Engaging Currere Toward Decolonization

Negotiating Black Womanhood through Autobiographical Analysis

Shauna Knox

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000473216
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Curricula

This timely volume uniquely illustrates how currere can be applied to the process of decolonizing subjectivity. Centered around the experiences of one black woman from the third world, the text details the theoretical underpinnings of Currere towards Decolonizing (CTD), and walks the reader through the autobiographical analysis involved in dismantling cognitive colonization.

Conceived as a four-part autobiographical process of remembering, identifying, imagining, and decolonizing, the method of CTD is demonstrated as a means of recognizing and reflecting on how the colonial project has been internalized, and of gradually dismantling the psychological, affective, and material impact of colonization. Using both theoretical and experiential standpoints, and intersecting with notions of anti-blackness, linguicide, and Africana womanhood, the volume moves curriculum theory urgently towards anti-colonial mechanisms that disrupt the colonizing process.

This text will benefit researchers, academics, and educators in higher education with an interest in curriculum studies, post-colonialism, and Black studies more broadly. Those specifically interested in interpersonal psychoanalysis, as well as gender and third world studies, will also benefit from this book.

1 The Essential Elements of My Decolonization

DOI: 10.4324/9781003203186-1

The Dissolution of Humanity

At 9:00am on July 13, 2015, two days before my birthday, Sandra Bland was found hanging in her solitary confinement cell at the Waller County Jail in Hempstead Texas. Eight hours after she was released of the plastic bags that noosed her, I’d read an email from my professor, informing me that I was officially enrolled in his new Writing in the Humanities class. He said he was “hopeful that the group would provide [me] with meaningful support in the present phase of [my] doctoral studies.” While I basked in his glowing remarks about our “enormous creative and scholarly potential.” My professor, a white man, wrote this to a class of four white women, one white man, one Arab woman, and me. None of us knew then that Sandra, a Black female civil rights activist, was pulled over by a white police officer three days prior for purportedly failing to signal a lane change. We also didn’t know the officer had threatened to tase her for filming the traffic stop with her cell phone, or that he forced her out of the car for not putting out her cigarette. We remained blissfully unaware as he slammed her head-first into the ground for being insufficiently deferential, before he heard his colleagues pronounce her dead after what authorities called suicide, and her family called murder. In spite of my professor’s hopes, the group was unable to meaningfully support me through that period of my doctoral study.

…

One night, the Writing in the Humanities class convened in a different building—it was newer, but the chairs were hard and the lights strained in their fluorescence. I remember it being August or September. I hadn’t eaten but my stomach wouldn’t settle down. I took the stairs instead of the elevator, trying to distract my body into relief, but I wasn’t myself. Just before heading to the class, I was mindlessly scrolling through my phone when I saw a video that made me sick without me knowing it. I saw a 15-year-old Black girl in her swimsuit thrown onto a concrete floor, grabbed by her hair, and slammed face-first into the ground. I saw the white male police corporal who was doing this, plant his knee into her back, pinning her there, while a journalist explained that the police were called in to break up a pool party she had been attending, and instead of dispersing immediately, Dajerria Becton had asked for permission to look for her glasses. Half-way through our discussion in class that night, I abruptly left and returned home. I did not sleep for days.

…

The next year, in early July, I discovered the Small Axe Project, which felt like rediscovering the hope of childhood that doesn’t know well enough not too hope too much. The journal describes itself as a subaltern platform for the intellectual and cultural critique of the Caribbean. I shared a story from the publication with my friends. It was about a girl from Santo Domingo accused of stealing from a woman for whom she cleaned in New York City. I was animated and inspired to play, to write and to think, so this time it felt like being knocked senseless while moving full speed ahead. There was a video again. Philando Castille and his girlfriend were pulled over for a broken taillight in Minnesota. Fearfully and unprompted, he told the police that he was licensed to carry a concealed weapon and that he had one in his vehicle. He narrated this as he reached for his wallet, following instructions to retrieve his license. But before his fingers touched the billfold, police had shot Philando seven times, twice in his heart. Diamond Reynolds, who was still strapped into the passenger seat beside her boyfriend’s slumped warm corpse, still felt obligated to call his murderer “sir.” Perhaps because I was still delirious because it sounded like “master.”

Diamond:

“You told him to get his ID sir [MASTER], his driver’s license. Oh my God, please don’t tell me he’s dead. Please don’t tell me my boyfriend just went like that.”

Officer:

“Keep your hands where they are!”

Diamond:

“Yes I will sir [MASTER]. I’ll keep my hands where they are. Please don’t tell me this, Lord. Please Jesus, don’t tell me that he’s gone. Please don’t tell me that he’s gone. Please officer don’t tell me that you just did this to him. You shot four bullets into him, sir [MASTER]. He was just getting his license and registration, sir [MASTER].”

Officer:

“Get the female passenger out!”

Second Officer:

“Ma’am, exit the car right now with your hands up! Let me see your hands. Exit now! Keep ’em up! Keep’em up!”

…

On February 23, 2020, I’d officially become Dr. Shauna Knox more than a month prior. I was quarantined with my husband in my home, trying to protect myself from a virus that threatened to destroy me in more ways than I knew how to prevent. I was newly emergent from the haze of doctoral wasteland and trying to regain some semblance of safety and control by disinfecting everything in sight, twice… even three times some days. While I scrubbed my fingers raw on my hands and knees, twenty-five-year-old Ahmaud Arbery went out for a jog instead, but he never came back. He was shot three times by a white father and son duo who hunted him like wild game in their pickup truck, and gunned him down. They said he looked like trouble. After Ahmaud, nothing in my house felt clean, but I was too paralyzed to leave it, I knew if I did, I might never come home.

…

On March 13th, 2020 at 12:40 am, I was tucked away in my covers, and probably willing myself to put my phone away to go to sleep. Breonna Taylor was also in her home that night, and under her own covers, but I survived the night, and she did not. She was shot five times by two white male police officers in the hallway of her apartment for no crime in particular. By the time I finally did fall asleep, she had fallen dead on her own floor. I knew it would never feel clean there again either.

…

On Sunday May 24, 2020, I’d finally mustered the nerve to tell my closest family and friends that I wanted to start a podcast and that I needed their help to do it. I admitted to each of them how hesitant I was feeling about sharing my own voice with the world again—for the first time in seven years I wouldn’t need to submit to the editorial approval of a standing committee who held my future in their hands. I wanted a place from which to earnestly speak, but the next day that sensation of safety would be violently ripped away from me. I was muzzled and shattered with the rest of the world as we watched George Floyd suffocate beneath the knee of a white male police officer who was gazing carelessly at stains on the sidewalk. Onlookers with camera phones were close enough to pick up George’s final sounds—agony muddled with whimperings to his mother. Where does a mind go while it’s trying to survive? I wondered. I’ll let you know when mine returns to me, and when it’s back, perhaps I’ll find my nerve again.

…

The realities that have surrounded the writing of this book are forged into the inky substance of every word I’ve written. I began writing it in a world with no appetite for addressing the implications of Blackness, and I find myself publishing it in a world that wants to capitalize on the exploitation of Black tragedy. I’ve written the above accounts to contextualize the world from which this book emerges, but I will not theorize our death our trauma.

I’ve heard it said that settler colonialism and white supremacy are close bedfellows but frankly, I can hardly tell the difference. This historical moment, which holds in it a searing visibility of the widespread state sanctioned murder of Black bodies, has demanded the provocations of this book of me. To be clear, the book is no more or less necessary than it has been in every moment of bloodied history that has preceded it, but its time is now. I begin by offering the cumulative experience of my own humanity in the writing of this book to compound its importance with the context of the inescapability of colonization and conquest in the contemporary present. I am speaking from the hallows of an eternity of pain, and I welcome you into the ravage.

Mr. Kartoffel, Theophilus Jones, and the Emerging Shauna Knox

Every year the Jamaica Cultural Development Commission (JCDC) hosts an island-wide competition meant to showcase literary talent. I had never heard of it, when at twelve my English teacher convinced me to enter. She gave me a poem to memorize, telling me that I’d be reciting it dramatically for a panel of judges in hopes of a medal. My poem, “Mr. Kartoffel,” was about a carefree British man who filled his pockets with china tea.

Says he, “If my wife and I should choose

To wear our stockings outside our shoes,

Plant tulip bulbs in the baby’s pram

And eat tobacco instead of jam

And fill the bath with cauliflowers,

That’s nobody’s business at all but ours.”

(Prelutsky, 1983)

Though I received a silver medal at the competition that year, I returned the following year with a poem I selected myself, by Heather Royes, a Jamaican poet. The poem, “Theophilus Jones Walks Naked Down King Street,” chronicled a homeless dreadlocked man’s journey to taking his own life, and his arrival to finally feeling light in his last moments.

Eventually, way out in the deep,

he stopped,

floated for a while, enjoying the sun,

watched a plane take off from the green-rimmed

palisades, and then, letting himself go,

allowed the water

to swallow him up.

(Prelutsky, 1983)

Subject and Crown

I could tell the story of Theophilus Jones in a way that I never could convey Mr. Kartoffel. Mr. Kartoffel had a carelessness and an audacity to be known as he was that I couldn’t animate. Mr. Kartoffel’s winsome independence caused him to list a barrage of strange behaviors that he felt entirely entitled to engage without so much as a thought of how he would be perceived: If we “fill the bath with cauliflowers, that’s nobody’s business at all but ours” (Prelutsky, 1983). Put simply, he could be whatever he wanted: Every day, as I memorized Theophilus’s story, I worried it would cost me my medal—nevertheless, I resolved to tell it. I thought I was forfeiting my chance because even though this competition was for us and about us, somewhere in me I believed that our stories would never earn the same acclaim as theirs, even with us as the judges. Theophilus was disappearing, and even as people watched him, they couldn’t see it. I needed every viewer of that competition to know that I was watching him. That year I won another silver medal for Theophilus Jones, but I went much further into the competition, and I almost medaled gold. The JCDC is a competition for Jamaican children to recite Jamaican literature; I’m sorry that my English teacher instructed me to enter it with a British poem, but I’m thankful that my last entry was in my own voice and about my own people.

The more I’ve lived, the more I’ve wondered whether or not Theophilus Jones lost his mind, or he just stopped waiting to be human. I’m also curious about why I told the stories of two men as if they were my own. Since I can neither leap into Mr. Kartoffel’s merriment, nor resurrect Theophilus’s final untouched insight, this time the story I tell will be my own.

Blackness, Africana Womanism, and Third Worldism

Blackness

In both contemporary academic discourse and wider society, the existential condition of the Black subject remains in question. The reality of Blackness is perpetually confronted with the counter-ideology of anti-Blackness, a societal logic which presumes the inhumanity and illegitimacy of all Black people (Bledsoe, 2020, p. 472). Now more than ever, the moment begs the question: is the Black subject alive, or scarcely grasping at survival? Is the Black subject actually a subject, or are we objects that are subject to forced manipulation? Does the Black self-continue to be a malleable figment of the White imagination, or has it earned its humanity? In this book, I mobilize the lived experience of Blackness as housed in my female body to observe and to explore the ramifications of race, gender, and geopolitics on one postcolonial subject: I am the subject in question.

Africana Womanism

This study adopts the Africana womanist lens of Clenora Hudson-Weems (1995), which examines the intricacy of an issue through the lenses of race and gender simultaneously. It considers the ethnic and cultural identity of the woman involved, while acknowledging the reality that Africana women are not afforded the social privileges typically associated with femininity (Hudson-Weems, 1995). This lens is best suited for ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The Essential Elements of My Decolonization
• The Dissolution of Humanity
• Mr. Kartoffel, Theophilus Jones, and the Emerging Shauna Knox
• Subject and Crown
• Blackness, Africana Womanism, and Third Worldism
• Blackness
• Africana Womanism
• Third Worldism
• School as an Ideological State Apparatus
• Decolonization and Subjectivity
• Decolonizing in Third Space
• Purpose and Research Questions
• Significance
• Theoretical/Conceptual Framework
• Third Space Activation of the Decolonial Imaginary
• Colonization as Trauma
• Autobiographical Inquiry
• Summary of Method
• Conclusion
• Note
• References
• 2 A Brief History of the Colonization of Subjectivity
• Critical Constructs of the Study
• Blackness
• Third Worldism
• Africana Womanism
• Research Conversation: Epidermalizing, the Sociogenic Principle, Objective Truth, and Practical Intervention
• Organizing Principles: Incommensurability, Reconciliation, and Decolonization as Journeying
• Decolonization as Praxis
• The Construct of Western Epistemic Dominance
• The Construct of Subjectivity
• Exploring Subjectivity in Third Space: The Decolonial Imaginary
• The Process of Currere
• Autobiographical Memory
• References
• 3 Decolonizing The Currere toward Decolonizing Method
• Overview of Methodology
• Currere toward Decolonizing
• Currere toward Decolonizing: Process Outline
• Critical Lenses in the Imagining Stage of CTD
• Deconstruction as Critical Lens
• Problematization as Critical Lens
• Self-understanding as Critical Lens
• Response to the Call as Critical Lens
• Contradiction as Critical Lens
• Research Expectations
• Procedures
• References
• 4 Currere toward Decolonizing Autobiographical Studies
• CTD Studies
• CTD Study I: Decolonizing Linguicide
• Remembering
• Identifying
• Imagining
• Decolonizing
• CTD Study II: Decolonizing Self-reflexive Invisibility
• Remembering
• Identifying
• Imagining
• Decolonizing
• CTD Study III: Decolonizing Imposed Vocationality
• Remembering
• Identifying
• Imagining
• Decolonizing
• CTD Study IV: Decolonizing Denegrification through the Internalized Gaze of the Crusader
• Remembering
• Identifying
• Imagining
• Note
• References
• 5 Decolonization Discoveries
• Discoveries from Decolonizing
• The Leverage of Gender among the Colonized
• The Subjectivity as Colonized Terrain
• The Era for Optimal Colonial Insurgency
• The Co-occupation of Unrelinquished Subjective Territory
• Is Decolonization Attainable? A Concluding Thought
• Vulgarity as Protest
• The Dehumanizing Effects of White Gaze
• Self-Inexpressibility That Leads to Self-Invisibility
• An Aside on the Absence of Contradiction
• Currere toward Decolonizing
• References
• Index