Introduction to Section One: Infractions

Richa Nagar

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.

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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/