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Insubordinate Space
No full textAs the system of education turns on itself under the conditions of neoliberal disaster, “common sense” dictates the amputation of certain areas of research in favor of increasingly authoritarian, colorblind, and extractive approaches to knowledge production. These efforts attempt to establish all other sites and perspectives as “insubordinate spaces” and thus targets of repression.
And yet insubordination and accompanying spaces for rethinking the politics of education and expanding political education persist and proliferate. Insubordination is a tool, as Barbara Tomlinson and George Lipsitz articulate, that has “transformative and redemptive power when mobilized against exploitation and hierarchy.” Protests in the streets and across the educational system have expressed frustrations over the lack of progress on educational conditions, and staged opposition to new policies that criminalize bodies and minds
The Race of Sound, by Nina Sun Eidsheim: What Good Work Does and Why It Matters
No full textLike previous Kalfou symposiums—on race and science, Black and Indigenous alliances for environmental justice, Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s The White Possessive, Black acts and arts of radicalism, and the scholarship of George J. Sánchez and Lorgia García-Peña—this convening brings together serious artists, activists, and academics who know that there is important work to be done, and that it is up to us to do it. For more than a decade authors in this journal have argued that race is a collective social, legal, and discursive construction, not an immutable and embodied property of individuals. As a biological fiction that has become a social fact—because people believe it exists and act according to that belief—racism and the colonial ways of knowing and being attached to it create, perpetuate, and exacerbate injustice, exploitation, and oppression. Racism and coloniality are crucibles in which other cruelties are learned and legitimated. Yet racism never appears in isolation. As Cedric Robinson has shown, racism and coloniality serve as excuses for and justifications of injustice. They concern power as well as prejudice, property as well as pigment, interests as well as attitudes. Virtually every article in Kalfou has shown that racism and coloniality migrate freely across discourses and social practices. They do not have one site of origin or expression. Nina Sun Eidsheim’s book and the responses in this symposium reveal how racial knowledge emanates from diverse forms of entrainment, that race seems to be real because we have been trained to think of it that way. By asking and answering questions about the concrete mechanisms, practices, and processes that make race seem natural, necessary, and inevitable, the authors convened here offer ways to address and redress the collective, cumulative, and continuing cruelty of racial subordination enacted both overtly and covertly in myriad ways
Mapping Complicities in Brahmin Supremacy to White Supremacy: An Unsettling of South Asia and South Asian America
No full textIn this article, I trace how the complicities in brahmin supremacy map onto complicities in white supremacy through the South Asian diaspora in the United States. Using my own autoethnographic accountings as a queer, oppressor-caste, low-income, non-Black, non-Indigenous, Punjabi Sikh, I explore the parallels, complexities, and incommensurabilities of class, caste, race, ethnicity, Indigeneity, religion, gender, and sexuality over transnational migrations to question who gets to claim the identities of South Asian and South Asian American, and how citizenship is negotiated within each. Tracing the logics of anti-Blackness, settler colonialism, caste supremacy, and orientalism, I analyze the ideological underpinnings that uphold brahmin supremacy and white supremacy to reveal how brahmin and white supremacy are interconnected and co-constructed
Boxing Ring Entrances as Insubordinate Spaces: A Disruptive Oral Herstory
No full textThis article examines the May 5, 2018, boxing ring entrance of world champion prizefighter Kali “KO Mequinonoag” Reis. Boxing ring entrances provide a source of entertainment, setting up the spectacle of the fight. They are also spaces where professional boxers can radically and creatively express themselves through their deployment of expressive culture. This article is based on a six-hour oral history with Reis and content analysis of the media coverage of her fights. It reveals that this boxer intentionally centers her gender, self-identification as a multiracial “Black Indian,” and two-spirit subjectivities as well as her “Fight 4 All Nations” motto in her ring entrance. Building on Barbara Tomlinson and George Lipsitz’s concept of insubordinate spaces, this article argues that Reis’s deployment of expressive culture in her insubordinate ring entrance serves as a disruption to neoliberal individualism, ideas of racial authenticity, Indigenous erasure, and gender politics in boxing. The oral herstory and examination of the ring entrance space constitute an important archive that challenges scholars to think about critical sports, ethnic, and cultural studies in new ways, all within a sporting space that has long remained underexamined
The Limits of Labor Solidarity: Competing Organizing Ideologies of Filipino and Alaska Native Salmon Industry Workers, 1928–1946
No full textIn the first half of the twentieth century, the canned salmon industry brought Asian migrants and Northwest Coast Native peoples together in a racially segmented labor force that spanned from Alaska to Oregon. This article focuses on the leadup to the 1946 union election for cannery workers in Alaska, where Seattle-based Filipino organizers affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) clashed with the Alaska Native Brotherhood (ANB) as they competed to represent the growing number of Alaska Native workers. I analyze the diverging ideologies of CIO and ANB leadership to understand the disjunctions that occurred throughout this conflict, focusing on debates over residency, race, and Indigeneity; Native women workers’ responses to the competing campaigns; and the post-election trajectories of both organizations. While CIO and ANB organizers agreed at times on certain measures, such as the need to curtail industrial fish trap usage, I argue that the divergence between their campaigns can be explained by their reliance on opposing ideological frameworks: Filipino organizers understood labor rights as an extension of civil rights, while Native leaders like William Paul understood labor rights as an extension of Indigenous land and resource claims. The competition between the CIO and ANB leading up to 1946 epitomizes a broader conflict between frameworks of civil rights and Indigenous sovereignty, and it provides an important opportunity to examine Native experiences with wage labor, tensions between Indigenous and migrant communities, and heterogeneous conceptions of settler colonialism and racial capitalism within labor movements
Mapping Race and Urban Ecologies: Collaborative Engagements with Critical Geography, Urban Studies, and Digital Humanities
No full text“Race and Urban Ecologies” served as the organizing theme for a course that adopted socio-spatial strategies to explore connections among racial justice and ecological flourishing. Drawing from approaches in the fields of critical geography, urban studies, and digital humanities—and taking inspiration from scholars and community members who use interdisciplinary methods to reimagine processes of knowledge production and community engagement—students worked together to create interactive digital maps. These maps contribute to the ongoing project of developing collective research practices and building a digital archive that examines intersecting injustices that impact marginalized communities while also reflecting community visions and struggles for livable and just geographies. Course research and cartography offered generative modes for deepening understandings of diverse communities and envisioning some of the spaces and politics we inhabit collectively
Making a Space for Epistemology and Aesthetics in Voice Studies
No full text(Mis)perceptions of Nina Sun Eidsheim as a vocalist and human being clearly inform The Race of Sound, grounding her empathy for and professional interest in others who have had similar experiences, as well as her resistance to categories of all sorts. She has learned so much from pleasing and perplexing different auditors and audiences, and she draws on insights derived from that experience to raise awareness, to instruct and liberate the rest of us from the categorical limitations and great simplifications of our perceptions of voice. By voice, here, I mean the physical sounds made by a speaking or singing or vocalizing human being that are perceived by the ears and brains of other human beings, not the voice on the page. The page, using words, presents many problems as a place to talk about the voice. Eidsheim’s work has helped embolden me, in my research on performative speech—primarily in poetry recordings, so far—to approach the voice with empirical methods (grounded in the physiology of voice production and perception, including sound visualization), balanced with equal attention to the cultural context in which a particular performance style arises, evolves, and is received by different audiences
The 2018 Pennsylvania Midterm Election: No Escaping Trump
Get PDFThis article uses pre-election survey, post-election survey, voter registration, and election data to interpret the outcomes of the 2018 midterm elections for governor, U.S. Senate, and U.S. House of Representatives in Pennsylvania. This analysis shows that the results of the 2018 midterm races in Pennsylvania were nationalized. Feelings about the president’s performance drove voter interest and turnout, and also factored into the choices that voters made in the gubernatorial, U.S. Senate, and U.S. House races. Voter preferences in each race followed the same pattern: even after accounting for partisanship and ideology, those who were dissatisfied with President Trump’s performance were more likely to vote for a Democratic candidate. The results suggest that the 2018 midterm results were a repudiation of the Trump presidency, but not a return to the state’s pre-2016 politics
Gauging Gerrymandering in Pennsylvania: A Monte Carlo Approach Using Methods from Spatial Statistics
Get PDFThere is currently no widely accepted standard method to determine whether gerrymandering has occurred. To determine a cutoff for unreasonable gerrymandering, simulating collections of districting plans in the absence of partisan bias has been proposed. In simulation-based methods, real-world election outcomes are compared to results from simulated districting plans. Here, a simulation method that creates possible districts in continuous space is proposed. Existing methods use preliminary spatial discretization of the state to perform simulations. This spatial discretization can result in biased estimates, which could lead to inaccurate conclusions regarding gerrymandering. We use our continuous-space method to analyze the political districts in Pennsylvania. All of our simulated elections result in fewer than 13 Republican seats, indicating that the districting plan used in Pennsylvania prior to 2018 was likely gerrymandered. This finding agrees with and confirms the results of simulation-based discrete-space gerrymandering studies without the presence of discretization bias
