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g3ryonnothing organized or formal, just stuff i wrote for class
While entering the world in which one is already pushed and situated in the margin is uncontrollable, it is within this margin that one may begin to discover the margin’s possibilities and limits. hooks proposes that to be located in the margin is to speak from a place of pain and suffering, to actively remember what the oppressors are trying to repress, and to recognize that the struggle of being in the margin is continuous. One may eventually “leave” the margin by acting on the internalized behaviors of oppression that have been imposed upon them (re: as Audre Lorde says, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house), but the knowledge and experience that has been imprinted on their memory will refuse to be forgotten. This is why being careful and intentional with the language one chooses to speak is important, as internalized oppressive behaviors such as misogyny, racism, and classism that intersect with each other must be continuously analyzed and undone by speaking, or even inventing, a new language in which those behaviors and ways of thinking are unfamiliar: “The oppressed struggle in language to recover ourselves, to reconcile, to reunite, to renew. Our words are not without meaning: they are an action, a resistance. Language is also a place of struggle.”
- "I have been working to change the way I speak and write, to incorporate in the manner of telling a sense of place, of not just who I am in the present but where I am coming from, the multiple voices within me. I have confronted silence, inarticulateness. When I say then that these words emerge from suffering, I refer to that personal struggle to name that location from which I come to voice - that space of my theorising."
- "Thinking again about space and location I heard the statement "our struggle is also a struggle of memory against forgetting"; a politicisation of memory that distinguishes nostalgia, that longing for something to be as it once was, a kind of useless act, and that remembering that serves to illuminate and transform the present."
How does individual participation in hegemonic structures, informed by a consciousness of the dynamics between the oppressed and oppressor, affect the development and spread of a pedagogy located in or of the margins? hooks' text may be applied to the context of efforts of "diversity" and "inclusion" in academia. As a student, I am constantly disillusioned by these efforts: while I am greatly privileged to attend an institution that prides itself on its progressive values, what structural measures are most academic institutions taking to go beyond mere recognition? As long as a hierarchy is maintained in the classroom, and the dynamics of systems of oppression linger in between discussions, worse implicitly, what does it all mean? What can be changed? We should go beyond discourse, beyond email notifications, beyond putting the trans and Amerikan flags side by side for a whole month as if that generates any feelings of pride or solidarity. The oppressed cannot unlearn the language of the oppressor overnight, or maybe even forever (but we must try): though this internalization of oppressive ways of behavior and thinking is not our fault, there lies a chance, a responsibility to transform awareness into resistance, passive acceptance into investigation:
"Understanding marginality as position and place of resistance is crucial for oppressed, exploited, colonised people. If we only view the margin as sign, marking the condition of our pain and deprivation then a certain hopelessness and despair, a deep nihilism penetrates in a destructive way the very ground of our being. It is there in that space of collective despair that one's creativity, one's imagination is at risk, there that one's mind is fully colonised, there that the freedom one longs for is lost."
As Paulo Freire notes in Pedagogy of the Oppressed:
"Functionally, oppression is domesticating. To no longer be prey to its force, one must emerge from it and turn upon it. This can be done only by means of the praxis: reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it... Making 'real' oppression more oppressive still by adding to it the realization of oppression" corresponds to the dialectical relation between the subjective and the objective."
Before the text moves into a sort of poetry, a dissolution between reader and author, hooks states:
"Silenced. During my graduate years I heard myself speaking in the voice of resistance. I cannot say that my my speech welcomed. I cannot say that my speech was heard in such a way that it altered relations between the coloniser and the colonised. Yet what I have noticed is that those scholars, most especially those who name themselves radical critical thinkers, feminist thinkers, now fully participate in the construction of a discourse about the 'Other'. I was made 'Other' there in that space with them. In that space in the margins, that lived in segregated world of my past and present. They did not meet me there in that space. They met me at the centre. They greeted me as colonisers. I am waiting to learn from them the path of their resistance, of how it came to be that they were able to surrender the power to act as colonisers. I am waiting for them to bear witness. To give testimony. They say that the discourse moved beyond a discussion of "us and them." They do not speak of how this movement has taken place. This is a response marginality. It is a space of resistance. It is a space I choose."
- The experience and struggle of the colonized and exploited are mythologized by the oppressor to refute its material reality and consequences.
- A distance is created, maintained, and widened: again re: attempts of "inclusion" and "diversity" in academia wherein the identities of the oppressed are highlighted in a microscopical/clinical way through an emphasis on language and sign. The margin is dissected, co-opted, and pitied by those in the center.
- Simultaneously, the oppressor attempts to excuse or deny a history of oppression by equalizing the oppressed with them by talking to the oppressed in the colonizer/oppressor's language, creating discourse regarding the "other", and exploiting the internalization of oppressive mindsets and structures by the oppressed.
As Rinaldo Walcott and M Neelika Jayawardane state, "Inviting someone to “speak your truth” is a way of reducing what the speaker says to a personal interpretation of an experience of discriminatory practices and/or behaviour. It implies that the “truth” is filtered through the speaker’s emotions, that it is subjective and belongs to the speaker’s experience of events, alone – rather than an indication of “factual” realities and the intractable structural arrangement and relations of the university." ("Diversity efforts in universities are nothing but façade painting")
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/5/7/diversity-efforts-in-universities-are-nothing-but-facade-painting
The margin is a difficult place to be, and an even more difficult place to choose to stay in. I think of the spaces I occupy in life, in other people's lives, as if hoping to fill slots of love and validation in the brains of those I care about, admire, or fear. I think of spaces where I am either invisible, or too much, or monstrous. Of the body moving through time, of my living vessel being the active factor of change, not time as its independent variable. Never time as the encompassing solution. There are so many ways in which I remember. I can't say that all those ways were wanted. It is one thing to admit that memory is fragile, and another to be unable to explain it.
"For me this space of radical openness is a margin - a profound edge. Locating oneself there is difficult yet necessary. It is not a "safe" place. One is always at risk. One needs a community of resistance."
While entering the world in which one is already pushed and situated in the margin is uncontrollable, it is within this margin that one may begin to discover the margin’s possibilities and limits. hooks proposes that to be located in the margin is to speak from a place of pain and suffering, to actively remember what the oppressors are trying to repress, and to recognize that the struggle of being in the margin is continuous. One may eventually “leave” the margin by acting on the internalized behaviors of oppression that have been imposed upon them (re: as Audre Lorde says, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house), but the knowledge and experience that has been imprinted on their memory will refuse to be forgotten. This is why being careful and intentional with the language one chooses to speak is important, as internalized oppressive behaviors such as misogyny, racism, and classism that intersect with each other must be continuously analyzed and undone by speaking, or even inventing, a new language in which those behaviors and ways of thinking are unfamiliar: “The oppressed struggle in language to recover ourselves, to reconcile, to reunite, to renew. Our words are not without meaning: they are an action, a resistance. Language is also a place of struggle.”
- "I have been working to change the way I speak and write, to incorporate in the manner of telling a sense of place, of not just who I am in the present but where I am coming from, the multiple voices within me. I have confronted silence, inarticulateness. When I say then that these words emerge from suffering, I refer to that personal struggle to name that location from which I come to voice - that space of my theorising."
- "Thinking again about space and location I heard the statement "our struggle is also a struggle of memory against forgetting"; a politicisation of memory that distinguishes nostalgia, that longing for something to be as it once was, a kind of useless act, and that remembering that serves to illuminate and transform the present."
How does individual participation in hegemonic structures, informed by a consciousness of the dynamics between the oppressed and oppressor, affect the development and spread of a pedagogy located in or of the margins? hooks' text may be applied to the context of efforts of "diversity" and "inclusion" in academia. As a student, I am constantly disillusioned by these efforts: while I am greatly privileged to attend an institution that prides itself on its progressive values, what structural measures are most academic institutions taking to go beyond mere recognition? As long as a hierarchy is maintained in the classroom, and the dynamics of systems of oppression linger in between discussions, worse implicitly, what does it all mean? What can be changed? We should go beyond discourse, beyond email notifications, beyond putting the trans and Amerikan flags side by side for a whole month as if that generates any feelings of pride or solidarity. The oppressed cannot unlearn the language of the oppressor overnight, or maybe even forever (but we must try): though this internalization of oppressive ways of behavior and thinking is not our fault, there lies a chance, a responsibility to transform awareness into resistance, passive acceptance into investigation:
"Understanding marginality as position and place of resistance is crucial for oppressed, exploited, colonised people. If we only view the margin as sign, marking the condition of our pain and deprivation then a certain hopelessness and despair, a deep nihilism penetrates in a destructive way the very ground of our being. It is there in that space of collective despair that one's creativity, one's imagination is at risk, there that one's mind is fully colonised, there that the freedom one longs for is lost."
As Paulo Freire notes in Pedagogy of the Oppressed:
"Functionally, oppression is domesticating. To no longer be prey to its force, one must emerge from it and turn upon it. This can be done only by means of the praxis: reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it... Making 'real' oppression more oppressive still by adding to it the realization of oppression" corresponds to the dialectical relation between the subjective and the objective."
Before the text moves into a sort of poetry, a dissolution between reader and author, hooks states:
"Silenced. During my graduate years I heard myself speaking in the voice of resistance. I cannot say that my my speech welcomed. I cannot say that my speech was heard in such a way that it altered relations between the coloniser and the colonised. Yet what I have noticed is that those scholars, most especially those who name themselves radical critical thinkers, feminist thinkers, now fully participate in the construction of a discourse about the 'Other'. I was made 'Other' there in that space with them. In that space in the margins, that lived in segregated world of my past and present. They did not meet me there in that space. They met me at the centre. They greeted me as colonisers. I am waiting to learn from them the path of their resistance, of how it came to be that they were able to surrender the power to act as colonisers. I am waiting for them to bear witness. To give testimony. They say that the discourse moved beyond a discussion of "us and them." They do not speak of how this movement has taken place. This is a response marginality. It is a space of resistance. It is a space I choose."
- The experience and struggle of the colonized and exploited are mythologized by the oppressor to refute its material reality and consequences.
- A distance is created, maintained, and widened: again re: attempts of "inclusion" and "diversity" in academia wherein the identities of the oppressed are highlighted in a microscopical/clinical way through an emphasis on language and sign. The margin is dissected, co-opted, and pitied by those in the center.
- Simultaneously, the oppressor attempts to excuse or deny a history of oppression by equalizing the oppressed with them by talking to the oppressed in the colonizer/oppressor's language, creating discourse regarding the "other", and exploiting the internalization of oppressive mindsets and structures by the oppressed.
As Rinaldo Walcott and M Neelika Jayawardane state, "Inviting someone to “speak your truth” is a way of reducing what the speaker says to a personal interpretation of an experience of discriminatory practices and/or behaviour. It implies that the “truth” is filtered through the speaker’s emotions, that it is subjective and belongs to the speaker’s experience of events, alone – rather than an indication of “factual” realities and the intractable structural arrangement and relations of the university." ("Diversity efforts in universities are nothing but façade painting")
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/5/7/diversity-efforts-in-universities-are-nothing-but-facade-painting
The margin is a difficult place to be, and an even more difficult place to choose to stay in. I think of the spaces I occupy in life, in other people's lives, as if hoping to fill slots of love and validation in the brains of those I care about, admire, or fear. I think of spaces where I am either invisible, or too much, or monstrous. Of the body moving through time, of my living vessel being the active factor of change, not time as its independent variable. Never time as the encompassing solution. There are so many ways in which I remember. I can't say that all those ways were wanted. It is one thing to admit that memory is fragile, and another to be unable to explain it.
"For me this space of radical openness is a margin - a profound edge. Locating oneself there is difficult yet necessary. It is not a "safe" place. One is always at risk. One needs a community of resistance."
