scholar-activist (Lugones 2003). In this reflection, written as a graduate student of color interrogating the neoliberal university,^[1]I began these reflections as I completed my PhD in Comparative Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley and am revisiting them now as I finish my second year as Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at … Continue reading I linger with some of the radical dilemmas that emerge when doing decolonial work within and without a colonial institution. To begin, I must situate myself, over and again, in time and place. 

Thinking and writing from xučyun (Huichin),^[2]“xučyun (Huichin) is the home territory (of) Chochenyo speaking Ohlone people, it extends from what we know today as the Berkeley hills to the Bay Shore, from West Oakland to El Cerrito. The … Continue reading I greet you from stolen land—unceded, Chochenyo-speaking, Muwekma, Ohlone, Lisjan territories currently occupied by the University of California, Berkeley. Here I am a guest, a visitor; dis-placed, dis-located. I must begin by giving thanks, asking permission, and respectfully acknowledging my Ohlone relatives and their ancestral homelands. I am thinking and writing as a Latinx scholar and cultural worker of Indigenous descent—a Chilenx Mapuche exile in diaspora, in migration—where researching has become a means, not of discovery, but of re-membering and re-connection. In this way, I am often reminded of the risks of trying to carry out this work in an institution such as the university—an institution whose structure is, in many ways, fundamentally antithetical to Indigenous lifeways and pedagogies, an institution whose structure actively seeks to erase the material and epistemic existence of many of our ancestor’s knowledge systems. As I walk this path, I often find myself in a space of radical contradiction, of trying to heal in a place of harm. This does not prevent the work from being done, but only asks me to be even more intentional, more focused, more careful—especially about what I am doing within, and without, and at times in spite of, despite the university. 

I am thinking here from my own personal experiences at the University of California at Berkeley, from 2007-2009, 2010-2012, and 2015-2020. All my formal training as a scholar has been in the Department of Ethnic Studies through a comparative, or relational approach to studying African American/African Diaspora/Black Studies, Indigenous/Native American Studies, Xicanx/Latinx Studies and Asian American/Asian Diaspora Studies. I transferred to Berkeley after eight years of part-time study at California Community Colleges, also working part-time as a musician, guitar and drum tech, and/or at coffee shops to pay the bills. I am not the first in my family to go to college, though my brother and I were the first to do so in the United States. Since being affiliated and resourced by the university, I have worked as a scholar-activist with political movements and organizations working towards food and environmental justice, as well as with queer, feminist, and healing justice projects. I have taught classes and facilitated workshops in K-12 schools, universities, prisons, and popular education spaces. 

Throughout this educational and activist journey, I have also maintained an active commitment to spiritual and cultural practice. Carried out in community, and guided by our elders, youth, and ancestors, this is the work I call ceremony. This is part of the “root work” (Zepeda, 2020) many of us have been called to do as de-indigenized, de-tribalized Xicanx, Latinx Indigenous peoples—estudiosxs en nepantla. In particular, I work with music, dance, plants, and hands-on healing practices in this context of ceremony. This path of research as ceremony has taken me up, down and across Turtle Island, Cemanahuac, Abiayala, aka “the Americas” (including the Caribbean)—to Huichin (Berkeley/Oakland, CA), Payomkawichum and Kumeyaay lands (San Diego, CA), Mexico-Tenochtitlan (Mexico City), Kullasuyu/Picunmapu (Central Chile) and Wallmapu/Ngulumapu (Southern Chile) in particular. I am a descendant of these long and tangled roots/routes. It is from this path of conocimiento (Anzaldúa 2013), this meandering and shapeshifting road, that I ponder.

I carry out my work—tracing how my communities are reconnecting, re-membering Mapuchekimün, huehuetlahtolli, the wisdom of our ancestors (despite multiple ongoing genocides)—in dialogue with the complex and precarious spaces of Indigenous/Native American and Xicanx/Latinx Studies in particular. Re-membering also requires that we de-center the Eurocentric imperial university—disrupting epistemic apartheid, colonial violence, transforming pedagogical and intellectual spaces through ancestral medicine and “traditional healing praxes” (Martinez, 2013). Teaching, reading, writing, dancing, singing, thinking; trying to do the good work, in a good way. This is prayerful direct action in a secular, corporate University. De-universalizing the university, from a parallel pluriverse. Reminding myself, and each other, that we are a peaceful people, good people, we are master astronomers, mathematicians, dancers, poets, musicians, artists, scientists, warriors on our own terms, and in our own right.

On Neoliberal/Settler Continuities

In this volume that seeks to critique the neoliberal university, I ask us to consider how the neoliberal university is always already a settler university. Its epistemologies (ways of knowing), methodologies (ways of arriving to knowing), and organizing principles (ways of structuring knowing) are colonial introductions to this land and its peoples (Smith, 1999). The corporatization and privatization of this university, and the academy at large, is happening on a foundational violence that is rooted in multiple and ongoing but unsuccessful genocides. As a project, the university does not value, nor consult the knowledge that comes from the land on which it is placed. Instead, as a settler university, it “destroys to replace” (Wolfe, 2006). Through these pensamientos—self-reflecting in community—I hope to provide a theoretical x-ray speculation on the scaffolding of the modern/colonial, settler research university; ideating towards decolonial, intercultural, pluriversal futures in the present. 

Following Dylan Rodriguez, I also wish to situate a critique of neoliberalism in a longer and wider view of colonial and imperial power. While neoliberalism as an analytic helps us locate a particular moment in late capitalist cultural history, it must also be understood as a rearticulation of an originary, settler colonial violence. Multiculturalism, and related projects of diversity, equity, and inclusion, remain rooted in settler colonial, genocidal logics—and therefore are not a departure from, but recommitments to a coloniality of power and knowledge. As Rodriguez argues:

The point to be amplified is that multiculturalism and pluralism are essential to both the contemporary formation of neoliberalism and the historical distensions of racial/colonial genocide…It is for this reason that I do not find the analytics of neoliberalism to be sufficient for describing the conditions of political work within the U.S. academy today. It is not just different structures of oppressive violence that radical scholars are trying to make legible, it is violence of a certain depth, with specific and morbid implications for some peoples’ future existence as such. If we can begin to acknowledge this fundamental truth—that genocide is this place (the American academy and, in fact, America itself)—then our operating assumptions, askable questions, and scholarly methods will need to transform

(Rodriguez, 2012: 812).

Carrying out our work where “genocide is this place” requires that we reconsider the nature of academic work—maintaining a decolonial skepticism towards self-congratulatory settler reforms. To be sure, calling attention to a lack of diversity, equity, and inclusion in a settler university is not enough. If we are not explicitly calling attention to genocide and settler colonialism as foundational to the spaces in which we are working—visibilizing this violence as it permeates the everyday fabric of academic life—we may end up working to naturalize, normalize or otherwise obscure the ways in which “genocide is this place.” We must, therefore, consider at length what may be said about the settler university as such.

Dismantling the Settler University: Eurocentrism and Genocide/Epistemicide

The settler university is a Eurocentric university, one that continues to look towards Western Europe—and its fabled Modernity—as the lineage through which an appeal to Reason, and therefore Knowledge, can be made (Maldonado-Torres, 2012). As a land-grant institution it is a land grab institution.^[3] See also www.landgrabu.org According to UC Berkeley’s own website:

The Morrill Act, signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln on July 2, 1862, created the so-called land-grant universities, donating land left over from the building of the Transcontinental Railroad to fund the creation of institutions of higher learning…The Morrill Act gave birth to the University of California and secured the state’s pre-eminence in research, agriculture and technological innovation…

(Freeling, 2012)

In another piece of university public relations, UC President Mark Yudof celebrates the Morrill Act as it “transformed not just California, but the entire United States, from a divided, underdeveloped society into one that is vigorously diverse, competitive and advanced” (Freeling, 2012). Yudof continues, “And perhaps most importantly, it made mass education—which is the bedrock of both national and individual progress—the norm, and not the exception.” The website states clearly that, “The goal was to provide higher learning to the children of the settlers, farmers and frontier prospectors” (Freeling, 2012).

Yudof (re)articulates the tired, linear discourse of Westernizing, colonial modernity—implying a shared, universal definition and desire for Progress, Advancement, Development and other euphemisms for settler colonial violence. I return to the epigraph from Linda Tuhiwai Smith that opens this piece, when she writes: 

Although colonial universities saw themselves as being part of an international community and inheritors of a legacy of Western knowledge, they were also part of the historical processes of imperialism. They were established as an essential part of the colonizing process, a bastion of civilization and a sign that a colony and its settlers had ‘grown up’.

(Smith, 1999)

This is the imagined role of the university in the state’s colonial order—the bringer of development, technology, and social cohesion—one of the institutions through which a society can aspire to become included in “the West.” This has often been the promise of settler colonial discourses and imaginaries—empty, savage landscapes lying in wait to be civilized. This is a colonial fantasy, a settler story that is repeated ad nauseum until it is normalized as inevitable. In other words, it is a myth; an utterance that silences as it speaks. There is no such thing as “land left over.” From an Other perspective, from Below, these fables of courageous settlers bravely exploring the wild frontier are colonial chimeras—a persistent set of marketing campaigns for genocide:

On October 8, 1867, the Trustees of the College of California voted to give all their land and property to the state to create a new “University of California.” These College trustees hoped to create an institution “equal to those of Eastern Colleges.” The state repealed the act of 1866 and on March 23, 1868—thereafter celebrated as Charter Day—the legislature passed the “Organic Act,” creating the University of California. The state then expanded the college out of Oakland into an adjoining town named after George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, who, during a visit to America in 1729, spoke of educating and converting to Christianity the “aboriginal Americans.”

(“Brief History of Cal”)

This is because the settler university is a genocidal university. UC Berkeley was founded during a moment when California was high on gold, rich off bounty hunting Native peoples, buying and trading dis-membered bodies—Manifest Destiny fulfilling its self-fulfilling prophecy. The settler university seeks to kill, to eliminate the Native (Wolfe, 2006); declares black and brown Others as enemies of this endless war on dark, feminine bodies and ways of knowing.^[4]If these are the ways of knowing that Audre Lorde calls “poetry” (Lorde 2007), then the university could also be understood as a dense site of the anti-poetic. Unfinished, unresolved, and unsuccessful; these genocides have always been a futile settler project—for they can never fully remove a people nor their ways of knowing from the land. Extermination, assimilation, civilization—these are stories meant to obscure the truth of their failed businesses, myths meant to celebrate an extinction that remains impossible. In other words, we are still here.

Non-Western ways of knowing have long been one of the first targets of colonial genocide. Situating the Westernized university in the “long sixteenth century”—as a project originating in the conquests of Southern Spain, Africa, and the Americas—decolonial scholar Ramon Grosfoguel describes how:

In addition to the genocide of people, the conquest of Al-Andalus was accompanied by epistemicide. For example, the burning of libraries was a fundamental method used in the conquest of Al-Andalus. The library of Cordoba, that had around 500,000 books at a time when the largest library of Christian Europe did not have more than 1000 books, was burned in the 13th century. Many other libraries had the same destiny during the conquest of Al-Andalus until the final burning of more than 250,000 books of the Granada library by Cardenal Cisneros in the early 16th century. These methods were extrapolated to the Americas. Thus, the same happened with the indigenous “codices” which was the written practice used by Amerindians to archive knowledge. Thousands of “codices” were also burned, destroying indigenous knowledges in the Americas. Genocide and epistemicide went together in the process of conquest in both the Americas and Al-Andalus.

(Grosfoguel, 2013: 80)

The amoxtin (‘codices’) that did survive this process of epistemicide were stolen and brought illegally to Europe, ending up in the private collections of the most notorious and ruthless families of the time—the Borgias, the Bourbons, and others. As if to further disrespect and distort this knowledge, these sacred amoxtli were then renamed after the families who benefited from this plunder; as Codex Borgia, Codex Borbonicus, etc. These texts remain in European collections such as the National Museum of Paris and the Vatican (Codex Vaticanus) named after their captors, far away from their descendants who know them as relatives, whose pedagogies know how to activate and dialogue with the knowledge they contain.

I seek to extend how we think of genocide even further. Genocide as structure is the attempted destruction of life writ large. Or, put another way, as a danzante, it is the desire to stop us from dancing, understood here as another way to try and destroy the essence of life itself. Part of this is containment, enclosure—and another still is desecration of the Sacred (Niumeitolu, 2019). Why else would they target and murder danzantes on multiple occasions while dancing in ceremony? It is seeking to interrupt the ancestral lifeways of peoples, for the sake of ending their existence and relationships to place, to themselves and each other. We must even redefine the notion of what makes a ‘people.’ In Mapudungun, through the concept of che, one can also refer to trees as wooden people, stones as stone people, or non-human animals as other forms of people. Therefore, the cutting down of trees, the forced mining of mountains and the mass extinction of millions of species of non-human life that has resulted from colonial extractivism are fundamental to this notion of genocide. 

The university is directly implicated in each aspect of these genocides. Every year UC Berkeley celebrates the “Big Game” against Stanford University by performatively cutting down a tree in the central plaza of campus. The University of California system was built with the wealth accumulated by white settlers mining for gold and bounty hunting Native peoples (Madley, 2016). The school mascot, the golden bear, is a bear species that went extinct as a direct result of colonial settlement—dropping from around 125,000 in the 18th century to being declared fully extinct in 1924 (Kroeber, 1925). The poisoning of the local watershed through nuclear testing and weapons development, planting the first invasive Eucalyptus grove, establishing the first Botanical Garden in the Western US—all of these are acts I wish to historicize and situate within this understanding of settler creativity and innovation as genocide. I describe these local histories of settler violence, as woven into the fabric of the university, not to restate a dominant narrative of Indigenous victimhood and supposed extinction, but instead to point to the context in which the projects of Indigenous and Ethnic Studies have taken shape—as rebellions, cross-cultural demands for a radical reimagining, enacting a complete redefinition of what it means to produce knowledge and what education (and the world) can look like. 

The university is sick. The trees, the students, the creek, are not well. It is a place of contamination and waste—of chronic illness and transgenerational violence. It perpetuates a way of being and working that is not rooted in right relations—interrupting ways of relating rooted in reciprocity, mutuality, kinship, responsibility. Here in “the academy,” relationships are weaponized for one’s own individual career aspirations. In the social sciences and humanities, single author articles published in the dusty journals of industry standards are often considered the most important—listed first in one’s tenure file review. Hearing of someone else doing work that is closely related to your own is seen as a threat, not as a synchronicity, nor an exciting opportunity to collaborate and build with a colleague. Lest we forget, this academic individualism that is actively being inculcated in our neoliberal youth is directly linked to the forced individualization of our ancestors who lived in community. Our ways of being as peoples, as nations, as collectives, are targeted. Instead, we are encouraged as scholars to claim individual ownership of “our knowledge” as property—further erasing the stolen land, stolen people, and stolen labor upon which the very concept of property relies. If there is one thing I have learned from my ancestors, it is that ownership was never the point. Knowledge was only as valuable as its ability to inspire and perpetuate collective, harmonious ways of being with each other and the land. We produce(d) knowledge through cross-cultural and humble epistemic collaboration; with each other, and all our relations—the land, the water, the plants, the stars, the more-than-human. The university dismembers these relationships, forgets, tears apart bodies, minds, hearts, spirits, and peoples. It disfigures, distorts, as it disowns its place in the cosmos.

On Spirituality

Often in protests we chant, asking each other: Whose university? The usual answer is: “our university.” I say: it is their university, because it is based on their Uni-verse, and they can keep it. From across the slipstream, we land here as inter-dimensional nepantlerxs, shape shifting outsiders within, relatives from Other worlds (Vizenor, 2012; Anzaldua, 2009; Hill Collins, 1986). In between, we bridge, we re-member, we work towards the end of the world. Even as I write these words, I must smudge myself, honor the hurt it brings to my heart, to my mind, to remember that this place, where I have studied on and off for over 13 years, is made up of these stories, still operates under these names, still reopens these wounds every time they open their doors for business. Here, healing is a seditious act. Dancing in the decolonial cracks (Walsh 2014) is an insurgent way of celebrating our survival as peoples and knowers. We don’t belong here, and that is a gift. 

This is spiritual direct action in a secular institution. This concept finds its way into my work because in my communities we do speak of ‘spirit’ in this way, though this is never at odds with the scientific, artistic nor materialist inquiry as it would be in a Western cosmology.^[5]David Delgado Shorter’s (2016) critique of spirituality as a key term in Indigenous Studies cautions that Eurocentric mistranslations of religious and spiritual concepts can exist on a slippery … Continue reading I am not studying the esoteric, but the everyday concrete ways in which we can be in right relation to each other and all our relations. I don’t rely on Western divisions and binary dissections of secular vs. spiritual, art or religion vs. science, etc. We must be careful with these colonial trapdoors that compel us to re-center European categories and epistemologies. Yet, wanting to be a good relative (Pelaez Lopez 2019), be a healthy future elder and (eventually) ancestor, puts me in this conversation on spiritual terms.  

 This understanding of spirituality is also informed by Anzaldúa’s concept of “spiritual activism” as “inner work/public acts” (Anzaldúa, 2001). I resonate with this notion of activism as a project that takes place within and without—where the courage and commitment to social transformation that is embodied by the activist, the warrior, is also translated and applied to the inner terrains of struggle. For the white supremacist, the capitalist, the patriarch, the homophobe, are not only external enemies—their messages are alive and well in the internal dialogues I witness when I sit to observe my own thoughts, actions and judgements as they cross the river of my mind in meditation. Similarly, these forces are not discreetly outside of our communities, as these systems of power have thoroughly infiltrated our families, our movements, our most intimate relations. 

Within this matrix of violence, the public interventions of decolonization we enact must be guided by love if they are to become the bases for durable and multiplying transformations—love for ourselves, our peoples, the land and love for the struggle itself. As bell hooks reminds us, working from an “ethic of love,” amidst these interlocking systems of power, demands that we work to remove the barriers to love as they emerge in ourselves and our communities (“the ethic of domination”)—as an act of liberation (hooks, 1994). In other words, building and enacting an interconnected world of loving relations in this deathworld of settler colonial, everyday war is an act of spiritual resistance. In this light, one of the deepest and most urgent root causes of the crises of modernity/coloniality is unearthed—a profound spiritual poverty (Nenquimo, 2020). 

On Sedition, Re-centering, and Research as Ceremony

The charge of sedition is a prerequisite for liberation. Liberation is always outside the structure, and therefore marginalized, illegalized, and criminalized (Dussel, 2003). What then is a liberatory education? What kind of knowledge do we need now, for these times? To be clear, education is not inherently liberatory. Again, historically education has often been another word for genocide. Therefore, repurposing and transforming education into a space of re-membering and decolonizing is nothing short of a complete upheaval, a deracination of the “worm eaten roots of the structure” (Fanon, 2008). I am reminded of slogans I have seen on t-shirts: “all my heroes have always killed colonizers”, “everything I want to do is illegal”. I am reminded that Frantz Fanon, Gloria Anzaldúa, and many others were never recognized for their work until after their deaths. Their dissertations (Fanon’s Black Skin/White Masks and Anzaldúa’s Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro), were both rejected as unacceptable academic work, but were later published elsewhere (outside traditional academic channels) and have ended up re-shaping entire fields of the academy. In this way, if we fail our exams, or are told our work isn’t rigorous enough, or is ‘incomprehensible’, in a settler university, this may mean we are doing something right. 

Shifting the geo and body politics of knowledge, I ask: where am I thinking from (Mignolo, 2012)? Knowledge comes from places, from bodies, from facing different directions and asking that corner of the universe to collaborate in this moment of knowing. Since the academy will never be my home, this is an invitation to recenter myself in my communities, and especially in ceremony. By this I mean, an important center of knowing is my community’s xictli, our rewe, our community altars that open up collective, intergenerational fields of knowing. The knowledge I seek doesn’t necessarily come from the modern/colonial settler classroom. Conocimiento doesn’t only come from books, it also comes from our bones, our danzas, cuicacameh (songs), from the cosmos themselves. Writing is just one way to try and translate this knowledge. However, this knowledge, in the form of consciousness, has been here since the beginning of time, and will be here long after we go back to the stars.

By Way of Conclusion 

While writing and editing this article, I completed my doctoral thesis on Anahuacan ceremonial dance and music as forms of spiritual resistance, as ways of knowing and seeking right relations despite 500 years of genocide and settler violence (Garzo, 2020). The knowledge of the ancestors that lives in our moyocoyani (cultural memory), mapuche kimün, that dances in ceremony, mitotiliztli teochitontequiza, is not accumulated materially, nor stored in archives. It is activated through the catalyst of ceremony; as a field of consciousness that lives in community and the embodied, oral tradition of the elders. It is a living, breathing repertoire of knowing. When research is ceremony, this de-centers the university as the sole place of knowing and knowledge production (Smith, 2008). 

In Mapudungun, (the language of my Mapuche ancestors and relatives) one of the words for knowledge is kimün. The knowledge of our people as Indigenous people is Mapuche Kimün (the knowledge of the people of the land)—the knowledge that maintains our indigeneity. From this perspective, the knowledge of Chileans and Argentinians (who are also my ancestors and relatives) is wingka kimün, the knowledge of the invaders. Naming invaders as such here is not meant to be disrespectful, but simply historically accurate. In fact, it honors that the invaders also have ways of knowing that we can learn from and be in conversation with. However, what these forms of (outsider) knowledge bring is different, it is knowledge that comes from another place.

In this way, my relatives in Wallmapu (Mapuche territory) have reminded me that we must be clear about which kind of knowledge we are seeking in these times of settler collapse. How can we rely on wingka kimün—an inherently dis-placed knowledge—for our efforts to restore and regenerate the earth, to re-member who we truly are? This is not a total refusal, or denial of wingka kimün, but again, a shifting of the center. Todo tiene su tiempo, there is a time and a place for every kind of knowledge. However, in this time, how can we come to re-member, and center our many pu Mapuche kimün (knowledges of the people of the land), our deep and old ways of knowing how to be peoples of the earth?

Part of the contradiction I have been grappling with in this essay is that I have come to understand many aspects of this work through the ongoing project of Ethnic Studies as such. However, we must remember that Ethnic Studies in many ways is a misnomer, a sloppy mistranslation of the original demands and visions of the 1968-1969 Third World Liberation Fronts of San Francisco State University and UC Berkeley. Initiated by the Black Student Unions of each respective campus and won only through intercommunal solidarity and coalition building between Black, Indigenous, Xicanx, and Asian American student struggles, the institutionalization of Ethnic Studies has come at the price of compromise, dilution and abortion of a more radical Third World Studies (Okihiro, 2016). These original Third World liberation impulses demand/ed a fundamental decolonization of knowledge and power. Working for a “relevant education,” rooted in self-determination and cross-cultural solidarity, the TWLF allows us to imagine and create an Other world. 

Thinking etymologically, “ethnic,” from the Greek ta ethne “the nations,” translated the Hebrew ha goyim “the (non-Jewish) nations…Hence in Late Latin, after the Christianization of Rome, gentilis also could mean ‘pagans, heathens,’ as opposed to Christians…gentile nation, foreign nation not worshipping the true God” (“Ethno-”). In this light, perhaps Ethnic Studies is a correct name insofar as it signals the study of the Other, the study of technologies and structures of Othering. Thinking from, with, those of us who have survived in/through resistance, us decolonial heathen Others who have refused to worship the Gods of the West—Man, Capital, Whiteness, Science, etc. How can we reimagine education in these ways, not as assimilation into a genocidal, settler world, not as becoming well-adjusted to a sick society, but as the process of unlearning settler modernity and re-membering who we truly are? We are not just somebody’s (the West’s) Others. What kind of education is possible when we de-center Europe and re-center spirit, that which re-connects? Beyond sedition, is liberation, what, and how do we study there? De-centering Europe is only the first step. 

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Suggested Citation:

Montalvo, M.C. 2024. “Within and Without the Settler University: Reflections on Decolonization, Spirituality and Research as Ceremony.”  In eds. José Manuel Santillana Blanco, Kidiocus King-Carroll, Naimah Zulmadelle Pétigny, and Kong Pheng Pha in collaboration with AGITATE! Editorial Collective. Seditious Acts: AGITATE! Special Volume with CRES: https://agitatejournal.org/article/within-and-without-the-settler-university-reflections-on-decolonization-spirituality-and-research-as-ceremony/