Interlude II

ABSTRACT

In this interlude, we would like to reflect briefly on the first two essays in the issue by commenting on the settler present. We make a brief comment on the fungibility of trauma and the relationship between it and memory. We build on these concepts to join the other authors in this issue who describe how they have begun a process of dissettling the institutions of public learning to prepare for the sets of possibilities available to us in the decades to come.

KEYWORDS:

• the settler colonial present
• trauma
• memory
• land
• seeds

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For more on the relationship between settler colonialism and the production of “death lands,” see Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Michael Lechuga, Visions of Invasion: Alien Affects, Cinema, and Citizenship in Settler Colonies (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2023).

2 Iyko Day, “Being or Nothingness: Indigeneity, Antiblackness, and Settler Colonial Critique,” Critical Ethnic Studies 1, no. 2 (2015), 112–13.

3 Ibid., 113.

4 For more on this process of organizing settler colonial subjects, see Lechuga, Visions of Invasion. In addition to describing the mechanisms of settler population production, the book also describes the extent to which settler narratives obscure the violences of colonialism in media.

5 For more on the history and impact of land-grant universities in the U.S., see Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone, “Land-Grab Universities” (landgrabu.org). This project details the ways unceded Indigenous lands were acquired by the U.S. and sold as scripts that founded dozens of universities across the nation.

6 We are referring here to the well-known quote Audre Lorde made in conference remarks in 1979, where she said “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Audre Lorde, Lorde, A. (2007). “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” Comments at the “The personal and the political panel,” Second Sex Conference, New York, September 29, 1979. See also, Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (Toronto, ON: Crossing Press, 2007).

7 For more on “pluriversality,” see Arturo Escobar, “Transiciones: A Space for Research and Design for Transitions to the Pluriverse,” Design Philosophy Papers 13, no. 1 (2015): 13–23; Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, and Praxis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).

8 One suggestion we have: look for seeds, things that we can plant, and will grow, in hostile terrains. These can be literal seeds (we will still need to eat) as well as metaphorical seeds: community organizing skills, coding/programming/hacking, media literacy, or media making. Find the things that can grow and sustain community outside the sterile, laboratory environment of the university.

9 La Paperson, A Third University Is Possible (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 34.