Racial Interpellation in the Academy

31 Dec 2019

Offering a set of provocations and invitations, Joseph M. Pierce (Stony Brook University) and Kaiama L. Glover (Barnard College) dialogue about the vulnerability of the Indigenous, black, and brown person in academia, and the solidarities, alliances, and kinship forged between black and brown intellectuals that pose a real threat to academic institutions. Building from Lorgia García Peña’s tenure denial, Pierce and Glover move from the structural violence attending their positions in academia to push us to think harder about how we do the work of decoloniality and/in Ethnic Studies.



Joseph Pierce | Writes:

I've been feeling the feelings of brownness. I think about this all the time as an Indigenous person in the Academe. I am reminded in class and in my office and on the street and in meetings. It's a feeling of loneliness, really, and it comes from being statistically insignificant. Being an asterisk or a footnote to diversity statistics, to dropdown menus, to methodological framings. "We don't have enough of you to even include you in the diversity study," and in the same breath, "but we recognize we are on unceded XXXX Indian land." What the fuck does that mean? That is where my mind went when I saw that García Peña was denied tenure. In truth, this has been on my mind because I was just granted tenure. Is that feeling also shame? Is it guilt?

I don't know. Maybe it has to do with the ways that Black-Brown kinship has also been on my mind because of the times, and because of the work that I am trying to do. Not so much as a thing of writing, but of doing, of being. This is what García Peña does in the introduction of The Borders of Dominicanidad, too. She opens with a scene of racialized interpellation. She takes her body, its contradictions, as a site of feeling those feelings. What else do we have, at the end of the day? But for me, this feeling of insignificance is the product of the racialized structures that we inhabit, traverse, uncomfortably, as racialized folks in the academe. The university is a violent place. It is. We have to start there. It is violent for its gatekeeping, its knowledge brokering, for its double speak, its contradictions.

García Peña calls this the "footnote condition" (3). I think of it as (statistical) insignificance. Because for Native folks what goes between those parentheses matters--it defines to a certain extent how we are imagined as belonging to land, community, spirituality, and knowledge. Especially to knowledge. For me, what does (Cherokee) mean? What would happen if we were to bring ourselves out of those parentheses--out of that footnote condition--and into the center? That is the decolonial ethics that García Peña makes plain. That is why her work is dangerous. That is why, for the white supremacist academe, she is dangerous. She makes plain the racist truths of our conditions of employment, its conditions, its underlying incommensurability with the work of decolonality.


Kaiama L. Glover | Responds:

For me, and I think for many of us, black and brown and otherwise “other” in the Academy, the affective is where we find ourselves dwelling—stuck, even—in the wake of Harvard's denial of tenure to Lorgia García-Peña. Each and every one of us has a story that falls somewhere on the continuum of that denial—a painful moment of misidentification, dismissal, or (inadvertent?) insult. Racialized interpellation à la Fanon, yes. We're calling it “microaggression” these days, though the prefix feels oxymoronic. Insufficient. Whether we've made it through tenure or not (and this matters immensely, yes), we cannot help but know and feel ourselves to be singular, exceptional, and odds-beating—and not in a good way. Each of us remains largely in the footnote, well-aware of our own isolation and precarity.

Our collective investment in Ethnic Studies as a field is of a piece with our collective outrage (indignation? despair?) at the acts of violence, both “micro” and structural, that condition our practice as scholars and teachers. In the face of our precarity, Ethnic Studies proposes an ever-expanding set of alternatives to the narratives that limit and delimit black and brown existence. As a field, it exhorts us to acknowledge the hard work of embodiment we do all the time. And García-Peña’s scholarship is an exemplary iteration of what this field can mean and make visible. Grounded in body-based knowledge in the tradition of Cherrie Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, and other foremothers, her work makes plain the cost of defying supremacist narratives both through study and through the very fact of presence. To be a brown body in certain spaces, her work and her experiences remind us, exploring narratives that contest or at the very least nuance and trouble persistent colonial epistemes, is to be at risk.

Exploring realities that nuance and/or refute the defining gaze of putatively former empire is not the only risk García-Peña takes. She works at the borders of race and geography, and dares to look hard at the microaggressions—often learned on the lap or at the feet of colonial powers—that fracture relations among those who should be kin. Hortense Spillers called this intramural conflict, and it is a phenomenon García-Peña addresses with sensitivity and great insight. Her deeply researched and eloquently related reading of Dominicanidad in the long-historical wake and contemporary face of Haitian “blackness” presents an opening and an airing out. It is a careful articulation of the specific pressure points that have weakened bonds of communication between like peoples, that have rendered translation utterly fraught. Like Spillers, García-Peña pays attention to the grammar of subjection, the “passive voice interference” that refuses to recognize perpetrators while turning victims against one another (13).

But if it is true that our mutual positionality as peoples of diaspora and empire is, above all, a question of narrative—of stories that precede our bodies and our experiences—then García-Peña's efforts to relate more truthful stories, told with the right grammar, propose a path to recognition. Her work is a bringing out of the parentheses that means to clarify us for us; it is a crafting of Wynterian truth-fors that foregrounds experiences and worldviews that escape (yes, contradict) the language and logics of the North Atlantic center. Her kind of work is not for the faint-of-heart. It has stakes and it has consequences, as we have seen once again. And as we have seen once again, the “conditions of employment” in our(?) Academy lack both clarity and justice. Reprisal is real. 

Is the empire afraid? Are its gatekeepers truly worried about what Ethnic Studies can do – about what its most brilliant thinkers will persist in thinking and teaching? Do they truly believe Lorgia García-Peña's work to be dangerous? Who knows. That's unclear as yet. But let us work, now, continuing in our way and in our spaces, to assure that it is so.


Joseph M. Pierce

Joseph M. Pierce is Associate Professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature at Stony Brook University. His research focuses on the intersections of kinship, gender, sexuality, and race in Latin America, 19th century literature and culture, queer studies, Indigenous studies, and hemispheric approaches to citizenship and belonging. He is the author of Argentine Intimacies: Queer Kinship in an Age of Splendor, 1890-1910 (SUNY Press, 2019) and co-editor of Políticas del amor: Derechos sexuales y escrituras disidentes en el Cono Sur (Cuarto Propio, 2018) as well as the forthcoming special issue of GLQ, "Queer/Cuir Américas: Translation, Decoloniality, and the Incommensurable." His work has been published recently in Taller de Letras, Revista Hispánica Moderna, Critical Ethnic Studies, and has also been featured in Indian Country Today. He is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation.

Kaiama L. Glover

Kaiama L. Glover is Ann Whitney Olin Professor of French & Africana Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her teaching and research interests include francophone literature, particularly that of Haiti and the French Antilles; colonialism and postcolonialism; and sub-Saharan francophone African cinema. She is the author of Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon (Liverpool UP 2010) and has published articles in The French ReviewSmall AxeResearch in African LiteraturesThe Journal of Postcolonial Writings, and The Journal of Haitian Studies, among others, and has co-edited and translated several works. She is founding co-editor of archipelagos: a journal of Caribbean digital praxis and founding co-director of the digital humanities project In the Same Boats: Toward an Afro-Atlantic Intellectual Cartography. Her most recent monograph, Disorderly Women: On Caribbean Community and the Ethics of Self-Regard, is forthcoming with Duke University Press in 2020.