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Abstract
At stake in contemporary US racial tensions is a struggle over the meaning of being “human.” By drawing on black feminist theories of being human as verb, and minority discourse critiques of humanism, the paper links racialization to apparatuses of humanization that emerge in early modernity including slavery, colonization, capitalism and environmental devastation. This paper takes up Sylvia Wynter’s differentiation between the human and man to examine recent critical public pedagogy projects – especially the public syllabus projects emerging around the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO; the Charleston, SC church bombing; the Idle No More movement in Canada, and the movement to stop the pipeline construction in Standing Rock, ND. The examination attends to how the “human” has been defined as a being with a race, and to how this definition of being “human” operates in the service of white supremacy. What the syllabus projects really requires of us, then, is not a curriculum geared toward the lesson that black and Indigenous citizens are humans too, but a collective grappling with the need for new ways of being human– ones not defined by whiteness, ones that can only be articulated in common.
Notes
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Notes
1 Here, it is helpful to note some history at the onset, as Brenda Child argues in Boarding School Seasons, “In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the reality was that properties and assets were still at stake, and a campaign for Indian land and resources was waged every single day of the boarding school era. The history of this land grab, rather than simply the rhetoric of assimilation, produced Indian boarding schools” (2000, p. vi).
2 For instance, the Ojibwe schools that Brenda Child (Citation2016) writes about, which are organized around Ojibwe language, ritual and worldviews. One of these schools, the Enweyang Ojibwe Language Nest, even happens on a state university campus (p. 27). This underscores the importance of work that Harney and Moten (Citation2013) would say can take place “in but not of” the university (p. 26).
3 In this context, I will use “state” or “statist” as an adjective to describe not only public schools but the overwhelming majority of “private” and “charter” schools in the USA (and, with slight difference, in Canada). That is, even if schools are not exclusively state funded, they tend to be oriented toward statist objectives and function in relation to state requirements and assessment regimes. There would, of course, be contexts where it is vital to insist on important differences between these modes of P-12 schooling, but here I treat them under the same umbrella.
4 I return to this below, but I want to mark here that this conception of the field is also proposed by Gaztambide-Fernández and Murad, who write that “The project of Browning is not simply about challenging citation practices or about the incorporation of ‘brown’ bodies in the space of curriculum studies. Rather, it involves encouraging the proliferation of multiple approaches to curriculum studies that reveal the ways in which colonial heteropatriarchal White supremacy continues to pervade curriculum studies” (2011, p. 15).
5 Capitalism, which is itself an outgrowth of the complex colonial matrix of early modernity, likewise reconfigured patriarchal, male-supremacist social formations. As Heidi Hartmann (Citation1981) argued, “While pointing out tensions between patriarchal and capitalist interests, we argue that the accumulation of capital both accommodates itself to patriarchal social structure and helps to perpetuate it” (169–170). This analysis must be intersectionally extended to account for capitalist, patriarchal, and racist hierarchies and oppressions.
6 Hannah Arendt (Citation1968) and Giorgio Agamben (Citation2000) have called attention to the problems nation–states have in protecting anyone whose legal status is merely “human” and not directly national. Agamben writes, “That there is no autonomous space in the political order of the nation-state for something like the pure human itself is evident at the very least from the fact that, even in the best of cases, the status of the refugee has always been considered a temporary condition that ought to lead to either naturalization or to repatriation. A stable statute for the human in itself is inconceivable in the law of the nation-state” (p. 20).
7 Wynter has been drawing on cybernetics at least since the early 1980s, but her most sustained account of how its concepts – especially “autopoeisis” – help her to diagnose the human/Man split is “The Ceremony Found: Towards the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn”, its Autonomy of Human Agency and Extraterritoriality of (Self-)Cognition” (2015). On cybernetics and autopoeisis, see Maturana and Varela (Citation1987) and Wolfe (Citation2009).
8 Weheliye writes, “In sum, black studies illuminates the essential role that racializing assemblages play in the construction of modern selfhood, works toward the abolition of Man, and advocates the radical reconstruction and decolonization of what it means to be human” (2014, p. 4).
9 Erica Meiners writes, “State violence makes visible other kinds of harm. For example, economic disinvestment is a form of state violence, as are hyperpolicing and racial profiling, underfunding schools, or supporting institutions that reward misogyny and heteronormativity” (2016, p. 136).
10 The #FergusonSyllabus can be found at https://sociologistsforjustice.org/ferguson-syllabus. I should note that this essay does not aim to provide a systematic overview of these syllabi projects, their emergence, and their effects. Rather, I use them as specific clusters of events that allow me to think through the relations between curricula, the state, and struggles over what it means to be “human”.
11 In another context, Snaza and Sandlin and I (Citation2017) take up Black Lives Matter as a struggle pitched toward the abolition of Man, drawing on Wynter and other biopolitical theories of racialization.
12 The #StandingRockSyllabus can be found at: https://nycstandswithstandingrock.wordpress.com/standingrocksyllabus/.
13 See the No Selves to Defend anthology: https://noselves2defend.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/noselvestodefend_v5.pdf.
For an overview of the Say Her Name project, organized by the African American Policy Forum, see: http://www.aapf.org/sayhername/.
15 I am borrowing this conception from Fred Moten. See conversation with Robin D.G. Kelley, “Do Black Lives Matter?” https://vimeo.com/116111740.
16 It is important to underscore that such sovereignty is not just about “control” over land, but about being able to enact modes of governance based on traditional structures and values. Thus, even restoring land rights, while undeniably a step in the right direction, is not sufficient given how the US government forcibly re-structured indigenous self-governance with Allotment. Sovereignty can and will take many forms.
17 Tuck and Yang open Youth Resistance Research and Theories of Change by thinking about Hopi refusal of the boarding schools that were part of a US Federal land grab (2014, p. 1). We could also think about the histories of slave rebellion (including the formation of the first black nation-state in Haiti, which, as Lisa Lowe [2015] underscores, was seldom understandable in emergent philosophies of liberalism, progress and freedom).
18 This sort of critique is precisely what la paperson calls “the second university”.
19 Another important site within the US is youth activism against deportation and nationalist attacks on immigration. See Kwon (Citation2013).
20 Wynter writes, “Thus our ‘stories’ are as much a part of what makes us human – of our being human as the imperatively artificial co-identifying, eusocial species that we are – as are our bipedalism and the use of our hands” (Citation2015, p. 217).
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Nathan Snaza
Nathan Snaza teaches English litearture, gender studies, and educational foundations at the University of Richmond. He is author of “Animate Literacies: Literature, Affect, and the Politics of Humanism” (Duke University Press, 2019), and co-editor of “Pedagogical Matters: New Materialisms and Curriculum Studies” (Peter Lang, 2016) and “Posthumanism and Educational Research” (Routledge, 2014).