Introduction to Section Two: Transgressions

Edén Torres

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.)

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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/