Pedagogies of crossing

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Alexander, M. J. (2005) Pedagogies of crossing. Durham: Duke.

Contents

Introduction

"What do privileges look like in the midst of war and the inevitable violence that accompanies the building of empire?" (2-3)
"Empire requires sacrifice - the sacrifice of consent - unable to function ... within the slow, cumberson machine of constitutional democracy" (3)
"Empire makes all innocence impossible" (4)

Why pedagogies and why pedagogies of crossing?

"The classroom is Sacred space" (8)

This book is concerned with

  • Products of domination and hierarchy
  • "The psychic products that fossilize deep in the interior" (5)
  • The promise (of late capitalism/empire) that "oppositional knowledges hold"
  • "The crafting of moral agency" (5)

Ways of understanding pedagogies (7):

  • Something given
  • Breaking through, transgressing, disrupting
  • Epistemic, ontological projects
  • Summoning subordinated knowledges marginalized through domination (7)
"I intended my teaching to serve as a conduit to radicalization, [...] certain imprisonment that conflates the terms of domination with the essence of life.[...] The focus on radicalization always already turns out attention to domination. The point is not to supplant a radical curriculum. The question is whether we can teach in order to teach." (8)

If i could write with fire: A word on how to read

Part 1. Transnational erotics: state, capital, and the decolonization of desire

  • Foregrounding the "sexualization of subjectivity"
    • By "heterosexual neocolonial state and white gay capital"
  • "Troublesome" meeting point of hegemonic (hetero) and oppositional (white gay) (11)

Part 2. Maps of empire, old and new

  • Ideological trafficking among itineraries of empire (12)
    • State, academy, industry

Part 3. Dangerous memory: Secular acts, sacred possession

  • "Memory as antidote to alienation, separation, and the amnesia that domination produces" (14)

The spiritual closet (15)

"There is a tacit understanding that no self-respecting postmodernist would want to align herself [...] with a category such as the spiritual, which appears so fixed, so unchanging, so redolent of tradition. Many, I suspect, have been forced into a spiritual closet." (15)

Erotic autonomy as a politics of decolonization: feminism, tourism, and the state in the bahamas

Competing histories of women's organizations in Bahamas

  • "Daughters of", orgs defining women viz service to patriarch
    • "From daughter, to lady, to citizen" (22)
  • Suffrage movement, National Council of Women sought to break the distinction between woman and citizen
    • Legacy of British colonialism
    • Should woman/citizen signify "erotic autonomy", thus "sexual agency"? (22)

Women's sexual autonomy as challenge to state

  • Challenges imaginary nuclear family (father/mother/kids) as "cornerstone" of society (22)
  • If erotic autonomy threatens to break up the family then is it als a renunciation of the duties of citizenship? (23)
    • One explanation for outlawing lesbian alongside prostitute? (23)

Heteropatriarchy

  • Lynda Hart
    • Heterosexualization + patriarchy
  • Excedes the sexual
  • Perpetuating colonial inheritance (24)
  • Enabling political, economic processes of recolonialization

Sexual Offences and Domestic Violence ACt, 1991 (24)

  • Sexual assault, abuse, harrassment, domestic violence considered criminal offenses
  • Mandated reporting of child abuse
    • $5000 fine for failure to report
  • Gay, lesbian sex among adults criminalized
    • Max 20 years in prison
  • Prostitution criminalized (previously was not)
  • People with HIV who do not disclose to sex partners subject to penalty of 5 years in prison

"Recolonialization" (25)

"The ways in which political and economic strategies are made to usurp the self-determination of the Bahamanian people." (25)

Operates through 3 levels

  • Law (positioned as "order") (25,27)
  • Matrimonial home, patrilineal private property (26)
  • Heteropatriachy, socializing people into heteronormativity (26)
    • In part for reasons of tourism
    • Reviving the myth of Sodom's destruction (29)

Domesticating violence: Feminists publicize the "private"

  • Suffrage in mid-20th c. involved Black people universally (men and women)
  • Previously, voting tied explicitly to property
    • One could even vote multiple times if one owned multiple pieces of property in different places! (29)
  • Prime influence on 1980s feminist movement
    • Emphasizing sexual politics as central to social relations
    • Not just a "peripheral category of significance only to women" (30)

Inherited tools, methods

  • Meetings
  • Workshops
  • Seminars
  • Coalition-building

Engagement with violence (30)

  • Recognition of and effort to dismantle "naturalized violence" (31)
  • Historical, systemic
  • Event-based
    • Rape, assault
  • High volume of reported violence
    • "Shattered the myth of the sanctity, safety, and comfort of the matrimonial home" (30)
  • Particular focus on incest (31)

Transformation from mobilization to legislation

  • SODV Act reflected many of the concerns of the feminist mobilization
  • But crucial differences persisted
  • How does this legislative artifact reveal the state's deployment of popular concern for its own state project?
    • Comparison with Britain (Bahamas has better social legislation) (34)

Ensuring the law of the father: Domestic violence as proxy (34)

  • SODV leaves "domestic violence" undefined (34)
    • Yet careful detail to the definitions of various types of property
    • Property, cohabited, conflated with marriage (34)
  • "Bodily harm" legislatively distinct from rape, incest (35)
  • Psycholoigical violence, threats absent the text (35)

Conflation of property and marriage (35)

  • Descended from British Dometic Violence and Matrimonial Proceedings Act of 1976 and 1983 (35)
    • Wife and husband have "obligations"
    • Husband responsible for economic stability
  • Laws tend to concern the proper disposal of property in the event of marital split
  • Men tend to disproportionately own (legally) the matrimonial home
    • Women not guaranteed financial stability or housing in the event of a breakup

Law assumes woman as historical "wife":

  • Not owning property
  • Not significant wealth
  • Dependent

Primogeniture (36)

  • Right of the first-born to inherit the family estate
  • Implies that the first-born is a son

"Flattening" of domestic power imbalance

  • Legislation asserts that "any party" within a marriage may bring charges of domestic violence
  • "Apparent gender neutrality" is only possible because the law distinguishes sexual assault / physical violence (38)
  • By emphasizing property exchange, women who report violence may be suspected of lying, trying to extort property from their husbands (39)

Discursive operation of this inadequate translation of demands to legislation

"Women are forced publicly to remain focused on the court system and its skewed, narrow definitions of violence in order to legitimize their broader claims. The gesture works to place women in the role of perennial supplicant, as permanently grateful, and as guardian of the minimal." (39)

The law sustains heteropatriarchy by...

  • Recoding domestic violence in terms of private property
  • Making women into mandater reporters, risking criminality
  • Forcing a distinction between types of violences, despite lived experiences that obviate interrelationships

Configuring the nation as heterosexual: The time when there were no lesbians and gay men in Bahamas

Seeking "moral weight" in comparison of penalties levied by law

  • Homosexuality carries very severe penalities (~20 years) (41)

Parlimentarians worried about "sodomites" in their midst (42)

  • Even concerned about "buggery" among hetero married couples! (43)
  • Heterosexuality made normative, and (most of all) "orderly" by the law (44)
    • Civilization is normative heterosexuality, all else is chaotic

The state of the closet or the state and the closet

  • State conceives of the nation as hetero (46)
    • Reproductive citizenry
    • Acts of "mere" pleasure do not advance the interests of the nation/state

Three ways to signal heterosexual nationhood

  • Normalization of violent heterosexuality and same-sex desire
  • Organization of an internal homophobic discourse on homosexual ontology
    • Functioning through pseudo-scientific discourse on naturalization and God's design/plan (46)
  • Invoking nostalgia for an idyllic Bahamas, free from Western "decadent incursions" (i.e., no gays) (47)
    • Erasure amnesia
    • Americanizing acceptance and visibility of homosexuality, same-sex desire

"The most important defense (Sodom), (51)

  • Interpreting Sodom enables a shortcut of many confusing points regarding the regulation of homosexuality
  • Positions homosexuality as always abberrant
    • Furthermore, punishable by God

Corrupting power of homosexuality (52)

  • Homosexuality threatens the state through corruption

"This land is mine": Tourism as savior and other fictions

Eroticization of national instability, apocalypse

  • Prostitutes (vectors of disease, threatening respectibility)
  • Sodomites (whites, upper-class, hypersex)
  • Lesbians (immoral, threatening domestic space)

"Safety" measured according to "safe" for heteronormative structures

  • Esp. w/r/t tourists

Tourism and labor

  • 58% of workforce dedicated to tourism
  • Majority women
  • "Legitimate" tourism labor is very low wage
    • "Illegitimate" (e.g. sex work) criminalized

Recolonization: Tourism and native identity

  • People who have resisted colonialization
  • Black state leadership inherits heteropatriarchy from former colonial rules (Britain)
    • Deploys its epistemology, ideology to create a state friendly to tourists from the former colonial nation
    • "World class" as euphemism for European
  • Likewise, Bahamians, now free, encouraged to adopt a "native" identity
    • Naturalizing the Bahamians as "friendly", "welcoming", "helpful"
"Tourism is not only an economic activity but also an important ideological site for the [...] construction of a national identity fashioned from the proclivities and desires of the imperial masculine subject, the invisible subject of the legal text." (61)

In whose interest is heteropatriarchy reinvented? (62)

"Black heteropatriarchy takes the bequethal of white colonial masculinity ver seriously" (62)
  • Westminster model of gov't
  • Belief in original nuclear family
  • Conscientious reproduction of law and its false ontologies
    • These laws concieved for white, male subject
    • Can they be so easily transferred?

Heterosexuality in need of defense

  • If husbands have to rely on consent, then heterosexuality must be out of control
    • Therefore, erotic activity must be regulated, constrained
    • Autonomous eroticism extended from rape to lesbianism
      • To all non heteronormative activities

Discursive trap of state power

"[Women may access state power but] heteropatriarchy is avidly mobilized to [enable] a homosocial, homophobic, and, in a real sense, bankrupt state to position itself as patriarchical savior to women, to citizens, to the economy, and to the nation." (64)
"Urgent need for an emancipatory praxis that deconstructs the power of heterosexual lore that positions women as their own worst erotic enemies and rivals." (65)

2. Imperial desire/ sexual utopias: White gay capital and transnational tourism

  • White gay consumer, above average income, social value of tourism
  • Textual analysis of gay tourism guides
    • Assumption of white gay tourist traveling from SF, Frankfurt, Amsterdam to various "exotic" locales
    • Emphases on "friendly" "native" people
    • Fetishization of the local people, no discussion of fetishizing the tourist
  • By detailing concern about alienating homophobia majority, corporations targeting the gay consumer position themselves as more progressive than average American
    • Is this true, however unpalatable? Can capital effectively lead progressive moves?

3. Whose new world order? Teaching for justice

Critical mapmaking

  • Pedagogical project, liberatory education
  • Expanded geography without the goal of conquest (Morrison) (91)
  • "Pedagogy and theory are mutually related" (92)

"Teaching for justice"

  • Always at odds with militarism (92)
  • Always at odds with hegemonic narratives of corporate class as sole agents of history (92)

Creation of new world order

  • Beginning with article from Dec 1989 in NYT
    • Required alliances among world gov'ts (Russia, USA), multinational corporations, "the American people" (95)
  • Women's implication in militarization, the lady soldier
    • Contrasting with the "veiled" Arab woman (in Iraq and elsewhere) (96)
  • Women's domestic roles in wartime (100)
    • Mother, daughter, sister to soldiers
    • Recipient of welfare, thus siphoning off money from the war effort

Global boundaries, global markets, and the making of class

  • Skewed class balance
    • "Corporate class" requires considerable workforce
    • Immigrant labor, dislocated from engagement with NWO elsewhere (101)

Critical consciousness

  • On the edges of "work zones", seeking "dignity" (105)

The economy and the academy: Educating for critical consciousness

  • 1990s, multicultural education blamed for failure of America to compete in global marketplace (106)

Links between academy, economy

  • Universities large service sector employer
  • Universities "provide workers for the economy" (106)
  • "Banking concept" of learning as "investment", upward mobility (Freire) (107)

Teaching for justice from a hunger for justice

  • "No innocent spaces [from colonialism]" (108)
"There is something quite profound about not knowing, claiming not to know, or not gaining access to knowledge that enables us to know that we are not the sole (re)producers of our lives." (109)

Reenvisioning curriculum

  • Does not reside within national and disciplinary borders
  • Takes account movements of histories
  • Demystifies boundaries between academy, community
  • Self-consciousness re: space, place
  • Thinking about the questions we post as we teach how to ask (112)
  • What "dialogic practices" will form a critical consciousness in which "citizenship is never normativized?" (113)

Academy as a place of work

  • How to move from multicultural, race-neutral practices to antiracist? (113)
  • Greater interest, critically in the actions, epistemes of the state (114)
    • Not equating "disinterest" with "benevolence" (114)
"Continually challenging each other to enunciate our vision of justice" (116)


7. Pedagogies of the sacred: Making the invisible tangible

One: the memory of mojuba: A spiritual invocation to remember

Mojuba, a place from Alexander's childhood

  • Remembered and recalled across times, spaces, peoples

Two: the crossing

"The dead do not like to be forgotten" (289)
  • Grief
  • Colonial enslavement, mass murder (290)
"Crossing are never undertaken all at once, and never one and for all." (290)

Three: cosmologies

Yoruba(land)

Locating traces of African practices, ontologies in the Americas

  • First in various practices from Brazil to Caribbean to Southeastern US
  • Finally, in the "basement of immigrant homes" in NY, Boston, Chicago (291)
  • Certain aspects atrophy while others take prominence
    • Depending on location, contact, circumstances, (Chance?) (291)
  • "Change and changelessness, then, are constant" (291)

Self-knowing through spirituality

  • Divinity found in the quotidian
  • Divine is the process through which we come to know ourselves (292)

Background of this project

  • Investigation of Thisbe, 1989 (293)
  • Moving beyond dominant understanding of spiritual practice as cultural retention and survival
    • To regard spiritual as epistemological (293)
    • Sense-making
    • World-making
    • Memory, house in cosmology
    • "Why, how, and under what conditions do a people remember?" (294)
  • Alexander experienced writer's block, stuck
    • Didn't even know how to know Thisbe
    • "Reading against the grain to fill in the spaces of an absent biography was simply not sufficient" (294)

Spiritual work

  • How do spiritual practitioners employ "metaphysical systems" for meaning making and self-knowledge? (295)
  • How does a spiritual experience shape subjectivity?
  • If spiritual practice shapes subjectivity + experience, and experience is central to feminist epistemology,
    • What is lost in a secular feminism that does not incorporate the spiritual? (295)
"The spiritual is no less social than the political, which we no longer contest as mediating the traffic between the personal and the political." (296)

Role of bodies

Body as site of ritual

  • And enacter of ritual

How, why, and when of ritual

  • Enscribed upon, through bodies
  • Body is memory (298)
  • Body is medium for the Spirit

Spiritual work to cultivate a Sacred interior

  • Making the self intelligible to the self
  • Remembering the self (298)

Notes on Santería, Vodou

  • Not typically compared
    • Friction, anger, racism between practioners in NYC
  • Many differences in their lineages to African traditions
    • Yet similarities, too
  • Both "used Catholicism as the subterranean mask to sabotage colonial attempts to annihilate them" (299)
  • Both share an epistemological history, similar set of foundational principles
    • Multiply manifested, multidimensional god
    • Tangible avatars
    • Inhabitation of human beings by spirits
    • Power of utterance
    • Healing power of physical elements

Four: Knowing who walks with you: The making of sacred subjectivity

"Yo soy mis santos y mis santos soy yo", María, In Prorok (300)

  • Consciousness grounded in the idea + practice of "Sacred accompaniament" (301)

Pedagogic moments, sites of learning

  • Lifelong project of learning, growing, living
    • Between physical and metaphysical
  • But where does one learn the practices, habits, rituals of spiritual work?
    • In certain communities, there are yards, meeting places (306)
    • But in NYC, it is "fragmented"
  • Multiple displacement requires "deliberateness" to learning (306)
"Dailiness [of spiritual practice] instigates the necessary shifts in consciousness, because each act, and each moment of reflection of that act, brings a new and deepened meaning of self in intimate concert with the Sacred." (307)

Materialism (307-8)

Within secular epistemologies

  • Material is tangible
  • Spiritual is invisible, intangible

Within spiritual epistemologies

  • Sacred may be manifest, made tangible in many ways

Temporality (309)

Sacred time dislocating linear "clock time"

  • Not "living in the past" (309)
  • But lost in time
  • A time that is still, immobile
  • Collapsing tenses

Five: Healing work is the antidote to oppression - Kitsimba

Sacred fire within humans, within earth

  • Role of "center" and "centering"
  • Objects and spaces may be centers of Sacred, or spirit (311-12)

Limits of spiritual healing

  • "Imagined maladi" caused by believing someone else is causing an illness
    • That it is not "natural" or Divine in origin (312-13)
  • Primacy of cause, la causa, of disequillibrium

Uncomfortable Kitsimba-voiced narratives

"I told her she could't write about me unless she came to know and feel my daily life." - Kitsimba (314)
  • Is this remotely possible???
  • Is it (dread...) self-indulgent?

Six: Beginnings

Intersubjectivity

  • Intersected by the Sacred (323)
  • Contact between politics and spirituality
    • Sometimes read suspect
    • But historically related time and again (323)

Traveling on the inside of cultural spirit categories

  • Critiques of patriarchical religions, fundamentalisms have (sometimes) kept researchers away from "the search for the Spirit"
    • Ceding ground to fundamentalists to define terms of Sacred engagement (325)
  • Repudiation of naturalization categorical "ought not" also repudiate engagement with "forces, process, and laws of nature" (325)
  • Don't reduce radical political movements into "mass psychologies of hatred" (325)
  • Examine ways in which secular feminism privatize the spiritual (326)
    • Praxis of the Sacred would have to be taken as real and the belief structure of its practitioners as having effects that are real (326)



Jump offs

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