Rewriting/recurricularlizing as a matter of life and death: The coloniality of academic writing and the challenge of black mattering therein

Abstract

Within our current order of knowledge, propagated by the Humanities and Social Sciences, the mattering of Black lives is all but inconceivable. The only possibility for challenging this inconceivability, asserts Sylvia Wynter, is to rewrite our current order of knowledge such that it refuses the overrepresentation of European man and opens to multiple co-existential and relational modes of humans being. While the call to rewrite is a call to rethink, reimagine, re-curricularize knowledge processes, it should also compel a reconsideration of the act of academic writing, as a key site where Black and other disenfranchised people are rendered less than human or not human at all. And as such it is also the site, upon which Black and other disenfranchised people have historically intervened “cutting and augmenting” meaning with sound to announce the presence of Black/Human and to bring forth new insights toward the project of rewriting the current order of knowledge in the interests of a multiple/co-existential rendering of humans being.

Keywords:

• Curriculum studies
• black mattering
• writing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 In the mid-1980s and -90s, investigations into practices at the San Diego and Los Angeles police departments revealed that officers used NHI, meaning no humans involved, to refer to incidents concerning people who were part of undesirable groups, including gangs, prostitutes, and other highly racialized and often jobless populations.

2 The capitalization of Human is to denote the movement away from Man as human and toward Wynter’s conception of the Human as multiple co-existential genres of humans being.

3 reWriting is intended to emphasize the act of writing within and towards Wynter’s notion of rewriting the current order of knowledge.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Denise Taliaferro Baszile

Denise Taliaferro Baszile is Associate Dean and Associate Professor of Curriculum and Cultural Studies in the College of Education, Health & Society at Miami University. Her work focuses on understanding curriculum as race-gendered text, with an emphasis on disrupting traditional modes of knowledge production, validation, and representation.