more reports, a video this time, from la otra campana in Tijuana, and the crossborder (“we didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us”) meeting of EZNL with latino groups in the USA. exiting news: a delegation of mujeres de la otra is organizing to meet different groups in California, they want to come to Watsonville to meet the Brown Berets.
Category: education
of course, life is education and education is life. and education is high on the agenda of the Student Worker Coalition for Justice and even more so among the Brown Berets. but being here at UCSC, i thought i’d make a thread of classes, seminars, colloquia… i decide to write about in these pages. although i must include the Challenging White Supremacy workshop, for my first 6 months here it was definately my the most intense educational experience. but then why not the Brown Berets… ay, you see, seperating education off from life doesn’t hold…
knowledge
without action there is no knowledge
goodbye to the Highlander –
an encounter that left me impressed
et avec envie d’y retourner
highlander
we got very lucky this time. it’s around noon when we arrive at the Highlander Research and Education Center – a place that people whom maggie encountered in her journey through Appalachia had spoken highly of. by the time we drove into New Market, just north of Knoxville, yesterday, it was dark, and our attempt to find the Highlander made us go in circles. we also knew that, even if we would have found it, chances to find the center open on a Friday night were slim.
we reach the center at noon today and are impressed by the immense beauty of the landscape. the office does look closed. but wait, there’s one other car and when we knock on the door Tufara shows up. she wasn’t supposed to be there, she insists, but you know how it goes with these kinds of social justice jobs… Tufara is just a wonderful delightful presence who tells us tales about the Highlander and the world. she’s a coordinator for the art and youth programs, and emphasizes how important it is that all the projects have an culture and youth dimension. and she tells us about the African caravan from South Africa to Nairobi, for the World Social Forum, that she’s part of.
trying to understand how the Highlander is connected to its environment, i like how she distinguishes neighbors and community. it comes as no surprise that the relationship with many of the immediate neighbors, after all these years, is full of tensions and hostility. we had a brief taste of the disconnection when we stopped at a bar on the road to ask directions. the woman behind the counter wasn’t sure, and a guy hanging around looked at us with suspicion when we told him what we were looking for. “The private club?” he asked, which made us want to make sure that we’re talking about the same place. an opportunity to poke a bit into his vision of the place – “so what do they do there?” a vile laugh and evasive respons, “well, you’ll just have to use your imagination about the things that go on there.” and Tufara tells us about the time she a dental emergency which forced her to go to the local dentist. while he was putting all the instruments in her mouth, he asked where she was from. (apparently a black woman could not be from ‘here’.) Alabama. “Good, i’m gonna fix you up so you can go back there.”
a widespread and well rooted racism that is so much part of the landscape here. on a number of occasions while driving through this landschape, and usually just after a sensation of beauty, the thought came to me that this is the land where the KuKluxKlan emerged. when looking through indymedia Tennessee before coming, i read reports of an intensification of racist actions in the region, this time specifically against new latino migrants – from actions to ban spanish (and spanish books from the library) to putting a burning cross in the yard of the home of a latino family.
yet then Tufara speaks of the Highlander’s community – some folks in the neighborhood (and with great enthousiasm she’s the godmother of a local girl), many goups in Knoxville and around (too many to start naming them, she says), groups in Tennessee, in the South, in the rest of the country. all kinds of organizations for social justice, poor people’s struggles. the current focus is bringing together white poor folks of Appalachia, black folks from the south and new latino immigrant communities in these regions.
the Highlander is all but an island, it is a node in a dense network of social justice groups. it functions as a place where people and groups gather and work together – they connect, strategize collectively, build networks and campaigns. it is a place of resources and peace to work, but it is clear that whatever takes place here, is meant to be taken (back) to other places.
Tufara also gets other people to come and meet us. Amber, an intern, and Pam, the director. a cup of coffee in the kitchen of the office. i’m impressed by the humanity that speaks through Tufara. when she talks about checking the stories she wants to tell about social justice with her grandma, to know if they are comprehensible. or about bringing together the older folk music people and the young hip-hop kids in a way that they understand why it is important to listen to each other. and when she talks about new orleans – about how the discourses about the opportunity for new ways of organizing, a discourse that i know from in the Bay Area, forgets that it’s about human lives.
Pam takes us around to show the place. the view on the Smokey Mountains is amazing. the house were most of the education takes place. the best idea of the world: the chairs set up in a circle in the big meeting room, are rocking chairs. just imagine how different a meeting must be if everyone is in a rocking chair… a dormitory pavilion with one sleeping room in particular where the beds are aligned with a hugh window opening up to the Smokies. the library pavilion full of precious resources, including a section with the original (marxist) books from when the Highlander was started in 1932. and a small house on the top of the hill, with a working and sleeping room for about 7 people. the board had decided that this spot would remain open but then one day they found that Myles Horton, who started the center, had build the house. imagine the work that one can get done here…
this weekend turns out to be one of the few without a workshop or meeting, so we don’t get to see the Highlander in action. but the gift of having this space for us…
running around in the grass, watching the colours in the sky, mountains and fog as the light fades away – from green and pink, and lots of purple. wandering through the house and reading the posters. an image of a campaign denouncing Dr. Martin Luther King’s visit to the “communist training school” that is the Highlander. Tufara also told us it had been denounced as a place with lesbians. but of course the most scandalous of all was the mixing of black and white people during the civil rights ear.
we go to New Market, to get food to cook for our hosts. while driving through this area we had already noted the presence of money. hills spread with houses and barns and meadows like in the Columbia area of two days ago, but new, big, houses inbetween. New Market is clearly developing. it shows in the supermarket. thinking what to cook, i first come up with risotto (predictable, can’t help it…). it’s unlikely they have arborio rice, maggie says. unlikely, but this super market in a small Tennessee town tells another story, about its development and globalisation of food. there is arborio rice, and an entire mediterranean food section, and a large section of fresh vegetables of all kinds. (and potatoes individually wrapped in cellophane, which i need to get for the small america bookproject…)
a late night discussion after Pam and Amber have left us. maggie describes her observation of how a consciousness of privilege among white (middle-class) kids in this country keeps them caught in guilt, and also a kind of jealously, that life is really going on elsewhere. a discussion of white privilege, once more, and important to keep on having these, perhaps especially in this country. but i notice to what extent the guilt part really irritates me (ay, not a good attitude for organizing workshops… i must find another way to respond…) – it strikes me as yet another strategy of avoidence, of self-indulgence, of nestling in the comfort of the familiar, of simply not doing one’s work.
freedom’s just another word for… growing up in relation to each other
reading Claude Meillassoux’ The Antropology of Slavery. The Womb of Iron and Gold. i am reminded how refreshing it is to read a text so much out of the canon, language, perspective, references and contours of US academy. a book that looks at slavery in Africa, from the perspective of what occured in African societies, and not the Americas. in a macro-sociological and systematic analysis of slavery, Meillassoux at some point turns to the meaning of the opposite of slavery – freedom.
“In a penetrating and masterly work, E. Benveniste (1969) reveals ‘the social origins of the concept “free” on the basis of a semantic analysis. ‘The primary meaning,’ he writes, ‘is not as we might be tempted to imagine, “released from something;” it refers to membership of an ethnic stock described by a metaphor taken from plant growth. This membership confers a privilege which is unknown to the alien and the slave. Free men are those “who were born and have developed together.” […] Benveniste’s discovery conforms to analysis of the development of the domestic agricultural economy in its double process of production and reproduction and of the place which the (male) individual acquires in this society through his double participation in the productive and reproductive cycles. The Maninka, using terms which are nearly identitical to Benveniste, in fact say, when referring to their congeners, those with whom they can identify themselves, ‘ka wolo nyoronka, ka mo nyoronka’: to be born together, to mature together. This does not express ‘consanguinity’ but rather ‘congeneration’: the growing-up of individuals together and in relation to each other.”
raises a whole set of questions about the relationship between the ‘alien’ (with whom one didn’t grow up, has no relationships with) and the free, but as i’m poking into this american idea of freedom i’m struck by the discrepancy – freedom as no attachments vs. freedom as common growth.
replacing the whip
a fragment from this week’s readings for Theories of Slavery that caught my attention, from Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection. Terror, Slavery and Self-making in Nineteenth-Century America. how “tethers of burdened individuality” and its accompanying hallmarks of individuated responsibility, morality, will and self-discipline replaced or supplemented the whip in the post-Emancipation era.
“Given this rendition of slavery, responsibility was deemed the best antidote for the ravages of the past; never mind that it effaced the enormity of the injuries of the past, entailed the erasure of history, and placed the onus of the past onto the shoulders of the individual. The journey from chattel to man entailed a movement from subjection to self-possession, dependency to responsibility, and coercion to contract. Without responsibility, autonomy, will, and self-possession would be meaningless. If the slave was dependent, will-less, and bound by the dictates of the master, the freed individual was liberated from the past and capable of remaking him/herself through the sheer exercise of will. Responsibility was thus an inestimable component of the bestowal of freedom, and it also produced individual culpability and national innocence, temporal durability and historical amnesia.”
theories of slavery
The Time of Slavery, an article by Saidiya Hartman. i read it at the beach yesterday, liked it a lot. there are still grains of sand in between the pages. yet in class everybody seems to agree that it is a very pessimistic piece. when walking a bit of the way home with one students, he tells how the text got on his nerves – her bourgeois indulgence in sentiments. he is a serious political theory student, into high theory and anarchism. and yes, i see what he means. but there is something in the way she works through what preoccupies and affects her that, precisey because she doesn’t claim an easy “working through” model, takes her readers to different places. coming to think about it, the consensus on the pessimism of the text strikes me as strange. to me it drew lines of hope.
her visit to Elimina Castle in Ghana (one of the places on the West-African coast from where enslaved Africans were merchandised to the Americas). she is addressed as a sister from the other side of the Atlantic, returning. she rejects the idea of “the return”, yet does not remain untouched by the address. “Dear Sister” pierces through the armor of my skepticism, which, like a scab covering a wound, is less the sign of recovery than it is a barrier against the still pulsating state of injury. Without this defense i am exposed and vulnerable, a naive woman on an impossible mission: the search for dead and forgotten kin. the seduction of “sister”, the banality. a placebo, a pretend cure for an irreparable injury.
the tour within the castle invokes reflections on the tourist industry feeding of injury, at times it infuriates her. yet when in the children’s dungeon women start crying, she recognizes something else going on, that exceeds the closures of tourism. When some of the women begin to cry. I am suprised since I have been unable to shed a single tear; moreover, this shoddy and sensationalist tour incites my anger, which seems the only emotion I can express with an ease. Yet watching these women, I realize that they have come here to act as witness.
remembering. the necessity. the traps. the time of remembering – the coevalance of then and how, of us and the dead. It would appear that our lives and even those of the dead depend on such acts of remembrance. Yet how best to remember the dead and represent the past is an issue fraught with difficulty, it not outright contention. The difficulty posed by the plaque’s injunction to remember is as much the faith it bespeaks in the redressive capacities of memory, as the confidence it betrays in the founding distinction or a break between then and now. For the distinction between the past and the present founders on the interminable grief engendered by slavery and its aftermath. How might we understand mourning, when the event had yet to end? When the injuries not only perdure, but are inflicted anew? Can one mourn what has yet ceased happening?
refusing the return, refusing a fantasy of origins. refusing the idea of repair, refusing that the injury and grief is whiped out by repair. The most disturbing aspect of these reenactments is the suggestion that the rupture of the Middle Passage is neither irreparable nor irrevocable but bridged by the tourist who acts as the vessel for the ancestor. […] The ease with which the “greatest crime against humanity” is invoked and instanteously eclipsed but the celebration of the return of those descendants of the Middle Passage would suggest that in the last instance the language of return acts to disavow the very violence that it purportedly gives voice to and insinuates that the derangements of the slave trade can be repaired.
mourning. it perils. and, she suggests (and i feel the classmates skipped over this), the beginning of a counterhistory. Mourning, a public experession of one’s grief, insists that the past is not yet over; this compulsion to grieve also indicates that liberal remedy has yet to be a solution to racist domination and inequality. […] Yet the work of mourning is not without its perils, chief among these are the slippage between responsibility and assimilation and witnessing and incorporation.
we talk about the difference between mourning and melancholia in class. in a text that might feel melancholic, her insistance on mourning is deliberate, as a footnote reference to Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia testifies. mourning as a reaction to the loss (of a person or an abstraction, like a motherland), and melancholia when you take the loss in yourself. it’s mourning that raises the question of ethical responsibility, that has a transformative power.
it also strikes me in this class, after listening generously and searching for places to connect, that i don’t like the way the students are trained here – in the sophisticated humanites. the things we read and talk about are disturbing, they affect… yet the students seem only in their comfort zones when talking in a well rehearsed theoretically sophisticated voice (which includes much talk about affects…), about representational strategies and all. so many times i feel like asking, now cut the crap, what exactely do you mean? the moments in between the well-rehearsed parts they seem so clueless…
sankofa
from Sankofa, the “homework” film for Theories of Slavery:
“Spirit of the dead rise up, lingering spirit of the dead rise up and posses your bird of passage. Those stolen Africans, step out of the ocean from the wombs of the ships and claim your story. Spirit of the dead rise up, lingering spirit of the dead rise up and posses your vessel. Those Africans, shackled in leg irons and enslaved, step out of the acres of came fields and coton fields and tell your story. Spirit of the dead rise up, longering spirit of the dead, rise up and posses your bird of passage. Those lynched in the Magnolias, swinging on the limgs of the weeping willows, rotting food for the cultures, step down and claim your story. Spirit of the dead rise up, lingering spirit of the dead, rise up and posses your vessel. Those tied, bound and whipped from Brazil to Mississippi. Step out and tell your story. Those in Jamaica, in the fields of Cuba, in the swamps of Florida, the rice fields of South Carolina. You waiting Africans, step out and tell your story. Spirit of the dead, rise up, lingering spirit of the dead rise up, and posses your bird of passage. From Alabama to Suriname, upt to the caves of Louisiana, come out you African Spirits, step out and claim your stories. You raped, slave bred, castrated, burned, tarred and feathered, roasted, chopped, lobotomized, bound and gagged. Spirit of the dead rise up, lingering spirit of the dead rise up and posses your bird of passage. You African spirit. Spirit of the dead rise up, lingering spirit of the dead rise up and posses your bird of passage.”
capitalism part III: what is neo-liberalism?
the Feminism and Global War group of the Institute for Advanced Feminist Research organized a panel discussion of neoliberalism today, with the aim to think about neo-liberalism from a feminist lens. three theorists of neoliberalism sat at the table, and after the discussion took place i realized that all three were antropologists: Aihwa Ong (UC Berkeley), James Ferguson (Stanford) and Lisa Rofel (UC Santa Cruz). whether due to the shared disciplinary background or not, a common ground emerged throughout their brief talks. the need for “small” stories of neoliberalism, perspectives from below, that debunk the idea that neoliberalism functions according to a singular and unitary logic, paying attention to the different meanings and faces of neoliberalism. all of this in contrast to accounts of Neoliberalism with a capital N (read: Harvey, Hardt & Negri,…).
a familiar mode of thinking, which has my sympathy – unpacking singular and unitary logics, attending to the stories from below, to the effects on concrete bodies. yet here it didn’t work. for one, at some instances these methodological and epistemological concerns had clearly been transformed into a meta-discourse. in the middle of the discussion Aihwa Ong uttered a surreal sentence linking the self-acclaimed modesty of her approach with accounting for modernity, globalization and neo-liberalism all at once. it also didn’t work because of the defensive set-up in its critique on theories of Neoliberalism, with the capital N. of course Gopal Balakrishnan (from New Left Review, who became the new History of Consciousness professor) and Chris Connery (Cultural Studies) insisted upon a more structural, more political theory, more Marxist account of neoliberalism. as they sat next to each other, and kept on whispering comments throughout the talks, it felt as if there were two blocks: the speakers in the front and the marxist back bench. and i kept on thinking, i want and need stuff from “both” of these approaches and how did they become so divided in this space…
i shouldn’t forget to mention that James Ferguson did a provocative thing in his discussion of a particular (basic income) project in South Africa that was pro-poor and pro-neoliberal at the same time. (“let’s try to think about that conjuncture, we can’t even think about it. and what if most effective politics are emerging not against neoliberalism, but from within…“) and that Aihwa Ong had a silly emotional outburst: you know, it’s really scarry to be here in Santa Cruz. everything needs to be framed in terms of “structure” and “oppositional politics”…. (i mean, honestly, the woman is from Berkeley…) and that James Clifford displayed his usual kindness and brilliance in shifting and creating the grounds to connect the pieces and divisions. his intervention began like this: as we all know, when we don’t like a political strategy, we call it reformist, when we do, we call it Gramcist…
a quick word with (the impressive) Gina Dent afterwards, who just became director of the Institute of Advanced Feminist Research. she didn’t disguise her insatisfaction with the event, in terms of the non-communication (beyond affirming their own positions) between the panel and the marxist back-bench. ah, but surely that was to be expected, i said (thinking about this particular set-up). not when i organize, she responds with beautiful fury.
but the pleasure of the day lay in the encounter with veronica. we had, eventually, found each other on this entirely de-centered campus in the forest – not an easy thing, this campus doesn’t cease to surprise and disorient, especially if one tries to think in terms of a central square or meeting place. after the panel we went to our home and talked and talked and talked. veronica just came back to california after two years in madrid, where she found the karakola and precarias a la deriva; maggie had put us into contact. lots of stories of european feminist networks and connections (oh, i get happy like a child when talking and plotting about these kinds of feminist families or mafias) and migration and euro-nostalgia.
spanish – dos mujeres
i won’t bother you after every spanish class, promised, but alvaro’s games today made me laugh too much not to drop you note. which i must start by saying that, when marÃa comes to pick me up after class and we try to find a dining hall on Science Hill, as this particular concentration of science buildings in the forest is called, we find out that there is not much except a van that stops by every day at noon, selling tacos, burritos, french fries, softdrinks… to a long line of hungry students (many of whom live on this campus) and staff. all of a sudden alvaro’s previous game of criticizing food habits here seems a bit less funny. (and frankly, who conceives a campus like this, without enough adequate dining facilities or food stores?) it already got a bit less funny earlier in class today when we had to tell each other what we ate this morning, and the seriously overweight girl sitting next to me said “pizza”.
but i wanted to tell you about today’s game. alvaro made us listen to Corazón loco in the Bebo and Cigala version to review the verb poder (No te puedo comprender, corazón loco). a pleasant although a bit random way to learn verbs, i remember thinking. but alvaro clearly had a greater plan. when we moved on to conversation, he asks: so what do you think, is it possible to love two women, yes or no. or two men or a woman and a man, that’s not the point. 10 minutes of discussion in small groups. the class is hit by bafflement and confusion. “He wants us to talk about whà t?!?” the kids look at each other; some mouths fall open, some heads shake in disbelief. sitting in the back of the room, i overlook the wave of slight panic rolling over the class, and catch the gaze of alvaro sitting at his desk, supposedly correcting some papers but hardly disguising how much he enjoys the whole scene. the sense of moral panic doesn’t last very long. at least in my small group the young women find themselves on the same page and express it with fervor. “¡No es possible!” and everybody switches to english quite fast this time in order to make their point. i stay quiet, enjoy the spectacle of alvaro and the class. then the young women turn to me. what can i say, claro que sÃ... and i’m looking forward to the other games alvaro still plans to play with these american undergrads.
brown berets
the first Brown Berets meeting i went to definately drew me in but this evening i’m very moved. my impression about the relationship to history and legacy is confirmed: also this meeting starts with a member briefly telling the history of the group. the 1960s, the inspiration of the Black Panthers, and urgencies provoked by police brutality and poor education. (Walkout! is a film that represents a part of that history.) the original group disbanded in the 1970s but local chapters remain. in 1994 the Watsonville chapter is established by high school kids after more gang killings in which a 9 year old sister and 16 year old brother die. the first peace and unity march takes place. sandino, who is telling the story this time, pauses on education. the each one teach one principle put forward by Malcolm X. the educational drive of the Brown Berets: educating ourselves and the community, as school were and are not teaching what we need to know.
the educational part of this meeting revolves around the alliance between brown and black power. the words of the guy running for the Santa Cruz city council at the protest serve as an introduction: we need to understand how the undocumented people from Mexico and other latin american countries picking strawberries are related to black slaves picking cotton. we watch an impressive fragment of a documentary, in which an old black woman in Mexico talks about her family history. her ancesters were run-away slaves from Florida, who sought and found refuge in a Mexican village. she speaks of a whole community of black people with a similar history, we see images of a group of black women singing the negro-spirituals that travelled with their ancestors to Mexico. the images, words and songs affect the gathering a lot, and people start talking about how “race” as we know it now was an alien concept to their black and latino ancesters. how it was about cultura. and through the imaginaries of resistance that are spun out, a strong presence of native americans emerges. stories about how the Chicapoos and Seminoles, Native American Nations, were known to provide safe places for those running away from slavery, and how it was possible for initial outsiders to become part of their nations. a recognition of how strong this Native American heritage runs through the Black history in this country.
returning to our ancestral roots, they emphasized, means understanding how these ancesters didn’t discriminate on the basis of “race” like in the system the whites brought with them. there’s a deep history of black and brown unity that needs to be reclaimed, and that finds more contemporary foundations in the alliance between the Black Panthers and the Brown Berets, and indeed the fact that the Brown Berets as an organization is modelled on the Black Panthers.
the conversation moves on into strong personal positioning. a black woman (she’s the only black person in the group) talks about what it means for her to be involved in the Brown Berets. how her family and community asks her questions about why she’s involved in someone else’s struggle. and she speaks about having Native American blood, and how that blood runs through black people in this country. a white guy (there are about three white people with myself included) speaks about what it means for him to be active in the Brown Berets. he refers to the “When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out” poem written under the Nazi regime. one of the core members of the group wants to respond to the charge of “reverse racism” that white friends of him tend to bring up. if black and brown power is okay for you, would it then be okay for me to talk about white power? his answer: listen, man, does it look like whites need more power in this world?
then a woman intervenes, almost in tears. all the things you’re talking about are very important, unity is important, don’t get me wrong. but there’s also other stuff going on. part of my ancesters are from the Cherokee Nation. but the Cherokee Nation, they also had slaves, they also participated in the slave trade. and now they exclude folks like me and my family. if you don’t have a rol number – but what kind of shit is that, i don’t even want a rol number – but if you don’t have it, you’re not considered Cherokee. but it’s part of my culture, my heritage. and they try to take that away through rol numbers, and blood quantum. what kind of shit is that… we also need to be talking about that.
the way people engage with each other is impressive. listening, hearing, taking people’s concerns and pains on, sharing them, constructing community. later during the meeting there is a time for nominating new members (i now understand better some of the dynamics of what seems quite a differentiated system of involvement and authoritative voices – everybody can come to the meetings but there’s a formal system of membership which works through nomination by a member in the meeting, followed by a vote about the person.) a guy of the core group nominates the black woman who spoke earlier. the political significance of this nomination escapes nobody and is expressed in a long round of applause. she starts crying, and i can’t help feel the tears welling up.
there so much more i learn, i’m not managing to digest and write about it all. touching upon three brief things for now. one, on October 13 & 14 the 40th anniversary of the foundation of the Black Panthers in Oakland will be celebrated. two, the impressive woman running for the Watsonville city council, mireya gomez, has been a queer latina spokesperson at college and member of the Brown Berets. the Brown Berets is mobilizing to support her, which is presented to the meeting, and especially to young people, as yet another educational activity: how to do a campaign in local politics. (and in many school programs this will get you credits, it is mentioned.) three, as part of la Otra Campaña el subcomandente Marcos & co are calling for a secret meeting with latin@ leaders from the US. secret in the sense that of course the time and place will be kept secret, but also that it will not be followed by a public communiqué. instead, the idea is to strategize for a while about possible common and complementary tactics. and so a delegation of the Brown Berets has been called for. (oh, what a smart and bold move of the EZLN, to initiate this kind of transnational coordination… and if Chavez keeps on doing his funky interventions…)