Saint Bakhtin, Porous Theorizing, and Proceeding Nonetheless

No abstrac

Saint Bakhtin, Porous Theorizing, and Proceeding Nonetheless

No abstrac

Doesn\u27t Your Work Just Re-Center Whiteness? The Fallen Impossibilities of White Allyship

Our purpose is to engage performative dialogue incorporative of currere on a central question in critical White studies (CWS). After precautionary notes and positionalities, we frame our dialogue within second-wave CWS. As its main section, six CWS scholars respond to the central question: Doesn’t research on White identities re-center whiteness? Analyzing the scholars’ responses, the performative dialogue is followed by an analytical discussion of CWS’ epistemological, ontological, and axiological convolutions. Via these convolutions, we recognize the impossibilities of facile “White allyship” within antiracist scholarship, curriculum and pedagogy, and related social movements. Instead of White allyship, we propose situated, relational, and process-oriented notions of alliance-oriented antiracist work

Laughing White Men

The complex social production of white racial identity is the focus of this article.  Drawing from a larger interview study conducted in a rural white community in the Midwest, I explore how Frank, a high school teacher, experienced being white.  I pay particular attention to Frank's descriptions of two white spaces in which he said he participated:  one that he called a "basement culture," characterized by laughter and racist and sexist humor, and another that he described as more formal and "politically-correct."  Ralph Ellison thought that white racial identity was created in various scapegoating rituals, such as lynching and racist humor.  With Ellison's help, I interpret a long comic story that Frank told about selling his van to Mexican immigrants, in which Frank was the butt of the joke, as an example of a scapegoating ritual that just might be compatible with a democratic project

Abandon voice? Pedagogy, the body, and late capitalism

The concept of voice—despite important criticism—continues to be one of the most powerful metaphors we have for thinking about agency and authorship in politics and education. In the first part of this article, Timothy Lensmire summarizes his previous work on voice, in which he criticized two popular conceptions and proposed a new one. Then, Nathan Snaza discusses Barbara Kamler’s response, grounded in feminist and poststructuralist commitments, to Lensmire’s work. Despite much agreement with Lensmire, Kamler argues that voice should be abandoned as a leading metaphor in critical pedagogies, in favor of story or text. In the third section, we return to an earlier text by one of the leading figures in writing pedagogy, Peter Elbow, in which he claims that instead of worrying about whether voice or text is best, we need to adopt a both/and approach; however, we find he privileges reception over production. In the final section, we argue for using the metaphor of voice precisely because it can call attention to the moment of production. This moment holds potential, in our account, for a concrete project of democracy

Saint Bakhtin, Porous Theorizing, and Proceeding Nevertheless

Boris Groys seems pretty serious. Not much of a laugher. Not a member of the laughing folk. Maybe that’s why what Groys says about Bakhtin and his theory of carnival feels so stunningly, almost unfathomably, wrong to us. For although we grew up centuries and an ocean away from the carnivals and popular festivals of the Middle Ages and Renaissance that Bakhtin evokes and idealizes, we did grow up—we first became our selves—among the laughing folk of the rural Midwest of the United States. However serious we have since become as scholars and professors, Bakhtin’s writing on carnival reminds us of home—of families and communities with their own limits and violences, certainly, but also with a life-sustaining laughter that we’ve needed in the academy and other spaces dominated by fear and an official truth