Songs of school abolition

Abstract

In this article, I theorize school abolition as a shift needed to unsettle education within current times of ecological precarity. As a practice and horizon, abolition reorganizes schooling’s ruling episteme by articulating humanity as a collective performance beyond the pedagogical paradigms of western man. Because racial capitalist schooling produced the political and economic subjects enacting socioecological destruction, even a progressive reformation of the school into a socially just institution will not save the planet. Disruptive pedagogy and insurgent curriculum are now an existential necessity, and school abolition offers a foundation for building liberatory alternatives. In this article, I consider school abolition by way of Gumbs’s experimental M Archive, which grounds three interrelated lines of speculation. First, I theorize schooling and extraction as two interrelated forms of violence, utilizing the work of Hartman, Ferreira da Silva, and Wynter to argue that both constitute material transformations essential to western humanism. Second, I suggest that school abolition is a natural consequence of climate catastrophe, drawing on Butler’s Parable of the Sower to illustrate the importance of learning and teaching forms of knowledge while surviving ecological precarity. Third, I speculate on the role of music, working with Jordan’s “The Talking Back of Miss Valentine Jones” to think more about collective and everyday forms of school abolition. These unique threads are connected by their account of how school and its abolition (dis)organizes collective definitions of humanity and its relationship with the environment.

Keywords:

• School abolition
• Black feminism
• Critical Pedagogy
• Environmental education

Disclosure statement

There is no conflict of interest to report for the author.

Notes

1 I define racial capitalism here as an anti-black global assemblage whose technologies of extraction, subjection, and dispossession maintain and organize themselves around ruling categories of western humanist knowledge, value, and being. Racial capitalism relies on slavery and settler colonialism, both understood in this paper as paradigmatic forces as opposed to past historical phenomena, to generate modern institutionality and structure rooted in the principles of economic subjectivity and practices of individuation. The two key facets of this definition are violence and humanism. Racial capitalism needs violence to produce and power the material and discursive apparatuses of the modern world; racial capitalism needs humanism, as a racial and gendered form of thought and ­existence, to calibrate its operations and render itself coherent. This conception of racial capitalism owes a great debt to the work of Robinson (2000) but is primarily informed by the work of Ferreira da Silva (2014a, 2014b) and Wynter (2003). By defining racial capitalism, I aim to provide a theory of violence that can anchor the larger web of terms I deploy in this article when describing the convergence of structure and subjectivity that produces humanism. These different phrases, ranging from liberal subjecthood to economic individualism to world-historical cognitive schema, are not used interchangeably. Instead, I use them to attempt a dynamic articulation of how violence shows up in/as activities and identities often taken to be natural, normal, or even liberatory.

2 In this article, I am concerned with global conditions of violence and global forms of collectivity antagonizing such terror. In naming the global dimensions of crisis and survival, I am working against a tendency in education research to limit the scope and scale of claims in the name of analytic precision. This is because my priority is tracing alternative epistemologies and models of universality, not premised on a logocentric assertion of transparency but instead on the fundamental reality of entangled experience. Taking globality and its discontents as a starting point is also a matter of what’s missed in the move to regional or national specificity. This article is rooted in black feminist thinking and black study, which are shaped by an immense geography of physical environments, socio-political structures, and overlapping histories. These circuitous flows and diverse manifestations of power cannot be primarily described by a set of boundaries imposed by nation states. Keeping those qualifiers in mind, it is also important to recognize that realities of empire, government, and sovereignty can also help contextualize this article’s emphasis. The thinkers cited are generally working in and writing about places within the borders of the United States and North America. Additionally, my commitment in this paper to tracing the black feminist origins of school abolition is rooted in the growing circulation of abolition in U.S. education discourse. As abolition becomes an increasingly popular commodity in education, I hope to contribute to a body of scholarship that centers black feminism and the labor of black women and femmes in an account of abolition as a practice. The relevance of that work to other contexts and the world at large remains a matter of theory in the writing that follows.

3 I use the prefix “ante-” to acknowledge the ways the activity and expression of dissent precedes and exists prior to the protocols that attempt to govern them. This understanding is indebted to the work of Moten (2019).

4 To further clarify the conception of abolition, I also want to define school, as well as the distinction drawn between school and education. While there is no consensus in critical scholarship with regards to the meaning of key terms or what the key terms even are, there is a general tendency to draw a distinction between the ruling curriculum which transmits knowledge that supports the status quo and the alternative practices that cultivate oppositional knowledge and revolutionary consciousness. In this article, I draw on elements of this tradition using the terms school and education to wrestle with both institutionally sanctioned forms of instruction that support the status quo and insurgent forms of knowledge creation that disrupt and enable resistance. School names a material and discursive assemblage of institutions that enact pedagogical violence to produce modern political-economic subjects. Education names a general practice of knowledge creation and learning that can be systematized to enforce authority or mobilized toward fugitive ends. This distinction is indebted to and grounded by the work of Shujaa (1994) and Bambara (1996).

5 Rupture is necessary insofar as school abolition’s annunciation must contend with the constraints imposed on individual and collective imagination. It requires imaginative dissent against progressivism that reduces freedom dreams to another round of anti-racist curriculum and urban school reforms.

6 In this article, I understand Baraka’s self as western man, a humanist self constructed through the material transformations of racial capitalism. To find the self and then kill it reflects an alternative transformation, an abolitionist unlearning that takes place in the music, through the chorus, and entangled with the earth.

7 The stanzas considered in “The Talking Back of Miss Valentine Jones” present themselves as an opening through interruption. The larger poem, originally published in Jordan’s 1977 collection Things that I Do in the Dark, is an account of the aftermath of the Vietnam war and different personal and societal reactions to the loss it caused (Jordan, 2005). Jordan touched on a range of realities from the experience of refugees to the failure of the welfare state, only to have the sonic and aesthetic sociality of black children in schools emerge seemingly out of nowhere. Their sound comes through an interjection made by a “myopic personage,” who amidst all the pain and lack produced by systems of warfare finds most insufferable the music of young people who don’t act like students (p. 236 ). A treatment of the larger poem and its implications for a theory of school abolition is beyond the scope of this article. However, the context for Jordan’s expression of the music and the manner with which it irrupts, as a rupture folded into but ultimately in excess of the authoritative capacity of pathologizing performance, can and should inform how the dislocated omnipresence of school abolition in and as music is understood.

8 This reality is recorded in sociological accounts of the school-to-prison pipeline, quantitative data of disproportionate suspension, expulsion, and arrests of black students, and news coverage of black students punished for singing along to their favorite songs.

9 I am citing the creative work of Baldwin, Brooks, and Bambara alongside the contemporary scholarship of Morris and Shange to illustrate the vast and interdisciplinary archive of black music and social life in schools. Through a commitment to listening, an intergenerational tradition of black intellectuals and artists have recorded the phonic substance that animates outward and against the imposition of containment. Their recordings constitute an expansive multiplicity of knowledge, of empirical and theoretical wealth, indicating that black students make life and joy where so many have claimed it impossible.

10 Everything is Everything. And it is a truth given in and as sound, that I received initially by way of Hill (1998) on an album committed to describing the richness of her musical miseducation. It is a truth I receive again and again, in the work of Noname, Nina Simone, Alice Walker, Alexis Gumbs, Diana Ross … and so on and so on and so on.