"The Alchemy of Race and Rights", Patricia J. Williams

In The Alchemy of Race and Rights, Patricia Williams begins with subject position (herself, her body, her thoughts, and spirit), and then weaves a work around civil rights, law, and commerce within fractures of her own life and hystery. For this text, I learned and connected it to so much we have been thinking through in class about epistemology and the academy (post-modernism, post-post-modernism, humanism, Enlightenment, positivism) as methods of research inquiry.
However, for this text, what I found myself reflecting on was how much I was drawn to William's writing style. For example, as she explains her work to her sister, she practices, within her writing, both dialogue and pedagogy. This is critical and mindful of traditional law text / academic text, which is generally "explanation" -- not a critical pedagogy / praxis (bell hooks, "Teaching to Trangress") and also usually has a "fourth wall" which it's audience. As Williams branches on her theoretical framework, her writing embodies what she is talking about. For example, William's writes, "legal language flattens and confines in absolutes the complexity of meaning inherent in any given problem", and then offers anecdotes to complicate even what a "given problem" could mean or how it could be interpreted.
I connected it with why I was initially drawn to "Pedagogies of Crossing", by Jacqui M Alexander as well. It was, in part, politic. But also, an intentionality around the writing form itself, so that the text was both "peer-reviewed work" but also prose-like. Other writers I admire are: Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Angela Davis... 

Sudbury, "Rethinking Anti-violence Strategies, Lesson's from the Black Women's Movement in Britain"

In this piece, the Southall Black sisters challenge our ideas of U.S.-centric racial formation. Because of organizing in Great Britain was primarily around working class struggle + different relationships to the colonizer within Britain, black is defined differently than the U.S. context. Writing this blog post directly after sitting with Mohanty's work helped me 'see' the sorts of coalition building and feminist praxis that Mohanty envisioned. My reaction to this text was more visceral, perhaps because of the detailing of each case, my own personal and familial connections to Southall, Eastham etc. This reading became a reminder for me how racial formation function so differently outside of the U.S. context, so the traditional triangulation of desis within the US translates so differently in the UK. For example, I think of how in the US, the model[ed] minority was constructed post-1965 to triangulate a new immigrant group against marginalized communities within the US (mainly Black and Latino), to the point that in contemporary organizing  many South Asian American students do not consider themselves 'people of color'. Yet, in the UK, there's a different understanding of colonial legacies between Black and Desi communities. Still, from my personal experience, within the desi community within the UK there is so much weaponization against each other (Hindu vs Muslim vs Sikh, the ideas of pitting different nation states against each other).

A question this text left me with was, what is the difference between antiviolence/nonviolence?
I think it's such an important political distinction to think about. It reminded me of Arundhuti Roy's argument, "If you're an adivasi[tribal Indian] living in a forest village and 800 CRP [Central Reserve Police] come and surround your village and start burning it, what are you supposed to do? Are you supposed to go on hunger strike? Can the hungry go on a hunger strike? Non-violence is a piece of theatre. You need an audience. What can you do when you have no audience? People have the right to resist annihilation." (6/5/2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jun/05/arundhati-roy-keep-destabilised-danger)

"'Under Western Eyes' Revisited: Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist Struggles", Mohanty

I really appreciated this work by Chandra Mohanty, in part because she revisited a piece of work in a way that made me think of the ethics of writing. In what I umbrella as q/woc feminist text, text is not "dead" in the sense that is published, and then considered finished or complete. I think of text as an active process, so that text is alive and can be revisited, or can change meaning. Partially, I think this of this evolutionary reading of text comes from woc feminisms because so often woc feminist text emerges from a point of experience, or embodied knowledge. These sorts of embodied epistemologies are always in flux because the body, too, is always a site which is in flux and relational to its environment. For this reason, I see so much of Audre Lorde's poetic as theory, and as text that is "alive", fluid and changing with multiple expressions of meaning or significance. So as Mohanty begins her work speaking from a place of individual and personal experience within a larger academic and public politic, she revisits her text in a way that embodies a feminist praxis and a feminist epistemology about our "work" or "text".

In decolonizing feminist scholarship, she critiqued universalizing methodologies, referencing Mie's study of lacemakers in Narsapur as an example of a multilayered analysis to reveal how a feminist work can be particular and universally significant. Also, as Mohanty reiterates, it's important that Mie's work also had a materialist analysis, which connected it to circuits of capital and different vulnerabilities to life/death circumstances (Ruth Wilson Gilmore).

This connects to my current project because I was struggling with defining an indigenous model of Kashmir as particular to its historical context and material occupation, but also universally significant to various decolonizing projects. I think Mohanty's work gives me a vocabulary and reference point to bring up this point within my research (under "ethical considerations").

Mohanty also explained how the politics of capitalism and globalization have become the more urgent focus point of a feminist struggle. I think this is particularly important when writing on "decolonizing" feminist methodologies. It's important and necessary to question what "decolonizing" means within the academic setting, especially within the privatizing public space of the university -- how it is ironic / but also crucial to teach a decolonial syllabi but also being transparent about how the university is a locust of privatizing capitalist power. 

Muñoz, J. - " Performing Disidentity: Disidentification as a Practice of Freedom"

This text was really fascinating for me. So often in ETHN, I feel that we miss out on queer analytical text and frameworks, so I was glad that this text was on our syllabi for this quarter...

-The way disidentification was explained to me, "you do it all the time." I think of how it relates to interpolating parts of our self to a body of knowledge or a system, but at the same time knowing that there is a gap/dislocation from that larger system. For example, in intersectional theory, there is an assumption that all parts of a subject intersect and exist at the same time, and that all those parts need to be performed or exposed in each instance. But with disidentity, we can understand how a self is produced by a minoritarian subject existing in these majority structures. In this way, we can relate to a majoritarian identity in pieces, without completely assimilating or rejected that identity. This contradictory way of understanding identity becomes a form of survival and resistance, especially for queer bodies of color, as people live and exist within a fluid spectrum of inconsistent identity practices.

• For example, our reading on feminist appropriations of economic theorists can be an example of disidentification. Hughes and Blaxter reupholster traditionally male-dominant scholarship to for a feminist agenda, disidentifying with Bourdieu's positionality but also using his work to build upon it.  

-Multiculturalism vs radical multiculturalism - Gonzales-Torres defines this as a reaction to corporate multiculturalism, "radical multiculturalism is focused on relational or intersectional aspects" (167). This reminds me of how critiques of "multi-culty" POC interactions are actually very white readings of POC spaces. Often times, these critiques assume that POC are never in contact, and when hybrid cultures or political possibilities are formed, they're dismissed as "multicultural" instead of inclusive and representative of different solidarities. So, as Muñoz writes about the difference between critical multiculturalism and a reductive multicultural pluralism, I found myself nodding my head. It reminds me of the foundational womyn of color feminist work in "This Bridge Called My Back", which positions womyn of color solidarities based on the positions of difference as well as similarity. I think in reductive multicultural pluralism, difference is blurred out to privilege and highlight similarity, but in actual POC spaces -- POC do work together inclusively, and do so understanding positions of difference (for example, I'm thinking of SAAC). 

"Conquest", Andrea Smith

-US tests weapons on indigenous peoples in the Americans; military and nuclear testing also takes place almost exclusively on Native lands.

Brings up a form of coloniality that we have to think through again, as traditional models of colony:metropole (most often in regards to colonization from Western Europe) and settler colonialism, to have a more complicated understanding of how coloniality functions to economically support the nation-state within the contemporary moment. In the case of U.S. settler colonialism for Native lands, Smith argues here that consolidating "empire within borders" supports military expansion internationally, so that the struggle for Native sovreignty intersects with multiple internationalist ("nation-state") issues, but also complicates the idea of what liberation can look like. 

"Feminist Appropriations of Bourdieu", Christina Hughes and Loraine Blaxter

In this piece, one thing that stood out to me was Hughes and Blaxter's writing on the academic field and social capital -- "whilst social capitalists are infused with a concern to reduce inequality, 'there is little sense of its structural, rather than personal, origins" (111). In this feminist reading of Bourdieu's working of social capital and what it means to be a practicing intellect, I wonder how social capital functions within the academy. Which bodies can never assimilate into the academic institution, because of the structural processes of the university? Meaning, which bodies can never amount social capital for mobility within the academy?
As I was reading this article, I was a little confused about the usage of "appropriation" to think about Bourdieu's theorization. From my understanding, the use of "appropriation" was a way to incorporate "male" theory into feminist theorizing, in a way reupholstering traditionally male-dominant scholarship to fit a feminist agenda. 

"Diaspora, Utopia, Critique of Capitalism", Paul Gilroy

Gilroy's reading reminded me of our discussions within class about blackness and geography -- thinking through the material relations which produce space and geographies (**how to think of land/geography as more than just an object, abstracting our relationships to land**). Similarly, I think that culture and sonic forms relate to geographies, as cultural objects are produced through material relations and social conditions of possibility. Gilroy, in line which British cultural studies, looks @ diasporic movement as both a process (the moving, the flux of moving bodies) but also a site of cultural production. He writes, "Black British cultures have been created from diverse and contradictory elements apprehended through discontinuous histories. They have been formed in a field of force between the poles of under- and overdevelopment, periphery and centre. Their bi-lingual character expressed these origins and dislocates the languages of sometimes antagonistic politics formations - black and white, slave and slave-holder, class, people, nation, and locality into new meanings" (219). Through this, emergent (sub)cultures should be given attention as cultural objects into themselves, as they speak to particular political moments, circuits of capital, and dynamics between the psychic/material. 

"Pedagogies of Crossing", M Jacqui Alexander

In the introduction of Pedagogies of Crossing, Alexander writes:

“We cannot afford to be continuously, one-sidedly oppositional...Pedagogies is intended to intervene in multiple spaces where knowledge is produced. ...In the same way in which Paulo Freire narrated our ontological vocation to become more fully human, these pedagogies assemble a similar ontological imperative, which pertains to learning and teaching. And since there is no crossing that is ever undertaken once and for all, this ontological imperative of making the world intelligible to ourselves is, of necessity, an enterprise that is ongoing. 

 Since the central metaphor of this book rests in the tidal currents of the Middle Passage, we should want to know why and how this passage -- the Crossing -- emerged as a signifier...Put differently, pedagogies that are derived from the Crossing fit neither easily nor neatly into those domains that have been imprisoned within modernity’s secularized episteme. Thus, they disturb and reassemble the inherited divides of the Sacred and secular, the embodied and disembodied, for instance, pushing us to take seriously the dimensions of spiritual labor that make the sacred and disembodied palpably tangible, and, therefore, constitutive of the lived experience of millions of women and men in different parts of the word.”

I think that this text serves as an important backdrop for any research design, because the oppositional consciousness she is calling for an active being within knowledge production. That is, epistemology (ways of knowing) must transcend into ontology (ways of be/coming). This pedagogy demands that we seek a crossing (never fully crossed, always in a diasporic, instable process) as opposed to a static, fixed bridge between binaries. I appreciate Alexander's thoughts of the in-between spaces of the psychic and material, the Sacred and secular, the geographic and memory. In many ways, this relates to my research because any understanding of Kashmir and land cannot be only understood through objective cartographies or linear timelines of communal conflict. Because materiality is constructed through social relations, any research around land evokes the psychic: memory, storytelling, language, loss, crossings. For my research to do justice to its subject, at a level of thought and production, it's important for me to continually remind myself of these crossings.

The phrase, "making the world intelligible" to ourselves stood out to me the most in my re-read of this passage. With the modern academy, knowledge production serves as a tool to "make sense" of chaos, of external realities. What is Alexander asking of her readership here? Why? 

initial research concepts:

the rough sketch of my research project is to frame kashmiri militarization (from india/pakistan) with other contemporary decolonial struggles, and to think through kashmir as an evolving indigenous model. traditionally/hystorically, kashmir is diagnosed as a "communal violence" of india/pakistan and hindus/muslims. however, i think that the forms of militarization, dispossession of land, gendered violence, and imperial cartographies relate kashmir more to a shifting face of coloniality. currently, i'm trying to historicize the conflict, and find points of comparison/conversation with other continuing struggles. this is also an attempt to connect ethnic studies theory to a location outside of the u.s., and look at forms of transnational solidarities.

"Kashmiriyat does not only mean simply a harmonious relationship cutting across religious and sectarian divisions or pluralistic tradition, but it is a far wider concept that has grown over centuries of historical processes that the region of Kashmir has embraced, both in peace and in turmoil. Kashmiriyat is not a mere concept, but an institution with societal, political, economic, and cultural currents and undercurrents. Kashmiriyat is only unique to Kashmir, and this specificity of Kashmir has evolved as a result of special circumstances rooted in Kashmir’s topography/geography, ecology, religious ethos, and cultural moorings. The immensity of distance has never restricted Kashmiris from traveling to distant lands. This region has always been surrounded by the world’s greatest civilizations such as China, Persia/Iran, Central Asia, and India. These civilizations always interacted with the region’s population and culture but did not and could not overwhelm the region’s character in any manner, irrespective of the small size of Kashmir and the number of people who migrated into Kashmir and inhabited it from time to time. All these forces facilitated the growth of an integral personality of Kashmir that imbibed varied socio-religious, politico-regional, and cultural trends that were assimilated and reworked by Kashmiris in evolving an indigenous model." -Ratthan Lal Hangloo

test post: kala - tamil, meaning unity kala - hindi, meaning the color black