Temple University Press Journals
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California’s AB 101: The Long, Intergenerational Struggle for Establishing and Expanding Ethnic Studies
No full textIn 2021, California governor Gavin Newsom signed into law AB 101, which requires that all students graduating high school by 2029–2030 must take an ethnic studies course. California is the only state in the nation with this graduation requirement. This article explores the historical and contemporary factors that pushed California to legislate and implement AB 101. We utilize a historical case study approach focusing on different student-led movements that embraced ethnic studies to combat educational inequalities. To do so, we pinpoint three historical phases in which ethnic studies became implemented throughout the state. In the first phase, influential scholars in the early and mid-twentieth century produced scholarship about historically marginalized people of color, which became foundational for the study of Black, Chicana/o, Asian American, and Indigenous people. The second phase involved students of color fighting for a culturally relevant curriculum, as demonstrated by the 1968 Third World Liberation Front, the 1968 East Los Angeles Chicano walkouts, El Plan de Santa Bárbara, and Chicanx/Latinx student hunger strikes in the 1990s. Lastly, the third phase consists of contemporary students, parents, educators, and activists successfully petitioning their local school districts to mandate ethnic studies as a high school graduation requirement. Despite these gains, far-right organizations in cities like Santa Barbara have mobilized to push back against both the ethnic studies requirement and progressive social justice groups like Just Communities Central Coast. This resistance initially derailed AB 331, an earlier ethnic studies bill that Governor Newsom vetoed based on accusations that it was “anti-Semitic.” A revised version, AB 101, was then introduced and passed. While momentous, we contend, AB 101 is still limited; reaching its full potential would require greater teacher credentialing and the expansion of ethnic studies to K–8 students
Eleven Years of Activism at the Haitian-Dominican Border
No full textThe 1937 Massacre, ordered by the infamous Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo and carried out by the Dominican army and conscripted civilians, claimed the lives of approximately fifteen thousand Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent. This article reflects on eleven years of work by Border of Lights (BOL), a transnational volunteer collective that publicly remembers the massacre and honors the lives lost. The article introduces readers to BOL and traces its impact and legacy since its inception in 2012. Written by two co-founders of BOL, the reflective piece acknowledges the physical and metaphorical “markers”—or memorials to the massacre—that exist today; we reference not only physical memorial sites but textual sites (and other “places of memory”) and temporal markers. The article ends by questioning what remembering the 1937 Massacre will look like in the future, especially as formal community organizing by BOL volunteers on the Haitian-Dominican border in the towns of Ouanaminthe, Haiti, and Dajabón, Dominican Republic, comes to an end
We Said, She Said: (or, Death by Neoliberal Administration)
No full textWe said “We’re in a house on fire; we need someone to hear our cries for help”
She said “I’m your new university president and I’m listening”
We said (and documented) “The House Is On Fire!”
She said “Okay, I hear there are issues with morale, enrollment, and finances . . .”
We said “Yes! What are you going to do??”
She said “Please be patient. I’ll be making slow incremental changes
Unbroken Spirit: California SHU Prisoner Hunger Strikes and the Promise of Rebirth
No full textIn 2011 and 2013 California prisoners rose in protest of the conditions of confinement in Security Housing Units (SHU) and launched a series of hunger strikes that would disrupt business as usual for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR). This article discusses the SHU prisoners’ resilient spirit and their refusal to exist within the confines of their isolated captivity and prison walls. Through Clyde Woods’s frameworks of “asset stripping” and “enclosures” I discuss how Pelican Bay, designed as a prison within a prison, can then be understood as an enclosure within an enclosure. I argue that the SHU was designed to fully strip incarcerated men of all assets and achieve incapacitation in order to eliminate any threat of prisoners’ collective organizational power. Despite the SHU’s highly developed forms of surveillance and psychological torture, many prisoners refused to concede and have their spirits broken. Instead, they relied on camaraderie to regenerate their spirit and build the communal power to resist carceral state violence
“Fighting for Community”: Young People Organizing for Freedom Now
No full textCentering a dialogue among young people who are movement builders, this article considers one example of freedom work: school walkouts. The authors narrate how mobilizing in Brooklyn and Chicago illustrates possibilities for futures beyond the euro-modern human project. Specifically, the article is a dialogic set of stories about organizing against the codification of adult superordination, with people across difference, and through collective praxes. We situate this movement building in the long tradition of Black radical work and share stories that shed new light on the locus of school-based counterinsurgent forces and young people’s self-determination. Young organizers incisively interrogate systems of power, delegitimizing these systems’ logics and practices, and move us radically beyond the current social organization by modeling sustained learning
Ethical Challenges in Contemporary Global Narratives: Photography, Truth, and the Intersection of Haiti and Palestine
No full textReflecting on the contemporary luxury of truth, the author contemplates its elusive nature and occasional appearance during moments of introspection. Drawing parallels between the unassuming arrival of truth and the bold, impactful statements made in the face of adversity, the narrative weaves personal experiences—such as attending a conference and grappling with one\u27s Haitian heritage—into a broader exploration of truth in the context of war, imperialism, and the role of photography. The author explores the challenges of encapsulating truth in photographs, especially amid the complexities of war, and highlights the historical role of images in visual imperialism, emphasizing the interconnectedness of histories like the ongoing genocide in Palestine and the imposition of occupation on Haitian land. The abstract concludes with a reflection on the transient nature of safety within the largest imperialist power and the collective responsibility to recognize dignity beyond geopolitical boundaries
Interrupt, Prohibit, Resist: An SB 17 Higher-Education Testimonio
No full textThis short nonfiction essay creatively details my journey as a faculty member who benefited from the support of a woman-of-color coalition, particularly in light of recent legislation (SB 17) against affinity groups and DEI work in Texas
Listening to Listening: A Response to Nina Sun Eidsheim’s The Race of Sound
No full textNina Sun Eidsheim’s The Race of Sound boldly proposes that we should listen to listening. In her words, “in carrying out an analysis that is conscious of the fact that any voice is part of the collective voice, and that listening contributes to shaping that voice, we must listen to how we listen” (57). This volume will fundamentally alter music studies—musicology, ethnomusicology, and music theory—as well as studies of voice, opera, dramaturgy, race, gender, and sexuality. It turns our attention away from what singers purportedly are, as gleaned through their vocalizations, and persuasively argues that we should not aim to produce an instrument that is more beautifully in tune with our inner selves. It instead asks us to think unflinchingly about how vocal timbres are enculturated and produced from entrainment—to recognize that the voices we hear are, in fact, created in the act of listening. Two areas Eidsheim addresses, the figure of sound and phantom genealogy, have been particularly suggestive for my own thinking about the ways that oppressive identifications about voice—structures of race, gender, and sexuality— haunt our teaching, writing, and listening
The Grace of Black Folk: Notes on Ubuntu Democracy
No full textThe Mississippi River holds the songs of my people: of how some of us were betrayed and sold back there, while others of us were scattered across a vast somewhere, and how none of us is welcomed anywhere, except where fugitives dare. No fugitive has ever survived by coincidence. The artful genius of the fugitive’s survival has entailed making quilts out of fragments, forging the belonging that can be found in exile, and listening to the songs of the river, those dark winding melodies in mysterious meter. Black poet laureate Langston Hughes wrote of hearing the river sing when Abraham Lincoln made the journey to New Orleans. The songs of the river summon the Sankofa bird, whose presence in our midst is a grace, an invitation for all of us to journey back into the past, to pause and wonder at how we made it over
Who Is Speaking? An Empirical Perspective on the Acousmatic Question
No full textRecent empirical work has begun to consider the social, political, and biological contexts in which voice information is exploited by both speakers and listeners, making this a fruitful moment to address the points of contact between scientific thought and the critical perspectives put forth in Nina Sun Eidsheim’s The Race of Sound. In that book, voice is viewed as a “thick object” that comprises all facets of identity, including race, gender, social class, age, and many other characteristics. However, in this article I discuss the specific subcase of personal identity as indicated by a name assigned to a voice sample, or by a “same/different” judgment regarding a pair of voices. If we claim, as Eidsheim does, that voice (a thick object) is collective and cultural, deriving meaning from listeners, then how do these views from the domain of critical theory mesh with current scientific thought and empirical data about how listeners determine a speaker’s personal identity—seemingly an important facet of that thick object