59© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 F. Boonzaier, T. van Niekerk (eds.), Decolonial Feminist Community Psychology, Community Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20001-5_5

Envisioning Photovoice as Decolonial Feminist Praxis

Josephine Cornell , Linda Mkhize, and Shose Kessi

Contents Introduction 60 Background on Photovoice Methodology 60

Photovoice as Decolonial Feminist Praxis in Community Psychology 61 Photovoice, Participant Co-Authorship and Critical Reflexivity 63

Photovoice Study Background and Context at UCT 64 Critical Reflections on Photovoice Across Levels of Participation 65

Photovoice as a Participant 66 Photovoice as Student-Researchers 69 Photovoice as Supervisor and Mentor 72

Concluding Reflections 72 References 74

J. Cornell (*) Department of Psychology, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, Cape Town, South Africa

South African Medical Research Council-University of South Africa Violence, Injury and Peace Research Unit, Cape Town, South Africa

Institute for Social & Health Sciences, University of South Africa, Johannesburg, South Africa e-mail: [email protected]

L. Mkhize Institute for Social & Health Sciences, University of South Africa, Johannesburg, South Africa

South African Medical Research Council-University of South Africa Violence, Injury and Peace Research Unit, Cape Town, South Africa e-mail: [email protected]

S. Kessi Department of Psychology, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, Cape Town, South Africa e-mail: [email protected]

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Introduction

Photovoice is a visual participatory action research methodology (PAR) influenced by feminist theory and Freirian critical consciousness (Foster-Fisherman et al. 2005; Wang 2006), that speaks to some of community psychology’s central aims, such as empowerment, liberation and social justice. However, these aims can be ambiguous and legitimize rather than challenge dominant structures (Burton et al. 2012). The participatory aspect of community psychology interventions are often undertheo- rized and are the point at which these aims are challenged in practice (Cooke and Kothari 2001). We argue that current debates on the decolonisation of psychology (e.g. Adams Gómez Ordóñez et al. 2017) should extend to community psychology to highlight power-relations in participatory endeavours. In this chapter, we reflect on how photovoice research might be practiced within an emerging decolonial fem- inist community psychology focusing particularly on participants’ voices in the analysis and dissemination of academic knowledge.

Background on Photovoice Methodology

Photovoice, developed by Wang and Burris in the 1990s for public health research, has been used within community psychology to explore multiple issues including youth perceptions of safety (Suffla et al. 2015) and violence (Chonody et al. 2013); fatherhood (Helman et al. 2018); and survival after political repression (Lykes et al. 2003).

Photovoice connects with community psychology’s stated – but often ignored in practice (see Gokani and Walsh 2017) – goal of social change. Participants produce photographs documenting aspects of their lives (Wang and Burris 1997; Wang 1999), which are then used to engage participants in critical group discussions about the oppressive conditions of their lives and how to enact social change. These pho- tographs are publically exhibited to key stakeholders and the broader community, illuminating participants’ experiences and perspectives; presenting opportunities for participants to engage with decision makers (Foster-Fisherman et al. 2005; Wang 2006; Wang and Burris 1997); and sometimes resulting in concrete changes in participants’ lives (e.g. see Bishop et al. 2013).

Photovoice thus espouses an emancipatory research paradigm positioning par- ticipants as experts of their own lives, agents of change in their communities and co-producers of knowledge in the research endeavour (Wang and Burris 1997). Knowledge production is considered a participatory and collective process that mit- igates the epistemic violence of much psychological research. However, participa- tory research has been criticised for subtly reproducing power relations (Cooke and Kothari 2001) and often participation ceases at the academic dissemination phase. As we will examine below, for photovoice to enable emancipatory praxis we pro- pose situating the methodology within decolonial feminist community psychology,

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which may mediate some of the implicitly oppressive tendencies of mainstream community psychology.

Photovoice as Decolonial Feminist Praxis in Community Psychology

Critiques of mainstream community psychology suggest it is largely acritical and at times complicit in upholding systems of oppression (Coimbra et al. 2012). There is some debate as to whether reactionary and apolitical inclinations within the disci- pline have been increasing over time (see Coimbra et al. 2012) or have been promi- nent within dominant community psychology since its development in the 1960s (Gokani and Walsh 2017). Regardless, critics emphasise the need for critical com- munity psychologies to explicitly examine:

the constructed consequence of prolonged colonialist oppression and profound social injus- tice recently reproduced in recent reactionary, so-called, ‘innovations’ in mental health social policy and practice in Western Europe which fail to address the most basic social, political and economic issues and, paradoxically, contribute to the creation of oppression, injustice and suffering (Coimbra et al. 2012, p. 138).

Community psychology in South Africa emerged in the 1980’s as a critical response to much needed theoretical and methodological expansions within the discipline of psychology (Seedat and Lazarus 2011). Many were questioning the relevance of psychology (Long 2013), a discipline historically implicated in legitimising the oppressive structures of apartheid and colonisation by espousing practices of inferi- orisation and control along ‘categories’ of race, class, and gender (Kessi and Boonzaier 2017). However, current debates on the decolonisation of higher educa- tion in South Africa have highlighted the need to revisit issues of relevance and the extent to which psychological research and practice sufficiently consider the par- ticularities of postcolonial contexts (Kessi and Boonzaier 2017). In this regard, PAR methods such as photovoice have much to offer research in community psychology (Foster-Fisherman et al. 2005; Orford 2008). We propose that combining photo- voice research with an explicitly decolonial feminist lens is a step towards challeng- ing pathological thinking about colonised peoples and renewing the relevance of psychological research and practice.

Photovoice falls within feminism’s theoretical ambit. Developed partly as a fem- inist approach to PAR (Wang and Burris 1997), photovoice, as Latz (2017) asserts, “is one way to do feminism” (p. 59). Photovoice, like feminist theory, is grounded on participants’ active involvement in decision-making and the privileging of knowledge gained through lived experience (Wang 1999). However, feminist theo- ries hold different overarching conceptions of participation. Whilst dominant approaches to feminism in community psychology tend towards liberal feminism which focuses on a gender rights discourse, alternative feminisms, such as Marxist feminism, radical feminism or African feminism have anti-capitalist, anti- patriarchal,

Envisioning Photovoice as Decolonial Feminist Praxis

anti-racist, and anti-imperialist agendas (Kiguwa 2004). We see a decolonial femi- nist praxis as drawing on these different approaches and addressing the multiple and intersecting workings of power at local and global levels. A decolonial feminist framework is not only rooted in a historical understanding of the effects of colonial power in contemporary society, but also centres the lived experiences of womxn1 in their interconnectedness with others and with the institutions and structures of soci- ety, as well as the experiences of all those (womxn and mxn) who have been histori- cally marginalised and oppressed. The ‘decolonial turn’ is not a distinct school of thought, but rather various theoretical positions, such as decolonial feminism, that all “share a view of coloniality as a fundamental problem in the modern (as well as postmodern and information) age, and of decolonization or decoloniality as a neces- sary task that remains unfinished” (Maldonado-Torres 2011, p. 2).

Framing photovoice as decolonial feminist praxis means that its key basis of participation must espouse an ongoing commitment to challenging these historical multiple and interconnected forms of power. In practice, this is difficult to achieve and participation has ambiguous effects. Critics of international development work, for example, demonstrate how ‘participatory’ projects can legitimise processes that maintain uneven power-relations between stakeholders (White 1996). This is rein- forced through complex international aid chains (Kelly and Birdsall 2010) and the institutional power to define ‘how’ participation will occur and what is considered a successful outcome (Seckinelgin 2012). Contradictorily, this instrumental use of participation can further disempower already marginalised groups. Furthermore, without sufficient access to symbolic and political power, participants in a PAR project may inadvertently reproduce notions about themselves and their communi- ties as disempowered (Kessi 2011). Hence, photovoice projects too risk becoming “instrumental practice” (Coemans et al. 2017, p. 18–19) if they fail to create condi- tions for agency and resistance (Howarth et al. 2014) within oppressive power structures.

When photovoice is “situated at the interface” of critical feminist and decolonial methodologies it can facilitate “participant protagonism towards emancipatory praxis” (Lykes and Scheib 2015, p. 131). A decolonial feminist theoretical frame- work explicitly challenges the gendered, classist, and racialised power structures embedded in the photovoice participants’ lives and promotes socially just praxes (Lykes and Scheib 2015). Thus, it may counter mainstream community psycholo- gy’s tendency to seek ‘social reform’ at an individual level rather than transforma- tive changes to oppressive systems (see Gokani and Walsh 2017).

In the photovoice project we describe below, we were concerned with these mul- tiple and intersecting oppressions operating within South African higher education institutions and how photovoice can provide the tools for resistance and change. Specifically, we extend the often ambivalent concept of ‘participation’ to include the practice of co-authorship between three decolonial feminists from different backgrounds and situated differently in a photovoice project.

1 We use the term ‘womxn’ to allow space for individuals who identify as genderfluid, genderqueer, gender non-conforming, or non-binary.

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Photovoice, Participant Co-Authorship and Critical Reflexivity

Although photovoice has social justice and empowerment potential, theorists have questioned whether in some applications of this method “much of its critical edge has been diluted” (Lykes and Scheib 2015, p. 140) with the risk of reproducing power inequity under the illusion of participatory action (Bishop et al. 2013). As Latz (2017) highlights, acknowledging the influence of feminist theory on photovoice does not guarantee that all aspects of a project will exemplify feminist principles. Despite photovoice’s theoretical emphasis on participation, it is uncommon for par- ticipants to be involved in the academic dissemination of the research (Evans- Agnew and Rosemberg 2016; Sitter 2017). Only minimal published research articles have photovoice participants as academic co-authors (e.g. Bishop et al. 2013). Evans- Agnew’s and Rosemberg’s (2016) critical review of 21 photovoice studies concluded that photovoice project designs vary in how participant voice is advanced, to the extent that participant voice is most absent in the manuscript publication stage. This absence is significant because researchers’ power is most often exercised in the pub- lication and dissemination process (Lykes and Scheib 2015). There is a need to reflect more thoroughly on whose voice is served in the academic publication of participants’ photo-stories (Evans-Agnew and Rosemberg 2016). Participant co- authorship has many important benefits. It ensures adequate credit is given to those who have contributed to knowledge creation (Castleden et al. 2010); and it reinforces the importance of considering perspectives and forms of knowledge from outside the academy (Flicker and Nixon 2016). For those participants based in academic envi- ronments (such as the participants in our study, who were university students), co- authorship may also have direct professional advantages (Flicker and Nixon 2016).

Qualitative research generally, and feminist and decolonial frameworks particu- larly, have highlighted the importance of considering researchers’ reflexivity. This includes rejecting researcher neutrality; reflecting on the researcher’s intersecting identities, their intentions, and their ideological assumptions; and considering the power dynamics between researchers and participants (Burr 1995). In photovoice projects, ongoing reflexivity ensures marginalised voices are centred and social change is promoted, but also reveals the author’s influence and position. Despite researchers’ ultimate control over photovoice project data dissemination and despite the commitment to critical reflexivity in feminist research, researchers rarely reflect on their positionality within PAR publications (Smith et al. 2010). The few photo- voice researchers who have published critical reflections provide insight into the varied dynamics within the photovoice process (e.g. Horwitz 2012; Suffla et al. 2015). Suffla et al. (2015), for example, utilise reflexivity to reveal the tensions, power dynamics, and variabilities in their photovoice project on youth perceptions of safety. In community psychologies drawing on critical paradigms, such as deco- lonial feminist community psychology, changing oppressive and inequitable social arrangements requires a reflexivity comprising both critical reflection and action (Montero 2011; Suffla et al. 2015). As researchers we cannot challenge epistemological violence embedded in research practice without “deep reflection on

Envisioning Photovoice as Decolonial Feminist Praxis

the ways the intersectionality of our identities plays out in the framing, design and interpretation of research” (Law 2016, p. 530). For a photovoice project to embody PAR aims, and align with both Freirean theory and decolonial feminism’s attention to transformative praxis and challenging power imbalances, researchers should ensure reflective participation throughout the entire photovoice process, including dissemination (Sitter 2017). As Evans-Agnew and Rosemberg (2016) recommend:

Given the underlying social justice intent of photovoice, and the primacy of privileging participants with the ability to speak and the right to be heard, we are left to question whether future photovoice researchers should rethink the fundamentals of their designs, and engineer distinct strategies to advance participant voice in the analysis and dissemination of photo-texts (p. 1028).

Until now, although participants in Shose and Josie’s work have been involved in other forms of dissemination, despite our stated commitment to participatory research none of our academic publications have included participants in co- authorship roles. Shose and Josie have authored several publications on the project’s findings (see Cornell and Kessi 2017; Kessi and Cornell 2015), including a publica- tion in which we analysed Linda’s photovoice data (see Cornell et al. 2018). We have tried to be sensitive to the participants’ voices. We produced the photographs and captions unedited so the participants’ voices reach otherwise inaccessible audi- ences directly. When participants used nudity to resist the University’s institutional culture and requested that their photographs were uncensored, we agreed despite discomfort around the naked body in academic publishing. However, we felt a truly decolonial feminist reflection on the photovoice process should include partici- pants’ perspectives more directly. In this collaborative chapter, by adopting a deco- lonial feminist lens, we disrupt this, and reflect critically on the photovoice process from three positionalities within a photovoice project: research participant, student- researcher and academic supervisor. Specifically, we explore the enactment of deco- lonial feminist mentorship in community psychology through the lens of a photovoice project examining transformation at a South African university. Rather than analysing Linda’s photo-stories, as Shose and Josie have done elsewhere, Linda presents, reflects on and contextualises her own photo-stories as co-author rather than subject. We argue this also addresses some of the ambiguous effects of participation, being the ability for powerful institutions (such as academia) to define the participatory process outcomes and we propose that this offers a method through which to decolonise how research in the academy is traditionally carried out.

Photovoice Study Background and Context at UCT

Our photovoice project examined black students’ experiences of transformation at a historically white South African university, the University of Cape Town (UCT) between 2013 and 2015. After the dismantling of apartheid in 1994, UCT’s transfor- mation policy has focused on increasing the diversity of the student population.

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However, beyond a more representative student body, transformation has been slow, inadequate and contested. As the RhodesMustFall2 and FeesMustFall3 student pro- tests have highlighted, the University’s institutional culture privileges whiteness, and many black students and staff experience alienation and exclusion. The photo- stories created by the students in our studies have elucidated, amongst other things, the curriculum’s Eurocentric focus; the colonial symbolism around campus; the adherence to rigid gender binaries in the organisation of space; the lack of black academic staff; and the dominance of stigmatising discourses around blackness within the University. The students in the photovoice studies used their photo- stories to resist the coloniality embedded within the University’s institutional culture and emphasise the need to decolonise the institution.

Part of this study formed the basis of Josie’s Research Psychology Masters’ the- sis, supervised by Shose. Linda, an undergraduate student in the Department of Psychology at the time, was a participant in the 2015 stage of this project. Since her participation in the project, Linda pursued psychology as a postgraduate and now professionally. As a postgraduate student, Linda conducted her own photovoice project exploring how blackness and gender/sexuality is navigated at a historically white university.

Critical Reflections on Photovoice Across Levels of Participation

It has been a privilege to work together as emerging decolonial feminist community psychologists in this photovoice project about race in the academy. In many ways, the three of us were bound together from the start of the project given our common situatedness in an academic institution. Despite differences in our everyday experi- ences of UCT, we nevertheless shared an insider perspective on many unspoken and assumed cultural practices occurring within academic institutions. Unlike other community psychological work where researchers enter a community as complete ‘outsiders’, this project reflects our deep personal and political connection to the space and motivation to change it, as revealed in the following reflections.

As supervisor, lead researcher and initiator of this project, Shose’s research prac- tice is located within a historical institutional space in which she has experienced alienation as well as deep connection, therefore presenting both possibilities and limitations for promoting critical consciousness and social justice. Through this project, engaging with race, class, and gender within the university itself went to the core of the necessary epistemic questioning involved in building decolonial feminist scholarship. Before venturing into communities ‘out there’, it is important to ques-

2 RhodesMustFall is a student resistance movement initiated in 2015, which calls for the decoloni- sation of higher education in South Africa. 3 FeesMustFall is a student resistance movement concerned with increased fees at South African universities which further impede black, poor and/or historically disadvantaged students.

Envisioning Photovoice as Decolonial Feminist Praxis

tion our own situatedness and whether our conceptual and methodological practices can contribute to any kind of social justice. This project represented a ‘way in’ for students at UCT, both as researchers and participants, to reflect on the idea of the university, its role and its functioning through their own experiences of alienation and belonging.

Photovoice as a Participant

Linda’s ‘way in’ was initially as a participant. As she reflects here below:

As the researched, I was involved in the photovoice project reflecting on the experiences of black students at UCT. My then lecturer, Shose, who would later informally become a men- tor to me, approached me to participate. After a focus group discussion and camera train- ing, I was asked the question “what does it mean to be a black student at UCT?” and used photography to answer this. Responding to this question verbally was straightforward as there was already an ongoing conversation about transformation in the institution. However, visually capturing what it meant to be a black student at UCT was a new and exciting challenge. The challenge came with knowing what my lived experience was in this body but being concerned with how I would meaningfully represent all of this in just a few photographs. I have always known that I am black but it was through my university educa- tion and experience that I came to understand what that truly meant on a larger scale. Each of my social science classes contributed differently to my growing critical consciousness, which unquestionably developed alongside this photovoice project. The answer to the aforementioned question included photographs of the base on which the Cecil John Rhodes4 statue once sat (see Fig. 1 and 2).

This photograph spoke to how fulfilling it was to have been a part of the process of getting the statue removed. Simultaneously, the remaining base was a painful reminder of how institutional racism remained even after the physical statue had been removed. Additionally, I photographed (see Fig. 3) the doors and names of nine academics in the Mechanical Engineering department which I felt demonstrated the skewed racial and gender representation of academics at UCT.

In hindsight, my understanding of blackness was narrow and non-intersectional. I had expected that other participants would have similar experiences to me and that each photo- story would reiterate what others had captured. In my photo-stories, I spoke about and, more importantly, reflected on the range of experiences related to my racial identity. This included my involvement in the #RhodesMustFall movement, expressing my frustration with the lack of black academics in my department/university and speaking about the rude awakening that came with encountering microaggressions inside and outside the lecture halls. There was a moment of reflection of my gendered experience which meant speaking

4 Cecil John Rhodes was Prime Minister of the Cape Colony in the late 1800s. He implemented multiple laws forcing black people off their land. He bequeathed the land on the slopes of Devil’s Peak (the site of the University’s Upper Campus) as the site for UCT and despite being a reviled figure the statue commemorating his memory was displayed at UCT until the RhodesMustFall student protests in 2015 forced its removal.

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Figs. 1 and 2 Cecil John Rhodes Is Still Here: The above pictures were taken where the Cecil John Rhodes statue used to sit. Now you will find the stand with the words “C.J waz here!” and a shadow of the statue spray-painted in the same area. The #RhodesMustFall movement was an attempt at racial transformation at UCT. However, even though the physical removal of CJR was a great achievement, there is still a lot of racist actions within the institution. In my particular experience, the drawing of the CJR shadow is representative of a lack of empathy for the struggles of black students at UCT. It is painful to think that someone thought it would be funny or necessary to paint this shadow of CJR after students had articulated their struggles during the RMF movement

Envisioning Photovoice as Decolonial Feminist Praxis

on the lack of women academics and then having to find sisterhood with other black women lecturers and friends to compensate for this. Looking back again, I realise that I did not account for my able-bodied or cisgender privileges, nor mention my sexuality. It was during the photo-sharing portion of this photovoice project that I realised that the experience of being a black student at UCT was tremendously nuanced. One participant revealed the dif- ficulty of being black while transgender and having to plot something as simple as going to the bathroom. Another participant highlighted how coming from a disadvantaged back- ground and surviving at UCT was almost impossible. One other participant pointed out the difficulty of having a mental and/or physical illness and physically navigating and success- fully completing one’s studies. At this point I fully comprehended the many ways people experience their blackness. I came to better understand that is not only about race but also class, gender, sexual, mental/physical ability amongst other factors.

Fig. 3 What’s in a name? The above pictures are of several names of the lecturers/professors in the Mechanical Engineering department. Here I attempted to show the lack of racial and gender representation within UCT. One of my biggest struggles has been that I seldom see people who look like me at the front of the classroom. The lack of diversity, in terms of race and gender, but also in terms of disability, sexual orientations, religion, etc. is concerning at such a university. A transformed UCT is one where these doors represent all types of social identities

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Photovoice as Student-Researchers

Linda’s involvement as a participant deepened her understanding of the multiple raced, classed and gendered experiences of being black. But the development of critical consciousness through the photovoice process, while mostly considered in relation to participants, can also be considered in relation to researchers. Linda’s experience as a photovoice participant and working with decolonial feminist researchers, impacted how she conducted her own photovoice project, how she made decisions around her own postgraduate research work and supervision choices, and the decolonial feminist principles she drew on when doing so:

I became the researcher the following year as a postgraduate student undertaking my own research project. The lecturer who had headed the photovoice project was one of three black women lecturers in my Psychology Department. When I had to choose a supervisor, although I was unsure about my research topic, I knew I would only be able to work with a black woman. I had decided on this for two reasons. Firstly, these black women offered comfort and camaraderie that was uncommon in my department. Secondly, their work was often based in critical or decolonial scholarship which was the same kind of academic work I intended to pursue. Fortunately, when the time came my project and my supervisor aligned perfectly. My familiarity and understanding of photovoice made it an easy choice for my own project. The research project looked at the experiences of black and queer (i.e. gender and sexuality) students at UCT. It was an unintended extension of the photovoice project in which I had previously participated. This project, however, was intentionally based on my thoughts and experiences of sexuality. At the time, I was navigating my complex identity as a queer and black woman and wondered about other students’ experiences. It was only with my supervisor and the empowering process of photovoice that I felt I could be vulnerable yet still secure enough to conduct research rooted in my personhood.

When I became the researcher, I wanted to provide a similar space and experience that had previously been offered to me as a participant. As the researcher, I felt it was vital to apply reflexivity as often as I could. I knew I presented as a black, cisgender woman and was typically assumed to be heterosexual. This meant that particular narratives of gender and race were mutual to myself and my participants. However, being heterosexual-assumed meant that participants would not know if I shared experiences related to sexuality with them. I considered how this would affect the process and attempted to make it known during the interview process that I was queer to create a space of support and common under- standing as I had witnessed as a participant in my first photovoice project. Despite great efforts, my photovoice project did not make it to the final and, arguably, the most essential part, the exhibition, as UCT encountered its second phase of #FeesMustFall which called for an institution-wide shut down. This meant that I was able to collect these stories for the sake of my project, but I was unable to share them with other students and relevant stake- holders such as UCT. For a long time I meditated on the problematic nature of this. It potentially placed me alongside academics who collect the stories of marginalized people for the sake of scholarly consumption without contributing to broader change. Essentially, it was from a researcher’s perspective that I understood the limitations of the photovoice.

Josie, like Linda, was involved in photovoice as a student-researcher under the supervision of decolonial feminist academics. Unlike Linda, whose research project

Envisioning Photovoice as Decolonial Feminist Praxis

was rooted deeply in her personhood, Josie describes herself as a privileged white student whose experience at UCT was characterised by belonging:

Shose invited me to complete my dissertation as part of a photovoice research project she had conceptualised around black students’ experiences in higher education. Shose made the decision to focus the research project on black students’ experiences, based on the impor- tance of centring and highlighting the voices of students who at that stage in 2013 (the project began prior to the RhodesMustFall movement and large scale student resistance initiated and lead by black students) were often silenced in discussions around higher edu- cation transformation in South Africa.

Shose considers that this was vital because:

The focus on black students was instrumental in building solidarity amongst individuals with common experiences of alienation yet who were nevertheless situated on varying lev- els of privilege and disadvantage. As Linda suggested, the consciousness of being black took on many forms that were raced, classed and gendered.

In her reflection, Josie says:

Because I am a white, middle-class, cisgendered, able-bodied postgraduate university stu- dent who occupied a privileged and comfortable position within this institution in compari- son to many of the participants, there was a risk of this project becoming one in which a white student did research on black students, and spoke on their behalf. PAR methodology was thus important to enable participants to take an active role in the research process which may minimise my role, voice and possible influence (although as discussed in the literature review above, this is not guaranteed).

For example, the participants were actively involved decision making around the public exhibitions of the photo-stories. The participants gave speeches and shared their experiences at the exhibition opening nights, to an audience including high- ranking members of the university administration. In this way, the participants were able to speak directly to otherwise inaccessible institutional decision makers. Some participants also took ownership over the exhibits and used the photo-stories in their own events which were not part of the photovoice project or initiated by the research- ers. Linda’s own reflection on the exhibition as a participant, illustrates how the exhibition was able to do this and the benefits that can be gained from the PAR process. As Linda describes:

At the end of this photovoice project, there was an exhibition where each participant had a board displaying their consolidated photo-stories. Fellow participants, students, lecturers and university stakeholders such as deans and heads of departments attended. It was both empowering and intimidating to have my work exhibited – especially considering the topic. The planning process was equally empowering because there was freedom in deciding how pictures would be displayed and when/how the event would run. Other participants took the opportunity to speak directly to the audience – an audience they would otherwise have been unable to access. This process allowed me to begin to build relationships with other students and lecturers who I might have never have engaged with had I not been a part of the ven- ture. Years later, these relationships have benefitted me personally and professionally. It was the openness and fluidity of the photovoice process that facilitated the development of such relationships.

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However, although the PAR process created space for participants’ active participa- tion and benefitted participants such as Linda, the research space was still influ- enced by Josie’s position as a white researcher:

My whiteness may have affected, for example, how comfortably participants spoke about race at UCT in front of me. In her study of staff experiences of transformation at a previ- ously white South African university, Ismail (2011) found that, as a fellow black academic, most participants considered her an ‘insider’ and thus felt comfortable discussing their experiences with her. In some ways, I was an ‘insider’, doing research on my own univer- sity, with fellow students often from the same department. However, the position of ‘insider’ is not fixed, and what is deemed ‘inside’ depends on my varied identity positionings (Trowler 2016). My whiteness and other normative intersecting identities afforded me substantial privileges within the university’s structure compared to many of the participants. Due to this ‘insider/outsider’ tension and status, I attempted to ensure participants felt comfortable and secure when discussing their (often painful) experiences in front of me. I think part of what helped is that the photovoice process started with focus groups in which, in terms of race, the participants outnumbered me as the white researcher (five in each group). In fact, the participants appeared to be comfortable being critical of white students at UCT even in the focus groups I (a white UCT student) was leading. I think what also helped was that my co-researchers5 were black, and except for some focus groups, they lead many of the inter- actions with the participants, such as the workshops in which the participants discussed their ideas for their photo-stories. I think having black academics from senior positions discuss these issues with the participants validated their experiences and ensured they felt secure voicing their perspectives. Although, this does not negate the presence of my white body in this space.

As Josie’s supervisor, Shose reflects that:

Having a white woman as student-researcher in a predominantly black space was an opportunity to reflect on the role of photovoice in dismantling whiteness and developing the researcher’s knowledge and consciousness.

Josie’s involvement in a project as a white student, has affected the development of her own consciousness around her privilege and oppressive behaviours and assump- tions. Continued critical reflection, guided by Shose, has been an important part of this ongoing development. As Josie reflects:

The university experience of marginalisation and silencing described by the participants as commonplace, was unfamiliar and surprising to me and one in which I was (and in many ways still am) complicit. Furthermore, as a student protected by my whiteness, class and other intersecting privileges I am able to reap the benefits of engaging in decolonial femi- nist research critiquing my university and whiteness, without taking on as much of the professional risk and emotional labour faced by my supervisor, Shose, (as a black aca- demic) and the participants (as black students) at a university with an institutional culture privileging whiteness. To quote Law (2016) from her critical reflection on researching inequality in psychology: “I am privileged to ask, but not to answer. I am privileged to construct the questions, rather than being constrained to respond to them” (p. 530). For these reasons, I think this kind of critical reflection is vital, if my co-authors and the partici- pants are expected to dive into uncomfortable personal reflections then so must I; including examining my complicity in upholding the oppressive and marginalising structures embed- ded within this and other higher education institutions. The involvement of white academics

5 Joy Moodley (as an honours student) and Professor Kopano Ratele of the University of South Africa were involved in various stages of this project.

Envisioning Photovoice as Decolonial Feminist Praxis

in the project of decolonisation of higher education requires continued self-reflexivity, acknowledgement of privilege, and the unlearning of exploitative and oppressive knowl- edges (Heleta 2016). As a supervisor and decolonial feminist mentor, Shose has guided me along this process of critical reflection in a sensitive, supportive and insightful manner. This shows that the inclusion of a more representative body of academic staff will bring nuanced and diverse experiences and perspectives to teaching and supervision, to the benefit of all students.

Photovoice as Supervisor and Mentor

Shose and other decolonial feminist psychologists in the Department, such as Professor Floretta Boonzaier, play an important role in mentoring emerging student- researchers such as Linda and Josie, engaging in decolonial feminist praxis. Particularly, in her facilitator role, Shose was guided by the following considerations:

Linda’s and Josie’s testimonies above speak to the importance of engaging with the inter- connectedness of oppressions in the research project in terms of race, class and gender although it was also important to anticipate and manage how these differences would play out with a minimum of power relations. I saw my role as facilitating that process so that student-participants and student-researchers could participate and find a sense of owner- ship in particular aspects of the project. Does photovoice enable us to do research that gives voice? What does it mean to ‘give voice’? What does it mean when a white woman analyses and presents black students’ stories? What does it mean when a black academic analyses and presents black students’ stories? What happens to the black students once their stories have been told and shared publicly? I cannot definitively answers these ques- tions, but in the past decade of doing photovoice research, it has become clear to me that managing power dynamics have much to do with the experience, knowledge, and facilita- tor’s sensitivity. The participatory work that I have engaged in over the course of my career, using photovoice in particular, has led me to reflect on my role as supervisor but also the many other elements of academic knowledge production. To this end, in collaboration with my colleague Floretta, we established the Hub for Decolonial Feminist Psychologies in Africa6 located in the Department of Psychology at UCT. This Hub emphasises the need for joint supervision of students and participatory ways of teaching and doing research, includ- ing publications.

Concluding Reflections

In this chapter, we critically reflected on the dynamics of a photovoice project from the different positionalities we occupy: as a photovoice project participant turned photovoice researcher; as a white student in a university with an institutional culture of whiteness researching black students’ experiences under the supervision of a black academic; and as a black woman academic and decolonial feminist scholar in

6 https://www.facebook.com/UCTfeministdecolonialpsychology/

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https://www.facebook.com/UCTfeministdecolonialpsychology/

a historically white institution. As we have shown, photovoice has much potential for conducting decolonial feminist research in community psychology. As Linda reflects:

Out of this entire process, I formed necessary and fruitful relationships. With my supervisor, I co-authored a paper exploring black queer students’ alienation in historically white uni- versity spaces. One participant produced a documentary on black, queer youth. They later reached out to screen the documentary at my new institution and potentially turn it into a forum for further discussions. With all of this in mind, I am still significantly fond of the photovoice process. It has offered me a delicate balance between decolonial feminist theory and praxis and provided me with mentorship I otherwise might not have had.

Josie Concludes

I think my involvement in this project, while fraught with complex power dynamics and practices (such as academic publishing) which reinscribe my privilege, working with par- ticipant co-researchers, such as Linda, and under Shose’s decolonial feminist supervision has been crucial in helping me along the ongoing and incomplete process of learning to enact a decolonial feminist praxis in community psychology.

Shose Reflects

This particular project was highly successful in achieving many of the stated aims: it gained visibility at the highest institutional levels; student participants became involved in politi- cal mobilisation and action beyond the project’s scope, such as RhodesMustFall and FeesMustFall; Linda chose a photovoice project for her honours research; Josie wrote a first class Master’s thesis; and, up until today, we are receiving ongoing requests for pre- sentations and dissemination of the photo-stories in various channels within and beyond the university both nationally and internationally. I attribute these successes largely to the ways in which the participatory, creative, affective and visible aspects of photovoice meth- ods enabled participants to feel recognised and empowered within and beyond the project. A decolonial feminist lens enabled us to build openness and trust in which students shared deeply traumatic experiences because of the critical ways in which these experiences were located and understood in a social historical context, and not reduced to personal failure.

This particular project significantly impacted my professional advancement at UCT. The stories told by our participants gained the attention of the senior leadership at UCT. In the first presentation of the findings at UCT in 2014, the then vice-chancellor, Dr Max Price unexpectedly attended the seminar. This was followed by multiple presentations and exhibi- tions in the various UCT faculties. I was subsequently invited to be an advisor on the Special Executive Task Team in the midst of the 2016 student protests. This project along with my other decolonial work has brought much attention in the university on how to embody a decolonial agenda for South African higher education.

Our project’s focus on praxes through creative participatory techniques represented a powerful channel through which student-participants, student-researchers and academic collaborators were able to start building a decolonial feminist agenda for the University.

It is important to acknowledge that the collaborative possibilities in this project were enabled by our proximity to each other as stakeholders of an academic institu- tion. Although power dynamics were present, these were minimal in comparison to projects where the participants are removed from the researchers in terms of geo- graphical location as well as identity considerations. The proximity and relative privilege we share made this co-authorship possible. Indeed, participant co-

Envisioning Photovoice as Decolonial Feminist Praxis

authorship may not always be possible or advisable. Some participants may wish to remain anonymous. There is also a risk that the participant co-authors may appear to speak for all participants (Castleden et al. 2010). Some participants may not wish to co-author on academic publications as they are largely inaccessible and are impli- cated in a history of serving dominant colonial interests. Participants may also feel that there are more valuable uses of their time, and methods of dissemination better suited to their needs (Flicker and Nixon 2016). Despite the value of photovoice and our ability to extend its participatory imperative through the present co-authorship, it remains to be seen whether and how such a practice can be replicated in and with other participant communities.

Acknowledgements We would like to thank the participants for sharing their experiences and for the effort and creativity they put into creating their photo-stories. We would like to acknowledge Joy Moodley and Professor Kopano Ratele for their involvement as co-researchers in various stages of this project. We would like to thank our reviewers for their thoughtful feedback.

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Envisioning Photovoice as Decolonial Feminist Praxis

Introduction
Background on Photovoice Methodology

Photovoice as Decolonial Feminist Praxis in Community Psychology
Photovoice, Participant Co-Authorship and Critical Reflexivity

Photovoice Study Background and Context at UCT
Critical Reflections on Photovoice Across Levels of Participation

Photovoice as a Participant
Photovoice as Student-Researchers
Photovoice as Supervisor and Mentor

Concluding Reflections
References

Denzin, Lincoln, Smith.pdf

Introduction: Critical Methodologies and

Indigenous Inquiry

In: Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies

By: Norman K. Denzin & Yvonna S. Lincoln

Edited by: Norman K. Denzin, Yvonna S. Lincoln & Linda Tuhiwai Smith

Pub. Date: 2014

Access Date: February 7, 2021

Publishing Company: SAGE Publications, Inc.

City: Thousand Oaks

Print ISBN: 9781412918039

Online ISBN: 9781483385686

DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781483385686

Print pages: 1-20

This PDF has been generated from SAGE Research Methods. Please note that the pagination of the

online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781483385686

Introduction: Critical Methodologies and Indigenous Inquiry

Norman K.Denzin and Yvonna S.Lincoln

Despite the guarantees of the Treaty of Waitangi, the colonization of Aotearoa/New Zealand and

the subsequent neocolonial dominance of majority interests in social and educational research have

continued. The result has been the development of a tradition of research into Māori people's lives

that addresses concerns and interests of the predominantly non-Māori researchers’ own making, as

defined and made accountable in terms of the researchers’ own cultural worldview(s).

—Bishop (2005, p. 110)

The capitalist system, and globalization theory which speak of ethics, hide the fact that their ethics

are those of the marketplace and not the universal ethics of the human person. It is for these matters

that we ought to struggle courageously if we have, in truth, made a choice for a humanized world.

—Freire (1998, p. 114, paraphrase)

There is hope, however timid, on the street corners, a hope in each and everyone of us…. Hope is

an ontological need.

—Freire (1992/1999, p. 8)

When I discovered the work of … Paulo Freire, my first introduction to critical pedagogy, I found a

mentor and a guide.

—hooks (1994, p. 6)

We seek a productive dialogue between indigenous and critical scholars. This involves a re-visioning of

critical pedagogy, a re-grounding of Paulo Freire's (2000) pedagogy of the oppressed in local, indigenous

contexts. We call this merger of indigenous and critical methodologies critical indigenous pedagogy (CIP).

It understands that all inquiry is both political and moral. It uses methods critically, for explicit social justice

purposes. It values the transformative power of indigenous, subjugated knowledges. It values the pedagogical

practices that produce these knowledges (Semali & Kincheloe, 1999, p. 15), and it seeks forms of praxis

and inquiry that are emancipatory and empowering. It embraces the commitment by indigenous scholars to

decolonize Western methodologies, to criticize and demystify the ways in which Western science and the

modern academy have been part of the colonial apparatus. This revisioning of critical pedagogy understands

with Paulo Freire and Antonio Faundez (1989, p. 46) that “indigenous knowledge is a rich social resource for

any justicerelated attempt to bring about social change” (Semali & Kincheloe, 1999, p.15).

In this introduction, we will outline a methodology, a borderland epistemology, and a set of interpretive

practices that we hope will move this dialogue forward. This will entail a critique of traditional research

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approaches to indigenous life—that is, those positivist and postpositivist approaches that address the

concerns and interests of nonindigenous scholars (Bishop, 2005, p.110; Semali & Kincheloe, 1999, p.15).

Such inquiry should meet multiple criteria. It must be ethical, performative, healing, transformative,

decolonizing, and participatory. It must be committed to dialogue, community, self-determination, and cultural

autonomy. It must meet people's perceived needs. It must resist efforts to confine inquiry to a single paradigm

or interpretive strategy. It must be unruly, disruptive, critical, and dedicated to the goals of justice and equity.

Such a framework lays the foundation for the Decade of Critical Indigenous Inquiry.

At this level, critical indigenous qualitative research is always already political. The researcher must consider

how his or her research benefits, as well as promotes, self-determination for research participants. According

to Bishop (2005, p. 112), self-determination intersects with the locus of power in the research setting.

It concerns issues of initiation, benefits, representation, legitimacy, and accountability. Critical indigenous

inquiry begins with the concerns of indigenous people. It is assessed in terms of the benefits it creates

for them. The work must represent indigenous persons honestly, without distortion or stereotype, and the

research should honor indigenous knowledge, customs, and rituals. It should not be judged in terms of

neocolonial paradigms. Finally, researchers should be accountable to indigenous persons. They, not Western

scholars, should have first access to research findings and control over the distribution of knowledge.

Our argument unfolds in several parts. We begin by locating qualitative research and the current move

to indigenous inquiry within their historical moments. We then briefly discuss the obstacles that confront

the nonindigenous critical theorist. We next take up a group of terms and arguments, including critical

methodology, indigenous epistemology, pedagogy, discourses of resistance, politics as performance, and

counternarratives, as critical inquiry. A variety of indigenous pedagogies are briefly discussed, as is

indigenous research as localized critical theory. We elaborate variations within the personal narrative

approach to decolonized inquiry, extending Richardson's (2000) model of creative analytic practices, or what

she calls CAP ethnography (p. 929). A politics of resistance is next outlined. We conclude with a discussion

of indigenous models of power, truth, ethics, and social justice.

Sandoval (2000), Collins (1998), Mutua and Swadener (2004), Bishop (2005), and Lopez (1998) observe

that we are in the midst of “a large-scale social movement of anticolonialist discourse” (Lopez, 1998,

p. 226). This movement is evident in the emergence and proliferation of indigenous epistemologies and

methodologies (Sandoval, 2000), including the arguments of African American, Chicano, Latina/o, Native

American, First Nation, Hawaiian, African, and Māori scholars, among others. These epistemologies are

forms of critical pedagogy; that is, they embody a critical politics of representation that is embedded in

the rituals of indigenous communities. Always already political, they are relentlessly critical of transnational

capitalism and its destructive presence in the indigenous world (see Kincheloe & McLaren, 2000).

Qualitative research exists in a time of global uncertainty. Around the world, government agencies are

attempting to regulate scientific inquiry by defining what counts as “good” science (for the case in Australia,

see Cheek, 2006; for the case in the United Kingdom, see Torrance, 2006). Conservative regimes are

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enforcing evidence-based or scientifically based biomedical models of research (SBR). Yet, as in the case

with such illconceived endeavors as, in the United States, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002, this

experimental quantitative model is ill suited to

examining the complex and dynamic contexts of public education in its many forms, sites, and

variations, especially considering the … subtle social difference produced by gender, race, ethnicity,

linguistic status or class. Indeed, multiple kinds of knowledge, produced by multiple epistemologies

and methodologies, are not only worth having but also demanded if policy, legislation and practice

are to be sensitive to social needs. (Lincoln & Cannella, 2004a, p. 7; see also Lincoln & Cannella,

2004b)

Born out of a “methodological fundamentalism” that returns to a much-discredited model of empirical inquiry

in which “only randomized experiments produce truth” (House, 2006, pp. 100–101), such regulatory activities

raise fundamental philosophical, epistemological, political, and pedagogical issues for scholarship and

freedom of speech in the decolonized academy.

In response to such challenges, a methodology of the heart (Pelias, 2004), a prophetic, feminist

postpragmatism that embraces an ethics of truth grounded in love, care, hope, and forgiveness, is needed.

Love, here, to borrow from Antonia Darder and Luis F. Mirón (2006),

means to comprehend that the moral and the material are inextricably linked. And, as such, [we]

must recognize love as an essential ingredient of a just society … love is a political principle through

which we struggle to create mutually life-enhancing opportunities for all people. It is grounded in

the mutuality and interdependence of our human existence—that which we share, as much as that

which we do not. This is a love nurtured by the act of relationship itself. It cultivates relationships with

the freedom to be at one's best without undue fear. Such an emancipatory love allows us to realize

our nature in a way that allows others to do so as well. Inherent in such a love is the understanding

that we are not at liberty to be violent, authoritarian, or self-seeking. (p.150)

Indigenous scholars are leading the way on this front.1 During the “Decade of the World's Indigenous

Peoples” (1994–2004), a full-scale attack was launched on Western epistemologies and methodologies.

Indigenous scholars asked that the academy decolonize its scientific practices (Battiste, 2006; Grande, 2004;

L. T. Smith, 2006). At the same time, these scholars sought to disrupt traditional ways of knowing, while

developing “methodologies and approaches to research that privileged indigenous knowledges, voices, and

experiences” (L. T. Smith, 2005, p. 87). An alliance with the critical strands of qualitative inquiry and its

practitioners seemed inevitable.

Today, nonindigenous scholars are building these connections, learning how to dismantle, deconstruct, and

decolonize traditional ways of doing science, learning that research is always already both moral and political,

learning how to let go. Ironically, as this letting go occurs, a backlash against critical qualitative research

gains momentum. New “gold standards” for reliability and validity, as well as design, are being advanced

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(St. Pierre, 2004). So-called evidence-based research—including the Campbell and Cochrane2 models and

protocols—have become fashionable (Pring, 2004; Thomas, 2004) even while its proponents fail to recognize

that the very act of labeling some research as “evidence based” implies that some research fails to mount

evidence—a strongly political and decidedly nonobjective stance. The criticisms, it seems, are coming in from

all sides.

The Historical Field

The term research is inextricably linked to European imperialism and colonialism (L.T. Smith, 1999, p. 1).

L. T. Smith (1999) contends that “the word itself is probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous

world's vocabulary…. It is implicated in the worst excesses of colonialism” (p. 1), with the ways in which

“knowledge about indigenous peoples was collected, classified, and then represented back to the West”

(p. 1). Sadly, qualitative research in many, if not all, of its forms (observation, participation, interviewing,

ethnography) serves as a metaphor for colonial knowledge, for power, and for truth. The metaphor works this

way: Research, quantitative and qualitative, is scientific. Research provides the foundation for reports about

and representations of the other. In the colonial context, research becomes an objective way of representing

the dark-skinned other to the White world. Colonizing nations relied on the human disciplines, especially

sociology and anthropology, as well as their field note–taking journaling observers, to produce knowledge

about strange and foreign worlds. This close involvement with the colonial project contributed, in significant

ways, to qualitative research's long and anguished history, to its becoming a dirty word.

Anthropological and sociological observers went to a foreign setting to study the culture, customs, and habits

of another human group. Often, this was a group that stood in the way of White settlers. Ethnographic

reports of these groups were incorporated into colonizing strategies, ways of controlling the foreign, deviant,

or troublesome other. Soon qualitative research would be employed in other social and behavioral science

disciplines, including education (especially the work of Dewey), history, political science, business, medicine,

nursing, social work, and communications.

By the 1960s, battle lines were drawn within the quantitative and qualitative camps. Quantitative scholars

relegated qualitative research to a subordinate status in the scientific arena. In response, qualitative

researchers extolled the humanistic virtues of their subjective, interpretive approach to human group life. In

the meantime, indigenous peoples found themselves subjected to the indignities of both approaches, each

methodology used in the name of a colonizing power (see Battiste, 2000b).

In North America, qualitative research operates in a complex historical field that crosscuts at least eight

historical moments. These moments overlap and simultaneously operate in the present.3 We define them

as the traditional (1900–1950); the modernist, or golden, age (1950–1970); blurred genres (1970–1986);

the crisis of representation (1986–1990); the postmodern, a period of experimental and new ethnographies

(1990–1995); postexperimental inquiry (1995–2000); the methodologically contested present (2000–2008);

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and the future (2008–), which is now. The future, the eighth moment, confronts the methodological backlash

associated with the evidence-based social movement. It is concerned with moral discourse, with the

development of sacred textualities. The eighth moment asks that the social sciences and the humanities

become sites for critical conversations about democracy, race, gender, class, nation-states, globalization,

freedom, and community.4 Successive waves of epistemological theorizing move across these eight

moments. In the first decade of this new century, we struggle to connect qualitative research to the hopes,

needs, goals, and promises of a free democratic society.

Many critical methodologists and indigenous scholars are in the eighth moment, performing culture as they

write it, understanding that the dividing line between performativity (doing) and performance (done) has

disappeared (Conquer-good, 1998, p. 25). But even as this disappearance occurs, matters of racial injustice

remain. The indigenous other is a racialized other.

Any discussion of critical, indigenous qualitative research must work within this complex historical field.

Qualitative research means different things in each of these moments. Nonetheless, an initial, generic

definition can be offered, understanding that there is no longer an objective, god's-eye view of reality. Critical

qualitative research is a situated activity that locates the gendered observer in the world. It consists of a set

of interpretive, material practices that make the world visible. These practices are forms of critical pedagogy.

They transform the world.

Critical qualitative research embodies the emancipatory, empowering values of critical pedagogy. Like critical

race theories and poststructural feminism (St. Pierre & Pillow, 2000), critical qualitative research represents

inquiry done for explicit political, utopian purposes, a politics of liberation, a reflexive discourse constantly in

search of an open-ended, subversive, multivoiced epistemology (Lather, 2007, pp. x–xi).

Interpretive research practices turn the world into a series of performances and representations, including

case study documents, critical personal experience narratives, life stories, field notes, interviews,

conversations, photographs, recordings, and memos to the self. These performances create the space for

critical, collaborative, dialogical work. They bring researchers and their research participants into a shared,

critical space, a space where the work of resistance, critique, and empowerment can occur.

As indicated in the Preface, we locate indigenous methodology in an intersection of discourses, the site

where theories of performance, pedagogy, and interpretive practice come together. This produces a focus

on performance, interpretive pedagogies, indigenous inquiry practices, and theories of power, truth, ethics,

and social justice. Taking our lead from the performance turn in the human disciplines (Denzin, 2003), we

assert that the performative is always pedagogical, and the pedagogical is always political. Critical personal

narratives enact this view of the pedagogical. They can be turned into performance texts that function as

performative interventions. Such work may queer autoethnography, by politicizing memory and reconfiguring

storytelling and personal history, as counternarratives. Such work disrupts taken-for-granted epistemologies,

by privileging indigenous interpretive pedagogies and inquiry practices.

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A Caveat

In proposing a conversation between indigenous and nonindigenous discourses, we are mindful of several

difficulties. First, the legacy of the helping Western colonizing Other must be resisted. As Linda Smith

observes (1999), “They came, They saw, They named, They Claimed” (p. 80). As agents of colonial power,

Western scientists discovered, extracted, appropriated, commodified, and distributed knowledge about the

indigenous other. Māoris, for example, contend that these practices place control over research in the hands

of the Western scholar. This means, Bishop (2005) argues, that the Māori are excluded from discussions

concerning who has control over the initiation, methodologies, evaluations, assessments, representations,

and distribution of the newly defined knowledge. The decolonization project challenges these practices that

perpetuate Western power by misrepresenting and essentializing indigenous persons, often denying them a

voice or an identity (Bishop, 2005).

Second, however, critical, interpretive performance theory and critical race theory, without modification, will

not work within indigenous settings. The criticisms of G. Smith (2000), L. T. Smith (1999, 2000), Bishop (1994,

1998), Battiste (2000a, 2000b), Churchill (1996), Cook-Lynn (1998), and others make this very clear. Critical

theory's criteria for self-determination and empowerment perpetuate neocolonial sentiments while turning the

indigenous person into an essentialized “other” who is spoken for (Bishop, 2005). The categories of race,

gender, and racialized identities cannot be turned into frozen, essential terms, nor is racial identity a free-

floating signifier (Grande, 2000, p. 348). Critical theory must be localized, grounded in the specific meanings,

traditions, customs, and community relations that operate in each indigenous setting. Localized critical theory

can work if the goals of critique, resistance, struggle, and emancipation are not treated as if they have

“universal characteristics that are independent of history, context, and agency” (L.T. Smith, 2000, p.229).

Third, there is a pressing need to decolonize and deconstruct those structures within the Western academy

that privilege Western knowledge systems and their epistemologies (Mutua & Swadener, 2004, p.10; Semali

& Kincheloe, 1999). Indigenous knowledge systems are too frequently made into objects of study, treated

as if they were instances of quaint folk theory held by the members of a primitive culture. The decolonizing

project reverses this equation, making Western systems of knowledge the object of critique and inquiry.

Fourth, paraphrasing L. T. Smith (2005), the spaces between decolonizing research practices and indigenous

communities must be carefully and cautiously articulated. They are fraught with uncertainty. Neoliberal

and neoconservative political economies both act to turn knowledge about indigenous peoples into a

marketable commodity. There are conflicts between competing epistemological and ethical frameworks,

including (Western) institutional human subject research regulations. Research is regulated according to

positivist epistemologies. Indigenous scholars and native intellectuals are pressed to produce technical

knowledge that conforms to Western standards of truth and validity. Conflicts over who initiates and who

benefits from such research are especially problematic (Bishop, 2005). Culturally responsive research

practices must be developed. Such practices would locate power within the indigenous community. What is

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acceptable and not acceptable research is determined and defined from within the community. Such work

encourages self-determination and empowerment (Bishop, 2005). In fact, in some indigenous communities,

such practices are already codified (L. T. Smith, 1999); such codes, regulating the activities, roles, and powers

of nonindigenous researchers, might serve as a preliminary model for other such communities.

Fifth, in arguing for a dialogue between critical and indigenous theories, Denzin and Lincoln recognize that

they are outsiders to the indigenous colonized experience. We write as privileged Westerners. At the same

time, we seek to be “allied others” (Kaomea, 2004, p. 32; Mutua & Swadener, 2004, p. 4), fellow travelers

of sorts, antipositivists, friendly insiders who wish to deconstruct from within the Western academy and its

positivist epistemologies. We endorse a critical epistemology that contests notions of objectivity and neutrality.

We value autoethnographic, insider, participatory, collaborative methodologies (Fine et al., 2003). These are

narrative, performative methodologies—research practices that are reflexively consequential, ethical, critical,

respectful, and humble. These practices require that scholars live with the consequences of their research

actions (L. T. Smith, 1999, pp. 137–139).

In calling for a dialogue between indigenous and nonindigenous qualitative researchers, we are mindful of

Terry Tempest Williams's cautious advice about borrowing stories and narratives from indigenous peoples. In

her autoethnography, Pieces of White Shell: A Journey to Navajoland (1984, p. 3), she praises the wisdom

of Navajo storytellers and the stories they tell (p.4). But she warns the reader we cannot emulate Native

peoples: “We are not Navajo … their traditional stories don't work for us. Their stories hold meaning for us

only as examples. They can teach us what is possible. We must create our own stories” (p. 5).

As nonindigenous scholars seeking a dialogue with indigenous scholars, we (Denzin and Lincoln) must

construct stories that are embedded in the landscapes through which we travel. These will be dialogical

counternarratives, stories of resistance, of struggle, of hope, stories that create spaces for multicultural

conversations, stories embedded in the critical democratic imagination.

Performance and Critical Pedagogy

Shaped by the sociological imagination (Mills, 1959), building on George Herbert Mead's (1938, p. 460)

discursive, performative model of the act, critical qualitative research methodology imagines and explores

the multiple ways in which performance can be understood, including as imitation, or mimesis; as poiesis,

or construction; and as kinesis, movement, gendered bodies in motion (Conquergood, 1998, p. 31; Pollock,

1998, p. 43). The researcher-as-performer moves from a view of performance as imitation, or dramaturgical

staging (Goffman, 1959), to an emphasis on performance as liminality, construction (McLaren, 1999), to a

view of performance as embodied struggle, as an intervention, as breaking and remaking, and as kinesis, that

is, a sociopolitical act (Conquergood, 1998, p.32).

Viewed as struggles and interventions, performances and performance events become gendered,

transgressive achievements, political accomplishments that break through “sedimented meanings and

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normative traditions” (Conquergood, 1998, p.32). It is this performative model of emancipatory decolonized

indigenous research that we endorse (see the Chapters 4, 9, 18, and 19, this volume).

The call to performance in the human disciplines requires a commitment to a progressive democratic politics,

an ethics and aesthetics of performance (Pollock, 1998) that moves from critical race theory (Ladson-Billings

& Donnor, 2005) to the radical pedagogical formulations of Paulo Freire (1998, 1992/1999, 2000), as his work

is reformulated and reinvented by Antonia Darder (2002), Mirón (Chapter 28, this volume), Kincheloe and

McLaren (2000, 2005), McLaren and Jaramillo (Chapter 10, this volume), Giroux and Giroux (Chapter 9, this

volume), and others. This performance ethic borrows from and is grounded in the discourses of indigenous

peoples (Mutua & Swadener, 2004).

Within this radical pedagogical space, the performative and the political intersect on the terrain of a praxis-

based ethic. This is the space of post-colonial, indigenous participatory theater, a form of critical pedagogical

theater that draws its inspirations from Boal's major works: Theatre of the Oppressed (1974/1979), The

Rainbow of Desire (1995), and Legislative Theatre (1998). This theater performs pedagogies that resist

oppression (Balme & Carstensen, 2001; Greenwood, 2001).5 It enacts a politics of possibility (Madison, 1998)

grounded in performative practices that embody love, hope, care, and compassion.

Consider the following:

In House Arrest and Piano, Anna Deavere Smith (2003) offers “an epic view of slavery, sexual

misconduct, and the American presidency.” Twelve actors, some in blackface, “play across lines of

race, age and gender to ‘become’ Bill Clinton, Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings … and a vast array

of historical and contemporary figures” (Kondo, 2000, p.81).

In Native Canadian Bill Moses’ play Almighty Voice and His Wife (1993) Native performers, wearing

whiteface minstrel masks, mock such historical figures as Wild Bill Cody, Sitting Bull, and young

Indian maidens called Sweet Sioux. (Gilbert, 2003, p.692)

Contemporary indigenous playwrights and performers revisit and make a mockery of 19th-, 20th-, and

21st-century racist practices. They interrogate and turn the tables on blackface minstrelsy and the global

colonial theater that reproduced racist politics through specific cross-race and cross-gender performances.

These performances reflexively use historical restagings, masquerade, ventriloquism, and doubly inverted

performances involving male and female impersonators to create a subversive theater that undermines

colonial racial representations (see Gilbert, 2003; Kondo, 2000, p. 83). This theater takes up key diasporic

concerns, including those of memory, cultural loss, disorientation, violence, and exploitation (Balme &

Carstensen, 2001, p. 45).6 This is a utopian theater that addresses issues of equity, healing, and social

justice.7

A Glossary and a Genealogy

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http://methods.sagepub.com/book/handbook-of-critical-and-indigenous-methodologies/n9.xml

http://methods.sagepub.com/book/handbook-of-critical-and-indigenous-methodologies/n18.xml

http://methods.sagepub.com/book/handbook-of-critical-and-indigenous-methodologies/n19.xml

http://methods.sagepub.com/book/handbook-of-critical-and-indigenous-methodologies/n28.xml

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Pedagogy: To teach in a way that leads. Pedagogy is always ideological and political.

Cultural pedagogy: The ways that cultural production functions as a form of education, as “it generates

knowledge, shapes values and constructs identity … cultural pedagogy refers to the ways particular cultural

agents produce … hegemonic ways of seeing” (Kincheloe & McLaren, 2000, p. 285; McLaren, 1999, p. 441).

Critical pedagogy: To performatively disrupt and deconstruct these cultural practices in the name of a “more

just, democratic and egalitarian society” (Kincheloe & McLaren, 2000, p. 285).

Democracy and Pedagogy

The “democratic character of critical pedagogy is defined largely through a set of basic assumptions” (Giroux

& Giroux, 2005, p. 21). Educational and everyday realities “are constructed in and through people's linguistic,

cultural, social and behavioral interactions which both shape and are shaped by social, political, economic

and cultural forces” (Fishman & McLaren, 2005, p.33). It is not enough to understand any given reality. There

is a need to “transform it with the goal of radically democratizing educational sites and societies” (Fishman &

McLaren, 2005, p.33). Educators, as transformative intellectuals, actively shape and lead this project.

Through performances, critical pedagogy disrupts those hegemonic cultural and educational practices that

reproduce the logics of neoliberal conservatism (Giroux & Giroux, 2005). Critical pedagogy subjects

structures of power, knowledge, and practice to critical scrutiny, demanding that they be evaluated “in terms

of how they might open up or close down democratic experiences” (Giroux & Giroux, 2005, p. 21). Critical

pedagogy and critical pedagogical theater hold systems of authority accountable through the critical reading

of texts, the creation of radical educational practices, and the promotion of critical literacy (Giroux & Giroux,

2005, p.22). Critical pedagogy is “a transgressive discourse, a fluid way of seeing the world, a pedagogy of

insubordination” (Steinberg, 2007, p. ix). In turn, critical pedagogy encourages resistance to the “discourses of

privatization, consumerism, the methodologies of standardization and accountability, and the new disciplinary

techniques of surveillance” (Giroux & Giroux, 2005, p. 23).

Critical pedagogy and its related critical methodologies can be summarized in terms of a small set of

principles involving cultural politics, political economy, and critical theory. Critical pedagogy embraces a

dialectical, relational view of knowledge. It conceives of the human agent in active terms. Following Gramsci,

there is an emphasis on critiques of ideology and the development of counterhegemonic forms of discourse

and praxis, as well as theories of resistance that presume the historicity of knowledge (Darder, Baltodano,

& Torres, 2003, pp. 12–14). With the Frankfurt school, efforts are made to show how theory and praxis

are intertwined. Truth claims are subject to the critiques of praxis as well as to critical pedagogy, to

counterhegemonic discourses that embrace an emancipatory cultural politics, including principles of radical

democracy.

New regimes of truth are sought. What is true must also be just and right. What is just is based on

pedagogies of kindness, hope, and love (Darder, 2002, p. 32). Critical pedagogy and its methodologies honor

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the experiences of indigenous persons and build on these experiences to construct empowering cultures of

compassion and care (Darder et al., 2003, p.11).

The Critics

Critical pedagogy has not been without its critics (Darder et al., 2003, pp. 16, 21; Ellsworth, 1989; Grande,

Chapter 12, this volume; Kincheloe, 2005, pp. 48–49; Lather, 1991, pp. 43–49, 1998; Luke & Gore, 1992;

L. T. Smith, 1999, pp. 185–189). While committed to critical pedagogy's key values of critique, resistance,

struggle, and emancipation, critics nonetheless take issue with how these values are implemented in practice.

Indigenous scholars argue that some versions of critical pedagogy undertheorize and diminish the importance

of indigenous concepts of identity, sovereignty, land, tradition, literacy, and language. Grande (Chapter 12,

this volume) fears that some critical pedagogy theorists persist in imposing Western, Enlightenment views of

these terms on the indigenous experience.

Poststructural and postmodern feminists assert that critical pedagogy did not adequately engage the issues

of biography, history, emotionality, sexual politics, gender, and patriarchy. Furthermore, they challenge the

privileging of reason “as the ultimate sphere upon which knowledge is constructed” (Darder et al., 2003, p.

16). Critics contended that the rationalist premise silences the voices of repressed persons (Darder et al.,

2003, p.16).

Ellsworth (1989, p. 309) argued that the theory failed to interrogate the perspective of the White male

theorist. She and others asserted that this failure compromises the emancipatory goals of the theory (Lather,

1991, p. 48; L. T. Smith, 1999, p. 186). Feminist scholars of color pointed to the failure of critical theory to

take up “questions of subordinate cultures from the specific location of racialized populations themselves”

(Darder et al., 2003, p.17). Working-class educators criticized the theory because they felt its language

was elitist and created a new form of oppression. Classroom educators and curriculum theorists contended

that critical pedagogy was about politics and not education. Political economy critics argued that critical

pedagogy theorists were obsessed with struggles surrounding culture and identity politics. This meant they

were retreating from issues of class and capital, politics and the media.

Indigenous Research as Localized Critical Theory

Indigenous critics, including Bishop (1994, 2005) and L. T. Smith (1999, pp. 185–186), observe that critical

theory failed to address how indigenous cultures and their epistemologies were sites of resistance and

empowerment. This criticism, however, was muted by the commitment of indigenous scholars to the same

values as critical theory—namely, to resistance and struggle at the local level.

Indeed, L.T. Smith (2000) connects her version of indigenous inquiry, Kaupapa Māori research, with critical

theory, as well as cultural studies, suggesting, with G. Smith (2000), that Kaupapa Māori research is a

“local theoretical position that is the modality through which the emancipatory goal of critical theory, in a

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specific historical, political and social context, is practised” (L. T. Smith, 2000, p. 229; see also Bishop, 2005).

However, critical theory is fitted to the Māori worldview, which asserts that Māori are connected to the universe

and their place in it through the principle of Whakapapa. This principle tells Māori that they are the seeds or

direct descendants of the heavens. Whakapapa turns the universe into a moral space where all things great

and small are interconnected, including science and research.

The “local” that localizes critical theory is always historically specific. The local is grounded in the politics,

circumstances, and economies of a particular moment, a particular time and place, a particular set of

problems, struggles, and desires. There is a politics of resistance and possibility (Madison, 1998; Pollock,

1998) embedded in the local. This is a politics that confronts and breaks through local structures of resistance

and oppression. This is a politics that asks, “Who writes for whom? Who is representing indigenous peoples,

how, for what purposes, for which audiences, who is doing science for whom?” (L.T. Smith, 1999, p.37).

A critical politics of interpretation leads the indigenous scholar to ask eight questions about any research

project, including those projects guided by critical theory:

1. What research do we want done?

2. Whom is it for?

3. What difference will it make?

4. Who will carry it out?

5. How do we want the research done?

6. How will we know it is worthwhile?

7. Who will own the research?

8. Who will benefit? (L. T. Smith, 2000, p. 239)

These questions are addressed to indigenous and nonindigenous researchers alike. They must be answered

in the affirmative; that is, indigenous persons must conduct, own, and benefit from any research that is done

on, for, or with them.

These eight questions serve to interpret critical theory through a moral lens, through key indigenous

principles. They shape the moral space that aligns indigenous research with critical theory. Thus, both

formations are situated within the antipositivist debate. They both rest on antifoundational epistemologies.

Each privileges performative issues of gender, race, class, equity, and social justice. Each develops its own

understandings of community, critique, resistance, struggle, and emancipation (L.T. Smith, 2000, p.228). Each

understands that the outcome of a struggle can never be predicted in advance, that struggle is always local

and contingent; it is never final (L. T. Smith, 2000, p. 229).

By localizing discourses of resistance and by connecting these discourses to performance ethnography and

critical pedagogy, indigenous research enacts what critical theory “actually offers to oppressed, marginalized

and silenced groups … [that is] through emancipation groups such as the Māori would take greater control

of their own lives and humanity” (L. T. Smith, 2000, p. 229). This requires that indigenous groups “take hold

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of the project of emancipation and attempt to make it a reality on their own terms” (L. T. Smith, 2000, p.229).

This means that inquiry is always grounded in principles centered on autonomy, home, family, and kinship.

It presupposes a shared collective community vision. Under this framework, research is not a commodity or

“purchased product … owned by the state” (L.T. Smith, 2000, p.231).

Localized critical indigenous theory and critical indigenous pedagogy encourages indigenists, as well as

nonindigenous scholars, to confront key challenges connected to the meanings of science, community, and

democracy. G. Smith (2000, pp.212–215) and L.T. Smith (2000) have outlined these challenges, asking that

indigenists

1. be proactive; they should name the world for themselves—furthermore, “being Māori is

an essential criterion for carrying out Kaupapa Māori research” (L. T. Smith, 2000, pp.

229–230);

2. craft their own version of science and empirical activity, including how science and

scientific understandings will be used in their world;

3. develop a participatory model of democracy that goes beyond the “Westminister ‘one

person, one vote, majority rule’” (G. Smith, 2000, p. 212);

4. use theory proactively, as an agent of change, but act in ways that are accountable to the

indigenous community and not just the academy;

5. resist new forms of colonization, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement

(NAFTA), while contesting neocolonial efforts to commodify indigenous knowledge.

In proactively framing participatory views of science, empirical research, democracy, and community,

indigenous peoples advance the project of decolonization.

Indigenous Voices, Critical Pedagogy, and Epistemologies of

Resistance

Indigenous pedagogies are grounded in an oppositional consciousness that resists “neocolonizing

postmodern global formations” (Sandoval, 2000, pp. 1–2). These pedagogies fold theory, epistemology,

methodology, and praxis into strategies of resistance unique to each indigenous community. Thus, the

oppositional consciousness of Kaupapa Māori research is like, but unlike, Black feminist epistemology

(Collins, 1991, 1998), Chicano feminisms (Anzaldúa, 1987; Moraga, 1995), Red pedagogy (Grande, 2000;

Harjo & Bird, 1997), and Hawaiian epistemology (Meyer, 2003). Still, there is a commitment to an indigenism,

to an indigenist outlook, which, after Ward Churchill (1996), assigns the highest priority to the rights of

indigenous peoples, to the traditions, bodies of knowledge, and values that have “evolved over many

thousands of years by native peoples the world over” (p.509).

Indigenist pedagogies are informed, in varying and contested ways, by decolonizing, revolutionary, and

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socialist feminisms. Such feminisms, in turn, address issues of social justice, equal rights, and nationalisms

of “every racial, ethnic, gender, sex, class, religion or loyalist type” (Sandoval, 2000, p. 7). Underlying each

indigenist formation is a commitment to moral praxis, to issues of self-determination, empowerment, healing,

love, community solidarity, respect for the Earth, and respect for elders.

Indigenists resist the positivist and postpositivist methodologies of Western science because these formations

are too frequently used to validate colonizing knowledge about indigenous peoples. Indigenists deploy,

instead, interpretive strategies and skills fitted to the needs, language, and traditions of their respective

indigenous community. These strategies emphasize personal performance narratives and testimonios.

A Māori Pedagogy

As an example, Māori scholar Russell Bishop (1994, 1998, 2005; see also Chapter 21, this volume)

presents a collaborative, participatory epistemological model of Kaupapa Māori research. This model is

characterized by the absence of a need to be in control, by a desire to be connected to and to be a part

of a moral community where a primary goal is the compassionate understanding of another's moral position

(Bishop, 1998, p. 203; Heshusius, 1994). The indigenist researcher wants to participate in a collaborative,

altruistic relationship, where nothing “is desired for the self” (Bishop, 1998, p. 207), where research is

evaluated by participant-driven criteria, by the cultural values and practices that circulate, for example, in

Māori culture, including metaphors stressing self-determination, the sacredness of relationships, embodied

understanding, and the priority of community over self. Researchers are led to develop new story lines and

criteria of evaluation reflecting these understandings. These participant-driven criteria function as resources

for resisting positivist and neoconservative desires to “establish and maintain control of the criteria for

evaluating Māori experience” (Bishop, 1998, p. 212).

Extending Sandoval (2000), indigenists enact an ethically democratizing stance that is committed to

“equalizing power differentials between humans” (Sandoval, 2000, p. 114). The goal “is to consolidate and

extend … manifestos of liberation in order to better identify and specify a mode of emancipation that is

effective within first world decolonizing global conditions during the twenty-first century” (Sandoval, 2000, p.

2).

Treaties as Political Pedagogy

These pedagogies confront and work through governmental treaties, ideological formations, historical

documents, and broken promises that connect the indigenist group and its fate to the colonizing capitalist

state. Thus, for example, during the “first 90-odd years of its existence the United States entered into and

ratified more than 370 separate treaties … [and] has … defaulted on its responsibilities under every single

treaty obligation it ever incurred with regard to Indians” (Churchill, 1996, pp.516–517). First Nation tribes

in Canada did not have aboriginal rights recognized in law until the Constitution Act of 1982 (Henderson,

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2000, p.165). In New Zealand, Māori debate the Treaty of Waitangi, which was signed between Māori chiefs

and the British Crown in 1840. Pedagogically, these treaties inscribed and prescribed only one way of being

indigenous—that is, as a person subservient to the colonial powers-to-be.

When Rigoberta Menchú accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of indigenes, she reminded her audience

that “we indigenous Peoples attach a great importance to the Treaties, Agreements, and other constructive

accords that have been reached between Indigenous Peoples and the former colonial powers or states. They

should be fully respected in order to establish new and harmonious relationships based on mutual respect

and cooperation” (Menchú, quoted in Cook-Lynn, 2001, p.34). Thus, does Menchú announce an ethical tenet,

a requirement that the agreements of the past be respected and honored, held as sacred truths (Cook-Lynn,

2001, p. 35)?

Decolonizing the Academy

As argued above, critical indigenist pedagogy contests the complicity of the modern university with

neocolonial forces (Battiste, 2000a, p.xi). It encourages and empowers indigenous peoples to make

colonizers confront and be accountable for the traumas of colonization. In rethinking and radically

transforming the colonizing encounter, this pedagogy imagines a postcolonial society and academy that

honor difference and promote healing. A decolonized academy is interdisciplinary and politically proactive.

It respects indigenous epistemologies and encourages interpretive, first-person methodologies. It honors

different versions of science and empirical activity, as well as values cultural criticism in the name of

social justice. It seeks models of human subject research that are not constrained by biomedical, positivist

assumptions. It turns the academy and its classrooms into sacred spaces, sites where indigenous and

nonindigenous scholars interact, share experiences, take risks, explore alternative modes of interpretation,

and participate in a shared agenda, coming together in a spirit of hope, love, and shared community.

This decolonizing project attempts to rebuild nations, communities, and their people through the use of

restorative indigenous ecologies. These native ecologies celebrate survival, remembering, sharing,

gendering, new forms of naming, networking, protecting, and democratizing daily life (Battiste, 2000b; L. T.

Smith, 1999, pp. 142–162).

Theory, method, and epistemology are aligned in this project, anchored in the moral philosophies that are

taken for granted in Māori and other indigenous cultures and language communities (L. T. Smith, 2000, p.

225). A pedagogy of emancipation and empowerment is endorsed, a pedagogy that encourages struggles

for autonomy, cultural well-being, cooperation, and collective responsibility. This pedagogy demands that

indigenous groups own the research process. It speaks the truth “to people about the reality of their lives”

(Collins, 1998, p. 198). It equips them with the tools to resist oppression, and it moves them to struggle, to

search for justice (Collins, 1998, pp. 198–199).

Pedagogies of Resistance

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In response to the continuing pressures of neocolonialism and neocolonization, L. T. Smith (1999, pp.

142–162) outlines some 25 different indigenous projects, including those that create, name, democratize,

reclaim, protect, remember, restore, and celebrate lost histories and cultural practices.8 These indigenous

projects embody a pedagogy of hope and freedom. They turn the pedagogies of oppression and colonization

into pedagogies of liberation. They are not purely utopian, for they map concrete performances that can

lead to positive social transformations. They embody ways of resisting the process of colonization. They

encourage processes that mobilize and transform communities at the local level. They honor indigenous

cultural practices and, in so doing, contribute to steps that heal the wounds of colonization. Thus are issues

of cultural survival and collective self-determination addressed.

Critical Personal Narrative as Counternarrative

The move to the politics of performance has been accompanied by a shift in the meaning of ethnography and

ethnographic writing. Richardson (2000) observes that the narrative genres connected to ethnographic writing

have “been blurred, enlarged, altered to include poetry, [and] drama” (p. 929). She uses the term creative

analytic practice (CAP) to describe these many different reflexive performance narrative forms.

These forms include not only performance autoethnography but also short stories; conversations; fiction;

personal narratives; creative nonfiction; photographic essays; personal essays; personal narratives of the

self; writing stories; self stories; fragmented, layered texts; critical autobiography; memoirs; personal histories;

cultural criticism; co-constructed performance narratives; and performance writing that blurs the edges

between text, representation, and criticism.

Critical personal narratives are counternarratives, testimonies, autoethnographies, performance texts, stories,

and accounts that disrupt and disturb discourse by exposing the complexities and contradictions that exist

under official history (Mutua & Swadener, 2004, p.16). The critical personal narrative is a central genre of

contemporary decolonizing writing. As a creative analytic practice, it is used to criticize “prevailing structures

and relationships of power and inequity in a relational context” (Mutua & Swadener, 2004, p.16).9

Counternarratives explore the “intersections of gender and voice, border crossing, dual consciousness,

multiple identities, and selfhood in a … post-colonial and postmodern world” (Mutua & Swadener, 2004, p.16).

The testimonio is another form of counternarrative. Its purpose, in part, is to raise political consciousness.

In it, the writer bears witness to social injustices experienced at the group level (Mutua & Swadener, 2004,

p.18). It is always an indigenous project, for it presumes that the subaltern can speak, and does, with power,

conviction, and firsthand experience.

The testimonio has a central place in this project. Rigoberta Menchú (1984, p. 1) begins her testimonio with

these words: “My name is Rigoberta Menchú, I am twenty-three years old, and this is my testimony.” Critics

contended that Menchú made up her story, that it was not truthful and could not be verified through scientific

methodology (Cook-Lynn, 2001, p. 203). But as Cook-Lynn (2001) observes, respectfully remembering and

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honoring the past, not factual truthfulness, is how the testimonio should be read. Furthermore, Menchú

was asking that the treaty agreements of the past be respected, so that new and harmonious relationships

based on mutual respect and cooperation could be built (Cook-Lynn, 2001, p. 34). This ethical tenet and

utopian impulse have been ignored by Menchú's critics (Cook-Lynn, 2001, p. 35). The struggle of colonized

indigenous peoples to tell their own stories is at stake in these criticisms.

Performance, Pedagogy, and Politics

Clearly, the current historical moment requires morally informed performance and arts-based disciplines that

will help indigenous and nonindigenous peoples recover meaning in the face of senseless, brutal violence,

violence that produces voiceless screams of terror and insanity. Cynicism and despair reign on a global

scale. Never have we had a greater need for a militant utopianism to help us imagine a world free of conflict,

oppression, terror, and death. We need oppositional performance disciplines that will show us how to create

radical utopian spaces within our public institutions.

The central tensions in the world today go beyond the crises in capitalism and neoliberalism's version

of democracy. The central crisis, as defined by Native Canadian, Hawaiian, Māori, and American Indian

pedagogy, is spiritual, “rooted in the increasingly virulent relationship between human beings and the rest of

nature” (Grande, 2000, p. 354). Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) discusses the concept of spirituality within Māori

discourse, giving added meaning to the crisis at hand:

The essence of a person has a genealogy which could be traced back to an earth parent…. A

human person does not stand alone, but shares with other animate … beings relationships based

on a shared “essence” of life … [including] the significance of place, of land, of landscape, of other

things in the universe…. Concepts of spirituality which Christianity attempted to destroy, and then

to appropriate, and then to claim, are critical sites of resistance for indigenous peoples. The value,

attitudes, concepts and language embedded in beliefs about spirituality represent … the clearest

contrast and mark of difference between indigenous peoples and the West. It is one of the few parts

of ourselves which the West cannot decipher, cannot understand and cannot control … yet. (p. 74)

A respectful performance pedagogy honors these views of spirituality. It works to construct a vision of the

person, ecology, and environment that is compatible with these principles. This pedagogy demands a politics

of hope, of loving, of caring nonviolence grounded in inclusive moral and spiritual terms.

Cultural Politics and an Indigenous Research Ethic

There is much to be learned from indigenous scholars about how radical democratic practices can be made to

work. As indicated above, indigenous scholars are committed to a set of moral and pedagogical imperatives

and “to acts of reclaiming, reformulating, and reconstituting indigenous cultures and languages … to the

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struggle to become self-determining” (L. T. Smith, 1999, p. 142). These acts lead to a research program

devoted to the pursuit of social justice. In turn, a specific approach to inquiry is required. In his discussion of a

Māori approach to creating knowledge, Bishop (1998) observes that researchers in Kaupapa Māori contexts

are

repositioned in such a way as to no longer need to seek to give voice to others, to empower others,

to emancipate others, to refer to others as subjugated voices, but rather to listen and participate …

in a process that facilitates the development in people as a sense of themselves as agentic and of

having an authoritative voice…. An indigenous Kaupapa Māori approach to research … challenges

colonial and neo-colonial discourses that inscribe “otherness.” (Bishop, 1998, pp. 207–208)

This participatory mode of knowing privileges sharing, subjectivity, personal knowledge, and the specialized

knowledges of oppressed groups. It uses concrete experience as a criterion for meaning and truth. It

encourages a participatory mode of consciousness (Bishop, 1998, p. 205), asking that the researcher give

the group a gift as a way of honoring the group's sacred spaces. If the group picks up the gift, then a

shared reciprocal relationship can be created (Bishop, 1998, p.207). The relationship that follows is built on

understandings involving shared Māori beliefs and cultural practices.

In turn, research is evaluated by Māori-based criteria. Like Freire's revolutionary pedagogy, West's (1993)

prophetic pragmatism, and Collins's (1991) Afrocentic feminist moral ethic, the Māori value dialogue as a

method for assessing knowledge claims. The Māori moral position also privileges storytelling, listening, voice,

and personal performance narratives (see also Collins, 1991, pp. 208–212). This moral pedagogy rests on

an ethic of care and love and personal accountability that honors individual uniqueness and emotionality

in dialogue (Collins, 1991, pp.215–217). This is a performative, pedagogical ethic, grounded in the ritual,

sacred spaces of family, community, and everyday moral life (Bishop, 1998, p.203). It is not imposed by some

external, bureaucratic agency. This view of knowing parallels the commitment within certain forms of Red

pedagogy to the performative as a way of being, as a way of knowing, as a way of expressing moral and

spiritual ties to the community (Grande, 2000, p. 356; Graveline, 2000, p. 361).

Moral Codes and the Performative as a Site of Resistance

Because it expresses and embodies moral ties to the community, the performative view of meaning serves to

legitimate indigenous world-views. Meaning and resistance are embodied in the act of performance itself. The

performative is where the soul of the culture resides. In their sacred and secular performances, the members

of the culture honor one another and the culture itself.

A new set of moral and ethical research protocols is required. Fitted to the indigenous (and nonindigenous)

perspective, these are moral matters. They are shaped by the feminist, communitarian principles of sharing,

reciprocity, relationality, community, and neighborliness (Lincoln, 1995, p. 287). They embody a dialogic ethic

of love and faith grounded in compassion (Bracci & Christians, 2002, p. 13; West, 1993). Accordingly, the

purpose of research is not the production of new knowledge per se. Rather, the purposes are pedagogical,

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political, moral, and ethical, involving the enhancement of moral agency, the production of moral discernment,

a commitment to praxis, justice, an ethic of resistance, and a performative pedagogy that resists oppression

(Christians, 2002, p. 409).

A code embodying these principles interrupts the practice of positivist research, resists the idea of research

being something that White men do to indigenous peoples. Furthermore, unlike in the United States, where

an institutional review board (IRB) model of inquiry is used that is not content driven, indigenous codes are

anchored in a culture and its way of life. Unlike the IRB mode, it connects its moral model to a set of political

and ethical actions that will increase well-being in indigenous culture. The code refuses to define indigenous

peoples as subjects who have been turned into the natural objects of White inquiry. Indigenous codes reject

the Western utilitarian model of the individual as someone who has rights distinct from the rights of the larger

group, “for example the right of an individual to give his or her own knowledge, or the right to give informed

consent … community and indigenous rights or views in this area are generally not … respected” (L. T. Smith,

1999, p. 118). Individual Māori do not have these rights.

Research ethics for Māori and other indigenous communities “extend far beyond issues of individual consent

and confidentiality” (L. T. Smith, 2000, p. 241). These ethics are not “prescribed in codes of conduct for

researchers but tend to be prescribed for Māori researchers in cultural terms” (L. T. Smith, 2000, p. 242).

These terms ask that researchers show respect for the Māori by exhibiting a willingness to listen, to be

humble, to be cautious, to increase knowledge, to not “trample over the mana of people” (L.T. Smith, 2000,

p.242).

Conclusion: Turning the Tables on the Colonizers

Here at the end, it is possible to imagine scenarios that turn the tables on the neocolonizer. It is possible

to imagine, for example, human subject research practices that really do respect human rights, protocols of

informed consent that inform and do not deceive, research projects that do not harm, and projects that in fact

benefit human communities.

Indigenous ethical and moral models call into question the more generic, utilitarian, biomedical, Western

model of ethical inquiry (see Bracci & Christians, 2002; Christians, 2000, 2002). They outline a radical ethical

path for the future. They transcend IRB principles that focus almost exclusively on the problems associated

with betrayal, deception, and harm. They call for a collaborative social science research model that makes

the researcher responsible, not to a removed discipline (or institution) but rather to those studied. This model

stresses personal accountability, caring, the value of individual expressiveness, the capacity for empathy,

and the sharing of emotionality (Collins, 1991, p.216). This model implements collaborative, participatory

performative inquiry. It forcefully aligns the ethics of research with a politics of the oppressed, with a politics

of resistance, hope, and freedom.

This model directs scholars to take up moral projects that respect and reclaim indigenous cultural practices.

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Such work produces spiritual, social, and psychological healing. Healing, in turn, leads to multiple forms of

transformation at the personal and social levels. These transformations shape processes of mobilization and

collective action. These actions help persons realize a radical performative politics of possibility. This politics

enacts emancipatory discourses and critical pedagogies that honor human difference and draw for inspiration

on the struggles of indigenous persons. In listening to the stories of indigenous storytellers, we learn new

ways of being moral and political in the social world. We come together in a shared agenda, with a shared

imagination and a new language, struggling together to find liberating ways of interpreting and performing in

the world (L. T. Smith, 1999, p. 37). In this way, does research cease to be a dirty word?

Notes

1. The list of names is long. It is nearly impossible to be complete. In addition to the indigenous authors in this

handbook, see Bishop (2005, p.111), L. T. Smith (2005, pp. 103–107), Ladson-Billings and Donnor (Chapter

4, this volume), and Battiste (2000a, 200b).

2. For a concise overview of the Campbell and Cochrane models, see Mosteller and Boruch (2002).

3. Jameson (1991, pp. 3–4) reminds us that any periodization hypothesis is always suspect, even those

that reject linear, stage-like models. It is never clear what reality a stage refers to. What divides one stage

from another is always debatable. Our eight moments are meant to mark discernible shifts in style, genre,

epistemology, ethics, politics, and aesthetics.

4. See Denzin and Lincoln (2005, pp. 2–3, 13–20, for an extended discussion of these moments). This model

has been termed a “progress narrative” by Alasuutari (2004, pp. 599–600) and Seale, Gobo, Gubrium, and

Silverman (2004, p. 2). The critics assert that we believe that the most recent moment is the most up-to-date,

the avant-garde, the cutting edge (Alasuutari, 2004, p. 601). Naturally, we dispute this reading. Tashakkori

and Teddlie (2003, pp. 5–8) have modified our historical periods to fit their historical analysis of the major

moments in the emergence of mixed methods in the past century.

5. This theater often uses verbatim accounts of injustice and violence in daily life. See Mienczakowski (1995,

p. 5; see also Chessman, 1971) for a history of “verbatim theater” and Mienczakowski's extensions of this

approach, using oral history, participant observation, and the methods of ethnodrama. A contemporary use

of verbatim theater is the play Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom (Riding, 2004). This anti-Iraq

war play addresses the plight of British citizens imprisoned at Guantanamo. The “power of Guantanamo is

that it is not really a play but a re-enactment of views expressed in interviews, letters, news conferences, and

speeches by various players in the post-Sept 11 Iraq war drama, from British Muslim detainees, to lawyers,

from U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfield, to Jack Straw, Britain's foreign secretary” (Riding, 2004,

p. B2). Nicolas Kent, the play's director, says he believes “political theater works here because the British

have an innate sense of justice. When we do stories about injustice … there is a groundswell of sympathy …

people are furious that there isn't due process. With Islamophobia growing around the world I wanted to show

that we, too, think there is an injustice” (Riding, 2004, p. B2).

6. W.E.B. Du Bois (1901/1978) reminds us that “the problem of the twenty-first century, on a global scale,

will be the problem of the color line … modern democracy cannot succeed unless peoples of different races

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http://methods.sagepub.com/book/handbook-of-critical-and-indigenous-methodologies/n4.xml

and religions are also integrated into the democratic whole” (pp.281, 288). This democratic whole cannot be

imposed by one culture or nation on another; it must come from within the culture itself.

7. At another level, indigenous participatory theater extends the project connected to Third World popular

theater. This is political “theatre used by oppressed Third World people to achieve justice and development

for themselves” (Etherton, 1988, p. 991). The International Popular Theatre Alliance, organized in the 1980s,

uses existing forms of cultural expression to fashion improvised dramatic productions that analyze situations

of poverty and oppression. This grassroots approach uses agit-prop and sloganizing theater (theater pieces

devised to foment political action) to create collective awareness and collective action at the local level. This

form of theater has been popular in Latin America, Africa, parts of Asia, India, and among Native populations

in the Americas (Etherton, 1988, p.992).

8. Other projects involve a focus on testimonies, new forms of storytelling, returning to, as well as reframing

and regendering, key cultural debates.

9. Cast in this form, the critical personal narrative counters the criticisms that it is inherently conservative

because it romanticizes marginality, ignores issues of political economy, and engages in simplistic,

chauvinistic essentialisms (see Darder & Torres, 2004, pp. 103–104).

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research. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.

Mutua, K., & Swadener, B. B. (2004). Introduction. In Edited by: K.Mutua & B. B.Swadener (Eds.),

Decolonizing research in cross-cultural contexts: Critical personal narratives (pp. 1–23). Albany, NY: SUNY

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Pollock, D. (1998). A response to Dwight Conquergood's essay: “Beyond the text: Towards a performative

cultural politics.” In Edited by: S. J.Dailey (Ed.), The future of performance studies: Visions and revisions (pp.

37–46). Annadale, VA: National Communication Association.

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Evidence-based practice in education (pp. 201–212). Berkshire, England: Open University Press.

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SAGE handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed., pp. 923–948). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

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London: Sage.

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study it? In Edited by: L. M.Semali & J. L.Kincheloe (Eds.), What is indigenous knowledge? Voices from the

academy (pp. 3–57). New York: Falmer.

Smith, A. D. (2003). House arrest and piano. New York: Anchor.

Smith, G. (2000). Protecting and respecting indigenous knowledge. In Edited by: M.Battiste (Ed.),

Reclaiming indigenous voice and vision (pp. 209–224). Vancouver: UBC Press.

Smith, L. T. (1999). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. Dunedin, New Zealand:

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Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

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pedagogy: Where are we now? (pp. ix–x). New York: Peter Lang.

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research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

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Evidence-based practice in education (pp. 21–33). Berkshire, England: Open University Press.

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to management. In Edited by: N. K.Denzin & M. D.Giardina (Eds.), Qualitative inquiry and the conservative

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Imperial_University_Academic_Repression_and_Schola..._----_(Introduction_The_Imperial_University_Race,_War,_and_the_Nation-State).pdf

Introduction

The Imperial University

Race, War, and the Nation- State

Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira

Storm Troopers and Students

Piya: January 19, 2012. It is midafternoon on a brisk and beautiful winter day in the Inland Empire of Southern California. I enter my second floor office in the Department of Women’s Studies at the University of California, Riverside. The hallway is silent. It reminds me, sadly, of any colorless and functional corporate office building. I wish for sound, some sign of collective social life. This alienating silence is particularly acute today given the noisy scenes of protest (including some Rabelaisian revelries with drumming and chants) taking place just a few hundred feet away in the student commons. The Board of Regents of the University of California (UC) is meeting on campus to address the budget crisis that has, for some years now, imper- iled this great public university system and led to severe tuition hikes. Stu- dents know that their fees will be raised again. Contingent faculty and other workers know they will be plunged into further precarity. For some years now, the alliances forged among student, faculty, and labor unions in response to the public education crisis have meant that any high- level UC administrators’ gathering is met with well- planned protests and resistance. But it also means that police officers and other law enforcement agents are in full gear and out in full force.

Earlier in the day, I join other protestors who throng the site of the meet- ing and whose mood is quite upbeat. “Whose university?” someone chants. “Our university!” replies the crowd. Plainclothes men mingle with protesters, lots of cameras are out. A friend, familiar with surveillance techniques, nudges me: “No need to get paranoid,” she says, “but you do realize we are all being photographed?” A police officer repeatedly asks us to clear the commons. “Our university!” chants the crowd in response. In that micromoment of regula- tion around who should people “the commons,” I sense that a fence is being

Chatterjee, P., & Maira, S. (Eds.). (2014). Imperial university : Academic repression and scholarly dissent. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from ucsc on 2021-01-12 16:08:08.

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built— and reinforced— around who can inhabit this public space of higher education and what it means for them to do so. Whose university, indeed?

Later, sitting in my quiet office, I suddenly hear a loud buzzing sound outside my window. A police helicopter is circling over the empty sports field adjacent to the building. It might be an optical illusion (because from that lofty mobile panopticon, it can see much more than I can), but it seems to be circling an empty expanse of green. I watch as the helicopter’s circles become smaller, tighter— it begins to resemble a psychotic bee. It seems utterly mad: the silence within, the angry buzzing outside. Suddenly, a small troop of khaki- clad youth march around the corner to my right. They have little ban- danas around their neck, they are in perfect formation— they pass by quickly. I blink hard because it seems so unreal— the quick, youthful military march whose steps I cannot hear. Later, I am told that they were deployed by the Riverside sheriff ’s department.

This tableau feels surreal and I decide to move back to the noise and action near the student commons. The scene has now turned tense. Police in full riot gear are nose- to- nose with students who are pushing them back. Protestors want the police out of their commons. I learn from someone that some protestors have been arrested. The Riverside Police Department’s SWAT team is already here and the regents have been escorted to their meet- ing in what looked like a secret service mission and military cavalcade, fit for royalty: regents, indeed. By late evening, the protestors have dispersed, but some of us, witnesses and participants, remain— talking about the various registers of militarized presence: the sheriff ’s scouts, the campus police in full riot gear, the SWAT team. The disruption of this collective protest seems to have hardly caused a ripple as we stand there in the now- quiet bucolic green expanse. But as if to remind us of the hyperreal qualities of this land- scape of power, we hear the thump of marching steps. Twenty men in light green khaki march by in platoon formation. They make no sound except for the quiet thud of their steps. They are young, not much older than some of the students I teach. The SWAT team is going home.

What can we make of this strange coupling of the bucolic and the brutal, of storm troopers and students? How can we make sense of a corporatized alienation and silence alongside the visible regulation of the “public” and contours of permissible protest? How can we understand more deeply this militarized performance of state university power and its “normalization” within the quiet green peace of a public university campus? What is being “secured” in this performance of power?

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Occupy the Occupation

Sunaina: November 2011. Just a few months prior to the events witnessed by Piya at UC Riverside, I had watched the pepper spraying of students by police on my campus, UC Davis. I was actually halfway across the world at the time, in Ramallah, Palestine. Pondering the question of U.S. public uni- versity students’ right to protest from contexts such as the occupied West Bank, where the basic freedom of mobility let alone right to education is highly restricted, underscores the ways in which higher education is firmly embedded in global structures of repression, militarism, and neoliberalism. In fact, that November morning while I was working in Zamn cafe, one of the many upscale coffee shops that have burgeoned in the new neoliberal economy of Ramallah, I looked up from my laptop and saw the image of Lt. John Pike, spraying UC Davis students with chemical weapons, on the large- screen television that was broadcasting Al Jazeera news. It was a slightly sur- real moment.

The video of the attack on the student protesters, seated on the ground, quickly went viral and drew national and global condemnation of this stark staging of state violence against the 99 percent, renaming the campus “Pep- per Spray University.” Not all who watched the video of the police attack on the student protesters, however, were aware that this dramatic event was the culmination of a long history of UC student protests, including at UC Davis, against tuition hikes as the burden of the UC and state’s budget crisis was increasingly placed on UC students. In the months leading up to the infamous incident of November 18, 2011, UC Davis students had joined the growing Occupy movement, inspired by the revolutionary upris- ings in Tunisia and Egypt. In fact, they had protested just a few days earlier against the fee hikes and also the violent assaults by police on UC Berkeley students and faculty. Student protesters, some of whom belonged to Occupy/ Decolonize UC Davis (UCD), occupied the administration building and erected tents on the campus Quad. The administration refused to allow Tah- rir Square to be brought to the Quad, but the protesters insisted on their right to remain— in defense of the right to education. Then the pepper spray.

In fall 2009, UC Davis students had also occupied the administration building, and fifty- two protesters were arrested. In March 2010, three hun- dred protesters had shut down the campus bus service and marched to the freeway to attempt to block traffic; they were beaten by police with batons. Many of these students were youth of color, some were from immigrant and

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working- or lower- middle- class families. When the Occupy/Decolonize UCD movement was launched in the wake of the Tahrir Square uprising, some began to also critique the ways in which neoliberal multiculturalism effectively masked the racialized politics of exclusion from higher educa- tion.1 In spring 2012, Occupy protesters began doing a regular sit-in at the U.S. Bank branch on campus, protesting the bank’s contract with the cam- pus and the complicity of both institutions with mounting student debt and the privatization of higher education. On March 29, the bank was shut down, but eleven students and one faculty member were charged by the Yolo County district attorney with a slew of misdemeanors, facing up to eleven years in prison. Among the “Davis Dozen” were students who had been pep- per sprayed and who were part of a lawsuit brought by the ACLU against the university. In fact, given that it was the university who had asked the district attorney to file criminal charges against the Davis Dozen, it was apparent that this much- less publicized case was an opportunity for the administra- tion to clamp down on the campus Occupy movement after having been unable to do so in the fall, given the national and international outcry over the pepper spraying. Some student activists were also brought up individu- ally for investigation by Student Judicial Affairs for issues apparently related to involvement in other campus activism. In other words, this was a tactic of legal pepper spraying.

One of the issues that had rocked the campus earlier in spring 2012, and in which some Occupy activists had been involved, was the attack on the Palestine solidarity movement at UC Davis in the wake of the controversial interruption of an Israeli soldier’s talk on campus by a student. Off- campus, pro- Israel groups began issuing vitriolic statements of condemnation, and UC president Mark Yudof sent a strident letter to the entire UC community condemning the disruption. The UC Davis Students for Justice in Palestine had actually staged a silent walkout at the event in order to avoid crimi- nal charges similar to those that had harshly penalized the UC Irvine and UC Riverside students, known as the Irvine 11. These eleven students had disrupted the speech of the Israeli ambassador at UC Irvine after the 2009 massacre in Gaza and had been prosecuted by the Orange County district attorney for their civil disobedience. The criminalization of the Irvine 11 sent a chilling message to Palestine solidarity activists that free speech in the case of critique of the Israeli state was not free, even in the academy, and came with the price of possible felony charges by the state. But the case also sparked creative organizing strategies as student activists nationwide began

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walking out of pro- Israel events with their mouths taped, silently perform- ing a critique of censorship and the exceptional repression of open debate on this issue. It became apparent that Israeli government officials and sol- diers of a foreign (occupying) military— supported and funded heavily by the United States— had more freedom of political speech on U.S. public uni- versity campuses than college students (not to mention the fact that many Arab and Muslim American youth have been subjected to FBI surveillance and entrapment since 9/11).

In Ramallah, as the Arab revolutions swept across the region in 2011, Pal- estinian youth, too, protested against military occupation as well as internal repression. Palestinian students continue to be abducted and incarcerated by Israel, which restricts their access to schools and colleges, as highlighted by the Right to Education campaign at Birzeit University. Young activists began stenciling graffiti on the walls of Ramallah with slogans such as “Occupy Wall Street, Not Palestine” and “#Un- Occupy.” Student activists at UC Davis were simultaneously rethinking the vocabulary of “occupy,” which signifies a tactic of protest and also a colonial practice, and adopted the label “decolo- nize” to indicate their solidarity with indigenous peoples. “Decolonize the university” is their demand— occupy the banks and occupy the occupation of other lands, other universities, and other societies transformed and devas- tated by settler colonialism, militarism, and neoliberal capitalism.

The Imperial University

In a post- 9/11 world, the U.S. university has become a particularly charged site for debates about nationalism, patriotism, citizenship, and democracy. The “crisis” of academic freedom emerges from events such as the ones we witnessed in Riverside and Davis but also in many other campuses where administrative policing flexes its muscles along with the batons, chemical weapons, and riot gear of police and SWAT teams and where containment and censorship of political critique is enacted through the collusion of the university, partisan off- campus groups and networks, and the state. After 9/11, we have witnessed a calamitously repressive series of well- coordinated attacks against scholars who have dared to challenge the national consen- sus on U.S. wars and overseas occupations. Yet there has been stunningly little scholarly attention paid to this policing of knowledge, especially against academics who have dared to challenge the national consensus on U.S. wars and overseas occupations and U.S. foreign policy in the Middle

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East. Simultaneously, the growing privatization of the public university, as in California, has demonstrated the ways in which the gates of access to public higher education are increasingly closed and the more subtle ways in which dissident scholarly and pedagogical work (and their institutional locations) is delegitimized and— in particularly telling instances— censored at both public and private institutions. The 9/11 attacks and the crises of late capital- ism in the global North have intensified the crisis of repression in the United States and also the ongoing restructuring of the academy— as well as resis- tance to that process— here as well as in the global South.2

What does it mean, then, to challenge the collusion of the university with militarism and occupation, the privatization of higher education, and economies of knowledge from within the U.S. university? When scholars and students who openly connect U.S. state formation to imperialism, war, and racial violence are disciplined, then how are we to understand freedom, aca- demic and otherwise? How is post- 9/11 policing and surveillance linked to racial, gendered, and class practices in the neoliberal academy? Has the War on Terror simply deepened a much longer historical pattern of wartime cen- sorship and monitoring of intellectual work or is this something new?

This edited volume offers reports from the trenches of a war on scholarly dissent that has raged for two or three decades now and has intensified since 9/11, analyzed by some of the very scholars who have been targeted or have directly engaged in these battles. The stakes here are high. These dissenting scholars and the knowledges they produce are constructed by right- wing critics as a threat to U.S. power and global hegemony, as has been the case in earlier moments in U.S. history, particularly during the Cold War. Much discussion of incidents where academics have been denied tenure or publicly attacked for their critique of U.S. foreign or domestic policies, as in earlier moments, has centered on the important question of academic freedom. However, the chapters in this book break new ground by demonstrating that what is really at work in these attacks are the logics of racism, warfare, and nationalism that undergird U.S. imperialism and also the architecture of the U.S. academy. Our argument here is that these logics shape a systemic struc- ture of repression of academic knowledge that counters the imperial, nation- building project.

The premise of this book is that the U.S. academy is an “imperial uni- versity.” As in all imperial and colonial nations, intellectuals and scholarship play an important role— directly or indirectly, willingly or unwittingly— in legitimizing American exceptionalism and rationalizing U.S. expansionism

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and repression, domestically and globally. The title of this book, then, is not a rhetorical flourish but offers a concept that is grounded in the particular imperial formation of the United States, one that is in many ways ambigu- ous and shape- shifting.3 It is important to note that U.S. imperialism is char- acterized by deterritorialized, flexible, and covert practices of subjugation and violence and as such does not resemble historical forms of European colonialism that depended on territorial colonialism.4 As a settler- colonial nation, it has over time developed various strategies of control that include proxy wars, secret interventions, and client regimes aimed at maintaining its political, economic, and military dominance around the globe, as well as cul- tural interventions and “soft power.” The chapters here help to illuminate and historicize the role of the U.S. university in legitimizing notions of Manifest Destiny and foundational mythologies of settler colonialism and exceptional democracy as well as the attempts by scholars and students to challenge and subvert them.

This book demonstrates the ways in which the academy’s role in support- ing state policies is crucial, even— and especially— as a presumably liberal institution. Indeed, it is precisely the support of a liberal class that is always critical for the maintenance of “benevolent empire.”5 As U.S. military and overseas interventions are increasingly framed as humanitarian wars— to save oppressed others and rescue victimized women— it is liberal ideolo- gies of gender, sexuality, religion, pluralism, and democracy that are key to uphold.6 The university is a key battleground in these culture wars and in producing as well as contesting knowledges about the state of the nation.

We argue that the state of permanent war that is core to U.S. imperialism and racial statecraft has three fronts: military, cultural, and academic. Our conceptualization of the imperial university links these fronts of war, for the academic battleground is part of the culture wars that emerge in a milita- rized nation, one that is always presumably under threat, externally or inter- nally. Debates about national identity and national culture shape the battles over academic freedom and the role of the university in defining the racial boundaries of the nation and its “proper” subjects and “proper” politics. Furthermore, pedagogies of nationhood, race, gender, sexuality, class, and culture within the imperial nation are fundamentally intertwined with the interests of neoliberal capital and the possibilities of economic dominance.

The chapters here link the critique of the university to the contemporary as well as historical workings of race, warfare, and the nation- state. They demonstrate that an analysis of the foundational linkages between the U.S.

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academy and the imperial nation- state need to be critically scrutinized, especially in the post- 9/11 moment, and that overseas imperial interventions are linked to domestic repression, policing, and containment that penetrate the university. In drawing attention to the core issue of U.S. imperialism, this volume goes beyond a liberal discourse of academic freedom, one that is generally bounded by the nation and individual rights. Shifting the focus from notions of freedom of expression, the chapters here link the battles over knowledge production and the policing of critical scholarship to the geopoli- tics of U.S. imperialism across historical time and space. The contributors to this book bring together seemingly disparate geographic areas and historical moments that are key sites of U.S. expansionism and U.S.- backed occupation (such as the Philippines, Palestine, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico) as well as varied fields of scholarship (such as American studies, cultural studies, Middle East studies, feminist studies, queer studies, and ethnic studies) precisely to show how knowledge building is central to the imperial project.

The chapters speak to one another across self- evident areas, themes, dis- ciplines, and historical periods. Through multidisciplinary research, autobi- ographical reflection, and writing in theoretical as well as personal registers, the book offers an intellectual and political intervention that we have imag- ined as a project of solidarity. As scholars who spend long hours sitting in our quiet offices— occasionally interrupted by the buzz of a helicopter— or in cafes in zones of differential occupation, wondering what acts of violence are not being televised, we began working on this book in order to engage in a conversation that often only happens in university hallways or over cock- tails at academic conferences but not enough in public and in print. The con- tributors to this book raise crucial questions about the imperial university that we hope will generate and contribute to an important, unfolding con- versation with scholars, intellectuals, and students and also activists, policy- makers, and interested readers in the United States and beyond.

Insiders/Outsiders/Solidarities

Our geopolitical positions— of our immediate workplaces as well as trans- national work circuits— underscore the complex contradictions of our locations within the U.S. academy. These paradoxes of positionality and employment have seeded this project in important ways. We have both taught at the University of California for many years— in addition to other U.S. universities— and have been members of the privileged upper caste of

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U.S. higher education: the tenured professoriate. We have each used these privileges of class, education, and cultural capital to live and work transna- tionally and have organized around and written about issues of warfare, colo- nialism, occupation, immigration, racism, gender rights, youth culture, and labor politics, within and outside the United States. In fact, we first began working together when we collaborated in 2008 on a collective statement of feminist solidarity with women suffering from the violence of U.S. wars and occupation, during the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and the Israeli siege of Gaza.7 Yet our privileges of entry, of inclusion, and of outside- ness are also always marked by the “dangerous complicities” of imperial privi- lege and neoliberal capital, as the chapters by Julia Oparah; Sylvanna Falcón, Sharmila Lodhia, Molly Talcott, and Dana Collins; Vijay Prashad; and Laura Pulido powerfully remind us. Even as we have recognized the institutional privileges and complicities through which we can do this work, we have experienced at various moments and in different ways— as the chapters by Alexis Gumbs, Clarissa Rojas, Thomas Abowd, and Nicholas De Genova suggest— a keen sense of being “outsiders” within— in the university, in aca- demic disciplines, in different nations.8

As scholars and teachers located within “critical ethnic studies” and “women and gender studies,” we are also well aware of a certain politics of value, legitimacy, and marginality at play, especially as the dismantling of the public higher education system and attacks on ethnic studies around the nation accelerate. The struggles to build ethnic studies and women/gen- der/sexuality studies as legitimate scholarly endeavors within the academy, emerging from several strands of the civil rights and antiwar movements, are well chronicled and keenly debated. The precarious positions as well as increasing professionalization and policing of these interdisciplinary fields within the current restructuring of the university is a matter of deep con- cern; for example, in the wake of the assault on ethnic studies in Arizona, the dismantling of women’s studies programs, and in a climate of policing and criminalizing immigrant “others” across the nation.

The pressure on academics to fund one’s own research— following the dominant grant- writing models of science and technology— is now even more explicit in a time of fiscal crisis and deepening fissures between faculty in the humanities, social sciences, physical sciences, education, and business who occupy very different positions in an increasingly privatized university.9 Prashad reminds us in his chapter of the consequences of the fiscal crisis for college students who bear a massive and growing burden of debt. We

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recognize these pressures on faculty and students as stemming from neolib- eral capitalism and the university’s capitulation to a global “structural adjust- ment” policy that is now coming “home” to roost in the United States, as astutely argued by Farah Godrej in her analysis linking the neoliberal uni- versity to militarism and violence. The academy has also tried to market the notion of “public scholarship,” transforming activist scholarship into a commodifiable form of knowledge production and dissemination that can affirm the university’s civic engagement— confined by the parameters of per- missible politics, as incisively critiqued by Salaita, Rojas, and Abowd. If we cannot— or choose not to— market our scholarship and pedagogies through these programs of funding and institutionalization, we find our work further devalued within the dominant terms of privatization in the academy. Given that neoliberal market ideologies now underwrite the “value” of our research and intellectual work, what happens to scholars whose writing directly tack- les the questions of U.S. state violence, logics of settler colonialism, and global political and economic dominance?

We know from stories about campaigns related to tenure or defamation of scholars, often shared in hallways during conferences and sometimes through e- mail listservs and the media, that there are serious costs to writing and speaking about these matters. For far too many colleagues who confront the most taboo of topics, such as indigenous critiques of genocide and settler colonialism or especially the question of Palestine, the price paid has been extraordinarily high. It has included the denial of promotion to tenure, being de- tenured, not having employment contracts renewed, or never being hired and being blacklisted, as this book poignantly illustrates. Coupled with the loss of livelihood or exile from the U.S. academy, many scholars have been stigmatized, harassed, and penalized in overt and covert ways. There are numerous such cases, sadly way too many to recount here— most famously those of Ward Churchill, Norman Finkelstein, David Graeber, Joel Kovel, Terri Ginsberg, Marc Ellis, Margo Nanlal- Rankoe, Wadie Said, and Sami Al- Arian— but it is generally only the handful that generate public campaigns that receive attention while many others remain unknown, not to mention innumerable cases of students who have been surveilled or harassed, such as Syed Fahad Hashmi from Brooklyn College, while again there are countless other untold stories.10 These are the scandals and open secrets, we argue, that need to be revealed and placed in broader frames of analysis of labor and survival within the U.S. university system.11

As some of the chapters powerfully demonstrate, struggles against

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censure, self- censorship, and institutional silencing are connected to longer genealogies in which the alliance between the academy and state power is abundantly clear. We consider this gathering of chapters an act of collective and collaborative solidarity between authors and editors, who in different ways have engaged and challenged the dominant codes of belonging and cit- izenship within the academic nation. Indeed, as the chapters suggest, these critiques also offer the possibility of a decolonized university— one in which we can both imagine and enact our pedagogies and scholarship through a postcarceral and nonimperial institutional lens, as suggested by Oparah and Falcón et al. and as gestured to by several other authors. Such a process of decolonization is possible through the work of solidarity. The collection joins a growing archive of urgent conversations about the future of critique and dissent in the U.S. university that we will continue to engage with through a web archive that accompanies the book. We hope this digital project will allow this conversation to spill over from the pages of the book and continue in the years to come.

Crises and Continuities

While the heightened patriotism in the wake of 9/11 and a decade of U.S. wars and occupation overseas have amplified the role of the academy in shaping our understanding of U.S. global dominance and simultaneously intensified attacks on “anti- American” views— particularly in relation to the Middle East and to Islam— there is nothing “new” about this state of emer- gency. Ongoing debates about the role of the imperial university are indica- tive of the “state of exception”; that is, the exclusion of some from liberal democracy and eviction from political rights is not a sudden break but is constitutive of the imperial state and the state of permanent war.12 The notion of the “imperial university” suggests that the War on Terror and the post- 9/11 culture wars made hypervisible the persistent role of higher education in shaping the discourses of nationalism, patriotism, citizenship, and democ- racy. This is a key premise of our framework and one that underlies many of the chapters here.

Indeed, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Lynne Cheney and Joseph Lieberman’s American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) and other neoconservative groups sounded a clarion call for an intensified scrutiny of scholarship that challenged U.S. dominance.13 These campaigns underscored the frontlines of the culture wars through robust deployment of notions

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of patriotism and national security considered key to defending “Western civilization” in a nation presumably facing an existential threat. Animating this powerful sense of danger to U.S. dominance are specific kinds of “anti- American” scholarship and the dangerous knowledges they impart. Further- more, the specter unleashed by unruly student protestors and the repression that they elicit can be viewed as one important aspect of this end game of cultural and imperial supremacy— and its pepper spraying and paranoias.

The post- 9/11 policing of knowledge and the neoliberal restructuring of the university create pressure points that reveal the forces of political imperi- alism and the economic matrix within which they are embedded, as argued by Godrej and Prashad, among others. This is a matrix that is historically formed: an imperial “knowledge complex” is fed by the profitable business of militarism, incarceration, and war. A decade after 9/11, the crises of late capi- talism in the global North (and the dismantling of public education) unravel the “safety nets” for many university students and employees; this is a pro- cess that Gumbs points out has a much longer genealogy that is intertwined with the racial management of populations within and beyond the campus. The “downsizing” of the university unmasks an ideological “precarity” even for critically engaged tenured or tenure- track faculty, among the most elite and “protected” of academic workers, as suggested by Pulido’s reflection on tenure battles in an elite, private institution. In fact, Oparah points out that private, liberal arts institutions are crucial to the corporate logics of the “global knowledge marketplace,” so that the neoliberal restructuring of the public university is clearly at work at private institutions as well, as wit- tily observed in Prashad’s account of his own college. Furthermore, Oparah argues that liberal arts colleges provide the corporate sector and the military- prison- industrial complex with “moral capital” precisely because of their supposed liberalism. As Prashad’s analysis suggests, the crises of “academic freedom” or student debt allow us to dig more deeply into the ways in which neoliberal practices and their geopolitics intersect— and how this informs the consolidation of the corporate university.

The bursts of dissent (both within scholarly production and in student protests and the Occupy movement) suggest that “business as usual” is being disrupted in the U.S. university. However, this dissent— and the modes of repression it provokes— begs the question of what sustains “business as usual.” Our introductory vignette, juxtaposing the bucolic green of a “peace- ful” campus with the performance of militarized power, offers our unease with the normalized terms of “peace” in our elysian surroundings, not to

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mention with the complicity of the U.S. state with military occupations elsewhere and the lockdown on open critique of particular foreign states. The police in riot gear do not signal something exceptional; rather, their presence unmasks the codes of “the normal” in academic discourse and practice. It is a normalization that we see routinely in the grants that we are encouraged to apply for and in Department of Defense funding that many scientists, social scientists, and technologists receive for their research, as discussed in Roberto González’s chapter. The capital provided by these grants has built the foundations of some of the most powerful and preeminent universities in the world: MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and many others. The alliance between military research and sci- ence, which is well known, builds the deepest strata of connection and com- plicity between imperial statecraft and the knowledge complex of the U.S. academy. This, also, is nothing new, as González and Oparah demonstrate in analyzing the historical, global economies within which U.S. intelligence and prison systems enact violent logics of incapacitation and counterinsurgency.

The contributors to this book seek to illuminate the historical continu- ities of crisis and the boundaries of regulation and containment, especially in the current moment, because they reveal the threshold of academic repres- sion. This involves connecting analyses of localized domestic dissent (e.g., in student protests) to the censorship of scholarship and pedagogies of cri- tique of U.S. state projects (especially related to support for Israel and the domestic and global frontlines of the War on Terror). Many of the chapters highlight that the regulation and repression of various forms of dissent share core ideologies— about corporate and militarized capitalism as the means and ends of state power as well as the deeper codes of cultural, racial, and national supremacy that they enable. When the University of California debates the purchase of an army tank, as it did in Berkeley in 2012, it crudely reveals the profound strategic confluence of military science and militarized praxis in fortifying the citadels of higher learning.

There are four overlapping arenas central to this complex field of engage- ment and debate that undergird the conceptual framework of our book: imperial cartographies, academic containment, manifest knowledges, and heresies and freedoms. These arenas provide a rubric for understanding the intersecting fronts of the academic, cultural, and military wars, and they also provide the scaffolding for the chapters that follow in this book.

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Imperial Cartographies

Empires of knowledge rest on the foundation of racial statecraft, milita- rized science, and enduring notions of civilizational superiority. What we call “imperial cartographies” can be traced through the meshed contours of research methods and scholarly theories as they are staked out in the prag- matic mappings of conquest, settlement, and administration of U.S. empire.14 It is important to note that expert knowledge on “other” cultures and civili- zations has been a cornerstone of the development of academic disciplines and used in the management of “difference” within the nation as well as the conquest and management of native populations by the United States, here and overseas.

For example, Victor Bascara examines an early iteration (and a model, perhaps) of what Bill Readings has called the “Americanization” of the uni- versity.15 Bascara’s chapter on the imperial universities founded in the U.S.- controlled territories of Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines after 1898 demonstrates how educational discourse and practices in the colonies exem- plified a complex colonizing mission. Cultural “difference” was mapped within the classroom through a distinct racial and gendered lens, one that, however benevolently, consistently tracked the ideologies of U.S. military, cultural, and economic supremacy. The educational mission for inclusion and civilization “there,” on the periphery, became a laboratory for new regimes of governmentality “here,” within the immediate territorial borders of the United States.

If universities of the imperial periphery introduced a new governmen- tality and constructed mobile, but unequal, racial/gendered and national subjects, then these processes must also be understood within the epistemol- ogies of “othering” being constructed by disciplines such as anthropology. Late nineteenth- century anthropology emerged through centuries- old sci- entific curiosity (and debates) about human difference as well as the admin- istrative imperatives of other imperial powers, such as Britain.16 Theoretical constructions of categories such as “savage” and “primitive” were not mere reflections of ivory tower ruminations about human origins and human sci- ence or “cultural” essences but helped create the very scaffoldings of Euro- pean and later U.S. imperial cartographies.17

If these constructions of racial hierarchy shaped the curricular and disci- plinary consensus about difference in the imperial university, then what can we say about institutional research practices that explicitly furthered state

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projects, especially during times of internal and external crises, such as war? In other words, what happens when professional scholars use their disciplin- ary tools and training to further military projects to defend the “national interest”? Academic knowledges about others have been significant as both information and “intelligence” for the subjugation and administration of indigenous and minoritized communities, within and beyond the United States, as demonstrated by González’s fascinating research on the contempo- rary Intelligence Community Center of Academic Excellence programs that target students of color. While this volume does not explore the fuller histo- ries of the relationship between the U.S. academy and war efforts throughout the twentieth century, we gesture to some historical “plottings” that signal an enduring coimplication between the institutionalized practices of the mili- tary and the academy. It is this deep historicized process of normalization that has created the dominant “consensus” and “silence” in the imperial uni- versity in the post- 9/11 period.

During World War I, for instance, some archaeologists worked as spies to literally offer “on ground geographical knowledges” that, as David Price argues, were “highly valued in wartime intelligence circles.”18 This involve- ment, however, created controversy when Franz Boas, the preeminent anthropologist, protested the involvement of anthropologists with U.S. military intelligence.19 Though Boas was not supported by a majority of his colleagues, the controversy has shaped the debates about the politics and ethics of anthropologists’ relationship to military intelligence to this day, as addressed in González’s chapter and by the Network of Concerned Anthro- pologists within the American Anthropological Association.

The imperial university was deeply embroiled in issues of war, labor, and protest throughout the first half of the twentieth century and during the earlier Red Scare. World War I and its aftermath saw the targeting and deportation of anarchists and antiwar socialists during the infamous Palmer Raids in a period of heightened nationalism and repression. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) was cofounded in 1915 by John Dewey and Arthur Lovejoy; the latter resigned from Stanford University over a controversy regarding the abuse of immigrant labor by the industrial- ist Stanford family.20 In 1940, the Rapp- Coudert Committee was established to “investigate ‘subversive activities’ at public and private colleges in New York.”21 Faculty and students at the City College of New York were protesting fascism and capitalism through the 1930s, with progressive student groups staging mass protests and sit- ins. The committee actually subpoenaed and

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questioned more than a hundred faculty, students, and staff; denounced more than eight hundred public school teachers and college faculty; and fired over sixty CCNY faculty.22

It is, of course, World War II and the ascendance of the United States as a global superpower that propelled the alliance between the U.S. state and the academy to new heights. The Manhattan Project and the development of the atom bomb sealed this intimate and soon inextricable link between scientific research and militarism. As R. C. Lewontin powerfully suggests, “It is not General Groves at his desk in the Los Alamos labs that has provided the symbolic image of the atom bomb project’s iconography but an Italian professor building an atomic pile under the spectator’s stands of the Uni- versity of Chicago’s athletic field. It is there, not in the Nevada desert, that Henry Moore’s ambiguous fusion of a mushroom cloud and a death’s head memorializes the Bomb.”23 As U.S. and Allied forces launched themselves into the global theatre of war, they recognized that they needed condensed, accelerated training about the geographies and peoples they were encoun- tering. Ironically, it was the Boasian commitment to field- based linguistic anthropology that created the capacity for “quickly learning and teaching the languages of the new theatres of warfare.”24 Further, Army Specialized Train- ing Programs (ASTPs) were established on 227 college and university cam- puses,25 and some anthropologists helped create “pocket guides” for Army Special Forces. These booklets summarized a region’s geographical history and included gems of “cultural advice” such as “not approaching Egyptian women” and “not concluding that East Indian men holding hands are homo- sexuals,”26 early predecessors to the post- 9/11 manuals on understanding “the Arab mind” or Islam used to train U.S. military interrogators and FBI agents in the War on Terror.

If the distilled study of “other cultures,” enabled by academic expertise, became important for warcraft in external theaters, other sets of research skills were used for the surveillance and containment of “others” within the nation- state. For instance, anthropologists at the Bureau of Indian Affairs monitored and influenced war- related opinion on Native American reserva- tions.27 Some anthropologists were involved in studying Japanese American communities as they “adapted” to their lives in the concentration camps set up by the War Relocation Authority, “one of the most publicly visible and volatile topics relating to anthropology’s war time contributions.”28 Between 1945 and 1948, this rapid and intense distillation of “method” and “informa- tion” about world cultures consolidated in area studies, arguably a paradigm

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shift in U.S. scholarship, and one that was based on an interdisciplinary approach that would literally carve out— and map— “regions” of the world.

By the end of World War II and the onset of the Cold War, the state- university compact to ensure that scientific knowledges would continue to serve U.S. global power was well assured. Noam Chomsky has argued that by 1945, U.S. wealth and power in the “international sphere probably had no counterpart in history.”29 Out of this mesh of forces of capital and super- power politics and supremacy emerged a consensus that state (and corpo- rate) funding for “research and development” in science and technology in the service of military development was vital for the growth of universities.30

Warnings about the dangers of this deep alliance between the U.S. mili- tary and intelligence, civil society, and the academy came not only from the margins but also from the Oval Office itself. Dwight Eisenhower propheti- cally warned about consequences of the immense power inhered in what he called the “military- industrial complex.” Interestingly, in an earlier draft of this famous speech, he had apparently inserted the word “academic” in the now famous mantra of power, but it was deleted.31 It was another politician, William Fulbright, who issued a clear warning of the dangers of academic collusion with the militarized state when he stated, “In lending itself too much for the purpose of government, a university fails its higher purpose.”32 These concerns about the narrowing of the sphere of democratic debate were also being raised by distinguished scholars (such as Hannah Arendt and John Dewey33) but McCarthyism and a new wave of political repression ensured that questions were not asked about the business of war— or the reasons that the business of war was also becoming an academic business.34

This intersection of Department of Defense, Pentagon, and research university interests resulted in massive amounts of funding and shifted the fiscal nature of universities’ state patronage from land- grant, agricultural resources to the huge war chest of the defense establishment. This fiscal patronage was both overt and covert, involving individual academics and departments across the disciplines, not just the sciences, with support from military grants. Chomsky, for example, remembers that in 1960 the political science department at MIT was funded by the CIA; closed seminars were held and “they had a villa in Saigon where students were working on paci- fication projects for doctoral dissertations.”35 As González points out in his chapter, “the CIA supported social science research throughout the 1950s and 1960s to perfect psychological torture techniques that were outsourced to Vietnam, Argentina, and other countries.” World War II and the Cold War

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had created, without a doubt, the prime “condition for the socialization of research and education.”36 At the height of the Cold War, social scientists were recruited to serve in military intelligence operations— whether gather- ing more “benign” forms of information, serving with the army in Vietnam, or teaching in the School of the Americas— and after 9/11, became “embed- ded” with the military in Afghanistan and Iraq.37

It is important also to note the countervailing forces that exposed some of these practices of imperial cartography and research to critical scrutiny and engaged in social protest and academic dissent. The combined pressures of decolonization, the U.S. civil rights movement, and the anti– Vietnam War protests in the 1960s unmasked the collusion between knowledge produc- tion and U.S. warcraft at significant moments. For instance, a scandal erupted about Project Camelot, initiated by the Special Operations Research Office (SORO) in 1964 and aimed at Latin America, with the stated goal to “devise procedures for assessing the potential for internal wars within national soci- eties.”38 When exposed in Chile, it drew “unwelcome attention” to the clear geopolitical, Cold War imperatives of area studies.39

If area studies constituted a certain kind of imperial cartography, its design also had “unintended consequences,” as argued by Immanuel Waller- stein. Most importantly, it opened up “interdisciplinary studies” in new ways and dislodged traditional ethnography and Oriental studies, the domi- nant approaches for the study of “Others.” These shifts created space for more “radical” visions of interdisciplinarity and curricular formation in the 1970s— namely, in the demand for, and establishment of, both ethnic stud- ies and women’s studies. Decolonizing and radical social movements (within and outside the United States), especially the antiwar movement, were pro- foundly important in carving out some space for alternative cartographies of knowledge— albeit marginal ones— within the university.

If the protest movements of the 1960s interrupted the hegemonic workings of the military- academy nexus, the post- 9/11 historical moment, according to many, is a retrenchment and intensification of this matrix of power. It is important to recognize the paradox cohering within the pro- cesses of collusion and protest at work in the academic- military- industrial complex. On the one hand, if it were not for the ruptures of the 1960s, how- ever short- lived, we as scholars in ethnic studies and women’s studies would not be employed in the very institutional sites that were created by those interventions. On the other hand, as Roderick Ferguson has argued and as Rojas and Gumbs suggest here, ethnic studies is increasingly part of an

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institutional incorporation and recuperation of protest movements and dis- senting scholarship that can reproduce the deeply imperial logics of man- agement and violence.40 This recomposition and absorption rests in the very paradox of the material realities that greatly expanded the U.S. academy and historically allowed it to prosper— military funding and military science. It was a prosperity that meant, and continues to mean, the normalization and acceptance of great repression within the academy and beyond, as evoked by Godrej and De Genova. Both repression and protest, then, might be viewed as part of the Janus- faced coin of the imperial university as engendered by U.S. economic power, especially in the immediate postwar period: a global supremacy intimately connected to the state- military alliance that protected its global capitalist interests.

What, then, are the “new” avatars of this imperial cartography? There are powerful historical continuities in the academy of the alliances among the natural and technological sciences, the social sciences, and the military- prison- industrial complex (MPIC), or the academic- MPIC. It is important to theorize, and map, the international political economies that underwrite the immensely powerful alliances among transnational corporate capital (espe- cially in the business of war and prisons), the military industry, and the state. González draws attention to the $60 million Department of Defense– funded Minerva Consortium, which continues to provide funding to social science research projects connected to “national security.” The role of the academy in these alliances consolidates what Oparah calls “dangerous complicities,” which inform the politics of institutional— and disciplinary— survival in dif- ficult economic times.

Certainly, there has also been resistance to the consolidation of the academic- military- industrial complex, for example, by the Network of Concerned Anthropologists and academics opposed to the Human Terrain System41 and by some scholars in the American Psychological Association during the heated debate about the role of psychological experts in torture practiced by the U.S. military in the War on Terror.42 There is also a long history of scientists who challenged the military imperatives of defense research— for example, offering an alternative definition of national security during the era of the Cold War and the nuclear arms race— and who were themselves regarded as “national security threats.”43

But the question remains, is scholarly dissent simply the other face of the coin of academic repression— that is, are expressions of protest doomed to be incorporated into the imperial cartographies they resist or it possible for

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them to create alternative mappings that resist recuperation? The chapters in this book allude to this enduring dilemma about resistance from within, directly and indirectly; some authors suggest that what is needed is a new paradigm that reframes the architecture of repression. For example, across distinctly different sites of (neo)colonialism and global capitalism, Oparah argues for an unmasking of a transnational carceral logic of “new” empire that traffics between the imperial core and its peripheries. She argues that it is not more, “countercarceral” knowledge that scholars resisting the “mili- tarization and prisonization of academia” must produce in order to realize a postcarceral academy. Rather, academics must use their privilege to chal- lenge the complicity of the academy with, and call for divestment from, prison and military industries. As Oparah and also Prashad eloquently suggest, the university must be reimagined as a site of solidarity with those engaged in struggles against neoliberal capitalism and organizing for the abolition of the academic- MPIC.

The chapters in this book provide analyses of imperial cartographies that can undergird this solidarity from within the academic- MPIC, uncover- ing the role of the carceral academy and exposing the hidden links between prison regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as within the United States, not to mention secret prisons or “black sites” overseas. Orientalist construc- tions of terrorists or religious “fanatics” underwrite military interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan as well as counterterrorism programs in the United States. As scholars such as González have observed, counterin- surgency has a cultural front that rests on racialized understandings and management of populations, an argument that is extended in his chapter on intelligence training through new programs recruiting students of color for new, presumably cosmopolitan careers.44 Indeed, González argues that the new intelligence centers are predicated on a transnational, racial mapping where the “emphasis is on the importance of building an ethnically and cul- turally diverse pool of intelligence agents who might blend in more easily abroad”45 and on the need for “FBI agents who can speak to Muslim women that might be intimidated by men.” Curricular development in these new, multicultural sites of imperial knowledge production reproduce enduring racial/gendered stereotypes and old Orientalist binaries of the “East and West” necessary for new fronts of war.

This external Orientalized mapping is intimately coupled with racialized disciplinary regimes within the United States. If students of color in public universities are being targeted for intelligence training in more systematic

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ways since 2001, then Oparah and Gumbs remind us of the historical pres- ence of military recruitment and the prison industry at these same insti- tutions. Oparah’s chapter remaps the indelible connections between U.S. militarization (abroad) and logics of carcerality (at home) through academic institutions that invest in and produce the capital, workers, and knowledges for an immensely profitable MPIC, one increasingly linked to foreign zones of occupation, such as in Palestine- Israel. These racialized, gendered, and classed mappings of an “empire within” are intimately linked to the subju- gation of “foreign,” racialized others beyond U.S. borders—a simultaneous logic, and process, that is then used to contain, and target, dissent from within the imperial university.

academic Containment

State warfare and militarism have shored up deeply powerful notions of patriotism, intertwined with a politics of race, class, gender, sexuality, and religion, through the culture wars that have embroiled the U.S. academy. The fronts of “hot” and “cold” wars— military, cultural, and academic— have rested on an ideological framework that has defined the “enemy” as a threat to U.S. freedom and democracy. This enemy produced and propped up in the shifting culture wars— earlier the Communist, now the (Muslim) terrorist— has always been both external and internal. The overt policing of knowledge production, exemplified by right- wing groups such as ACTA, reveals an ideo- logical battle cry in the “culture wars” that have burgeoned in the wake of the civil rights movement— and the containment and policing demanded within the academy. Defending the civilizational integrity of the nation requires producing a national subject and citizen by regulating the boundaries of what is permissible and desirable to express in national culture— and in the university. As Readings observed, “In modernity, the University becomes the model of the social bond that ties individuals in a common relation to the idea of the nation- state.”46 Belonging is figured through the metaphor of patriotic citizenship, in the nation and in the academy, through displays of what Henry Giroux has also called “patriotic correctness”: “an ideology that privileges conformity over critical learning and that represents dissent as something akin to a terrorist act.”47

This is where the recent culture wars have shaped the politics of what we call academic containment. For right- wing activists, the nation must be fortified by an educational foundation that upholds, at its core, the singular

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superiority of Western civilization. A nation- state construed as being under attack is in a state of cultural crisis where any sign of disloyalty to the nation is an act of treachery, including acts perceived as intellectual betrayal. The culture wars have worked to uphold a powerful mythology about American democracy and the American Dream and a potent fiction about freedom of expression that in actuality contains academic dissent. This exceptionalist mythology has historically represented the U.S. nation as a beacon of indi- vidual liberty and a bulwark against the Evil Empire or Communist bloc; Third Worldist and left insurgent movements, including uprisings within the United States in the 1960s and 1970s and in Central America in the 1980s; Islamist militancy and anti- imperial movements since the 1980s; and the threat posed by all of these to the American “way of life.” The battle against Communism, anti- imperial Third Worldism, and so- called Islamofascism entailed regulating and containing movements sympathetic to these forces at home, including intellectuals with left- leaning tendencies and radical schol- ars or students— all those likely to contaminate young minds and indoctri- nate students in “subversive” or “anti- American” ideologies.

What does it mean, then, to contain scholars who “cross the line” in their academic work or public engagement? Academic containment can take on many modalities: stigmatizing an academic as too “political,” devaluing and marginalizing scholarship, unleashing an FBI investigation, blacklist- ing, or not granting scholars the final passport into elite citizenship in the academic nation— that is, tenure. These various modalities of containment, which are discussed by Thomas Abowd, Laura Pulido, and Steven Salaita, among others, narrow the universe of discourse around what is really per- missible, acceptable, and tolerable for scholars in the imperial university. All these modes are at work in the three important moments of ideological policing that we touch on here: World War I and the McCarthy era of the 1940s– 1950s, the COINTELPRO era from the late 1950s to early 1970s, and the post- 9/11 era or “new Cold War,” which is the major focus of this book.

Moments of social stress and open dissent about class politics in the United States during World War I and the first decades of the twentieth cen- tury make clear that containment worked in tandem with emerging defi- nitions of “academic freedom.” As the U.S. professoriate began to build its ranks at the end of the nineteenth century and a few scholars48 challenged the status quo, “academic freedom” emerged as a way to deal with these dis- senters as well as the “relative insecurity” felt by many in this new profes- sion.49 Indeed, the tumult of the turn of the century led to a pattern within

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the academy that has persisted— the exclusion of ideas as well as behavior that the majority did not like and an increasingly internalized notion that “advocacy for social change” was a professional risk for academics.

The AAUP’s Seligman Report of 1915 reveals that the notion of academic freedom was, in fact, “deeply enmeshed” with the “overall status, security, and prestige of the academic profession.”50 Setting up procedural safeguards was important, but its language regarding “appropriate scholarly behavior” and cautiousness about responding to controversial matters in the academy (by ensuring that all sides of the case were presented) suggested the limits of dissent. Academic freedom, then, is a notion that is deeply bound up with academic containment— a paradox suggested in our earlier discussion of protest and inclusion/incorporation in the academy and one that has become increasingly institutionalized since the formation of the AAUP.

The academic repression of the McCarthy era received its impetus from President Truman’s March 22, 1947, executive order that “established a new loyalty secrecy program for federal employees.” However, the roots of insti- tutional capitulation— by both administrators and faculty— when the state targeted academics who were communists or viewed as “sympathizers” are much deeper. It is also significant that the notion of “appropriate behavior” for faculty rested on a majoritarian academic “consensus” about “civil” and “collegial” comportment. For example, Ellen Schechter notes cases prior to the Cold War where scholars were fired not necessarily for their political affiliations per se but due to “their outspoken- ness.”51 This repression from within— not just beyond— the academy reveals the cultures of academic con- tainment where, as Pulido, Gumbs, and Rojas remind us, certain kinds of “unruliness” must be managed or excised.

The logic of academic containment was dramatically staged during the civil rights and antiwar struggles, when the FBI surveilled and arrested Black Power, anti- imperialist, and radical scholar- activists during the era of COINTELPRO (1956– 1971). Angela Davis, most famously, was fired from UCLA by then California governor Ronald Reagan for being a member of the Communist Party. Some of these radical intellectuals went on to develop and establish programs in ethnic studies, critical race studies, and women’s studies, fields that later became embroiled in the conservative attacks that unfolded in the 1980s and 1990s against the specter of an “un- American” and “divisive” multiculturalism. Works such as Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals: How Politics has Corrupted Our Higher Education, and in some ways also David Hollinger’s

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Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism generated anxieties about the presumed failure of university education to transmit an essential set of knowledges and a contentious debate about the divisiveness of multicultur- alism and movements for group rights.52

Right- wing hysteria and neoconservative moral panics in the culture wars were accompanied by liberal concerns that ethnic studies, and to some extent women’s studies and queer studies, were devolving into “identity politics.” Liberal- left intellectuals, such as Todd Gitlin, worried that ethnic and racial studies asserted an identitarianism that was an abandonment of a “proper” left politics. Salaita points out that Gitlin also criticized as irrespon- sible scholars who challenged the policies of the Israeli state, as have other progressive scholars open to critiques of militarism or colonialism— except in the case of Israel. In other words, the culture wars were fought not just between the right and left but within the liberal- progressive left as well.

In her painful— and politically revealing— experience with Chicana/o studies in California public institutions over the past twenty years, Rojas offers a glimpse “of the ways imperial projects order gender/sexual/racial politics at the public university” and the “resulting devastating violence deployed on subjects deemed dangerous to the colonial imaginary of a colo- nial, heteropatriarchal Chicano studies.” The difficult question that Rojas’s “testimonio” addresses is how to connect this hetero- masculinist logic and violence— what she calls heteropatriracialities— to the “incorporation” of ostensibly liberatory, decolonizing projects such as Chicano/a studies that were birthed through the antiwar and antiracist movements of the 1960s. We view this perverse “incorporation” of ethnic studies as the result of a dangerous “internalization” of the imperial project of the university and also as meshing well with the hetero- masculinist and classed cultures that shape the dominant, everyday practices of the imperial academy. Contain- ment is not abstract at all— it is marked decisively, and often violently, on specific kinds of bodies whose presence is definitively marked as “Other,” as evident in Abowd’s and Godrej’s chapters. If one speaks from already dan- gerous embodiments, structured historically, then that speech risks always being seen as a threat. The “natives” within the academy must be most care- ful and most civilized in their speech, as Rojas and Abowd suggest. Their queer/sexed/raced bodies mark always- possible threats. There are enough natives who perform the terms of civilization and capitulation and con- tain themselves: that is how empires have always ruled— through tokenism,

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exceptionalism, and divide- and- rule. When it comes from “within,” contain- ment and silencing— as Rojas shows us— can be the most devastating of all.

These stories of academic containment must be situated within the cul- ture wars and also within the context of what Christopher Newfield, among other critics, calls a “long counterrevolution” against the gains of the civil rights and left movements of previous decades.53 Newfield argues that right- wing movements waged a cultural offensive that targeted “progressive trends in the public universities” as an important front of “roundabout wars” on the middle class, waged through the “culture wars on higher education”: “The culture wars were economic wars” against the new, increasingly racially integrated middle class, “discrediting the cultural framework that had been empowering that group.”54 In other words, the culture wars were also class wars staged on a racial battlefield, for the corporatization and privatization of the public university, as in California, occurred as it was becoming more racially integrated.55

Several chapters illustrate the ways in which academic containment emerges with and though the containment of economic, racial, and cultural struggles. In Gumbs’s chapter, the class wars are situated in the racial man- agement of student of color and immigrant populations in the CUNY sys- tem in the post– civil rights era of open admissions and campus occupations by students; violent policing to enforce “law and order” accompanied rising incarceration rates of people of color. Similarly, Godrej’s chapter illuminates the ways in which protests of university privatization and nonviolent civil disobedience by students and faculty during the current budget crisis in the University of California have been met with police brutality by increas- ingly militarized campuses; casting these movements as a threat evades the structural violence of tuition hikes, exclusion, impoverishment, home fore- closures, and the “neoliberal disinvestment in the concept of education as a public good.”

In effect, the neoliberal structuring of the university is also a racial strat- egy of management of an increasingly diverse student population, as increas- ing numbers of minority and immigrant students have entered public higher education. Well- funded, neoconservative organizations and partisan groups, such as ACTA, David Horowitz’s Freedom Center, and Campus Watch, have placed ethnic studies, feminist and queer studies, and critical cultural studies in their bull’s- eye as the political project of leftist professors running amok in the academy and teaching biased curricula. In addition, campaigns such as Horowitz’s Academic Bill of Rights and Student Bill of Rights constructed

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the figure of a new victim in the culture wars: the “American student” whose freedom to challenge these partisan faculty had been suppressed.56 Accord- ing to these right- wing campaigns, “radical” scholars were force- feeding U.S. college students with anti- American views, and right- wing students were being marginalized and “discriminated” against due to their political ideol- ogy and affirmative action programs. Thus the language of marginalization and exclusion was turned on its head, as the discourse of right- wing vic- timhood and ideological discrimination was unleashed against the political movements and intellectual projects that opposed racial and class inequality.

In addition, the right appropriated the language of “diversity,” a key point of contradiction in the academic culture wars. For example, the “Students for Academic Freedom” campaign launched by Horowitz used the notion of “intellectual pluralism” to mask its well- orchestrated attack on the left.57 The cultural right manufactured a portrait of itself as the true advocate of intel- lectual pluralism and freedom, remaking diversity through a “free market” model based on the right to choice in the marketplace of ideas.58 The notion of choice, central to models of flexible accumulation and global economic competitiveness for proponents of neoliberal capitalism, underlies the tenet of intellectual choice. A “weak” multiculturalism and liberal notion of toler- ance thus served the right well, for they used it to argue that the problem was not simply that of “diversity,” which they apparently embraced, but that there wasn’t enough “intellectual diversity” on college campuses. Teaching, and also research, was becoming one- sided, to the detriment of those upholding “true” American values, who were increasingly marginalized in hotbeds of left indoctrination into anti- Americanism on college campuses. In addition, as Pulido’s case study demonstrates, as faculty and administrators of color— not to mention women— have made their way into the ranks of university management, academic institutions can hide behind the language of racial (and gender) representativeness and tokenist inclusion to deflect critiques of systemic problems with faculty governance.

The strategic co- optation of the language of pluralism for academic con- tainment is nowhere more evident than in the assault on progressive schol- arship in Middle East studies and postcolonial studies and in the intense culture wars over Islam, the War on Terror, and Israel- Palestine. The 9/11 attacks and the heightened Islamophobia they generated allowed Zionist and neoconservative groups to intensify accusations that progressive Middle East studies scholars and scholars critical of U.S. foreign policy were guilty of bias and “one- sided” partisanship, as observed in accounts of censure,

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suspicion, and vilification by Abowd, De Genova, and Salaita. The post- 9/11 culture wars conjured up new and not- so- new phantoms of enemies— in particular, the racialized specter of the “terrorist.” This figure, and the racial panic associated with it, has been sedimented in the national imaginary as synonymous with the “Muslim” and the “Arab” since the Iranian Revo- lution of 1978– 1979 and the First Intifada against Israeli occupation in the late 1980s. The War on Terror consolidated Orientalist caricatures of Mus- lim fanatics and Arab militants, but it is important to note that these also dredged up avatars of a historical logic of containment and annihilation of indigenous others.59 The native, the barbarian, and the foreigner converge in this cultural imaginary that legitimizes violence against anti- Western, unciv- ilized regions incapable of democratic self- governance and that is produced by expert knowledge of other peoples and regions. The wars in Iraq and “Af- Pak” and the global hunt for terrorists entailed an intensified suspicion and scrutiny of ideologies that supported militant resistance or “anti- American” sentiments and necessitated academic research on communities that were supposedly “breeding grounds” for terrorism.

The post- 9/11 panic about Muslim terrorists and enemy aliens increas- ingly focused on the threat of “homegrown terrorism” as the War on Ter- ror shifted its focus to “radicalized” communities within the United States, especially Muslim American youth. At the same time, as Godrej observes, the criminalization of those considered threats to national security has included the violent repression of Occupy activists and student protesters and indefinite detention authorized by the PATRIOT (Provide Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism) Act and the National Defense Authorization Act. Protests focused on higher education thus blur into dissent against U.S. warfare and the homeland security state in a cli- mate of heightened campus securitization and university collaboration with the FBI in the interest of “public safety.” Anarchists are considered domestic terror threats to be contained, and Muslim or Arab American students (or faculty) who are also anarchists are subjected to multiple levels of contain- ment and scrutiny, as suggested in the chapter by Falcón et al. Academic containment is clearly part of a larger politics of repression and policing in the national security state that affects faculty and students as well as the cam- pus climate in general.

While the FBI has interviewed unknown numbers of Muslim and Arab American college students and infiltrated and monitored Muslim student organizations since 9/11, counterterrorism experts have generated models of

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“radicalization” of Muslim youth, especially males, invoking cultural pathol- ogies of “hate” and alienation. Regimes of surveillance, detention, and deportation of terrorists, or terrorist sympathizers lurking within the nation, are underwritten by a gendered and racialized logic: the imperative to save women, particularly Muslim and Middle Eastern women, from inherently misogynistic Muslim and Middle Eastern men. Cultural knowledge and aca- demic expertise are needed to refine policies of humanitarian intervention in these imperial cartographies of nations or cultures whose women are in need of rescue and nations or civilizations in need of saving, as brilliantly argued by Jasbir Puar in her work on U.S. and Israeli homonationalisms. While it is easy to critique overtly racist commentators in the culture wars, we must note that it is not just right wing but also liberal critics and scholars who worry that a new “political correctness” is supposedly silencing critiques of cultures and religious communities whose social norms are inherently antithetical to Western secular modernity (that is, Muslims and Arabs). This allegation ignores the deafening silences in many quarters— including in the academy— about ongoing state terror against particular, racialized populations.60

Indeed, the antiwar movement has been dismally weak on most college campuses since 2003– 2004 and there have barely been any campus protests against the wars and drone attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan that continue to be waged by Obama or against the prison at Guantanamo. A troubling trend since 9/11 is that U.S. liberal feminism concerned about the oppres- sion of Muslim women— but not about the occupation, colonization, and devastation of their societies by warfare or neoliberal capitalism— has found perhaps unlikely allies in neocon activists in the culture wars, from Irshad Manji and Ayaan Hirsi Ali to Horowitz.61 And equally significantly, these external attacks on critical scholarship have occurred in a context where the neoliberal privatization of the university has accelerated and where attacks on women’s and gender studies, queer studies, and also ethnic studies pro- grams have intensified.

In addition, we see a gendered and racial logic in academic contain- ment where the figure of the “angry Arab” (or Muslim) male scholar is often subjected to policing by a deeply politicized notion of academic “civility.” There is a general uneasiness about male scholars of color as inappropriately aggressive if they challenge the status quo, especially in the context of U.S. nationalisms and nationalisms allied with U.S. hegemony— that is, American Zionist movements. This is evident from the string of campaigns targeting

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Arab and Palestinian male academics in the United States, such as Sami Al- Arian, Joseph Massad, Rashid Khalidi, and Abowd, who alludes to the racial logic in the allegations drummed up against him by Zionist activists and the dismal, and in some cases hostile, response of the university administration.

So while there are indeed Arab and Muslim female academics who have been targeted by Zionist campaigns, notably the Palestinian academic Nadia Abu El Haj, it is evident that Arab and Muslim masculinities are framed in the culture wars as inherently violent and potentially perverse. At the mini- mum, they are insufficiently conforming to or excessively threatening to white American masculinity, and, at worst, they are an existential threat to the nation, but in either case they must be contained. On the other hand, Arab and Muslim femininities are viewed by this same Orientalist logic as inherently victimized and in need of protection, but it is generally difficult to view the Arab or Muslim male scholar as in need of saving and support within the framework of liberal white “civility.”

Abowd pinpoints the unease with “uppity” Arab male academics who challenge the powerful status quo in the academy in a climate in which Ara- bophobia, not to mention Islamophobia, has consolidated the conflation of critiques of Israel with sympathy for terrorism. This is a moment in which even campus boycott and divestment movements focused on Israel are attacked as “anti- Semitic,” as evident in the firestorm over the panel on boy- cott at Brooklyn College in 2013;62 there is a complex conflation of racializa- tion, racism, gendering, and right- wing nationalism that is at work here, one that Puar and Salaita address.63 Furthermore, as Abowd notes, overtly racial- ized constructions and suspicion of Muslim male academics— or academ- ics who might be Muslim— as inherently anti- Semitic and militant and who must be disciplined, emerge in unexpected moments and in academic spaces where one would assume this kind of blatant racial suspicion is impermis- sible. Falcón et al.’s chapter cites the poignant case of an Arab/Muslim Amer- ican male student who was removed from the classroom by police and was considered a “threat” due to his radical, anti- imperialist critiques, which, not surprisingly, he felt increasingly fearful of expressing in class. Their chapter reminds us that we need to think more deeply about how the post- 9/11 appa- ratus of policing and surveillance has affected students who feel the most vulnerable and has transformed the classroom environment.

The racial and gendered logic of academic containment is powerfully evident in De Genova’s autobiographical chapter, which suggests that the critique of white male scholars who directly challenge dominant ideologies

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of militarism and U.S. foreign policy, if expressed in terms that unsettle the acceptable academic consensus in elite institutions, is also deeply troubling and compels other academics to distance themselves from dissent consid- ered beyond the pale. Processes of racialization and gendering— the build- ing of consensus around war and nation making— are intertwined with the daily work and lived experience of scholars within the university, making it a highly charged site in debates about the mission of higher education and the future of the nation- state.

Manifest Knowledges

The U.S. academy has been built, historically, on a set of conceptual and political foundations about what it means to educate people about freedom, democracy, and citizenship. The university is an institution that has roots in an Enlightenment project of liberal Western modernity and was founded as a space historically open only to male, propertied subjects. In addition, as we have argued and as the chapters demonstrate, the U.S. university has been a space where foundational histories of settler colonialism and Manifest Des- tiny have been buttressed, exposed, and contested. The linkages between the university and the global expansionism of the United States are thus crucial to explore if we understand the academy as an imperial university that pro- duces what we call “manifest knowledges”— what is, and what can be, known about histories of genocide, warfare, enslavement, and social death and what are manifestly insurgent truths.

All the chapters in this book speak to this issue, some more directly than others. Gumbs brilliantly excavates pedagogies of both disciplining and sub- alternity in the teaching of English composition, which she describes as a tool for making expendable, minority student populations “composed” in the context of imperial racism and genocidal violence— manifest knowl- edges are enacted in both police brutality and overseas invasions, from New York to Grenada and Palestine. Black feminist poets June Jordan and Audre Lorde subverted the dictates of what Gumbs describes as “police English” in criminology programs that supported the pedagogy of police brutality, insisting instead on teaching black English and exploring how imperialism, in the United States and elsewhere, defined who was human.

There is by now a robust body of scholarship in several fields such as American studies, Native American studies, indigenous studies, ethnic stud- ies, queer studies, and feminist studies that has challenged canonical tenets

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of U.S. history and Manifest Destiny. Yet it is also very apparent that manifest knowledges about state violence and imperialism continue to be contested in the settler colony and its academy— including knowledge about U.S. sup- port for other states’ violence and settler colonial policies, as pointed out by Salaita, Gumbs, Falcón et al., and Puar, as well as by Abowd and Oparah. Manifest knowledges thus involve the production, and policing, of foun- dational truths about a global apparatus of settler colonialism that extends beyond the United States to other imperial and colonial sites. Scholarship and critical teaching of U.S. foreign (imperial) policy in Iraq and Afghani- stan and, in particular, of U.S. support for the Israeli state and its colonial and apartheid policies have long come under fire from a constellation of right- wing and pro- Israel think tanks and groups. Critiques of the contradictions between a state practicing discrimination based on religion and race and its self- professed image as an exemplar of “liberal democracy,” in a sea of back- ward and antidemocratic Arab and Muslim nations, began to mount around the world and, gradually, in the United States, particularly on college cam- puses. There has been growing condemnation of Israel’s illegal occupation, especially in the wake of the massacre of civilians in Gaza in 2008– 2009, the murder of international solidarity activists aboard the humanitarian aid flotilla trying to break the siege of Gaza in 2010, and the second war on Gaza in fall 2012. As Abowd notes, the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement in the United States has grown since 2008– 2009, but this has also led to an unprecedented demonization of Palestine solidarity and Muslim American student groups, who became increasingly engaged with antiwar activism and progressive- left alliances after 9/11. American Zionists rejected the possibility that there could be “human rights” for Palestinians— a popu- lation synonymous with “Islamic Jihad.”64

For instance, in 2010, the Anti- Defamation League (ADL) blacklisted Stu- dents for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a Palestine solidarity organization with autonomous campus chapters across the nation, as one of the top ten anti- Israel organizations in the United States— along with the Muslim Student Association, the leftist antiwar coalition ANSWER, and Jewish Voice for Peace— for daring to “accuse Israel of racism, oppression and human rights violations.”65 The ADL was outraged that “SJP chapters regularly organize activities presenting a biased view of the Israeli- Palestinian conflict, includ- ing mock ‘apartheid walls’ and ‘checkpoint’ displays, presentations by sensa- tionalistic anti- Israel speakers and longer programs like Palestine Awareness and Israeli Apartheid weeks,” featuring “speakers who described Israel as an

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‘ethnocentric racist society’ and Zionism as ‘inherently undemocratic.’” The report, and the scare quotes therein, revealed precisely what was so effec- tive about these student protests but so threatening to a group such as the ADL, which has long masqueraded as an antiracist organization advocating for civil rights— except in the case of Israel- Palestine, where it supports racial discrimination and the suspension of civil rights.66 Salaita astutely observes that this contradiction arises from a situation in which “support for Israel is actually necessitous of proper multicultural consciousness” for academics and so considered normative and apolitical, while support for Palestinian rights is considered indecently “political.” The academic battle over the per- missibility and boundaries of knowledge production about Israel- Palestine has thus become one of the most charged sites of manifest knowledges in the imperial university today.

As SJP activists began using creative protest strategies, erecting mock checkpoints and simulacra of the Israeli “security wall” in the middle of cam- puses, the racial politics of Israeli state technologies of policing, segregation, encampment, collective punishment, and displacement of Arabs and Mus- lims suddenly erupted into plain sight in the U.S. academy. This provoked a vicious backlash from those who had long sought to suppress these “facts on the ground” and support the Israeli state’s exceptionalism, including in the academy, as noted by Salaita and Puar. The ADL, for example, has a long history of blacklisting and harassment of faculty who are critical of Israel, such as Noam Chomsky and William Robinson, a sociologist at UC Santa Barbara who was accused of anti- Semitism for his critique of Israel’s war on Gaza in 2009.67 The threat of “deportation” from the academic nation— which can and has resulted in the loss of livelihood— creates a stifling climate of repression in which many faculty and doctoral students engage in self- censorship, altering their research agendas and teaching for fear of threats to their careers.

The ADL is just one of many prominent, off- campus groups active in the culture wars related to Israel- Palestine that regularly intervenes in col- lege campuses and documents cases of anti- Semitism conflated with “anti- Israelism” and, consequently— as Puar notes in her chapter and Salaita has observed elsewhere— promotes the indivisibility of Israel and Jewishness.68 This tactic has been taken to new levels in campaigns to define campus activ- ism critical of Israel as racist and anti- Semitic and hence in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, as well as in the California State Assembly resolu- tion HR 35, mentioned by Prashad, which makes a similarly stunning move.69

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But the point is also, as Salaita has argued, that groups such as the ADL have used the language of liberal humanism and tolerance, civil rights, and antira- cism to promote and consolidate the commonsense that “support for Israel is a prerequisite of responsible multicultural citizenship,” nowhere more evi- dent than in the U.S. academy.70 Furthermore, Puar’s groundbreaking work on homonationalism incisively critiques the ways in which the production of Israel as gay friendly and thus liberal and modern has made Israeli “pink- washing” of its repression and violence against Palestinians, including queer Palestinians, an effective strategy for recruiting liberal gays and lesbians worldwide. This liberal, “multicultural conviviality” conflates American and Israeli exceptionalisms and produces a commonsensical pro- Israelism that defines acceptable national belonging and multicultural citizenship here in the United States— not simply in Israel or only for Jewish Americans.71 This manifest knowledge has become a cornerstone of notions of “civility” and of academic freedom in the U.S. academy, as indicated by Abowd’s chapter as well as De Genova’s observations of the fliers attacking him as betraying Israel, not just the United States, after 9/11. This is because, as Salaita points out, allegiance to U.S. state power is conflated with loyalty to Israel.

At the same time, the book is unique in situating an analysis of the Pales- tine issue, which often seems “exceptional” in the U.S. academy, in relation to a longer genealogy of settler colonialism and a broader structure of McCar- thyism that extends beyond Middle East studies and implicates fields such as feminist, queer, and ethnic studies. It in this regard that Gumbs’s eloquent chapter on the poetics of solidarity offers a different window into the writ- ing and pedagogy of June Jordan and Audre Lorde, situating it in relation to their anti- imperialist critiques of the Israeli assault on Palestine and also the U.S. invasion of Grenada in the 1980s. Puar also interrogates the ways in which Israeli homonationalism is entangled with the politics of global gay and lesbian organizing and anti- Muslim racism in Europe and the United States and undermines transnational queer and feminist solidarity through regimes of censure within and beyond the academy. Manifest knowledges are, thus, produced and regulated in multiple sites, and these chapters offer alternative archives of composition and citation, censure and solidarity.

As the normative commonsense and also the censorship of the Palestine question has begun to dissolve somewhat in the academy in recent years and the Arab uprisings shifted the dominant narrative about the “Arab and Mus- lim world,” if ever so slightly, a new front of the culture wars has shifted its focus to solidarity with Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim queers and women

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who must be rescued by the West from homophobia, honor killings, or other “cultural crimes.” Puar points out that the “woman question,” as a rationale for colonial domination, has increasingly been replaced by the “homosexual question,” harnessing sexual rights to a discourse of racial and cultural supe- riority and buttressed by academic knowledge circuits. As Gumbs argues, in an earlier moment, black feminist writers developed a queer poetics of survival and insurgent knowledge production in the context of racial pan- ics over saving white femininity from the threat of minority and immigrant males and in an era of assaults on the self- determination of Third World nations. Manifest knowledges of gender and sexuality are thus intimately bound with colonialist and racial logics of rescue and freedom in modernity that infuse the culture wars.72

Falcón et al. bring the question of manifest knowledges as a queer and feminist question into the classroom and into the context of transna- tional feminist pedagogy and collaboration as part of their Collective of Antiracist Scholar Activists. They grapple collectively with what it means to teach antiracist, feminist critiques of capitalism, imperialism, and hetero- normativity while not falling prey to the university’s demand for “superser- viceable feminism” and “competitive individualist” scholarly production as women scholars with and without tenure- track positions. The form of their coauthored chapter/dialogue creatively expresses their desire for challeng- ing the demands for neoliberal productivity while being cognizant of their complex institutional positions and the opportunities available as academics to teach feminist, critical race, and postcolonial theory. As scholar- activists, their pedagogy and collaboration become a method for resisting manifest knowledges, not just about U.S. imperial culture, but about what it means to be a “proper,” productive academic. As hinted at in our opening reflections on the Occupy student movement, Falcón et al.’s chapter calls on us to create anti- imperialist spaces of knowledge production and pedagogy within our classrooms and “occupy” the imperial university.

heresies and Freedoms

Following from the production of manifest knowledges and logic of academic containment in the imperial university, the chapters in this section explore how liberal codes of academic freedom are undermined or consolidated as neoliberal privatization weakens spaces of critique in the academy. The chap- ters by De Genova, Prashad, and Dominguez in the concluding section of

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the book, as well as other chapters, critique what could be described as the “holy grail” of academic freedom, one of the pillars upon which academic liberalism builds its edifice and which is central to the academic wars. We argue that there is a narrowing of the field of possible dissent in the U.S. academy precisely because of the ways in which the repression of knowledge production and the resistance to academic repression are both constituted through notions of academic freedom and academic heresies.

We gestured earlier to how the development of “academic freedom” took place against the backdrop of World War I and the early twentieth century precisely because of the nonconformity of individual scholars in class and wartime politics. Academic freedom emerged as a way to both negotiate a sense of professional insecurity as well as construct a measured response to matters of “national interest” (such as anticapitalist or antiwar protest). This was a critical time for establishing the protocols of professionalism for aca- demia. Ellen W. Shrecker, in her magisterial study of McCarthyism’s effects on the academy, argues that the pivotal Seligman Report by the AAUP in 1915 “reveals how deeply enmeshed the notion of academic freedom was with the overall status, security and prestige of the academic profession.”73 It is apparent that academic freedom continues to be fragile given the increas- ing professionalization of the academy and hypercompetitiveness of the aca- demic job market.

Indeed, De Genova’s experience of “crossing the line” at Columbia Uni- versity, in the post- 9/11 climate of hypernationalism, is part of a genealogy that he traces to 1917, when Columbia penalized two faculty members for their public opposition to World War I. A controversy arose at the time about the distinguished historian, Charles Beard, who remarked in 1916 (during debates about U.S. “neutrality”) that the “world’s strongest republic could certainly withstand the inconsequential effort of a single ‘To Hell with the Flag’ comment.”74 Outraged trustees at Columbia interrogated Beard about his comment and political views in an unpleasant echo of De Genova’s own account of academic repression. Though Beard was eventually “exon- erated,” he resigned when his two colleagues at Columbia were terminated due to their political views. A powerful precedent about the boundaries of political— especially antistate— speech was set into motion.

Where were “academic freedom” and the AAUP during this ferment? The newly created organization kept a distance from the unrest envelop- ing the Columbia campus and was “unwilling to offer its limited assistance to those being driven off campuses.”75 Schecter argues that the AAUP’s early

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discussions of academic freedom sought primarily to protect faculty from outsiders’ “meddling” with scholar’s teaching and research by setting up “procedural safeguards.” But these safeguards could not adequately address political dissidence or any political positions that were considered “unsym- pathetic” by the majority of academics. What appeared to be “protection” was really about perceptions, and evaluations, of institutional loyalty and “appropriate” behavior that would not jeopardize the professionalism and status of academia.

When the litmus test of the AAUP’s politics and “academic freedom” arrived four decades later, in the form of McCarthyite repression, the acad- emy’s capitulation to state imperatives and the subsequent destruction of many individual careers and lives should not come as a surprise. Prashad points out that faculty were expelled for their relationship to the Communist Party under the guise of defending academic freedom, for to be a Commu- nist was to be enslaved by dogma and to be unfree. Academic freedom was constructed through a negative and reactive polarity to create the narrow boundaries for “permissible dissent” rather than a positive protection in sup- port of dissent. Clyde Barrow observes, “It created an intellectually defen- sible zone of political autonomy for the professoriate, which . . . sufficiently circumscribed as to exclude as unscholarly whatever political behavior the leading member of the academic community feared might trigger outside intervention.”76 Even when university presidents could have protected their faculty, most did not, as in the case at the University of Washington dis- cussed by Prashad. The fact that some university administrators could, and did, resist assaults on academic freedom showed that universities could have defied state repression— but most chose not to.

Loyalty to the institution and profession was built on a hegemonic con- sensus (including among “liberal” faculty) of protecting economic security, most importantly for the majority. Indeed, adherence to this “corporate ideal” was premised on the artificial bifurcation of “politics” and “adminis- tration” so that the (administrative) protection of tenure (and other proce- dural safeguards) could be seen as outside of the realms of the “political.”77 As the chapters by De Genova, Prashad, and Salaita suggest, this ideologically constructed bifurcation continues to haunt radical and progressive scholars in battles over tenure, employment, and teaching today, even if the particular definition of what constitutes the threshold of the “political” shifts over time in the imperial university.

Clearly, if academic freedom is invoked as a “holy grail” in regulating and

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containing the proper subjects of the imperial nation, the “bad” citizen of the academy is considered heretical. As Ricardo Dominguez and Pulido, Abowd, and De Genova eloquently discuss, acts of transgression of the boundaries of belonging to the academic nation illuminate how narrow, and fragile, the universe of dissent is. While it is perhaps easy to pinpoint, if not always to counter, the campaigns of right- wing and conservative scholars and activists against academic dissent, these chapters highlight an important point— that for academics, censorship and repression generally comes wrapped in a lib- eral mantle, and it is waged through the language of diversity, dialogue, and, often, academic freedom itself. Right- wing and neoconservative activists— or what Prashad calls “cultural vigilantes”— in the culture wars have not only strategically reshaped the discourse of diversity and feminism, as alluded to earlier, but also appropriated the language of “academic freedom.” Indeed, right- wing groups such as Horowitz’s Students for Academic Freedom have used the notion of “intellectual pluralism” to police teaching and invoked academic freedom as a new ideological battle cry for the right. So the fol- lowing are the crucial questions: How is it possible to transform academic freedom into a justification for the closing down, rather than opening up, of intellectual and political debates? What inheres in the principle of academic freedom that allows it to be appropriated, apparently seamlessly, by those who align themselves with the political and economic status quo?

The answers lie, to a large extent, in the definition and utilization of aca- demic freedom as a liberal principle and in the paradoxes that this liberal politics generates in the academy and beyond. Prashad argues that the lib- eral precept of academic freedom draws on John Stuart Mills’s conception of the necessity of “contrary opinions” for providing checks and balances for social norms but not for enabling a “transformative political agenda.” A Eurocentric genealogy of academic freedom would trace it to notions of critical pedagogy in German universities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, intertwined with notions of economic and political liberalism embedded in Enlightenment modernity.

Cary Nelson, the renowned president of the American Association for University Professors (AAUP), who for many U.S. academics represents the face of institutionalized academic freedom, writes, “Academic freedom thus embodies Enlightenment commitments to the pursuit of knowledge and their adaption to different political and social realities.”78 The AAUP issued the Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Ten- ure in 1915,79 and for some scholars, such as Robert Post, this declaration is

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the “greatest articulation of the logic and structure of academic freedom.”80 According to Post, this is because it conceptualizes academic freedom as based on “compliance with professional norms” specific to academic labor and on the safeguarding of scholarly expertise that produces “professional self- regulation” and “professional autonomy” for faculty.81 Yet even Post acknowledges that there is a paradox inherent in this conceptualization based on academic labor, for these professional norms are not so easily defined and so academic freedom is “simultaneously limited by, and independent of, pro- fessional norms.”82 A critic of the AAUP’s unwillingness to protect scholars targeted by McCarthyism suggests the AAUP upholds procedural freedom without an understanding of the importance of expanding its understanding of political freedom: “Stripped of its rhetoric, academic freedom thus turns out to be an essentially corporate protection. And as we trace its develop- ment during the Cold War, we should not be surprised to find that it was involved more often to defend the well- being of an institution rather than the political rights of an individual.”83

Other scholars, such as Judith Butler, also point out that the AAUP’s formulation of academic freedom intended to “institutionalize a set of employer- employee relationships in an academic setting,” not to guarantee academic freedom as an individual right.84 While she agrees with Post that academic freedom should not be rooted in “individual freedom” or simply in First Amendment rights of freedom of expression, she goes further to point to the collusion between the university and the state in defining pro- fessional norms and professional freedom in scholarship and to emphasize that expectations of what is permissible for academics are always historically evolving and often politically motivated. So these professional constraints are contingent and contested, not fixed; Butler argues, “As faculty members, we are constrained to be free, and in the exercise of our freedom, we con- tinue to operate within the constraints that made our freedom possible in the first place.”85

We take these critiques of an individually based, constrained, and “weak” notion of academic freedom further, arguing that academic freedom is per- haps not tenable as a basis for a just struggle for “freedom,” if that struggle needs to be defined by affirmative principles rooted in progressive or left conceptions of freedom, justice, and equality, as suggested by Prashad. In other words, academic freedom is not, and should not be, the holy grail of dissent. Academic freedom is generally understood— and operationalized in the U.S. academy today— as an ideologically neutral principle of freedom

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of expression and First Amendment rights. It is thus a libertarian, not just liberal, notion of individual freedom, and it is framed as a core principle of Western modernity and democracy, serving both the liberal- left and the conservative- right. In this model, neo- Nazis or antiabortion advocates have the same rights to academic freedom in the university as do queer activists or antiwar proponents. There is no progressive ethos built into the principle of academic freedom, and this is what makes it easily available for recupera- tion and resort by the right as much as the left. Prashad makes the important observation that even the academic left often tends to take refuge in the “safe harbor” of academic freedom rather than engaging in a struggle for “genuine campus democracy” and labor rights for workers on campuses and for the right to education as a public good and for a “culture of solidarity,” as evoked by Dominguez.

Perhaps one of the most ironic examples of what could be described as the use of academic freedom as a smoke screen for larger struggles over other kinds of freedoms was the cancellation of the AAUP’s own conference on academic boycotts, slated to be held in 2006 at the Rockefeller Confer- ence Center in Bellagio, Italy. The conference featured a diverse group of scholars with a range of views on the strategy of academic boycott— some in favor, some opposed— within the context of the emerging, global debate about the Palestinian call for an academic boycott of Israeli academic institu- tions, inspired by the boycott of South African institutions in the apartheid era. However, under mounting pressure from Israeli and pro- Israel academ- ics, the meeting was cancelled.

The AAUP, instead, published online many of the papers intended for presentation at the conference, but it also issued a report strongly condemn- ing the academic boycott. Joan Scott and Harold Linder, who had helped organize the conference and later edited the online publication, expressed dismay that the conference was canceled, but they also concluded that the AAUP’s “principled opposition to academic boycott” was an expression of its commitment to academic freedom.86 While Joan Scott later revised her position in an eloquent essay,87 this seemingly contradictory position is an argument that is often used in opposition to the academic boycott, in the case of Israel, and it expresses a deeper paradox that illuminates the fault line at the core of academic freedom— as does the entire saga of the failed con- ference. Is it possible that closing off the possibility of a boycott of academic institutions— in the context of their complicity with military occupation and

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apartheid policies— is an expression of academic freedom, or is it a denial of that academic freedom? And whose academic freedom is being upheld?

Lisa Taraki, a sociologist at Birzeit University in the West Bank who was scheduled to present at Bellagio, noted in her paper, “I think that the abstract ideas of academic freedom and the free exchange of ideas cannot be the only norms influencing the political engagement of academics. Often, when oppression characterizes all social and political relations and structures, as in the case of apartheid South Africa or indeed Palestine, there are equally important and sometimes more important freedoms that must be fought for, even— or I would say especially— by academics and intellectuals.”88 Omar Barghouti, a Palestinian intellectual who is, like Tarakai, a cofounder of the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), argued that the AAUP was “privileging academic freedom as above all other freedoms.” Citing Judith Butler, he argued that this position excluded the freedom of “academics in contexts of colonialism, military occupation, and other forms of national oppression where ‘material and institutional foreclosures . . . make it impossible for certain historical subjects to lay claim to the discourse of rights itself ’. . . . Academic freedom, from this angle, becomes the exclu- sive privilege of some academics but not others.”89

Barghouti and Taraki make two crucial points: First, they state that academic freedom cannot trump other rights to freedom (and other freedoms)— the right to freedom of mobility for students and scholars to attend college, to travel to conferences, and to do research; the collective right to self- determination; the freedom from occupation and racial segrega- tion; and, in essence, the freedom to live in peace, dignity, and equality. As suggested by our introductory vignettes, the freedom and right to education of students living in zones of occupation and war overseas must be linked to the freedom of students and scholars working— and protesting— within the imperial university. Proponents of the academic boycott of Israeli institu- tions argued that the campaign is, thus, in support of and produces academic freedom, and also supports human rights for all— as it was in the boycott of South African institutions. Second, they allude to the selectivity of the prin- ciple of academic freedom— why South Africa and not Palestine?— and the ways in which the U.S. academy (like the Israeli academy) and professional associations such as the AAUP are firmly embedded in a political context while pretending to be outside or above it.90

This adjudication of neutrality and self- professed impartiality is, in fact, a political stance, as argued by Salaita and illustrated by De Genova’s

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reflections on the limits of academic solidarity with radical critiques of U.S. imperialism. The holy grail of academic freedom shores up the political com- mitments and investments— not to mention the intellectual freedoms— of powerful academics and constituencies and fails to protect the commitments and interventions of the heretics who are less powerful or far outside the sta- tus quo. This is powerfully illustrated by the intense political campaign tar- geting De Genova for his “blasphemous” criticism of U.S. military violence and Dominguez’s farcical play about his experience of being investigated by the FBI and UC San Diego due to the Electronic Disturbance Theater’s “vir- tual sit- in” protesting the UC fee hikes and the Transborder Immigrant Tool project.91 We must ask, why is it that some cases of academic “blasphemy” provoke an outpouring of sympathy and support from colleagues while other cases are considered too heretical to warrant (ready) solidarity?

Nelson’s own writing on academic freedom is instructive in revealing the AAUP president’s political position on academic freedom and its limits— just one instance of exceptionalisms in the intense debate about academic freedoms and heresies among distinguished, progressive scholar- activists. In No University Is an Island: Saving Academic Freedom, Nelson denounces “major fractions of the Left,” especially academics, who have apparently “grown increasingly hostile and unforgiving toward Israel.”92 Nelson’s sweep- ing statements include anecdotal observations of departments (unnamed) that have apparently refused to consider job candidates who do not support the two- state solution or who support Israel, proclaiming without any spe- cific evidence that there is a hostile academic environment for “faculty and students with sympathies for Israel.”93 One wonders if Nelson is speaking of the same U.S. academy that the authors in this book— and so many other scholars— inhabit and work in or whether he is, indeed, living on “an island.”

We discuss the Bellagio train wreck and Nelson’s position here because of the prominent role of the AAUP in adjudicating and defining the boundar- ies of academic freedom— and academic heresies— as evident in more recent controversies.94 Despite the AAUP’s otherwise impressive record on issues related to academic labor, the issue of Palestine- Israel seems to be a sticking point for the organization, as is the case in so many other liberal- progressive spaces, including academic ones— precisely because it is obfuscated through a discourse of academic freedom. This illustrates the fault lines in a principle of academic freedom that evacuates politics, in selective instances, or cir- cumscribes and contains what is proper politics for academics, shaping the

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stance that scholars can or should take in response to twenty- first- century occupation, settler colonialism, wars, apartheid, and encampment.

Steven Best, Anthony Nocella II, and Peter McLaren, in their edited vol- ume on academic repression, incisively observe that academic freedom, in fact, functions as an “alibi for the machinery of academic repression and control” and ends up justifying the “absorption of higher education into the larger constellation of corporate- military power.”95 Academic repression, they argue, is constitutive of the academic- military- industrial complex, a framework that situates the university squarely within, and not outside of, the network of state apparatuses of control, discipline, surveillance, carcer- ality, and violence, as alluded to by Dominguez and as argued by Godrej, Oparah, and Gumbs. In other words, as Taraki and Barghouti also suggest, it does not make sense (for progressives- leftists) to fight for academic free- dom outside of the struggle against neoliberal capitalism, racism, sexism, homophobia, warfare, and imperialism. To state it more clearly, there can be no true “freedom” in the academy if there is no such freedom in society at large.96

The holy grail of academic freedom, defined within the liberal param- eters critiqued by Prashad, has been institutionalized as a limited and prob- lematic horizon for progressive academic mobilization. Academic freedom maintains the illusion of an autonomous university space in a militarized and corporate society such as the United States and in a “surveillance soci- ety and post- Constitutional garrison state” that continues to be consolidated under Obama, as suggested by Dominguez and other authors.97 This does not mean giving up entirely on invoking academic freedom, for it can be, and is, often strategically used as a minimal line of defense to introduce criti- cal ideas and broaden public debates within the academy. However, progres- sive campaigns organized around the principle of academic freedom often run into a profound fault line in their mobilization, if not also organized around larger political principles. In our experience, campaigns focused on organizing in defense of scholars targeted since 9/11, especially those work- ing in Middle East and Palestine studies, often end up struggling with these same contradictions if they attempt to cohere simply around “academic free- dom” rather than a more rigorous (progressive) political consensus, given how fractured the academic left is when it comes to Middle East politics and Israel- Palestine.

Critics of the academy, such as Readings, make a fundamental point: “The University is not going to save the world by making the world more

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true,” and it must be viewed as all institutions are, not as an exceptional space or site of radicalism and “redemption” but as a site where “academ- ics must work without alibis, which is what the best of them have intended to do.”98 In other words, the university is an institution within an impe- rial nation- state— a point understated by Readings— and so any struggle waged within or against it must not romanticize its progressive possibilities and must be squarely situated within a struggle that extends beyond its hal- lowed walls. This is what the Occupy movement, discussed at the outset, attempted to do on many campuses, and this is also why it was so brutally suppressed— because it made a linkage between the university and larger structures of power, as in earlier movements of student uprising, that was fundamentally threatening to the imperial university.

Conclusion: decolonizing the University

Scholars working in zones of occupation, militarism, settler colonialism, and imperialism, here and there, call on us to recraft our notion of “aca- demic freedom” by focusing unflinchingly on the larger structural forces and deeper alliances between the MPIC and the academy. If we heed this call seriously, we are moved to think about the question of freedom— academic and otherwise— in a much deeper way. Ultimately, our project is to decolo- nize the imperial university, and the chapters here help us understand how imperial cartographies produce manifest knowledges and logics of academic containment that structure the U.S. academy and its repression. Academic heresies and insurgencies are constitutive of this critique of the holy grail of academic freedom and of the spaces that we can create in our pedago- gies and academic work through forms of intellectual guerilla warfare and theaters of dissent, as suggested by Rojas and Dominguez, among others. This involves not shying away from forms of speech and scholarship that compel unease, as De Genova courageously suggests— challenging genocide, “death,” and the many forms of violence under white supremacy and in the settler colonial state. We can build on Gramsci’s critical work on hegemony in thinking of insurgent spaces within the academy that must be fostered in alliance and direct engagement with those “organic intellectuals” or move- ments beyond the university, even as those alliances are surveilled or cen- sured. If this book is a project of solidarity— one we hope will continue to evolve through our web archive— it aims to help support and build dissent focused on dismantling empire, and thinking freedom otherwise.

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notes

1. See Sunaina Maira and Julie Sze, “Dispatches from Pepper- Spray University: Privatization, Repression, and Revolts,” American Quarterly 64, no. 2 (June 2012): 315– 30. 2. Mahmood Mamdani, “The Importance of Research in a University,” Pamba- zuka News 526 (April 21, 2011), http://www.pambazuka.org/en/issue/526. 3. Ann L. Stoler and Carole McGranahan, “Introduction: Refiguring Imperial Terrains,” in Imperial Formations, ed. Ann L. Stoler, Carole McGranahan, and Peter Perdue (Santa Fe, N.Mex.: School for Advanced Research, 2007), 3– 44. 4. Amy Kaplan, “Where Is Guantánamo?,” in Legal Borderlands: Law and the Construction of American Borders, special issue of American Quarterly, ed. Mary L. Dudziak and Leti Volpp, 57, no. 3 (2005): 831– 58; Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease, eds., Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993). 5. Uday S. Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth- Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 6. Sunaina Maira, “‘Good’ and ‘Bad’ Muslim Citizens: Feminists, Terrorists, and U.S. Orientalisms,” Feminist Studies 35, no. 3 (2009): 631– 56; Randall Williams, The Divided World: Human Rights and Its Violence (Minneapolis: University of Minne- sota Press, 2010). 7. Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira, “An Open Letter to All Feminists: State- ment of Solidarity with Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim Women Facing War and Occupation,” Monthly Review Zine, March 13, 2008, http://mrzine.monthlyreview. org/2008/cm130308.html. 8. For an incisive exploration of some of these contradictions, see Mary E. John, “Postcolonial Feminists in the Western Intellectual Field: Anthropologists and Na- tive Informants?,” Inscriptions 5, no. 6 (1989): 49– 74. 9. See Christopher Newfield, Unmaking the Public University: The Forty- Year As- sault on the Middle Class (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008); Chris- topher Newfield, Ivy and Industry: Business and the Making of the American Uni- versity (Durham: Duke University, 2003); Sheila Slaughter, Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, States and Higher Education (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). 10. Jeanine Theoharis, “My Student, the ‘Terrorist,’” Chronicle Review, April 3, 2011, http://chronicle.com/article/My- Student- the- Terrorist/126937/. 11. See also Rosalind Gill, “Breaking the Silence: The Hidden Injuries of Neolib- eral Academia,” in Secrecy and Silence in the Research Process: Feminist Reflections, ed. R. Gill and R. Flood (London: Routledge, 2009). 12. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 13. See, for example, Erin O’Connor and Maurice Black, “Academic Freedom and

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Middle East Studies,” American Council of Trustees and Alumni, winter 2008, http:// www.goacta.org/news/academic_freedom_and_middle_east_studies, and numer- ous other analysis produced by ACTA on www.goacta.org; Kenton R. Bird and Eliz- abeth Barker, “Academic Freedom and 9/11: How the War on Terrorism Threatens Free Speech on Campus,” Communication Law and Policy 7 (Autumn 2002): 431– 60. 14. The scholarly critique about the relationship between Anthropology and colo- nial administration is considerable. For a sampling, see Talal Asad, ed., Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1973); Jan van Breman and Akitoshi Shimizu, Anthropology and Colonialism in Asia and Ocea- nia (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 1999); Diane Lewis, “Anthropology and Colonial- ism,” Current Anthropology 14, no. 4 (December 1973): 581– 602. 15. Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer- sity Press, 1996), 2. It is important to note here, though, that Readings’s argument about “Americanization” of the university is embedded within his subtle readings of globalization in the current period and not a wholesale argument about U.S. hege- monic expansion. We use his term to signal this early twentieth- century model that is certainly about the latter, especially in epistemological and curricular formations as Bascara outlines. 16. For the most comprehensive study of the emergence of these ideas in the his- tory of anthropology, see George Stocking, Race, Culture and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 17. For example, some of the earliest British ethnologists were also colonial administrators— who became experts on the languages and “customs and man- ners” of the natives whom they tried to both understand and control. See Peter Pels, “From Texts to Bodies: Brian Houghton Hodgson and the Emergence of Ethnology in India,” in Anthropology and Colonialism in Asia and Oceania, ed. Jan van Bremen and Akitoshi Shimuzu (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 1999), 66; Sita Venkateswar, De- velopment and Ethnocide: Colonial Practices in the Andaman Islands (Copenhagen: International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs, 2004). 18. David Price, Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect of American Anthropology in the Second World War (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 8. 19. For more specific, and longitudinal, studies of anthropologists’ involvement in various forms of military intelligence, see John D. Kelly, Beatrice Jauregui, Sean T. Mitchell, and Jeremy Walton, eds., Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgency (Chi- cago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Eric Wakin, Anthropology Goes to War: Pro- fessional Ethics and Counterinsurgency in Thailand (Madison: University of Wiscon- sin Press, 1992); Montgomery McFate, “Anthropology and Counterinsurgency: The Strange Story of Their Curious Relationship,” Military Review (March/April 2005),

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24– 38. McFate’s article provides a fascinating and detailed analysis of the Boas controversy. 20. Steven Best, Anthony J. Nocella II, and Peter McLaren, “The Rise of the Academic- Industrial Complex and the Crisis in Free Speech,” in Academic Repres- sion: Reflections from the Academic- Industrial Complex, ed. Anthony J. Nocella II, Steven Best, and Peter McLaren (Oakland, Calif.: AK Press, 2010), 17. 21. Ibid., 22. 22. Ibid., 21. 23. R. C. Lewontin, “The Cold War and the Transformation of the Academy,” in The Cold War and the University: Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years, ed. Noam Chomsky et al. (New York: New Press, 1977), 13. 24. Price, Anthropological Intelligence, 74. The 1942 Intensive Language Program was “designed to plug American campuses directly into war prepared- ness” (Price, Anthropological Intelligence, 75). 25. For a detailed analysis, see Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Unintended Conse- quences of Cold War Area Studies,” in The Cold War and the University: Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years, ed. Noam Chomsky et al. (New York: New Press, 1977), 199. 26. Price, Anthropological Intelligence, 43. 27. Ibid., 27. 28. Ibid., 165. 29. Noam Chomsky, “The Cold War and the University,” in The Cold War and the University: Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years, ed. Noam Chomsky et al. (New York: New Press, 1977), 176. 30. David Meireran and Amy Goodman Interview, “Carnegie Military Univer- sity: How the Pentagon Funds Universities to Contribute to War,” Democracy Now!, November 19, 2004, http://www.democracynow.org/2004/11/19/carnegie_military _university_how_the_pentagon; Stuart Leslie, The Cold War and American Science: The Military- Industrial- Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford (New York: Colum- bia University Press, 1993). 31. Henry Giroux, The University in Chains: Confronting the Military- Industrial- Academic Complex (Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm Publishers: 2007), 11. Giroux argues that he deleted the phrase before he delivered the address on January 17, 1961. 32. Ibid. The full speech can be found in William J. Fulbright, “The War and Its Effects: The Military- Academic Industrial Complex,” in Super- State: Readings in the Military Industrial Complex, ed. Herbert I. Schiller and Joseph D. Phillips (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970), 173– 78. 33. Giroux, The University in Chains, 161. He notes, “ACTA is not a friend of the principle of academic freedom, nor is it comfortable with John Dewey’s notion that education should be responsive to the deepest conflicts of our time, or Hannah

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Arendt’s insistence that debate and a commitment to persuasion are the essence of a democratically oriented politics.” 34. Jonathan Feldman, Universities in the Business of Repression: The Academic- Military- Industrial Complex and Central America (Boston: South End, 1989). Feld- man offers a comprehensive accounting with copious statistics and naming of per- sons and amounts of funding. See, especially, his appendix, 245– 308. 35. Chomsky, “The Cold War and the University,” 181. Half of MIT’s $200 million budget in 1969 was funded by the military (Ibid., 182); see also Feldman, Universities in the Business of Repression, 208, for a table on 1983 DOD Contracts at MIT. 36. See Lewontin, “The Cold War and the Transformation of the Academy,” 10– 12. 37. For the role of anthropological expertise and training in war, see Price, Anthro- pological Intelligence, and also Roberto González’s chapter. For more contemporary analysis, see John D. Kelly et al., Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgency 38. For a detailed discussion of Project Camelot and the Chilean exposé, see Wallerstein, “The Unintended Consequences of Cold War Area Studies,” 220– 23. 39. Mark Solovey, “Project Camelot and the 1960s Epistemological Revolution: Rethinking the Politics- Patronage- Social Science Nexus,” Social Studies of Science 31, no. 2 (April 2001): 171– 206. 40. Roderick A. Ferguson, The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). 41. For an extensive discussion of recent debates within the discipline about this issue, see George R. Lucas, Anthropologists in Arms: The Ethics of Military Anthropol- ogy (Plymouth, U.K.: Altamira, 2009). 42. See Alfred McCoy, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror (New York: Henry Holt, 2006). 43. Joe Masco, “Bad Weather: On Planetary Crisis,” Social Studies of Science 40, no. 1 (February 2010): 16. 44. Roberto J. González, American Counterinsurgency: Human Science and the Human Terrain (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2009). 45. González, American Counterinsurgency, 4. 46. Readings, The University in Ruins, 181. 47. See Henry Giroux, “Higher Education after September 11th: The Crises of Academic Freedom and Democracy,” in Academic Repression: Reflections from the Academic Industrial Complex, ed. Steven Best, Anthony Nocella, and Peter McLaren (Oakland, Calif.: AK Press, 2010), 93. 48. See Ellen W. Schrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 12– 23. In the 1890s, scholars such as Rob- ert T. Ely, a prominent economist, were targeted for their critique of industrialists and what was viewed as pro- Left views. In Ely’s case, a member of the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents charged him with supporting strikes and unions. Faced

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with losing his job, Ely capitulated. Schrecker notes that Ely’s victory was an im- portant sacrifice in terms of the practice of “academic freedom” by “accepting the Regent’s authority to censor his political views and more significantly by accepting a restricted notion of appropriate academic behaviour” (italics ours). See Schrecker’s comprehensive and brilliant analysis of this “foundational” moment of academic “containment” (in our terms), 15– 17. 49. See Schrecker, No Ivory Tower, 15. 50. Ibid., 18. 51. Ibid., 63. 52. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schus- ter, 1987); Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1990); David Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 1995). 53. Newfield, Unmaking the Public University, 268. 54. Ibid., 5– 6. 55. Ibid., 3– 5. 56. The bills are promoted by Students for Academic Freedom, whose webpage has the credo, “You can’t get a good education if they’re only telling you half the story”: http://www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org. 57. See “The Student Bill of Rights,” Students for Academic Freedom, http://www .studentsforacademicfreedom.org/documents/1922/sbor.html. 58. Newfield, Unmaking the Public University, 115– 21. 59. Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); Roxanne Dunbar- Ortiz, “The Grid of His- tory: Cowboys and Indians,” in Pox Americana: Exposing the American Empire, ed. John B. Foster and Robert W. McChesney (New York: Monthly Review), 31– 40. 60. Chatterjee and Maira, “An Open Letter to All Feminists.” 61. Maira, “‘Good’ and ‘Bad’ Muslim Citizens.” 62. Judith Butler, “Judith Butler’s Remarks to Brooklyn College on BDS,” The Nation, February 7, 2013, http://www.thenation.com/article/172752/judith- butlers - remarks- brooklyn- college- bds#. 63. For example, David Horowitz’s ad in the New York Times in 2011 defaming 150 U.S. scholars who supported the academic and cultural boycott of Israel as anti- Semitic proponents of “blood libel” against Jews. 64. For example, the notorious public transit ads in San Francisco and other cit- ies by Pamela Geller’s Stop Islamicization of America campaign stated, “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Is- rael. Defeat jihad.” See interview with Geller by Jamie Glazov, “Is Islamic Jihad Not Savagery?,” Front Page, November 26, 2012, http://frontpagemag.com/2012/ jamie- glazov/is- islamic- jihad- not- savagery/.

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65. “The Top Ten Anti- Israel Groups in America,” Anti- Defamation League, October 4, 2010, http://www.adl.org/main_Anti_Israel/top_ten_anti_israel_groups.htm?Multi _page_sections=sHeading_2. 66. See Steven Salaita, Israel’s Dead Soul (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011). 67. Max Ajl, “Academic Freedom Controversy Brewing at University of Califor- nia,” The Electronic Intifada, May 20, 2009, http://electronicintifada.net/content/ academic- freedom- controversy- brewing- university- california/8242. 68. Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 45. 69. Nora Barrows- Friedman, “Bogus Allegations of ‘Anti- Semitism’ Create Real Climate of Fear for Arab, Muslim Students in US,” The Electronic Intifada, August 8, 2012, http://electronicintifada.net/content/bogus- allegations- antisemitism- create - real- climate- fear- arab- muslim- students- us/11563; Yaman Salahi, “The Echo Cham- ber of Campus Anti- Semitism,” Al Jazeera, August 29, 2012, http://www.aljazeera .com/indepth/opinion/2012/08/201282991348710688.html. 70. See Salaita, Israel’s Dead Soul, 14. 71. Ibid., 3. 72. Joseph A. Massad, Desiring Arabs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Puar, Terrorist Assemblages. 73. Schrecker, No Ivory Tower, 18. 74. Clyde Barrow, Universities and the Capitalist State: Corporate Liberalism and the Reconstruction of American Higher Education (Madison, Wis.: University of Wis- consin Press, 1990), 227. 75. Ibid., 228. 76. Ibid., 14. 77. Ibid., 229. 78. Cary Nelson, No University Is an Island: Saving Academic Freedom (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 1. 79. Robert Post, “The Structure of Academic Freedom,” in Academic Freedom after September 11, ed. Beshara Doumani (New York: Zone Books, 2006), 65. Lovejoy had, in fact, resigned from Stanford in protest over the dismissal of faculty in 1900 for op- posing exploitation of Asian immigrant labor. 80. Ibid., 71. 8 1. Ibid. 82. Ibid., 75. 83. Schrecker, No Ivory Tower, 23. 84. Judith Butler, “Academic Norms, Contemporary Challenges,” in Academic Freedom after September 11, ed. Beshara Doumani (New York: Zone Books, 2006), 107.

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85. Ibid., 128. 86. Joan W. Scott and Harold F. Linder, “Introduction to Academic Boycotts,” Aca- deme 92, no. 5 (September– October 2006): 35– 38. 87. Joan W. Scott, “Changing My Mind about the Boycott,” Journal of Academic Free- dom 4 (2013), http://www.aaup.org/reports- publications/journal- academic- freedom/ volume- 4. 88. See Lisa Taraki’s essay in “[Critics] of the AAUP Report,” Academe 92, no. 5 (September– October 2006): 56. 89. Omar Barghouti’s essay in “Critics of the AAUP Report,” Academe 92, no. 5 (September– October, 2006): 44; Judith Butler, “Israel/Palestine and the Paradoxes of Academic Freedom,” Radical Philosophy 135 (January– February 2006): 8– 17. 90. The AAUP called for divestment from corporations complicit with apartheid South Africa in 1985 and acknowledges that this was a “form of boycott,” if not an ac- ademic boycott as such. Joan W. Scott et al., “On Academic Boycotts,” AAUP, http:// www.aaup.org/report/academic- boycotts. 91. It is interesting to note here the chilling parallels of Dominguez’s surreal inter- view with FBI agents at UCSD with what happened in the McCarthy period: “It was not uncommon for a faculty member to be called to an administrator’s office to be interrogated in the presence of an agent of the FBI or some other government opera- tions. It was believed quite appropriate for academic administrators to initiate an in- vestigation into the political life of faculty.” See Lionel S. Lewis, Cold War on Campus (Piscataway, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1987), 251. 92. Nelson, No University Is an Island, 113. 93. Ibid., 110. 94. This was made ever more apparent in the controversy that erupted about the issue of AAUP’s Journal of Academic Freedom on academic boycott that included several articles in support of the boycott and was followed by a rebuttal by Nelson and criticism by pro- Israel academics. See Journal of Academic Freedom 4 (2013), http://www.aaup.org/reports- publications/journal- academic- freedom/volume- 4. 95. Best, Nocella, and McLaren, “The Rise of the Academic- Industrial Complex,” 29. 96. Ibid. 97. Ibid., 27, 29. 98. Readings, The University in Ruins, 144– 45, 171.

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Langhout 2016.pdf

Abstract Agitation, as deployed by the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), occurs when imaginations and curiosities are piqued, and self-interest is made visible. In this framework, agitation is a step in creating change. In this paper, I outline two agitations within US-based community psychology. I then describe a third agitation that is underway; I add my voice and call for a methodology of diffraction as a contribution to critical reflexivity practices within US-based community psychology. Consistent with the IAF framework, I do not provide solutions. I write this paper as a provocation to help us think imaginatively and creatively about our actions and future, so that we can consider the paradigm shifts needed to move into critical ways of understanding connection, responsibility, accountability, and creating change—of interest during Swampscott and today.

Keywords Community psychology � Training � Reflexivity � Diffraction � Competencies

This is not a history lesson; it is agitation, in the Industrial Areas Foundation1 (IAF) tradition. Agitation piques imag-

inations and curiosities, and make self-interest visible (Toton, 1993). Community psychology has a healthy dose of agitation, including at the Swampscott conference (Anderson et al., 1966). I briefly review two agitations, aimed at training, and provide fodder for further agitation. Consistent with the IAF, I will not present solutions. Instead, I provide agitation, in the form of a call to move toward a methodology of diffraction as a way to practice critical reflexivity. I aim this agitation at US community psychologists. This is a too brief overview, given from my perspective: a cis-woman mostly able bodied, mostly straight working class-raised white academic who has only lived in the United States, and who was born 5 years after the Swampscott conference.

Agitation 1—1960s and US-Based Community Psychology’s Beginnings: Calls for Change

Viet Nam War. Jim Crow. Red lining. Women dying from abortions. Sodomy laws. Moynihan Report.

Anti-War Movement. Civil Rights Movement. Black Power. Chicano Movement. Women’s Liberation Movement. Combahee River Collective. Queer Liberation Movement. American Indian Movement. Poor People’s Campaign. De- institutionalization of those with mental health diagnoses. My father is a first generation high school graduate.

Some US-based clinical psychologists were aware that the field was not organized in ways that were consistent with socially just movements, and for those working toward these ends, available paradigmatic perspectives were somewhat challenging, hence Swampscott.

The time had come to expand psychology’s area of inquiry and action. . . psychologists [should participate

This is Not a History Lesson; This is Agitation: A Call for a Methodology of Diffraction in US-Based Community Psychology

Regina Day Langhout

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2015 opening plenary session, entitled “Reflections on the Swampscott Confer- ence,” at the biennial conference for the Society for Community Research & Action in Lowell, MA.

✉ Regina Day Langhout [email protected]

University of California, Santa Cruz, CA, USA

1 The IAF is an organization founded in 1940 in Chicago. It is a community organizing model that organizes institutions, such as faith-based groups, unions, and schools. Each IAF affiliate creates a multi-issue campaign and organizes to achieve wins related to those issues. There are IAF affiliates across the United States and Canada, and in some European countries.

Am J Community Psychol (2016) 58:322–328 DOI 10.1002/ajcp.12039

COMMENTARY

in]. . .the anti-poverty effort. . .the field of educa- tion. . .social change activities. . .and move toward a new field. . . “Community Psychology. . .” This [implies] major realignments. . .[because a clinical] men- tal health [paradigm has]. . .decreasing strategic leverage and validity for helping to answer some of the growing problems of our complex society.

(Anderson et al., 1966, p. 4)

There was vigorous debate regarding inquiry, action, and paradigms for this newly named in the US field.2

For example, should the community psychologist be a consultant, an activist, or a participant-conceptualizer? Should the framework be prevention, public health, or something else? Based on these unresolved debates, Swampscott attendees decided to leave these issues as open questions.

Once the goal of social change research is accepted. . . [universities and communities will need] theory, research skill, and community action skills. . .Training requirements . . .cannot be formulated at the present time. . .Novel and more appropriate research models and techniques will evolve to meet emergent needs.

(Anderson et al., 1966, p. 8, 25)

Graduate programs set out to develop new theoretical frameworks, research modalities, scientific paradigms, and field-based competencies useful to the scholar-activist.

Agitation 2: The 1980s/Early 90s: The Reagan Years; Calls for Shifts in Training Programs by Women and People of Color

Reagan. Materialism. Neoliberalism. Regeanomics. The Cold War. US covert operations in progressive Latin American countries. Co-optation of prevention. Nancy Reagan’s “Just say no” campaign invades the airways and billboards of my Modesto hometown. Modesto: the 5th least formally educated place in the United States (Bernardo, 2015).

Massive anti-nuclear protests. National Coalition on Racism in Sports and Media organizes against Indian mascots. Federal air traffic controllers strike for better working conditions. Organizing against the School of the Americas. Protests against backing dictatorships in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Chile, Argentina, and the list goes on.

Community psychologists agitated to point out short- falls in our practice and training. Based on a content anal- ysis of American Journal of Community Psychology and Journal of Community Psychology articles from 1973 to 1978, Lounsbury, Leader, Meares and Cook (1980) argued that research methods had not undergone the shifts needed for social intervention. They argued: The most vital contributions of community psychology will not be served by observation or preservation of the status quo; they will come from innovative interven- tions into social systems where the objective is improved functioning and enhanced quality of life for system participants.

(p. 433–434)

The authors argued for different methods to ensure that social systems better serve system participants. It was not only research methods that were targeted, however. Com- munity psychologists of color were agitating for shifts to facilitate cultural competencies. For example, Suarez-Bal- cazar, Durlack and Smith (1994) surveyed graduate pro- grams and reported that fewer than half of the 56 responding programs required a course in multicultural issues. Perhaps partly because of this state of affairs, Watts (1994) encouraged the field to:

Give all graduate students the knowledge and skills they need to understand their own population member- ships as well as those who identify with other socially meaningful populations. . .European Americans are part of the racial-cultural mix, and they need to locate them- selves in it. . .self examination helps us understand our position and role in social systems. . .If students can think critically of the sociopolitical implications of their professional work, they reduce the likelihood that their activities maintain or increase social injustice.

(p. 807–808)

Watts points out that community psychologists can increase social injustice if we (especially those of us who are white) do not have an understanding and practice of studying our social locations and positioning. In this way, Watts called for the transformation of the role of research- ers and with it, the field.

Around this time, some community psychologists were working to address some of these concerns. In Puerto Rico, the social-community psychology graduate program at the University of Puerto Rico was founded from a social constructivist paradigm designed to address liberation in a colonial context (Serrano-Garc�ıa & L�opez- S�anchez, 1991). Because of this paradigmatic and ideolog- ical orientation, the program is interdisciplinary and includes popular knowledge as worthy of inclusion into

2 Community psychology has many beginnings in many countries. There is no single origin story for community psychology as a field.

Am J Community Psychol (2016) 58:322–328 323

academic discourse. These decisions were made beyond mainland US borders and were discerned through Latina/o organizing and theory informed by Latin American con- texts and scholars (Montero, 2007). These commitments and orientations resulted in a training program that seeks to make values transparent, relationships more horizontal, community assets more visible, and primary commitments to community members rather than academic disciplines (when conflict arises; Serrano-Garc�ıa, 1988; Serrano- Garc�ıa & L�opez-S�anchez, 1991). The goal is social change by working alongside community members.

In the States, Lykes and Hellstedt (1987), as well as Mulvey and Silka (1987) describe the training model for social-community psychologists at the University of Low- ell, now the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. The program was designed to serve the students and communi- ties of Lowell and was informed by mental health and human rights work in Central America (Lykes, personal communication, 11/4/15). Students were primarily work- ing class and middle class women. The program used Freire’s dialogic model, incorporating the experiences and desires of students into the learning process. Program innovations included emphasizing systems change, and supporting students to become change agents, which included skill development in collaboration, understanding the role of social class and ethnicity in shaping experi- ence, and diagnosing their own strengths and weaknesses. In this context, Lykes and Hellstedt (1987) called for more participatory methodologies.

Agitation 3: 50 Years in. Now What?

Ferguson. Fruitvale. Baltimore. New York. Charleston, South Carolina. Islamaphobia. Arizona’s Eloy Detention Center. Modesto: a city with some of the highest air and water contamination levels in the United States (American Lung Association, 2015; Helman, 2012).

#BlackLivesMatter. Trans* movement gains main- stream visibility. Occupy. Undocuqueer. Maine Wabanaki- State Child Welfare Truth and Reconciliation Commis- sion.

Many community psychologists recognize the need for social change and liberation. Yet, we should not think solely about what community psychology offers. We should think deeply about the liberation of community psychology. To do this, we will have to be better partners with the communities most affected by state-sanctioned violence and more critical of our and our field’s position- ing, as has been codified in the 2012 community psychol- ogy core competencies. Considering training, the competencies describe community inclusion and partner- ship, as well as ethical, reflective practice (Competencies,

2012). Specifically, community psychologists should “make positions of power and privilege (including one’s own) transparent. . . [and] develop avenues for respectful dialogue” (pp. 10–11). We should also “articulate how one’s own values, assumptions, and life experiences influ- ence one’s work, and articulate strengths and limitations of one’s own perspective” (p. 11).

We are in the midst of another agitation. The codifica- tion of competencies come, in part, due to years of agita- tion, as well as the field’s turn toward liberation psychology with an emphasis on participatory epistemo- logical stances brought more centrally into community psychology primarily by women and/or people of color across the Americas, including Brinton Lykes, Maritza Montero, Irma Serrano-Garc�ıa, and Rod Watts, to name a few. I add my voice to the current agitation, by calling for the development of a methodology of diffraction to help us with transformation.

Diffraction as a Methodology

For me, participatory methodologies make visible gaps between my ontology and methodology, which has led me to read within critical race and feminist studies. These perspectives can help us with the fashioning of a method- ology of diffraction as a form of critical reflexivity, which can help us move toward more liberatory practices and processes. Diffraction is the study of entanglements cre- ated by differences (Barad, 2006). In this section, I outline issues with reflection as a metaphor, and argue for diffrac- tion as an alternative metaphor for practicing critical reflexivity.

Swampscott critiqued the neutrality of post-positivism and consequently, created an opening for critical theory. Specifically, the ideology of post-positivism maintains that the research should be value free, and that care must be taken so that the values of the researcher are separate from what is researched (Guba & Lincoln, 1994; Nelson & Prilleltensky, 2010). The ideology of critical theory, on the other hand, maintains that values are integral to the research process and that subsequently, the researcher is morally obligated to transgress the status quo and engage in research that transforms social situations (Guba & Lin- coln, 1994; Nelson & Prilleltensky, 2010). During Swampscott, a move to critical theory was partial due in part to the absence of methodologies within psychology that were aligned with critical theory, and a desire to stay within psychology.

In the intervening years, some theoretical lenses from critical theory have become visible in community psychol- ogy (e.g., Dutta, 2016; Sonn, 2016). A basic tenet of criti- cal theory is that that the researcher matters and should be

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visible (Nelson & Prilleltensky, 2010; Reyes Cruz & Sonn, 2011). This tenet takes seriously the question of what it means for researchers to be implicated in the lives of everyone with whom we are in contact, including par- ticipants (Torre, 2009). Within critical theory, reflexivity is often used as a tool for self-positioning (Fine, 1994). This is an important methodological shift because it helps us consider our processes and positionalities, or our subjectivities, which is essential for critical theorists, com- munity-based interventionists, and community psycholo- gists (Competencies for community psychology practice, 2012).

Examining this turn through examining the visual metaphors implicit in this conceptualization contributes a missing dimension in reflexivity. Visual metaphors are often a representation of our practices. Indeed, Western thought has intertwined vision and knowledge as a meta- phor since the Greeks started constructing this form of science (Keller & Grontkowski, 1983). Two feminist science studies scholars at UC Santa Cruz, Donna Har- away and Karen Barad, focus on this construction of science. “The methodology of reflexivity mirrors the geo- metrical optics of reflection,” which makes it a methodol- ogy of seeking out sameness, even if the reflection is an imperfect replica (Barad, 2006, p. 72; but also Anzald�ua, 1987/1999 and Haraway, 1992). This makes sense given conventional social science invokes representation as a major form of meaning making, which often includes romanticizing, essentializing, and distancing (Anzald�ua, 1987/1999; Haraway, 1992; Reyes Cruz & Sonn, 2011; Tuck, 2006). Specifically, to be represented, people are transformed from subjects into objects, or objectified, and therefore the receiver of action rather than a co-actor with others, including the community psychologist.

Reflection and replication present a problem for the community psychologist who is working to create some- thing different that transforms society and is rooted in people’s realities and their complex personhoods. Creating something different should be done via a transformed science. Science must be transformed because of issues with objectification, but also because conventional frame- works for social science have used difference as a syn- onym for deficit due to dualistic thinking (Haraway, 1992; Reyes Cruz & Sonn, 2011; Tuck, 2006; van der Tuin, 2014). Reflexivity has not transformed the role of the uni- versity-based researcher (Lykes & Crosby, 2014); perhaps the reason is because of this foundation in reflection and replication. Therefore, we must ask, which kind of social science or ontological framework invokes solidarity and connection as a major form of meaning making and does not mark different as pejorative?

It is time we move toward a methodology of diffraction to embody solidarity via the study of subjectivity, process,

change, connectivity, desire, and difference. We can make this shift by building on the work of feminist science scholars (Karen Barad, Donna Haraway), critical feminist social psychologists (Michelle Fine, Mar�ıa Elena Torre, Lois Weis), and critical feminist social-community psy- chologists (Urmitapa Dutta, Brinton Lykes, Maritza Mon- tero, Irma Serrano-Garc�ıa). Specifically, Barad (2006), who has a PhD in theoretical particle physics, considers diffraction as a way to “study the entangled effects differ- ences make” (p. 73). She builds this approach by drawing together the work of Neils Bohr and breakthroughs in quantum physics with the work of Donna Haraway, Gloria Anzald�ua, and Trinh Minh-ha on the paradigm shifts needed to move into more decolonized ways of understanding connection, responsibility, accountability, and creating change—of interest during Swampscott and today.

Diffraction is about the entanglements of responsibility to one another. It is attuned to difference and the effects those differences have within the world. (Community) psychologists should not misunderstand diffraction as assessing for individual and/or group differences, often via path analytic models. Indeed, these models are often rooted in a metaphysics of individualism, which is con- trary to diffraction (Barad, 2006).

Diffraction patterns, such as the resulting ripples that occur when a stone is dropped into a body of water, do not show the difference that was made by dropping the stone, but rather the effects of the dropping of the stone (Haraway, 1992). Diffraction was the major breakthrough in physics that transformed classical metaphysics. We need a similar paradigm shift in US-based community psychology, which is an issue we have been grappling with since Swampscott. Specifically, in classical meta- physics, the framework of particles was first used to understand light, sound, and water, but particles are often about displacement,3 which is a bit like assimilation and colonization for community psychologists. But light, sound, and water are about relationship, differential effects, and change, or entanglements. Instead, waves were a more useful organizing framework. Waves do not displace one another to take the place of each other. Moreover, they bend around obstruction. Diffraction allows for a reconfiguring of patterns and draws attention to movement and patterns rather than stagnation. It allows us to examine how entanglements can create change, and how waves can constructively or destructively interfere with each other. It is a way to “explore entanglements

3 Under certain circumstances, particles can behave like waves, and waves can behave like particles, which was part of the breakthrough of quantum physics, but this is beyond the scope of this paper.

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and the differences they make” (Barad, 2006, p. 74). It encourages us to think as waves.

Thinking through this metaphor in terms of implica- tions for community psychology is important because until we engage methodologies that enable us to under- stand this field’s positioning, and ourselves within it, it will be difficult for us to disrupt the structures of white- ness, patriarchy, class privilege, heteronormativity, cissex- ism, and other dominant US cultural norms that are foundational building blocks of our social science. A methodology of diffraction can help us as we continue to refine the vision that US-based Community Psychology began to lay out in the 1960s. It can help us consider how to go about looking more critically, and in this way, widens our scope regarding what to look at.

Big steps in these directions are apparent in the meta- phor of critical bifocality (Weis & Fine, 2012). With the metaphor, the researcher is encouraged to make theoretical and methodological commitments to examine links and tensions between structures and experience. Indeed, a focus on only one aspect or the other can distort social problems because entanglement and therefore diffraction is erased from view. In this way, diffraction helps us to concretize the call for divergent problem solving (Rappa- port, 1987).

I would like for us to develop a praxis of resistance and communality via diffraction. Mar�ıa Lugones (2015) argues for communality rather than community. Commu- nity is about being together. According to Lugones, com- munality is about community, but also about resisting oppression. Communality goes inward, outward, and weaves between us. It is a praxis of entanglement and resistance, or, according to Anzald�ua (1987/1999), Lugones (2008, 2015), and Montero (2007) a praxis of liberation. These ideas are rooted within an episteme of relatedness, which means that the ontological underpin- ning of knowledge is that it is constructed within and through relationships (Montero, 2007; who drew from Dussel and Levinas). Taking a relational episteme as an ontological foundation, Mar�ıa Elena Torre encourages us to consider Anzald�ua’s nos-otras as a framework for understanding our mutual implication (2009). Specifically, when differing social identities come together, we are able to make connections that might otherwise remain invisi- ble, meaning we can make visible our entanglements, overlaps, contradictions, complications, oppositions, and web of relations, and act upon them (Torre, 2009; Torrre & Ayala, 2009; but also Montero, 2007). In other words, multiplicity and movement are made visible, due to the focus on in-between spaces, as well as a shared action- reflection process often found in feminist action research (Lykes & Crosby, 2014; Torrre & Ayala, 2009). This move can re-position the university-based researcher as

someone who accompanies or travels with rather than directs (Lykes & Crosby, 2014; Montero, 2007).

We must situate and root our field as practice from the margins, hyphens, borderlands, and in-between spaces, and from critically engaged subjectivities, if we are to col- laborate in ways that are liberatory because this will allow us to be in conversation and communion with the parts of ourselves and the parts of other people who are at the margins, hyphens, and borders. These shifts not only apply to how we consider positionality and subjectivity, but also to philosophies of science, theories of change, and community-based processes. A methodology of diffraction might help us, for example, better embody the dialectic within our practice (Rappaport, 1987) as we are better able to tolerate ambiguity, divergence within our- selves, and a stance of inclusion rather than exclusion (Anzald�ua, 1987/1999; Dutta, 2016; Lykes & Crosby, 2014; Torre, 2009). Furthermore, we might move away from theories of change that are grounded in “damage narratives,” which conceptualize disenfranchised groups as only damaged, and instead move toward theories of change grounded in “desire narratives,” which conceptual- ize disenfranchised groups as being comprised of complex people who have hopes, desires, and dreams for a differ- ent social world that is based in the wisdom of their mate- rial circumstances (Tuck, 2006). Moreover, just as we might think about divergent solutions (Rappaport, 1987), and a multi-stranded community psychology (Dutta, 2016), we should also think about how divergent scientific paradigms can be put into the service of social change. Just as some particles can behave as waves in certain cir- cumstances, perhaps divergent paradigms can behave as vehicles for solidarity and social justice in specific cases. A methodology of diffraction can encourage us to seek divergence, amplification, and convergence.

I hope this methodology of diffraction is our next shift because some are challenging us to take steps to decolo- nize our field as a form of public restitution (Dutta, 2016; Reyes Cruz & Sonn, 2011; Sonn, 2016; Tuck, 2006). I am hopeful that we can make these strides because this work is already being done across the Americas4 and beyond (e.g., India, Africa). We must commit ourselves to studying the work of Gloria Anzald�ua, Karen Barad, the

4 It is not my intention to ignore important work that is happening and has happened on other continents, but rather to call for those in the United States to study deeply across the Americas. We may be more likely to see the ripples of diffraction across the Americas given the historic migration patterns and relationships across these two continents. Moreover, looking across the Americas is a way to take up Gloria Anzald�ua’s call for all people in the Americas, including whites to “root ourselves in the. . .soil and soul of this con- tinent. . .to be nurtured in it. . .to share. . .and learn. . .in a respectful way” (p. 90).

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Bolivian Union of Child and Adolescent Workers (Unatsbo), Orlando Fals-Borda, Maria Lugones, Ignacio Mart�ın-Bar�o, Chela Sandoval, Eve Tuck, and the Zapatis- tas, to name a few.

One all too brief example is from the work of Gloria Anzald�ua (1987/1999). With respect to subjectivity, she encouraged people to understand that borderlands and bor- der studies were present any time two people from differ- ent social groups (e.g., gender, sex, ethnicity) met. These borders are designed to separate us from them, but the border is often artificial, and almost always in a state of transition. Furthermore, borders are also within us, which is further sign of their artificiality. Indeed, Anzald�ua desired a culture that is accountable to and accounts for three of her cultural groups: Mexican, white, and Indian. Through a methodology of diffraction, where she chooses strands, traditions, and fragments from each, she invokes her own “feminist architecture” to create a more account- able culture, or “una cultura mestiza” that moved away from dualism and with it, objectivity (p. 44). With this new framework, Anzald�ua is able to dissolve dualisms of “us” versus “them” and recognize entanglements. This enables her to re-interpret and re-shape dominant narra- tives of difference and deficit. For example, she takes on conclusions about language and argues that she speaks at least eight languages rather than Spanish and English poorly/incorrectly/deficiently/in non-standard ways. To recognize working class English, Chicano Spanish, and Tex-Mex alongside standard English and standard Spanish is to understand language from a methodology of diffrac- tion rather than reflection. With this insight comes the ability to see fragments, strands, and waves that move together as well as apart, which enables us to see the sur- vival and resistance of peoples otherwise considered “defi- cient.” We can see more rather than less because we are not looking only for that which mirrors dominant expecta- tions.

In psychology, Torre (2009) uses the nos-otras frame- work to show how students from different social class and racial identities researched AP classes, and eventually decided to organize to have them removed from their schools because of the increased tracking and exclusionary practices they created. Indeed, AP courses were not viewed as fair or neutral. This desire to decrease the “opportunity gap” became important to all of the students because they saw how they were mutually implicated in one another’s lives.

With the growing number of social-community psychology and interdisciplinary programs in the United States, we are better positioned to learn what other fields and movements can offer to us as we create a bricolage of diffraction for community psychology. I am hopeful we will be able to see waves, including how they bend, amplify, and connect. We must do this for ourselves so

that we can keep ourselves accountable, for places like my hometown of Modesto, and for all those—including those who met at Swampscott in 1965—who are demand- ing that we provide theories, skills, resources, opportuni- ties, and spaces to assist in the work of liberation and social transformation.

Acknowledgments A heartfelt thank you to Cindy Cruz, Wanda Alarcon, and Brinton Lykes, who assisted me with thinking through different aspects of this paper. Also, thank you to the Community Psychology Research & Action Team, Meg Bond, Jim Dalton, Urmi Dutta, Mo Elias, and Chris Sonn for their feedback on various drafts of this paper.

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Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning Spring 2008, pp.50-65

are dismantled. This article uses perspectives from the literature to uncover and explicate the meaning of a critical service-learning view. In discussing each of the three distinguishing elements of the critical ser- vice-learning approach, I examine the classroom and community components.

Traditional vs. Critical Service-Learning

Community service learning “serves as a vehicle for connecting students and institutions to their com- munities and the larger social good, while at the same time instilling in students the values of community and social responsibility” (Neururer & Rhoads, 1998, p. 321). Because service-learning as a pedagogy and practice varies greatly across educators and institu- tions, it is difficult to create a definition that elicits consensus amongst practitioners (Bickford & Reynolds, 2002; Butin, 2005; Kendall, 1990; Liu, 1995; Varlotta, 1997a). However, I use the terms ser- vice-learning and community service learning to define a community service action tied to learning goals and ongoing reflection about the experience (Jacoby, 1996). The learning in service-learning results from the connections students make between their community experiences and course themes (Zivi, 1997). Through their community service, stu- dents become active learners, bringing skills and information from community work and integrating them with the theory and curriculum of the class- room to produce new knowledge. At the same time, students’ classroom learning informs their service in the community.

Research heralds traditional service-learning pro- grams for their transformative nature—producing students who are more tolerant, altruistic, and cultur- ally aware; who have stronger leadership and com- munication skills; and who (albeit marginally) earn higher grade point averages and have stronger crit-

Traditional vs. Critical Service-Learning: Engaging the Literature to Differentiate Two Models

Tania D. Mitchell Stanford University

There is an emerging body of literature advocating a “critical” approach to community service learning with an explicit social justice aim. A social change orientation, working to redistribute power, and devel- oping authentic relationships are most often cited in the literature as points of departure from tradition- al service-learning. This literature review unpacks these distinguishing elements.

A growing segment of the service-learning litera- ture in higher education assumes that community ser- vice linked to classroom learning is inherently con- nected to concerns of social justice (Delve, Mintz, & Stewart, 1990; Jacoby, 1996; Rosenberger, 2000; Wade, 2000; 2001; Warren, 1998). At the same time, there is an emerging body of literature arguing that the traditional service-learning approach is not enough (Brown, 2001; Butin, 2005; Cipolle, 2004; Marullo, 1999; Robinson 2000a, 2000b; Walker, 2000). This literature advocates a “critical” approach to community service learning with an explicit aim toward social justice.

Referencing the service-learning literature, I unpack the elements that distinguish a critical ser- vice-learning pedagogy. In reviewing the literature, I was challenged by an unspoken debate that seemed to divide service-learning into two camps—a tradi- tional approach that emphasizes service without attention to systems of inequality, and a critical approach that is unapologetic in its aim to dismantle structures of injustice. The three elements most often cited in the literature as points of departure in the two approaches are working to redistribute power amongst all participants in the service-learning rela- tionship, developing authentic relationships in the classroom and in the community, and working from a social change perspective. I wanted to understand and make clear the differences in these approaches and what they might look like in practice. How might the curriculum, experiences, and outcomes of a criti- cal service-learning course differ from a traditional service-learning course?

The critical approach re-imagines the roles of community members, students, and faculty in the service-learning experience. The goal, ultimately, is to deconstruct systems of power so the need for ser- vice and the inequalities that create and sustain them

ical thinking skills than their non-service-learning counterparts (Astin & Sax, 1998; Densmore, 2000; Eyler & Giles, 1999; Kezar, 2002; Markus, Howard, & King, 1993). Due largely to this evi- dence, service-learning has emerged on college and university campuses as an effective practice to enhance student learning and development. But some authors assert that, “to suggest that all forms of community service equally develop an ethic of care, a flowering of a mature identity, and advance our understanding of community is misleading” (Neururer & Rhoads, 1998, p. 329).

There are examples in the literature where com- munity service learning is criticized, labeled as charity or “forced volunteerism,” critiqued for rein- forcing established hierarchies, and deemed pater- nalistic (Boyle-Baise, 1998; Cooks, Scharrer & Paredes, 2004; Cruz, 1990; Forbes, Garber, Kensinger, & Slagter, 1999; Ginwright & Cammarota, 2002; Levinson, 1990; McBride, Brav, Menon, & Sherraden, 2006; Pompa, 2002; Sleeter, 2000). Pompa (2002) explains her reservation:

Unless facilitated with great care and con- sciousness, “service” can unwittingly become an exercise in patronization. In a society replete with hierarchical structures and patriar- chal philosophies, service-learning’s potential danger is for it to become the very thing it seeks to eschew. (p. 68)

Robinson (2000a) concurs, boldly stating that ser- vice-learning as a depoliticized practice becomes a “glorified welfare system” (p. 607). Without the exercise of care and consciousness, drawing atten- tion to root causes of social problems, and involv- ing students in actions and initiatives addressing root causes, service-learning may have no impact beyond students’ good feelings. In fact, a service- learning experience that does not pay attention to those issues and concerns may involve students in the community in a way that perpetuates inequali- ty and reinforces an “us-them” dichotomy. Further, such interpretations of service-learning (ironically) serve to mobilize and bolster privileged students to participate in and embrace systems of privilege (Brown, 2001), preserve already unjust social structures (Roschelle, Turpin, & Elias, 2000), and may act to “normalize and civilize the radical ten- dencies” of our constituent communities, students, and ourselves (Robinson, 2000b, p.146).

Ginwright and Cammarota (2002) critique ser- vice-learning, advocating a social justice approach instead:

Unlike “service learning,” where youth learn through participation in community service pro- jects, social awareness places an emphasis on

community problem solving through critical thinking that raises questions about the roots of social inequality. For example, a service learning approach might encourage youth to participate in a service activity that provides homeless fam- ilies with food, while social awareness encour- ages youth to examine and influence political and economic decisions that make homelessness possible in the first place. Reflected in this example is a critical understanding of how sys- tems and institutions sustain homelessness. Through an analysis of their communities, youth develop a deep sense of how institutions could better serve their own communities and initiate strategies to make these institutions responsive to their needs. (p. 90)

While I agree with Neururer and Rhoads (1998) that it would be misleading to suggest that all service- learning experiences encourage the type of critical analysis suggested by Ginwright and Cammarota, I believe it is equally misleading to suggest that no ser- vice-learning class or program encourages the in- depth analysis or approach to community problem- solving that Ginwright and Cammarota name social awareness. In the service-learning field, the approaches labeled as “service learning” and “social awareness” by Ginwright and Cammarota might be labeled as traditional and critical service-learning.

The concept of critical service-learning first appears in Robert Rhoads’s (1997) exploration of “critical community service.” Rice and Pollack (2000) and Rosenberger (2000) employed the term “critical service learning” to describe academic ser- vice-learning experiences with a social justice orien- tation. This explicit aim toward social justice chal- lenges traditional perceptions of service “as meeting individual needs but not usually as political action intended to transform structural inequalities” (Rosenberger, p. 29). A recent study by Wang and Rodgers (2006) shows that a social justice approach to service-learning results in more complex thinking and reasoning skills than traditional service-learning courses. A critical approach embraces the political nature of service and seeks social justice over more traditional views of citizenship. This progressive pedagogical orientation requires educators to focus on social responsibility and critical community issues. Service-learning, then, becomes “a problem- solving instrument of social and political reform” (Fenwick, 2001, p. 6).

Critical service-learning programs encourage stu- dents to see themselves as agents of social change, and use the experience of service to address and respond to injustice in communities. Rahima Wade (2000) terms this perspective “service for an ideal” as opposed to “service to an individual” (p. 97). Boyle- Baise (2007) labels this “service for critical con-

Traditional vs. Critical Service-Learning

Mitchell

sciousness.” Marullo (1999) considers service-learn- ing a revolutionary pedagogy because of its potential for social change. Service-learning, he suggests:

If implemented properly, should be critical of the status quo and should ultimately challenge unjust structures and oppressive institutional operations. It is the analytical component of ser- vice-learning that gives it revolutionary poten- tial, because it is precisely this component that will reveal the systemic, social nature of inequal- ity, injustice, and oppression. Service-learning is also revolutionary to the extent that it creates a partnership for change among community and university actors. Once the sources of social problems are seen to reside in the social and political systems that so lavishly reward the few at the expense of the many, it becomes obvious that such systems require change. It is in the ensuing step, advocating for change and assist- ing students to acquire the knowledge and skills to become agents of change, that the revolution- ary potential becomes real. In this sense, service- learning provides an opportunity for institution- alizing on college campuses activism committed to social justice. (p. 22)

To actualize the potential, Boyle-Baise (2007), Wade (2000), and Marullo (1999) see that critical service-learning must emphasize the skills, knowl- edge, and experiences required of students to not only participate in communities, but to transform them as engaged and active citizens. Critical ser- vice-learning must focus on creating true commu- nity-university partnerships where community issues and concerns are as important (in planning, implementation, and evaluation) as student learn- ing and development (Brown, 2001). Critical ser- vice-learning must embrace the “progressive and liberal agenda” that undergirds its practice (Butin, 2006, p. 58) and serves as the foundation for ser- vice-learning pedagogy (Brown, 2001). The work to realize the potential of this pedagogy and avoid paternalism demands a social change orientation, working to redistribute power, and developing authentic relationships as central to the classroom and community experience (see Figure 1).

A Social Change Orientation

Student development and community change often are viewed as mutually exclusive. Traditional interpretations of service-learning tend to empha- size students, focusing on “preprofessional” expe- riences (viewing service much like an internship or practicum), and the personal or social development of students (mostly attitudes toward leadership, altruism, and sometimes thoughts or feelings about the people served in the community). “Rarely do

students in service-learning programs consider whether some injustice has created the need for service in the first place” (Wade, 2001, p. 1). Programs that might put more emphasis on social change may be characterized or dismissed as activism, or deemed inappropriate or too political for classroom learning. Wade posits that the practi- cality of traditional service-learning (service to individuals) versus critical service-learning (ser- vice for an ideal) may explain the prominence of service-learning programs that emphasize student outcomes over community change:

In general, service for an ideal is more com- pelling to me because of its potential power to effect change for more people. However, in prac- tice, service to individuals is more accessible and easier to facilitate with a given group of stu- dents over a short time (e.g., a semester). (p. 98)

In service-learning programs that do not take a critical approach, the emphasis of the service expe- rience is to find the students some opportunity to do good work that will benefit a service agency, and provide the students with an opportunity to reflect upon the work they are doing and perhaps upon their own assumptions and stereotypes about the individuals with whom they serve. This type of service-learning approach requires “foregrounding issues of identity and difference as a way of help- ing students alter their personal and world views and preparing students with new ideas and skills that can help them understand and work across dif- ferences” (Chesler & Vasques Scalera, 2000, p. 19). Chesler (1995), Eby (1998), Ginwright and Cammarota (2002), and Robinson (2000a; 2000b) all caution that these types of service programs, while beneficial for the students in service roles and providing much needed service in communi- ties, do not lead to any transformation in the com- munity and certainly do not tap into the revolution- ary potential that Marullo (1999) envisions. Mark Chesler (1995) explains:

Service-learning does not necessarily lead to improved service, and it certainly does not necessarily lead to social change. As students fit into prescribed agency roles for their service work they typically do not challenge the nature and operations or quality of these agencies and their activities. As we do service that primarily reacts to problems—problems of inadequate education, of under-staffed and under-financed health care, of inadequate garbage collection service, of failing correctional institutions— our service does not focus on challenging or directing attention to changing the causes of these problems. (p. 139)

Traditional vs. Critical Service-Learning

While individual change and student development are desired outcomes of traditional and critical ser- vice-learning, critical service-learning pedagogy bal- ances the student outcomes with an emphasis on social change. This requires rethinking the types of service activities in which students are engaged, as well as organizing projects and assignments that challenge students to investigate and understand the root causes of social problems and the courses of action necessary to challenge and change the struc- tures that perpetuate those problems.

Social change efforts “[address] tremendous inequalities and fundamental social challenges by creating structures and conditions that promote equality, autonomy, cooperation, and sustainabili- ty” (Langseth & Troppe, 1997, p. 37). Service- learning practitioners who want to move toward critical service-learning must find ways to organize

community projects and work that will allow ser- vice-learners to critically analyze their work in the community. Educators using a critical service- learning pedagogy must support students in under- standing the consequences of service alongside the possibilities—the ways service can make a differ- ence as well as those ways it can perpetuate sys- tems of inequality. O’Grady (2000) reminds us, “Responding to individual human needs is impor- tant, but if the social policies that create these needs is not also understood and addressed, then the cycle of dependence remains” (p. 13).

Rhoads (1998) offers some of the “big ques- tions” that guide a critical service-learning approach: “Why do we have significant economic gaps between different racial groups? Why do women continue to face economic and social inequities? Why does the richest country on earth

Figure 1. Traditional vs. Critical Service-Learning

have such a serious problem with homelessness?” (p. 45). If service-learning programs aren’t asking these questions or encouraging students to investi- gate the links between “those served” and institu- tional structures and policies, service-learning stu- dents may never move beyond “band-aid” service and toward action geared to the eradication of the cycles of dependence and oppression (Levinson, 1990; O’Grady, 2000; Walker, 2000).

Critical service-learning pedagogy fosters a crit- ical consciousness, allowing students to combine action and reflection in classroom and community to examine both the historical precedents of the social problems addressed in their service place- ments and the impact of their personal action/inac- tion in maintaining and transforming those prob- lems. This analysis allows students to connect their own lives to the lives of those with whom they work in their service experiences. Further, a critical service-learning approach allows students to become aware of the systemic and institutionalized nature of oppression. The action/reflection dynam- ic of a critical service-learning pedagogy encour- ages contemplation on both personal and institu- tional contributions to social problems and mea- sures that may lead to social change (Marullo, 1999; Rice & Pollack, 2000). This praxis brings to light the political nature of a pedagogy aimed to address and contribute to dismantling structural inequality.

Community service that is seen as part of an action/reflection dynamic that contributes to social change is dangerous in that it fosters a desire to alter the social and economic struc- ture of our society. It is political because it questions how power is distributed and the connection between power and economics. (Rhoads, 1997, p. 201)

Chesler and Vasques Scalera (2000) argue, “pro- grams focused on social change involve students more directly in mobilizing to challenge racist and sexist structures in community agencies and in the allocation of scarce social resources, and advocate for the construction of community-oriented poli- cies and programs” (p. 19). Through a critical ser- vice-learning approach, students can look ahead and consider the kind of work, beyond those ser- vice efforts already in place, that might ameliorate or transform social problems and lead to sustain- able change (Wade, 2001).

The Community Component

“We are neglecting activities that address the struc- tural roots of problems,” Robinson (2000b, p.145) warns. The service work most service-learners par-

ticipate in—e.g., tutoring, soup kitchens, afterschool enrichment programs—are shaped for the benefit of the students, reflecting “the skills, schedules, inter- ests, and learning agenda of the students in service- learning rather than to meet real community needs” (Eby, 1998, p. 4). In this way, the needs of service- learning students often take precedence over com- munity issues and concerns, and the service work performed is less than transformative.

Involving students in social change oriented ser- vice work is more difficult. Practitioners may need to work outside traditional non-profits and commu- nity-based organizations to partner with groups actively working to change systems and structures (in contrast to “simply” offering services). Social change oriented service is more political than tra- ditional notions of service and therefore may be subject to criticism from those who fear the prac- tice attempts to indoctrinate rather than teach (Butin, 2006; Robinson, 2000a; 2000b). The types of service experiences that allow students to con- sider social change and transformation may not bring immediate results and, therefore, may not offer the type of gratification that students involved in more traditional service-learning classes experi- ence when the painting is completed, homeless per- son is fed, or child has finished the art project. Social change oriented service takes time. Social justice will never be achieved in a single semester nor systems dismantled in the two- to four-hour weekly commitment representative of many tradi- tional models of service-learning.

Forbes et al. (1999) are clear about the goals they desire through a critical service-learning approach:

We want…to empower students to see them- selves as agents capable of acting together with others to build coalitions, foster public awareness, and create social change. Our goal is to avoid the trap of the cultural safari, instead discussing and demonstrating the tools the students will require to pursue the objec- tives they set forth within the engaged parame- ters of their own diverse lives and concerns. At the very least, this should short-circuit the stance of charitable pity that traditional volun- teerism often produces. (p. 167)

Merely assigning students to work in a particular agency or program is not enough; faculty, students, and staff must all be involved in a dialectic and responsive process that encourages analysis and action to address issues and problems facing com- munities. Instead of seeing the community agency as “a highly innovative textbook” (Brown, 2001, p. 16) or community members as “passive beneficia- ries” (Ward & Wolf-Wendel, 2000, p. 767) in the service-learning relationship, a critical service-

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learning pedagogy engages community partners actively to create and define the service-learning experience. Marullo and Edwards (2000) offer principles that should guide a service-learning approach with aims of social justice. In particular, the contention that “the resources of the communi- ty should be developed and expanded as a top pri- ority (taking precedence over the enrichment or gains experienced by the volunteers)” speaks to a service experience with a social change orientation (Marullo & Edwards, 2000, p. 907).

The Classroom Component

A critical service-learning pedagogy asks stu- dents to use what is happening in the classroom— the readings, discussion, writing assignments and other activities—to reflect on their service in the context of larger social issues. “Such a vision is compatible with liberatory forms of pedagogy in which a goal of education is to challenge students to become knowledgeable of the social, political, and economic forces that have shaped their lives and the lives of others” (Rhoads, 1998, p. 41).

Students must be encouraged to reflect on the structural causes and concerns that necessitate their service (Eby, 1998; Roschelle et al., 2000). Marullo and Edwards (2000) caution, “If students’ causal explanation of a social problem such as poverty, illiteracy, or homelessness points to flaws or weaknesses in individuals’ characteristics, it is quite likely that they have missed entirely the social justice dimension of the problem” (p. 903). Dialogue, reflections, and writing assignments can encourage the analysis that allows students to understand real world concerns and the systemic causes behind them. Additionally, incorporating community knowledge through, for example, including presentations or co-teaching by commu- nity members involved in the service-learning part- nership, can provide “insider” information about community needs and concerns and make linkages to root causes that may be more difficult for facul- ty and students who enjoy a more privileged status.

A discussion of whether the language of com- munity “needs” implies community deficits and reifies structures of inequality is inevitable in a crit- ical service-learning pedagogy. Acknowledging community needs, problems, and/or issues does not necessarily imply deficits or deficiency, but rather concerns, issues, and resources that can be addressed through the service-learning relation- ship. This problem of language is a challenge addressed in the literature but not resolved. For example, though Brown (2001) challenges that framing community issues as needs “suggests that it is a community’s own fault or inadequacy that

has created the need being addressed” (p. 15), she continues to invoke the construction of community need throughout the monograph. We need to recon- struct “need” as a term that invokes structural and systemic problems without blaming individual communities. A critical service-learning pedagogy brings attention to social change through dispelling myths of deficiency while acknowledging how sys- tems of inequality function in our society. We must help students understand that inadequate teaching and learning resources, a lack of affordable hous- ing, redressing laws that unfairly criminalize homelessness, the absence of accessible and avail- able childcare, and the unfair distribution of gov- ernment resources (e.g., policing, garbage collec- tion, public green space, among many others) are compelling community needs and there is no blame or shame in acknowledging them as such.

Course readings can also reflect a social change orientation. “Required readings help students examine theoretical perspectives…and evaluate whether they adequately reflect the reality of the disenfranchised individuals with whom they work” (Roschelle et al., 2000, p. 841). Readings can often invoke voices or experiences not heard or realized in service, and raise questions and inspire dialogue that can lead to deeper understanding. The readings and concepts covered in a critical service-learning course should bring attention to issues of social justice and concepts of privilege and oppression.

Service, itself, is a concept steeped in issues of identity and privilege which must be wrestled with for students to be effective in their service work. A critical service-learning program is intentional in its social change orientation and in its aim toward a more just and caring society; part of that intention- ality is demonstrated in the concepts with which students engage in classroom discussions, read- ings, and writing assignments.

Capstone experiences can bring attention to social change through a service-learning experi- ence. They can be a culminating research project that allows students to analyze, propose, and implement a strategy to address a community con- cern. Capstone experiences are most effective when students’ service involves collaborations with community members and responds to community- identified concerns. From mistakes and successes, students come to understand the process of com- munity change (Mitchell, 2007).

Bickford and Reynolds (2002) argue that the framing of service-learning projects and activities in the classroom “impacts both what our students do and how they understand it (i.e., whether it con- tributes to ‘change’ or just ‘helps’ someone). The frameworks within which we think of our work are

Traditional vs. Critical Service-Learning

not ‘irrelevant’” (p. 241). A social change orienta- tion allows critical service-learning programs to look beyond immediate challenges to more com- prehensive issues of our communities (Téllez, 2000). A critical service-learning pedagogy moves beyond simply doing service in connection to a course’s academic content to challenging students to articulate their own visions for a more just soci- ety and investigate and contemplate actions that propel society toward those visions.

Working to Redistribute Power

Traditional service-learning programs seldom acknowledge the power differences inherent in ser- vice-learning experiences. Lori Pompa (2002) dis- cusses the undergirding power issues in the tradi- tional service-learning approach:

If I “do for” you, “serve” you, “give to” you— that creates a connection in which I have the resources, the abilities, the power, and you are on the receiving end. It can be—while benign in intent—ironically disempowering to the receiver, granting further power to the giver. Without meaning to, this process replicates the “have-have not” paradigm that underlies many social problems. (p. 68)

An aspect of the service-learning experience that practitioners cannot escape or diminish is that stu- dents engaged in service-learning will undoubtedly have greater societal privilege than those whom they encounter at their service placements. Whether it be race, class, age, ability, or education level, and in some cases the privilege of time (which may also manifest as class privilege), students in some way (or in all of these ways) have more power than the con- stituents in the service agencies where they work. “Service, because it involves the experience of social inequalities and crossings of the very borders that sustain and reproduce them, facilitates musings on alternative worlds; on utopias, not as practical reali- ties, but as visions propelling social change” (Taylor, 2002, p. 53). While some practitioners point to an “encounter with difference” as an aspect of the ser- vice-learning experience that leads to the develop- ment and change desired (Kahne & Westheimer, 1996; Rhoads, 1997), we must be cautious in asking students to engage in these experiences without chal- lenging unjust structures that create differences. Cynthia Rosenberger (2000) contends, “the develop- ment of critical service learning, whose goal is to contribute to the creation of a just and equitable soci- ety, demands that we become critically conscious of the issues of power and privilege in service learning relationships” (p. 34).

The ways in which service-learning programs are

traditionally structured, Cooks et al. (2004) argue, lead to a socially constructed image of a community in need of repair, with students armed and prepared to “fix” what is wrong. Simply by choosing which agencies will be “served” and how and when stu- dents will enter the service experience to complete certain tasks or meet certain objectives allows power to be retained firmly in the grasp of the instructor and students. From this place, we determine “who or what needs to be ‘fixed’, to what standard, and who should be in charge of fixing the problem” (Cooks et al., p. 45). Service-learning faculty, who wish to incorporate a critical approach, must recognize and problematize issues of power in the service experi- ence. Warren (1998) challenges, “Looking at diversi- ty alone is not enough to truly examine social justice issues. Diversity often implies different but equal, while social justice education recognizes that some social groups in our society have greater access to social power” (p. 136). Too often, the “difference” experienced in the service setting is reduced to issues of diversity. This action serves to essentialize and reinforce the dichotomies of “us” and “them,” repro- ducing the hierarchies critical service-learning seeks to undo.

Butin (2003) introduces a “postructuralist perspec- tive” of service-learning as a way to investigate our collusion with systems of injustice and viewing ser- vice-learning as “a site of identity construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction” (p. 1684). “Specifically,” he writes, “a poststructuralist perspec- tive suggests that in positioning ourselves as tutors who give back to the community, we are necessarily involved in asymmetrical and static power relations” (p. 1684). A critical service-learning pedagogy names the differential access to power experienced by students, faculty, and community members, and encourages analysis, dialogue, and discussion of those power dynamics. Without looking at access to social power and the role of power (or the lack of power) in determining who receives service as well as what services are provided, the potential of using service-learning as a pedagogy that brings society closer to justice is forfeited.

Illuminating issues of power in the service-learn- ing experience is not easy. It requires confronting assumptions and stereotypes, owning unearned privilege, and facing inequality and oppression as something real and omnipresent. Densmore (2000) supports a curricular approach that explores in- depth both the historical and current relationships between social groups that leads to and reinforces hierarchies of difference in society. Rosenberger (2000) seems unsure whether service-learning practitioners are prepared to embark upon this challenge when she asks:

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Is service learning willing to participate in the unveiling and problematizing of the present reality of our society and to respond to the dif- ficult, complex issues of inequity, oppression, and domination? Is service learning willing to make less-privileged people subjects and not objects? (p. 32)

Hayes and Cuban (1997) introduce “border peda- gogy” as a means to enable individuals to think more deeply about power relations and their experiences with privilege and oppression. “Border crossing serves as a metaphor for how people might gain a more critical perspective on the forms of domination inherent in their own histories, knowledge, and prac- tices, and learn to value alternative forms of knowl- edge” (Hayes & Cuban, p. 75).

The very real power differentials in service- learning relationships must be exposed in order to be critically analyzed and possibly changed (Varlotta, 1997b). Butin (2005) concurs, under- standing service-learning pedagogy as “fundamen- tally an attempt to reframe relations of power” (p. x). A critical service-learning pedagogy not only acknowledges the imbalance of power in the ser- vice relationship, but seeks to challenge the imbal- ance and redistribute power through the ways that service-learning experiences are both planned and implemented. To do so, everyone’s perspective, especially those of community members to whom power is potentially redistributed, “must be accounted for and eventually integrated into the service experience” (Varlotta, 1997b, p. 38).

The Community Component

Service-learning has already been called on for its tendency to privilege the needs of students above those of community members (Brown, 2001; Eby, 1998). A critical service-learning experience seeks mutual benefit for all parties in the experi- ence. Ward and Wolf-Wendel (2000) challenge us to view service-learning as a “focus in on us” (p. 769, emphasis added), recognizing that the prob- lems being addressed through service-learning impact all of us as a community.

In developing a service-learning experience, stakeholders consider the complementary relation- ship between the service activity, course content, community needs, and student outcomes. To chal- lenge the distribution of (and work to redistribute) power, critical service-learning experiences empower community residents “to do as much of the work as its resources allow” (Marullo & Edwards, 2000, p. 907). The service experience in a critical service-learning pedagogy need not mimic traditional paradigms of service. Students and faculty can work alongside community mem-

bers, political advocacy, and direct protest (espe- cially as actions determined by the community to best serve community needs) can be viewed as ser- vice, and campus resources can be allocated to address community needs (e.g., providing commu- nity access to the campus library, involving ana- lysts from institutional research in completing a community needs assessment, operating a soup kitchen from a university dining hall). Additionally, long-term partnerships that begin before and last beyond the semester and provide opportunities for continuity avoid the “turn-over” typical in tradi- tional service-learning (Brown, 2001). These actions probably do not go far enough to dismantle the oppressive hierarchies defining the server- served dichotomy, but may provide enough chal- lenge to the usual service relationship to allow our- selves, our students, and community members to question the distribution of power.

The Classroom Component

In the classroom, critical service-learning experi- ences look to knowledge from community mem- bers, the curriculum, and the students themselves. “Service-learning challenges our static notions of teaching and learning, decenters our claim to the labels of ‘students’ and ‘teachers,’ and exposes and explores the linkages between power, knowledge, and identity” (Butin, 2005, pp. vii-viii). Through classroom experiences, questioning the distribution of power can be facilitated through readings, reflective writing, experiential activities, and class- room discussions. These experiences recognize that knowledge and understanding are developed in many different ways.

Discussions about biases, unearned privilege, and power must figure prominently in service- learning classrooms (Green, 2001; Nieto, 2000; Roschelle et al., 2000; Rosenberger, 2000). A criti- cal service-learning pedagogy encourages analysis and dialogue that allows students to identify and challenge unequal distributions of power that cre- ate the need for service. The border pedagogy that Hayes and Cuban (1997) advocate may create the openness and acceptance of “alternative knowl- edge” needed to create an inclusive service-learn- ing experience where stakeholders can share power and challenge traditional power relationships.

Crossing borders of knowledge, and entering into “borderlands,” where existing patterns of thought, relationship, and identity are called into question and juxtaposed with alternative ways of knowing and being, provides the opportunity for creative and oppositional reconstructions of self, knowledge, and cul- ture… (p. 75)

Traditional vs. Critical Service-Learning

How power relationships are produced and repro- duced should be ongoingly observed and critiqued, with a consciousness geared toward reconfiguring power relationships to reverse current (and expect- ed) hierarchies in traditional service practice. Recognizing the knowledge of (and in) the com- munity by insuring community input is reflected in the curriculum is important (Brown, 2001; Cipolle, 2004). This may be accomplished by bringing community members into the service-learning classroom through curriculum development or teaching roles, having faculty members engaged in the service experience alongside students, or “reversing” the service-learning structure by hav- ing classes in the community.

Reconfiguring the traditional classroom is another way to encourage the redistribution of power. Disrupting the banking dynamic that is supported by a classroom configuration with a teacher in the front and the students in rows can be challenged by having all class participants (faculty included) sitting in a circle. Holding classes in lounge environments (where comfortable chairs or couches replace more formal student desks) is another way to challenge the dynamic. A change in the learning environment can introduce students to the possibility that learning occurs in multiple locations. Students and communi- ty members may also share facilitation of the class with faculty members, and students (and community members) can provide input into the construction of the syllabus or the topics addressed in the classroom. These actions can help redefine the meaning of teachers and learners (Schultz, 2006). Creating a “professorless” environment where students and/or community members participate in reflection with- out the pressure or influence of a faculty member’s presence can also shift the power dynamic and raise questions about knowledge, power, and identity (Addes & Keene, 2006).

Marullo and Edwards (2000) suggest that com- munity members should benefit from the skill development (“problem solving, critical thinking, organizational know-how, and communication skills”) afforded to many students in service-learn- ing programs (p. 907). Shouldn’t (and couldn’t) a critical service-learning pedagogy fully integrate community members into the service-learning experience? The distribution of power in this dynamic could be questioned and reconfigured as every participant in the service-learning relation- ship viewed themselves as a part of the community working for change, as a student in the classroom seeking to build skills for community development, and as a conveyor of knowledge—a teacher—with valid and powerful ideas, experiences, and per- spectives to share.

Developing Authentic Relationships

Developing genuine partnerships among edu- cators and their students, and people and orga- nizations situated in “the community,” is criti- cal to the learning process and to working toward social justice…the relationship should be considered as both a means to social justice and a product of a more just society. (Koliba, O'Meara, & Seidel, 2000, p. 27)

Rosenberger (2000) notes, “much of the service learning literature shares a commitment to building mutual relationships and to letting members of the community identify the need. What is missing, however, is an approach for creating such relation- ships” (p. 37). The focus on developing authentic relationships, relationships based on connection, is an important element of a critical service-learning pedagogy. Critical service-learning demands we recognize the differences in service relationships, but as Collins (2000) reminds us, “most relation- ships across difference are squarely rooted in rela- tions of domination and subordination, we have much less experience relating to people as different but equal” (p. 459). Instead, we must learn to see our differences as “categories of connection,” places from which to analyze power, build coali- tions, and develop empathy (Collins, 2000).

Relationships based on connection recognize and work with difference. Connection challenges the self-other binary and emphasizes reciprocity and interdependence. Common goals and shared understanding create mutuality, respect, and trust leading to authenticity. Reciprocity in the service- learning experience seeks to create an environment where all learn from and teach one another (Kendall, 1990). This emphasizes a collaborative relationship and seeks to involve all parties equally in the creation of service-learning experiences (Rhoads, 1997).

“In most service-learning situations, relation- ships are clearly based on difference: I’m home- less; you’re not” (Bickford & Reynolds, 2002, p. 237). This position makes it challenging to form a relationship based on connection, because the express purpose of interaction is centered on the differences between the service-learning student and the community served. Varlotta (1997b) cau- tions, “unless service-learners explicitly theorize the complex relationships between and among servers and servees, one group is likely to become subordinate to the other” (p. 18).

Critical service-learning experiences must pay special attention to how relationships are devel- oped and maintained in the service experience. The challenge is to create relationships that neither

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ignore the realities of social inequality in our soci- ety nor attempt to artificially homogenize all peo- ple in the service-learning experience (Bickford & Reynolds, 2002). Varlotta (1997b) warns:

If students participating in a service-learning experience are instructed to look constantly for the things that make them like the people they are serving, then artificial homogenization is likely to result. While it is sure to be the case that college students enrolled in service-learn- ing courses have something in common with servees, I believe it is dangerous, condescend- ing, and offensive to suggest that they can put themselves in the place of a homeless person, a run-away teen, a battered woman, etc. Is it possible after serving at these types of “safe- haven” shelters for college students to under- stand what it is like to be homeless or victim- ized by family violence? Though students might improve their understanding of home- lessness, domestic violence, and teenage street life especially if they reflect critically upon these social problems and contextualize the specific situations at play, it is still unlikely, in my opinion, to claim that service-learning allows them to “know” what it is like to be homeless, abused, etc. (p. 80)

Students cannot enter the service-learning experience with the false understanding that they are “just like” the community served. In theorizing complex rela- tionships, students must be able to name the ways they are both like and unlike the individuals they work with in the service setting, and further how those similarities and differences impact their inter- actions at the service site and (should this chance meeting occur) away from the service site. This is not to say, however, that students cannot build effective, authentic relationships with community members based on connection. As Varlotta (1997b) acknowl- edges, service learners may indeed have something in common with “those served.” Students in service- learning experiences might use those commonalities to forge relationships with community members, and over time, through the experience of sharing their lives, authentic relationships may develop.

Some service-learning practitioners view dialog- ic engagement as critical to the development of authentic relationships with community members (Jones & Hill, 2001; Levinson, 1990; Pompa, 2002). Pompa sees dialogic engagement as both verbal exchange and as the experience of “being together.” Levinson explains:

Engagement implies intensity…Programs that engage students demand not only that students use their hearts (e.g., sympathize or empathize with clients); they also insist that students

understand intellectually the “broad social dynamics” underlying the situations of the people they serve (the plight of the elderly, causes of poverty, racism, etc.). Engagement programs require more commitment from their students than just fulfilling the required num- ber of hours. (p. 69, emphasis in original)

This mandate from Levinson (1990) further clarifies the interlocking elements of a critical service-learn- ing pedagogy. Authentic relationships demand atten- tion to social change and understanding the root causes of social problems. Authentic relationships also demand an analysis of power and a reconfigur- ing of power in the service relationship. Taylor (2002) and Varlotta (1997b) might also argue that authentic relationships demand a new metaphor for service, one that replaces our notions of service with notions of community in which all people understand and embrace our connectedness and interdepen- dence. Remen (2000) indicates agreement with this approach as she defines service as “belonging.” She sees service as “a relationship between equals,” or “a relationship between people who bring the full resources of their combined humanity to the table and share them generously” (p. 198). A critical ser- vice-learning pedagogy asks everyone to approach the service-learning relationship with authenticity. In this process, we would develop a shared agenda, acknowledge the power relations implicit in our interactions, and recognize the complexity of identi- ty—understanding that our relationship within the service-learning context is further complicated by societal expectations.1

The Community Component

The service-learning relationship is inherently complex because of the myriad roles the pedagogy requires of students and community members. For students, this requires them to move between student and teacher roles throughout the service experience (sometimes playing both roles simultaneously). A student may be placed in a particular service experi- ence for the skills she can bring to the agency and asked to teach or train various community members elements of that skill (e.g., a student working in a computer facility for a job training program). At the same time, that student is expected to make observa- tions and to analyze and understand the systemic and institutional forces that make their service necessary in today’s society. Community members, on the other hand, might be asked to move between roles of stu- dent and teacher, supervisor, and person in need. As a student, the community member may be the person learning about computers from the service-learner at the job-training program, and as the person in need, that community member may also be (or feel)

Traditional vs. Critical Service-Learning

expected to show gratitude and appreciation for the service being provided. As a supervisor, the commu- nity member may be in a position of providing direc- tion to the service-learner, telling the individual (or several individuals) where to go, what to do, and how to do specific tasks. As supervisors, community members are sometimes asked to provide orientation and job training, verify service hours, and meet with students to give feedback and assess the students’ ser- vice. Finally, as teacher, we sometimes ask commu- nity members to be their most vulnerable. The ser- vice-learning experience asks that community mem- bers teach us (and/or our students) what it means to be in their particular circumstance (be it homeless, “at-risk”, elderly, or illiterate).

Preparation for the service experience and the varied roles students and community members will be challenged to fill must be clearly conveyed in a critical service-learning pedagogy. All participants must be informed and willing to engage in these service relationships if authenticity is to be devel- oped. Susan Cipolle (2004) warns that “students are often unprepared for the service learning expe- rience” and points specifically to a lack of knowl- edge or understanding about the people served as a factor of student unpreparedness (p. 20). In my experience, students involved in service-learning either have not had the opportunity nor taken the time to explore the communities that surround the college or university campus. It is important to pro- vide that opportunity for students, to give them a chance to learn about and understand the commu- nity in which they will be working. But, this lack of knowledge is also true for the service site. Service agencies are often unprepared for service-learning with unclear expectations for students’ service and time, with limited understanding of what service- learning is, and (sometimes) without an accurate understanding of the history, knowledge, skills, and experiences of the students coming to serve. We do the students and the service agency a disservice by asking students to show up for service with little to no information about the mission and work of that agency. We do community partners a disservice by not appropriately preparing them for the service- learning relationship. Because developing authen- tic relationships is a desired goal of a critical ser- vice-learning pedagogy, appropriate preparation for the relationship is extremely important.

Levinson’s (1990) directive for engagement beyond service hours means that opportunities for stakeholders in the service-learning relationship to interact beyond the service work are important. Formal and informal meetings between students, faculty, and community members offer possibilities for dialogue and coalition building.

Authenticity necessitates good communication between campus and community partners. This begins with appropriate preparation for the relation- ship, and continues with ongoing dialogue to provide opportunities to share information, exchange feed- back, and evaluate the partnership. Strand, Marullo, Cutforth, Stoecker, & Donohue (2003) stress that all members in a campus-community collaboration “work to be effective talkers and good listeners” (p. 55). They suggest avoiding academic jargon and slang, co-developing ground rules, and working to ensure stakeholders have equal voice “including those people who, because of age or social status, are not used to contributing equally to a discussion or being listened to” as strategies for effective commu- nication (Strand et al., p. 55).

The problem of continuity, discussed earlier, is another important consideration of authenticity in relationships. Authenticity is not achieved in a semester, so an ongoing partnership and prolonged engagement in service are integral to achieving this desired outcome. By prolonged engagement in ser- vice, I mean a service opportunity that is ongoing, where students are regularly engaged and involved in the projects and work of the service agency. This service should be meaningful, providing the stu- dent with work that captures their passion or inter- est and affording the agency necessary and impor- tant contributions to its purpose. The agency should be able (and feel comfortable) to depend on regular involvement from campus partners (stu- dents, faculty, staff or others). The opportunity to continue and expand their service work at the agency should be available to students as the skills and knowledge these students develop can contin- ue to benefit the agency and provide new service- learners with peer models. An expanding role with the service site can also provide students with more and greater skills that may assist them in applying their academic disciplines in service work or in developing passions or interests that lead to career options or lifelong involvement in service.

The agency also benefits from sustained service engagement. Programs and projects benefit from experienced leadership. New service-learning stu- dents can be trained and oriented by a fellow stu- dent, saving community partner time and resources. Constituents of community agencies see a familiar face time and again which can make it easier and more comfortable when new students are introduced into service roles. Experienced vol- unteers also transition easily into staff roles of community agencies. As relationships are devel- oped, skills are learned, and commitment to the work is evident, students become valuable resources to the agency.

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Long-term partnerships, where faculty and high- er education institutions are engaged with the com- munity, should be the goal of critical service-learn- ing. A commitment to community development that is sustained and maintained benefits all stake- holders in a critical service-learning experience and goes a long way toward developing authentici- ty (Marullo & Edwards, 2000). A campus commit- ment to partnership can funnel financial resources into a community, generate interest in and attention to issues facing the community, and break down town-gown barriers. Further, a long-term partner- ship builds knowledge as the institution becomes more invested and involved in the community. This benefits the service-learning relationship as cam- pus and community work together to define and develop critical service-learning experiences that effectively respond to community needs by utiliz- ing the experience, expertise, and resources of the community, departments (programs or schools), faculty, university staff, and students. Campuses and communities can do more, through developed and authentic partnerships where trust is built and agendas shared, to implement programs, policies, and interventions that address root causes, trans- form communities, and lead to sustainable change.

The Classroom Component

In the critical service-learning classroom, devel- oping authentic faculty and student relationships provides a model for engagement in the communi- ty. This is achieved by a commitment to dialogue, developing self-awareness, critical reflection, and building solidarity.

Authenticity in relationships is dependent on dia- logue and connection. Sustained and meaningful fac- ulty and student exchanges are necessary to engage “in a critical analysis of the world” (Cipolle, 2004, p. 22) that connects to personal histories, multiple perspec- tives, and sociological and historical material (Zúñiga, 1998). Dialogue includes opportunities for formal and informal interaction, honoring conversations during breaks and before and after class as effective spaces for relationship building (Cranton, 2006). Extended con- versations “about subject matter in a way that builds an improved and shared understanding of ideas or topics” is an element of authentic pedagogy (Newmann, Marks, & Gamoran, 1996, p. 289). Zúñiga recom- mends a blend of content and process—a facilitation that deals strategically with disciplinary knowledge and behavioral outcomes—to begin and sustain mean- ingful faculty-student dialogue.

Self-awareness is an important feature of authen- ticity (Cranton, 2006; Glatthorn, 1975). To be authentic we must acknowledge who we are and the biases that shape our interactions. Exploring

identity, personal histories, and experiences of privilege and oppression are important to engage effectively and authentically. Experiential activi- ties, simulation exercises, and personal reflection can facilitate self-awareness exploration (Cranton; Zúñiga, 1998). Cranton suggests an autobiography exercise where participants develop a narrative shared with others. The participation of facilitators and/or instructors in these self-awareness exercises is especially important as authentic relationships must be fostered amongst all participants in the classroom (Cranton; Glatthorn, 1975).

Critical reflection is central to transformative learning and service-learning practice (Cranton, 2006; Jacoby, 1996), and may contribute to authen- tic relationships in the classroom. Engaging in crit- ical reflection requires questioning assumptions and values, and paying attention to the impacts and implications of our community work. While jour- naling is often used to encourage critical reflection, Popok (2007) goes further, recommending that stu- dents share their writing in front of an audience to receive and respond to feedback. This exchange develops authenticity through vulnerability and trust-building. This exercise also creates a space for students to be challenged, question their ideas, and integrate new perspectives into their thinking. Glatthorn’s (1975) notion of growth as a process of self-discovery is especially important to critical reflection. The classroom must be designed to cre- ate space for students to discover their opinions and commitments to the concerns raised through a crit- ical service-learning experience.

Radest (1993) encourages building solidarity, a concept central to authenticity. Solidarity extends beyond the service relationship to a broader com- mitment to social justice; it reflects what is possi- ble once the service-learning course ends. Cipolle (2004) and Sheffield (2005) express a need for sol- idarity as an outcome of service-learning. “It devel- ops in the student not simply emotional readiness, but a cognitive/imaginative readiness” to engage in future action for social change (Sheffield, p. 49). Walker (2000) assigns an action plan at the end of the service-learning course to build this readiness in students. Students develop an advocacy cam- paign based on their service experience and research and are able, then, to figure out ways to act on their own and engage others in the work. Expressions of solidarity represent a dimension of authenticity because they demonstrate that we will continue to work for social change and social jus- tice once the service-learning experience has con- cluded. It is the recognition that the social prob- lems and structural inequalities that create and maintain those problems belong to all of us and

Traditional vs. Critical Service-Learning

require all of us for change to occur. Service-learning, Rhoads (1997) contends, is an

experience “that brings students into a direct and significant relationship with others, and thus chal- lenges students to consider a variety of significant issues about the self, such as a code to live by” (p. 36). The critical service-learning experience forged with authentic relationships, challenges students to confront stereotypes and generalizations and leads to the development of a more caring self (Rhoads). Through these relationships, service-learning prac- titioners hope that students will feel compelled to pursue further action on the issues they encounter in the service experience. At the same time, how- ever, Bickford and Reynolds (2002) remind us, “Avoiding superficial encounters begins with the recognition, already in place among service-learn- ing advocates, that one assignment, one semester, is not enough” (p. 234). Authentic relationships depend on a commitment to one another that extends beyond the last day of class.

Conclusion

In this review of a critical service-learning peda- gogy, I have indicated that a social change orienta- tion, working to redistribute power, and developing authentic relationships are the elements most cited in the literature to differentiate the practice from tradi- tional service-learning models. Pompa (2002) sum- marizes the critical service-learning approach as “becoming conscientious of and able to critique social systems, motivating participants to analyze what they experience, while inspiring them to take action and make change” (p. 75). Marullo (1999) predicts that a critical service-learning pedagogy will produce future activists and leaders committed to social justice. Critical service-learning advocates see the potential to transform generations and ulti- mately society through carefully implemented ser- vice-learning experiences.

While the intentionality of a critical service-learn- ing approach may be difficult to implement within the borders of institutions and a society that do not necessarily invite social change, the promise of this approach and the ethical obligations of the pedagogy require this be the next direction of service-learning programs. Schulz (2007) reminds us that “social jus- tice cannot activate itself. Rather, it takes the con- certed effort of interdependent stakeholders (com- munity members, students, and instructors) to trans- form social justice theory into service-learning prac- tice” (p. 34). Developing experiences with greater attention to equality and shared power between all participants in the service experience and challeng- ing students to analyze the interplay of power, priv- ilege, and oppression at the service placement and in

their experience in that placement will ensure that a critical service-learning pedagogy questions and problematizes the status quo.

Notes

Many thanks to the editors and reviewers of this jour- nal for their thorough and insightful feedback.

1 I am grateful to Dr. Seth Pollack for helping me think through the dimensions of authenticity crucial to relation- ship building in critical service-learning pedagogy.

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Author

TANIA D. MITCHELL is the service-learning director for the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University. In this role, she directs the department’s academic program in public service, community development, and com- munity-based research. Her teaching and research interests include service-learning pedagogy, college student development, and social justice.

No_One_Is_Illegal_Fighting_Racism_and_State_Violen..._----_(Part_I, Chs. 1-11_What_Is_a_Vigilante_Man_White_Violence_in_California_History).pdf

Part I

“What Is a Vigilante Man?” White Violence in California History

Mike Davis

Akers, Chacón, Justin, and Mike Davis. No One Is Illegal : Fighting Racism and State Violence on the U.S.-Mexico Border, Haymarket Books, 2006. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucsc/detail.action?docID=3028072. Created from ucsc on 2021-01-04 11:27:16.

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Victoria Cintra (in the car), Gulf Coast Coordinator for the

Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance (MIRA), advises un-

documented workers in Hangar 216 of the Naval Construc-

tion Battalion Center in Gulfport, Mississippi. Some of the

270 workers, including 30 women, contracted by a private

company accused its owner of imposing subhuman work-

ing conditions at the New Orleans Naval Base. They lived in

tents with no water or electricity, food was scarce, they

were overworked and underpaid. They were evacuated to

Gulfport when Hurricane Rita struck. September 2005.

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Introduction

C alifornia’s golden fields have too often been irrigated with the blood of its laborers. A notorious case in point was the great strike that spread like wildfire through the San Joaquin Valley in the fall

of 1933. Protesting starvation wages that failed to fill their children’s empty bellies, twelve thousand defiant, mainly Mexican cotton-pickers walked off the job under the leadership of the leftwing Cannery and Agri- cultural Workers Industrial Union. Moving between farms in caravans of cars and trucks, mass pickets soon shut down the harvest over a three- hundred-square-mile area. The growers quickly trucked in strikebreakers from Los Angeles, but most of the scabs either deserted to the union or were scared away by the fierce, hunger-driven militancy of the strikers.

The growers, cotton ginners, and chamber of commerce types then resorted to a classic tactic: arming themselves as vigilance groups to im- pose a reign of terror upon the cotton counties. These Farmers’ Protec- tive Leagues broke up the strikers’ meetings, drove them out of their encampments and burnt their tents, beat them on the picket lines, stopped and harassed them on the roads, and threatened any merchant who extended credit to the strikers or any small farmer who refused to hire strikebreakers. When strikers complained to authorities, the local sheriffs promptly deputized the vigilantes. “We protect our farmers here in Kern County,” explained one deputy sheriff. “They are our best people.... They keep the county going.… But the Mexicans are trash.

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They have no standard of living. We herd them like pigs.”1

In spite of beatings, arrests, and evictions, however, the solidarity of the strikers remained unbreakable through early October, with the growers facing the loss of their entire crop. The San Francisco Examiner warned that the whole valley was “a smouldering volcano” ready to erupt. Concerned state officials offered a fact-finding commission, which the union readily accepted, but the vigilantes responded with murder. At a rally in Pixley on the tenth of October, union leader Pat Chambers was addressing strikers and their families when ten carloads of shotgun-wielding vigilantes abruptly arrived on the scene. Cham- bers, a battle-scarred veteran of California’s harvest wars, sensed immi- nent danger and dispersed the rally, urging the strikers to take shelter in the red-brick union headquarters across the highway. Historian Cletus Daniel describes the carnage that followed:

As the group made its way toward the building one of the growers fol- lowing it discharged a rifle. When a striker approached the grower and pushed the barrel of his gun downward another armed grower rushed forward and clubbed him to the ground. While he still lay on the ground the grower shot him to death. Immediately the rest of the growers opened fire on the fleeing strikers and their families. Amid the screams of those that lay wounded on the ground, growers continued to fire into the union hall until their ammunition was finally exhausted.2

The vigilantes killed two men, one of them the local representative of the Mexican consul-general, and seriously wounded at least eight other strikers, including a fifty-year-old woman. As a San Francisco re- porter noted, the wild fusillade also shredded the American flags draped over the union headquarters. Almost simultaneously in Arvin, sixty miles south, another band of farmer-vigilantes opened fire on picketers, killing one and injuring several. Although the workers defi- antly returned to their picket lines, the growers threatened to drive their families out of the huge strike camp near Corcoran. Faced with yet more violence of unknown scope, the strikers reluctantly yielded to state and federal pressure and accepted a wage increase in lieu of recog- nition of their union.

The following year, while public attention was riveted upon the epic San Francisco general strike, vigilante growers and local sheriffs tore up the constitution across rural California, and imposed what New Dealers as well as Communists would denounce as “farm fascism.” One of the darkest spots was the Imperial Valley—the West’s closest social

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and racial analogue to Mississippi—where successive lettuce, pea, and melon strikes during the course of 1933–34 were broken by a total ter- ror that included mass arrests, anti-picketing ordinances, evictions, beatings, kidnappings, deportations, and the near lynching of the strik- ers’ lawyers. While urban workers led by the new Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) unions were successfully overthrowing the open shop in San Francisco and Los Angeles, California’s agricultural work- ers—whether their names were Maria Morales or Tom Joad—were being terrorized by bigoted deputies and raging mobs. The bitter mem- ory of these brutal events would be woven into John Steinbeck’s novels In Dubious Battle and Grapes of Wrath, as well as recalled in Woody Guthrie’s haunting “Vigilante Man”:

Oh, why does a vigilante man Why does a vigilante man Carry that sawed-off shotgun in his hand? Would he shoot his brother and Sister down?

But this “vigilante man” was not merely a sinister figure of the De- pression decade: as I will argue in this capsule history, he has cast a per- manent shadow over California from the 1850s onwards. Indeed, vigi- lantism—ethno-racial and class violence (or threat of violence) cloaked in a pseudo-populist appeal to higher laws and sovereignties—has played a far larger role in the state’s history than is generally recog- nized. A broad rainbow of minority groups, including Native Ameri- cans, Irish, Chinese, Punjabis, Japanese, Filipinos, Okies, African- Americans, and (persistently in each generation) Mexicans, as well as radicals and trade-unionists of various denominations, have been vic- tims of vigilante repression. Organized private violence, usually in tan- dem with local law enforcement, has shaped the racial-caste system of California agriculture, defeated radical labor movements like the IWW, and kept the New Deal out of the state’s farm counties. It has also spurred innumerable reactionary laws and reinforced both legal and de facto segregation. Moreover, the vigilante is no curio of a bad past, but a pathological type currently undergoing dramatic post-millennial re- vival as many Anglo-Californians panic in the face of demographic de- cline and the perceived erosion of their racial privileges.

Today’s armed and combat-camouflaged “Minutemen” in their various factions, who instigate confrontations on the border, or (in

INTRODUCTION 13

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their civilian garb) harass day laborers in front of suburban Home De- pots, are the latest incarnations of an old character. Their infantile strutting and posing may contrast rather comically to the authentic fas- cist menace of the Associated Farmers and other Depression-era groups, but it would be foolish to discount their impact. Just as the grower vigilantes of the 1930s succeeded in militarizing rural Califor- nia against the labor movement, the Minutemen have helped to radi- calize debate about immigration and race within the Republican Party, contributing to the full-fledged nativist backlash against the Bush ad- ministration’s proposal for a new Bracero Program. Candidates in Re- publican primaries in Southern California now vie with one another for endorsement by the Minutemen leaders. These armed and media- savvy neo-vigilantes, by threatening to enforce the borders themselves, also spur the increasingly successful campaign to turn local law en- forcement into immigration police. And as true dialecticians will con- cede, what begins as farce sometimes grows into something much uglier and more dangerous.

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Chapter One

Pinkertons, Klansmen, and Vigilantes

Americans appear responsible for developing vigilantism, the consum- mate expression of conservative violence.

—Robert Ingalls1

B efore looking at the career of vigilantism in California history, it is first useful to map its location within the larger history of American class and racial violence. The eminent labor historian

Philip Taft once opined that the United States had the “bloodiest and most violent labor history of any industrial nation in the world.” Set- ting European civil wars and revolutions aside, Taft is probably correct: American workers have faced chronic state and employer violence against which they have frequently responded in kind. Robert Gold- stein, in his encyclopedic study of political repression in the United States, estimates that at least seven hundred strikers and demonstrators were killed by police or troops between 1870 and 1937.2 In contrast to the more politically centralized societies of Western Europe, the worst violence (like the Ludlow and Republic Steel massacres) usually came from local police and militias. But what truly demarcates the United States is not so much the scale or frequency of state repression, but rather the extraordinary centrality of institutionalized private violence in the reproduction of the racial and social order. No European society tolerated such a large, nearly permanent sphere of repressive activity and summary justice by non-state actors.3 But then again, no European

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society shared the recent U.S. experience of genocidal frontier vio- lence—often organized by posses and informal groups—against Native Americans, or the widespread participation of poorer Southern whites in the policing of slavery.

Fig. 1. MODES OF REPRESSION

I. STATE VIOLENCE a. Federal: regular army b. State: militias, national guard, state police c. Local: police, sheriffs, sworn posses

II. PRIVATE OR PERI-STATE VIOLENCE a. Heartland: corporate police and private detective agencies (Pinkertons) b. South: organized white supremacists (Klan) c. West: vigilantes (Order of Caucasians)

In effect, there were three geographically distinct if non-exclusive systems of private repression. First, in the industrial heartland, where local government was occasionally in the hands of Socialists or Demo- crats sympathetic to the labor movement, the biggest industrial, min- ing, and railroad corporations, loathe to put their entire trust in the local state, deployed literal armies of armed guards, plant detectives, and company police. There is little equivalent in European history for the formidable repressive role of the Pinkertons, the Sherman Corpora- tion, the Bergoff Agency, the Baldwin Felts Detective Agency, the Penn- sylvania Coal and Iron Police, or the Ford Service Department. (The Pinkertons alone reputedly outnumbered the regular U.S. Army in the early 1890s.4) Nor is there any counterpart in the experience of Euro- pean labor to such epic “private” battles as Homestead in 1892, when steelworkers defeated a regiment of Pinkertons, or Blair Mountain in 1921, when ten thousand West Virginia miners battled the Baldwin Felts for more than a week.

Second, throughout the post-Reconstruction South white su- premacy was routinely enforced by the noose and pyre in a continua- tion of the antebellum traditions of seignorial violence against slaves and the conscription of poor whites as slave hunters.

Again, there is no equivalent, except episodically in the imperial Russia of the Black Hundreds, for this sustained terror by false arrest,

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chain gang, arson, assassination, massacre, and public lynching (thirty- two hundred between 1882 and 1930).5 When lynching deaths were combined with legal executions, “an African-American was put to death somewhere in the South on the average of every four days.”6 De- spite the stereotype of lynch mobs composed of shoeless illiterate whites, the violent overthrow of Reconstruction was led by regional elites, and the planter and business strata continued to condone and orchestrate racial violence whenever it was politically expedient or re- inforced their economic dominance. They seldom challenged and often profited from a culture where “community justice included both statu- tory law and lynch law.”7 Indeed, cotton tenancy and debt peonage, and thus the profits of landowners and merchants, were maintained through chronic racial violence and the extinction of Black civil rights.

Third, vigilantism constituted a distinctive system of locally sanc- tioned violence throughout the former Western frontier states, but espe- cially in the Southwest where Anglo rule had been imposed by military conquest on Native American, Hispanic, and Mexican populations. In California—the state that was as epicentral to vigilantism as Mississippi was to Klan violence or Pennsylvania was to corporate repression—the domination of a conquered Spanish-speaking population intersected with the social control of immigrants from Asia. Vigilantism—often ex- tolled from the pulpit or editorial page—policed the boundaries of “whiteness” and “Americanism.” But vigilantes, sometimes deputized as posses, were also the strikebreakers of last resort, as well as the popular arm of antiradical crusades (such as those from 1917 to 1919 or in the early 1930s).

It should be emphasized, of course, that while these three systems of peri-legal violence had strong geographical foci, there were obvi- ously many overlaps. Blacks, for example, were murdered in the streets of Springfield (1908) and East St. Louis (1917) and lynched in Duluth (1920) as well as in the former Confederacy. Likewise the Pinkertons terrorized the IWW in Montana (the subject of Dashiell Hammet’s first novel, Red Harvest), and the “second” Klan of the 1920s was probably most powerful in Oregon, Colorado, and Indiana. Middle-class vigi- lantes often played auxiliary roles in the big showdowns between Mid- western labor and capital, as in Akron in 1913 or Minneapolis in 1934. The best single historical study of antilabor vigilantism, moreover, is Robert Ingalls’s book on Tampa, Florida—a New South city—where

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local business elites terrorized “workers, labor organizers, immigrants, blacks, Socialists, and Communists”: a bloody history that culminated in the repression of striking Cuban cigar makers in 1931.8

Nor, in the face of the caste-like segmentation of the American working class, is it very profitable to attempt to rigorously distinguish ethno-religious and racial violence from class violence. Thus the 1897 Latimer Massacre, when deputies and vigilantes murdered twenty-one peaceful Slavic miners protesting a newly passed “alien tax,” was as much an anti-immigrant pogrom (“We’ll give you hell, not water, hunkies!” screamed the deputies) as it was class repression. Likewise many of the Black sharecroppers and independent farmers who were murdered or lynched in the South were singled out because they had defied a boss, competed with whites for land, or achieved unusual pros- perity. As Stewart Tolnay and E. Beck have shown in a well-known study, Southern lynchings tended to follow the economic cycle of cot- ton, with “Blacks safer from mob violence when the profits from cotton were high.”9 Indeed, it is the fusion of racial or ethnic hatred with eco- nomic self-interest (real or perceived) that explains much of the ex- tremity as well as the self-righteousness of private violence toward sub- ordinate groups in American history.

Why then even bother to distinguish Western “vigilantism” from Southern mob violence, particularly if vigilantes were usually racists, while Southern terrorists were also apt to strike out at white radicals, Jews, and civil rights supporters? Likewise large-scale agriculture in the Southwest as in the Southeast was capitalized on caste discrimination, disenfranchisement, and employer violence. In Factories in the Fields (his non-fiction counterpart to Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath), radical journalist Carey McWilliams was emphatic that California vigilantism, even if “nowadays … sophisticated by self-conscious artistry,” was built on “an antiforeign bias” and infused by “racial feeling.”10 But if any dis- tinction between the West and the South can only be upheld within a more fundamental continuum, California-style vigilantism nonetheless has tended to be more episodic and ad hoc, less firmly anchored in statutory inequality (like Jim Crow laws), more pluralistic in the objects of its intolerance, but less dualistic in its legal and moral legitimation.

The Western vigilante classically claims the right to act because the state is either absent, in the hands of criminals, or in default of its fun- damental obligations (for example, to enforce immigration laws or de-

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fend private property). Thus the Brawley News in 1933 resorted to the following sophistry to justify a particularly brutal vigilante attack on striking Mexican farmworkers: “It was not mob violence, it was a stud- ied organized movement of citizens seeking the only way out of diffi- culties threatening the community’s peace when the hands of the law are tied by the law itself.”11 White Southerners, on the other hand, have always asserted supreme racial prerogatives that override any state or federal statute and require no convoluted rationalization. The West- erner defends his actions in the name of unenforced laws and the fron- tier principle of posse comitatus, while the Southerner appeals to the primal priority of race and “white honor.” If the sadistic frenzy of anti- Black violence in Southern history has found few defenders outside the region, Western vigilantism—often just as racist and despicable—was praised by the likes of Hubert Howe Bancroft, Leland Stanford, and Theodore Roosevelt, and, indeed, is still celebrated today as an essen- tially “wholesome tradition of spontaneous communal justice,” part of a romantic heritage of frontier democracy.12

What about the social roots of vigilantism? In his study of Tampa, Ingalls finds a fundamental continuity of elite control: “vigilantes take the law into their own hands to reinforce existing power relationships, not to subvert them.… Whether the particular target was a black pris- oner, a union organizer, a political radical, or a common criminal, ex- tralegal violence was supposed to preserve the status quo.”13 More pon- dero u s l y, R ay Abr a h a m s , w h o l o o k s a t v i g i l a n te g ro u p s a s a n international phenomenon, concludes that “vigilantism is rarely simply a popular response to the failure of due legal process to deal with breaches of the law. ‘The people’ and ‘the community’ are, on inspec- tion, complex concepts, and the populism of much vigilante rhetoric conceals … a self-satisfied elitism.”14 Richard Brown, in an earlier study of vigilantism on the frontier, argued that “again and again, it was the most eminent local community leaders who headed vigilante move- ments … [and] the typical vigilante leaders were ambitious young men from the old settled areas of the East. They wished to establish them- selves in the upper level of the new community, at the status they held or aspired to in the place of their origin.”15

In California history, however, there is a striking difference be- tween the class profiles of vigilantism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Victorian vigilantes (with the notable exceptions of the two

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San Francisco vigilance movements of the 1850s) tended to be workers, petty entrepreneurs, and small farmers fighting in the name of Jack- sonian values to preserve a monopoly of “white labor” against what they construed as elite conspiracies to flood the state with “coolies” and “aliens.”16 From the turn of the century, however, such plebeian na- tivism, although still present, yielded to anti-Asian and antiradical out- bursts now led by wealthier farmers, middle-class professionals, and local business elites, who were as likely to be California Progressives as old-guard Republicans. In the 1930s, vigilantism on an unprecedented scale was franchised as part of the employer counterrevolution led by the fascistic Associated Farmers. Briefly revived by growers during the epic strikes of the United Farm Workers in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the vigilante ethos subsequently migrated from the farm valleys to the conservative suburbs, where the specter of “illegal” immigrants helps fill the aching vacuum in right-wing imagination left by the col- lapse of the international communist conspiracy.

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Chapter Two

White Savages

The vigilantes’ first act was to erect a makeshift gallows and hang Joaquin Valenzuela before the entire population of San Luis Obispo. The unfortu- nate Valenzuela was probably innocent of the most recent murders.

—John Boessenecker1

T he brief campaigns and little battles in the Los Angeles and San Diego areas that constituted the 1846–47 war of conquest in Cali- fornia were but a prelude to the protracted, incomparably more

violent predations of Anglo gangs, filibusters, and vigilantes who expro- priated native land and labor during the 1850s. The “border,” in the first instance, was not the line drawn by the Army Corps of Topographical Engineers in the aftermath of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, but the genocidal violence that Jacksonian democracy unleashed on the South- west. This ur-violence of the border in the era of what Marx would have called “primitive accumulation” is the subject of Cormac McCarthy’s epic Blood Meridian—a hallucinatory but historically accurate recount- ing of the Glanton gang who murdered and scalped their way from Chi- huahua to San Diego. For white savages like Glanton, Manifest Destiny was a godlike license—“a personal imperialism”—to kill and plunder as they marauded through Indian camps and adobe villages.2

Native Californians were the first victims of the Anglo conquest. The instant society of white males created by the California gold rush had an insatiable hunger for sexual objects and servile domestic labor.

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The first legislature accommodated this demand with indenture laws that essentially enslaved Indian women and children to white masters. Bands of “squawmen,” led by Glanton counterparts like Robert “Growl- ing” Smith, fanned out through the Napa and Sacramento valleys, kid- napping Indian slaves and killing all who resisted. “You may hear them talk of the operation of cutting to pieces an Indian squaw in their dis- criminate raids for babies as ‘like slicing old cheese,’” wrote the Sacra- mento Union in 1862. “The baby hunters sneak up to a rancheria, kill the bucks, pick out the best looking squaws, ravish them, and make off with their young ones.”3

The abduction or murder of Indians was subsidized by the state government, which issued bonds to pay volunteer companies—shades of Glanton’s scalp hunters—to exterminate California’s first peoples. Out of an estimated Indian population of 150,000 in 1846 (already re- duced by half from pre-Spanish levels), only 30,000 survived by 1870. Bret Harte, together with Mark Twain the premier chronicler of the gold rush era, described an atrocity he encountered in an Indian village atta cke d by v ig ilantes along the Re dwo o d Co ast in 1860: “ T he wounded, dead, and dying were found all around, and in every lodge the skulls and frames of women and children cleft with axes and hatch- ets, and stabbed with knives, and the brains of an infant oozing from its broken head to the ground.”4

In the gold camps themselves, vigilantes fulfilled their stereotypical role of administrating rough frontier justice from a tree limb to rustlers and dry-gulchers, but they also frequently acted as an ethnic militia to forcibly evict the Spanish-speaking miners who had arrived earliest in the Mother Lode Country. If the goldfields were briefly the closest ap- proximation to the Jacksonian utopia of a “republic of fortune,” where independent and formally equal producers dug for gold, it was also a closed, Anglo-Saxon democracy that excluded the “greasers,” construed as all “Latin or half-breed races.” The punitive foreign miners’ license tax passed by the first legislature in 1850 provided a pretext for armed vigi- lance groups to expel Mexican and Chilean miners from their claims. When Latino miners resisted, they were punctually lynched, as in the case of sixteen chileanos in the Calaveras district, or the “beautiful, spir- ited pregnant Mexican woman by the name of Josefa” in Placer County who had shot an American miner after he called her a “whore.”5

In the mining region around Sonora, defiant Mexican and Euro-

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pean miners, led by French and German 1848 revolutionary exiles, re- sisted Anglo intimidation in a series of confrontations that came close to full-fledged civil war. “Into the diggings,” historian Leonard Pitt re- lates of one famous incident,

marched four hundred Americans—a ‘moving engine of terror’— heading for Columbia Camp, the foreigners’ headquarters. They col- lected tax money from a few affluent aliens and chased the rest away, with a warning to vacate the mines. One trooper recalls seeing “men, women and children—all packed up and moving, bag and baggage. Tents were being pulled down, houses and hovels gutted of their con- tents … [until] the posse finally arrested the two ‘hot-headed French- men … of the red republican order….’ The men liquored up for the road, hoisted the Stars and Stripes to the top of a pine tree, fired off a salute, and headed for home.6

The “red republicans” quickly organized their own column and stormed the town of Sonora, but ultimately the weight of American numbers and the presence of the regular army led to a “foreign” exodus from the gold fields. Many of the Sonorans were then robbed of their mules and horses by the California militia when they tried to cross the Colorado River at Yuma on their way home.

Meanwhile, in the southern “cow” counties and along the central coast, the poorer Mexican and Mission Indian (neophyte) populations fought a bitter rearguard action against Anglo usurpers. Traditionally characterized as mere desperados, Tiburcio Vasquez, Pio Linares, Juan Flores, and the semi-mythic Joaquin Marietta were, in fact, social ban- dits or even guerrilla chieftains in a grim conflict that pitted vigilante posses, composed of demobilized soldiers and Indian-killers, against the dispossessed gente de razon. In the south, patrician Californio landowners like the Sepulvedas and Picos usually supported the vigi- lantes, but in the north some of the great dynasties, like the Berreyesa clan which had six members murdered, were driven into extinction or exile by chronic conflict with the Anglos.7

One of the biggest vigilance movements—indeed, “one of the most violent events of the gold rush”—was the campaign organized in Los Angeles to defeat the so-called “Flores Revolution,” led by Juan Flores and Pancho Daniel. Arrested by Anglos in 1855, Flores soon escaped from San Quentin to join forces with Daniel, a compañero of Joaquin Murietta, and a dozen other ranch hands and miners. In January 1857, while visiting his young Indian lover, Chola Martina, at San Juan

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Capistrano, Flores killed Los Angeles Sheriff Barton and three mem- bers of his posse. Vigilantes, including Mexican-hating Texans known as the “El Monte Boys,” eventually captured Flores after several battles and escapes; he was lynched before a large crowd at the foot of Fort Hill in today’s downtown Los Angeles. Other Californios died more anony- mously. “Juan Flores was the twelfth man slain by Los Angeles vigi- lantes,” historian John Boessenecker explains. “Ten suspects had been hanged and two shot to death. Of those, only four were definitely con- nected to the Flores-Daniel band.”8

Boessenecker sees these incidents as part of a larger race war that raged along the El Camino Real in the mid-1850s, with the San Luis Obispo area as a second epicenter. Here the band of Pio Linares, joined by Joaquin Valenzuela and the Irish horseman Jack Powers, preyed upon Anglo ranchers and travelers, while Anglo vigilantes in turn ter- rorized the local Californios. It was a war without pity on either side. Before the vigilantes were through, they had killed Linares in a famous gun battle and lynched seven of his companions, including Valenzuela (for a murder he most likely didn’t commit). Around the same time, two hundred vigilantes broke into the Los Angeles jail, dragged Pancho Daniel, the surviving leader of the Flores band, out of his cell, and strung him up from a nearby gate. The contemporary San Francisco Bulletin contrasted the difference in attitudes between the “lower class of Californians, or Sonorans” who vowed to avenge the heroic Daniels, and the “respectable portion” who supported his Anglo executioners.9

Although the principal axis of social violence in gold rush Califor- nia was this conflict between plebeian Californios and Indians, on one hand, and the sons of Manifest Destiny on the other, the most famous vigilantes were the San Francisco businessmen and politicians who comprised the two Vigilance Committees of 1851 and 1855. The first committee emerged in public view in June 1851 when, under the histri- onic urgings of Sam Brannan—the notorious Mormon filibuster and land speculator who had been the original publicist of the gold discov- eries in 1849—an Australian thief named John Jenkins was lynched from the old customs house in Portsmouth Square. When the mayor tried to persuade the vigilantes to leave justice to the courts, Brannan thundered: “To hell with your courts! We are the courts! And the hang- man!”10 Several other “Sidney Ducks”—mainly Irish Australians blamed for arson and crime in San Francisco—quickly followed Jenk-

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ins to the noose, while two more were stomped to death in the street. “As foreigners in California,” writes Robert Senkewicz in his history of the incident, “the Australians were regarded as poachers in the Garden of Eden.” The vigilantes—largely merchants, importers, bankers, and lawyers—closed down shop after most of the Australians fled the city.11

They reopened on an expanded scale in 1856 to deal with the chal- lenge of the Tammany Hall–type political machine that the charismatic David Broderick (a former “Locofoco” from New York City) and his largely Irish and Catholic supporters were building in San Francisco. The deaths of two prominent anti-Broder ick leaders—William Richardson (a U.S. marshal) and James King (a newspaper editor)—in separate confrontations with erstwhile Broderick supporters Charles Cora (an Italian gambler) and James Casey (a Democratic county su- pervisor) formed the immediate pretext for the committee’s regroup- ment. But the lynching of Cora and Casey in May 1856 by the Second Vigilance Committee, headed by William Tell Coleman, a pro-slavery Democrat from Kentucky, had less to do with criminal justice than the determination of Protestant merchants, Know-Nothings, and anti- Catholics to check the growth of the Broderick machine.

The vigilantes, in effect, were upper-class insurrectionists bent on a sweeping purge of Irish political power.

[With] Casey and Cora out of the way,” writes Father Senkewica, “the committee swiftly turned to its important task. In short order, a num- ber of Broderick’s political operatives found themselves surrounded on the streets by squads of armed vigilantes and hustled to the waiting ex- ecutive committee. They were tried for a variety of offenses, mostly re- lating to political fraud and ballot box stuffing. After conviction, which was virtually automatic, they were hurried off for deportation on ships that were already in the process of clearing the harbor.12

Democratic elected officials who survived deportation were co- erced into resigning; they were replaced in the next election by candi- dates endorsed by Coleman, the city’s temporary dictator, and the vigi- l a n te s . T h e s o - c a l l e d “ Pe op l e’s Pa r t y ” of t h e S e con d Vi g i l a n ce Committee soon merged with the new Republican Party and ruled San Francisco until 1867. The destruction of his urban political machine, however, had the ironic result of refocusing Broderick’s ambitions on state politics, where he was quickly elected by the legislature to the U.S. Senate. (Senator Broderick, a Free Soil Democrat, was killed in a fa- mous duel in 1859 with California Supreme Court Chief Justice David

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Terry, a rabid supporter of slavery.) One of the contemporary opponents of the vigilantes, William

Tecumseh Sherman (then a San Francisco banker), pointed out that “as they controlled the press, they wrote their own history.” Indeed, the San Francisco Vigilance Committees later became apotheosized by philoso- pher Josiah Royce (in his 1886 book, California) and historian Humbert Howe Bancroft (in his 1887 book, Popular Tribunals) as paragons of lib- erty and civic virtue. This image of the heroic bourgeois vigilante who episodically buckles on his six-gun to restore law and order to a society overrun by criminal immigrants and their corrupt politicians would be an enduring California myth, inspiring anti-Asian Progressives in the 1910s and 1920s as well as suburban nativists in the beginning of the twenty-first century.

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Chapter Three

The Yellow Peril

To an American, death is preferable to life on a par with a Chinaman.

—Dennis Kearney (1877)1

T he Times of London was, of course, the journal of record for the nineteenth century, and the first entry indexed for “Los Angeles” is “Chinese massacre, 24 October 1871.” Following the shooting

of a sheriff (shades of Juan Flores), a vigilante mob of five hundred An- glos had swept through “Nigger Alley” (near present-day Union Sta- tion) slaughtering Chinese boys and men on sight. The official death toll was nineteen (almost 10 percent of the local Chinese population), but contemporary observers thought the actual number was likely much higher. In a modern reflection on the incident, the historian William Locklear argued that two decades of Anglo vigilantism and race hatred in Los Angeles had created “a fertile ground” for the worst pogrom (Indian massacres aside) in California history.2

The Chinese (who in 1860 made up about one-fifth of the state’s labor force) had often been victimized during the gold rush era—when they were generally allowed to work only abandoned and low-grade claims—but persecution began on a systematic scale during the re- gional economic downturn of 1869–70. Through the continuing de- pression of the 1870s, the Chinese became the scapegoats for a disinte- g r a t i n g Ca l i for n i a d re a m , a s t h e utop i a n h op e s of t h e for m e r forty-niners were dashed against the realities of concentrated economic

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power, the scarcity of homestead land, falling wages, and rampant un- employment. If for a few years in the early 1850s the goldfields had been a producers’ democracy, where white men of different class back- grounds toiled side by side, monopoly had become firmly entrenched in land, commerce, and mining by the end of the decade. The rise of the Central Pacific (later Southern Pacific) Railroad and its ruling “Big Four” team of capitalists during the 1860s established semi-feudal bar- onies upon the ruins of Jacksonian equality; while the long economic crisis of the 1870s ruined thousands of small farmers, self-employed teamsters, ambitious young professionals, and miscellaneous entrepre- neurs. Their petty-bourgeois hysteria grew into hallucinatory rage against a fictitious “Yellow Peril,” which demagogues like Dennis Kear- ney (former seaman turned prosperous businessman) then spread throughout the San Francisco and California labor movements, where it metastasized into an incurable obsession for the next fifty years.

In Indispensable Enemy, a pathbreaking analysis of working-class “false consciousness,” Alexander Saxton explains how an exclusionist, anti-Asian populism, rooted in the contradictions of Jacksonian produc- erist ideology, preempted the moral universe of California labor. Instead of making common cause with Chinese workers, Kearney’s Working- man’s Union of San Francisco, and its offshoot, the Workingman’s Party of California, screamed “Chinese Must Go!” and demanded the abroga- tion of the 1868 Burlingame Treaty that had normalized Chinese emi- gration to the United States. Their huge bonfire processions spilled over into rioting and the destruction of Chinese businesses. The economic crisis was attributed by Kearney and other Workingman leaders to a de- monic conspiracy of “coolies” and monopolists, whose ultimate aim was nothing less than the destruction of the American white republic.3

Indeed, in his pro-Workingman novel, The Last Days of the Repub- lic (1880), the Kearneyite Pierton Dooner described how the desperate efforts of San Francisco’s white workers to massacre the Chinese were thwarted by the capitalist militia, leading to the enfranchisement of the Chinese and, ultimately, their conquest of North America. “The Temple of Liberty had crumbled; and above its ruins was reared the colossal fabric of barbaric splendor known as the Western Empire of His Au- gust Majesty, the Emperor of China.… The very name of the United States was thus blotted from the record of nations.”4

Dooner’s novel was the ancestor of scores of Yellow Peril and

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White-Civilization-in-Danger screeds. (Its contemporary descendants include the immigration apocalypses and “brown perils” retailed in re- cent books by Victor Davis Hanson, Daniel Sheehy, Tom Tancredo, and other xenophobes.)5 His advocacy of preemptive massacre a la Los An- geles also made The Last Days of the Republic a kind of Turner Diaries for members of the Workingman’s movement and their rural allies. If the 1877 attacks on the Chinese in San Francisco were quelled by bour- geois vigilantes (a Committee of Public Safety drilled by the venerable William Tell Coleman) and the timely arrival of U.S. warships, anti- coolie violence became chronic in the California countryside where many Chinese ex-railroad workers had sought employment as field hands and harvest workers.

The Order of Caucasians was the rural equivalent to San Fran- cisco’s Workingman’s anti-coolie clubs, with a rapidly growing mem- bership in the Sacramento Valley. In 1877, at the height of unrest in San Francisco, unemployed members of the Order attacked Chinese camps throughout the Valley: burning bunkhouses, beating field hands, and in March, near Chico, murdering four Chinese workers. That summer the violence spread to the Great Gospel Swamp near Anaheim in Southern California, where vigilantes belonging to the Order attacked Chinese hop-pickers. The following year the powerful state Grange endorsed Kearney’s call for an all-out crusade against the “long-tailed lepers from Asia,” declaring that the Chinese were an “overshadowing curse which are sapping the foundation of our prosperity, the dignity of labor, and the glory of the State.”6

Vigilantism, of course, was also political theater with the chief aim of scaring politicians into passing vigorous anti-Chinese legislation. In 1879, while tramps continued to assail Chinese immigrants in the rural valleys, a new state constitution was hammered out in Sacramento under the influence of delegates from the Workingman’s Party and the Grange. In anticipation of later Jim Crow constitutions in the Deep South, it mandated segregated schools for “Mongolians,” barred them from public employment, and allowed incorporated communities to segregate them in Chinatowns (the artifacts of prejudice rather than collective choice). Soon afterward, 94 percent of California voters en- dorsed a referendum to exclude further Chinese immigrants. “Califor- nia’s Karl Marx,” the land reformer Henry George, protested that white hysteria over the Chinese was squandering a historic opportunity for

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radical reform of the state’s economic system. (George, originally an anti-Chinese zealot, had distanced himself from the racist dema- goguery of the Kearneyites.)7

Nor did the “monopolists,” allegedly the sponsors of the “coolie menace,” defend the Chinese with total ardor. As Richard Street explains in his history of nineteenth-century California farm labor, when Chi- nese harvest hands in the 1870s and early 1880s began to organize and even strike, many of their employers suddenly lost enthusiasm for the Burlingame Treaty. With white Californians now so powerfully united against Chinese immigration, President Chester Arthur ignored the protests of Beijing and signed the Chinese Exclusion Act in May 1882.8

But the termination of immigration only increased pressure to expel the Chinese from the fields. Local Anti-Coolie Leagues and Anti- Chinese Associations organized boycotts of ranchers who employed Chinese labor, and even committed arson and made death threats against the huge Bidwell Ranch. In February 1882, vigilantes drove Chi- nese workers out of the hop fields north of Sacramento and burned down their bunkhouses near Wheatland. A month later at a huge anti- Chinese convention in Sacramento, lawyer Grover Johnson, the father of future Progressive governor and senator Hiram Johnson, keynoted the call to kick the Chinese out of the state.9

The September 1885 massacre of twenty-eight Chinese miners by white members of the Knights of Labor in Rock Springs, Wyoming (which forced President Cleveland to send federal troops to protect the survivors), detonated pogroms across the Far West. As Alexander Saxton put it, “the fund of anger and discontent building up among working- men [in the bad economy of 1884–86], by a kind of Gresham’s law, con- verted itself into the cheaper currency of anticoolieism.” In the first half of 1886, vigilance committees to “abate” and remove the Chinese emerged in thirty-five California towns, including Pasadena, Arroyo Grande, Stockton, Merced, and Truckee. This was ethnic cleansing on an unprecedented scale, and thousands of Chinese were expelled from these smaller cities and towns. Most of them fled to San Francisco’s heavily fortified Chinatown, where they were reduced to “fighting in the alleys for garbage and rotten fish,” while growers—used to a captive labor sup- ply—complained bitterly about the shortage of cheap farm labor.10

For the next few years, anti-Chinese agitation simmered just below the boiling point, until the Depression of 1893 ignited yet another wave

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of white chauvinism and mob violence. In the Napa Valley, the White Labor Union organized to drive the Chinese from the vineyards, while other vigilantes attacked Chinese immigrants in Selma and murdered two field hands near Kingsburg. Vigilantism also spread to Southern California’s orange groves as hundreds of whites drove Chinese immi- grants out of the wealthy citrus town of Redlands in “a blaze of gun- shots.” Thanks to Representative Geary from Sonoma County, Con- gress had just legislated that Chinese be required to obtain certificates of residence—creating, as Street points out, “America’s first internal passport system.” The “Redlands Plan,” popularized by a local sheriff, used the Geary Act to legalize the expulsion of local Chinese who failed to register. But in many citrus towns—including Anaheim, Compton, and Rivera—unemployed whites didn’t bother with legalisms; they simply formed mobs and attacked the Chinese in their camps.11

As the depression deepened, vigilantism continued to flare through the winter and into the spring and summer of 1894. Growers gradually conceded to the terror, hiring white tramps and urban unemployed men in the place of a rapidly aging, bachelor Chinese workforce whose ranks were in any event being rapidly depleted by the Exclusion Act and its amendments. For a half century the Chinese had given their sweat and blood to build the state: now they were brutally pushed aside. New gen- erations would have little inkling of the irreplaceable role that Chinese labor had played in constructing the vital infrastructure (roads, rail- roads, aqueducts, fields, and fruit orchards) of modern California life.12

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Chapter Four

“Swat a Jap”

Underlying this Japanese problem is the fundamental proposition that this is a white man’s country—and will remain so.

—Asiatic Exclusion League (1909)1

T he first significant stream of Japanese immigrants to California came from Hawaii: plantation laborers escaping the hellish con- ditions and coolie wages in the cane fields. After the islands’ an-

nexation in 1898, migration to the mainland, as well as direct immigra- tion from Japan, became easier. Japanese laborers soon replaced the Chinese in the beet fields and orchards, and immediately inherited their pariah status. As early as 1892, when the state’s Japanese population was still negligible, that tireless bigot, Dennis Kearney, was already scream- ing that the “Japs Must Go!,” although, as historian Roger Daniels em- phasizes, prejudice toward the Japanese was still “mainly a tail to the anti-Chinese kite.” By the eve of the San Francisco Earthquake, however, the Japanese were a significant segment of the agricultural workforce, with a growing reputation for standing up for their rights. Indeed, they were the early twentieth-century pioneers of agricultural unionism and organized an impressive strike with Mexican coworkers in the beet fields of Oxnard as early as 1903. But the powerful San Francisco unions spurned the new immigrants and instead organized the Japanese and Korean Exclusion League in May 1905 (partly, Saxton argues, to distract attention from scandals within the Union-Labor Party).2 As the geriatric

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Chinese population declined, the younger, economically dynamic Japanese became the new incarnation of the Yellow Peril.

In San Francisco, petty violence toward Japanese residents became a chronic problem, with particularly brazen incidents during and after the earthquake in April 1906. “Nineteen cases of assault against Japan- ese residents … were reported, despite the fact that the Japanese gov- ernment had sent funds to aid the stricken city.” When the world- renowned Tokyo seismologist Professor Fusakichi Omori arrived with the gift of a new seismograph for the University of California, he and his colleagues were slugged and stoned on Mission Street by a gang of youths and men. The hooligans were later consecrated by the local press as popular heroes.3

That fall, moreover, Japanese kids were kicked out of white schools and segregated with the Chinese—an insult that soon became a major diplomatic incident. In contrast to China in the 1870s and 1880s, Japan was an emergent great power that had just achieved a stunning military victory over czarist Russia. Theodore Roosevelt became the first in a se- ries of American presidents reluctantly forced to balance rational for- eign policy against the implacable anti-Japanese hysteria on the West Coast. A temporary palliative—which did little to assuage either Japan- ese or Californian public opinion—was the 1908 Gentleman’s Agree- ment that halted the immigration of laborers, while allowing a trickle of “picture brides.”

But by 1908 the social base of anti-Japanese agitation was changing from the urban labor movement to the rural and urban middle classes. Through extraordinary hard work and community solidarity, the Issei (first-generation immigrants) and their children were saving their wages and buying or leasing land. They created dynamic niches in sub- urban truck farming, berry and flower growing, nurseries, and urban landscaping. California’s growers and wealthy orchardists, like the Hawaiian sugar barons before them, were shocked by the gritty deter- mination of the Japanese to become their own masters, “competitors rather than employees.” As Carey McWilliams explained, the large ship- per-growers opposed Japanese land ownership because “it threatened the continued existence of large units of production and it decreased the supply of farm labor.”4 Likewise, Japanese immigrants encountered the wrath of small farmers who resented the skilled, intensive methods of cultivation favored by Japanese farmers, which tended to raise the

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value of land and the cost of farm leases.5 Middle-class Progressives, generally obsessed with social-Darwinist notions of racial competition, embraced the defense of “Anglo-Saxon agriculture” and took up the mantle of “keeping California white.” Although labor-supported Dem- ocrats as well as the Hearst press continued to fulminate about the dan- gers of miscegenation and the necessity of school segregation, Progres- sives emphasized the Japanese as relentless agricultural competitors and sponsored legislation to prevent them from acquiring more farm land. Already ineligible for U.S. citizenship thanks to previous exclu- sionist laws, the Issei generation would now be forbidden to own land.

The proposed Alien Land Law, however, was immediately and forcibly contested by European rentiers, especially the Dutch and British, who had long owned vast tracts of prime California agricul- tural land. The Progressive-dominated legislature quickly obliged, with new wording that exempted these powerful interests while focusing the bill even more narrowly on the hardworking Issei.6 The act’s passage in 1913, after a few cosmetic changes to appease alarmed Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, sparked mass protests in Japan and new demands to send the Imperial Fleet to California. As Kevin Starr ex- plains, California’s Progressives irreparably poisoned public opinion in Japan and helped make a Pacific war virtually inevitable.

During the agitation leading to the Alien Land Law of 1913, a war party, stung by the insult being offered in California, surfaced in the Japanese government, and representatives of this group began to scout the possibilities of a loan to finance a war against the Untied States. Eighteen years before Pearl Harbor, in other words, and well before the seizure of power by the fascist clique in the Japanese cabinet, the Keep California White! Campaign had succeeded in provoking a number of highly placed people in the Japanese government to view war with the United States as the only adequate response to the racial insults that were being offered. It was even suggested at the time that Japan declare war only on California and not the rest of the United States.7

The legislation may have inflamed Tokyo, but it did not prevent the Issei from holding land in the name of their U.S.-born children (the Nisei) or leasing more from avaricious white landowners. Further con- frontation with white California, however, was temporarily postponed by the soaring wartime demand for agricultural products, which en- sured high profits for all farm producers and temporarily abated racial agitation. But demagogic nativism returned with a vengeance during

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the sharp postwar recession in 1919 and then persisted in various vio- lent and malignant incarnations throughout the 1920s.

This new wave of anti-Japanese activism addressed both the con- tinuing success of Issei as farmers as well as the efforts of their English- speaking, citizen children to integrate themselves into ordinary Califor- nia life. Under the generalship of two venerable Progressives—U.S. Senator (and former governor) Hiram Johnson and retired Sacramento Bee publisher V. S. McClatchy—a broad nativist coalition, including the Native Sons of the Golden West, the American Legion, the State Feder- ation of Labor, the Grange, the Federation of Women’s Clubs, and the Loyal Order of Moose, pushed a new, tougher alien land act through the California legislature in 1920, then moved on to Washington, D.C., to lobby for a total ban on Japanese immigration.

While Congress debated the proposed Johnson-Reed (or Quota Immigration) Act, the xenophobic Native Sons pressured colleges to fire their “pro-Japanese” professors and warned parents of the danger- ous sexual predilections of the Nisei (“Would you like your daughter to marry a Japanese?”). A common nativist demand (resurrected in 2005 by anti-immigrant Republicans) was an amendment to deny citizen- ship to children born in the United States of alien parents. Meanwhile, anti-Japanese groups in the Los Angeles area, including the Native Sons and the Ku Klux Klan as well as local homeowner associations, organ- ized a vigilante movement “designed to make life miserable for all Japanese residing there.” This 1922–23 “Swat the Jap” campaign in- volved everything from billboards and boycotts to spitting on Japanese pedestrians to assault and battery, with dark threats of more serious vi- olence if Nisei persisted in moving into “white” neighborhoods and acting like entitled U.S. citizens.

“Swat the Jap,” with its emphasis on ritual public humiliation, was an eerie prefiguration of the treatment of Jews in early Nazi Germany; but—as one anti-Japanese leaflet reprinted by Daniels makes clear—it also has considerable resonance with contemporary screeds against Latino immigrants.

You came to care for lawns, We stood for it

You came to work in truck gardens, We stood for it

You moved your children to our public schools We stood for it

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……………… You proposed to build a church in our neighborhood

BUT We DIDN’T and WE WON’T STAND FOR IT ………………………………………………. WE DON’T WANT YOU WITH US SO GET BUSY, JAPS, AND GET OUT OF HOLLYWOOD8

Congress, under intense lobbying from Johnson and other Western representatives and senators, passed the Johnson-Reed Bill in 1924 and banned all further immigration from Japan. But alien land laws and im- migration bans still failed to evict the Japanese from their farms and busi- nesses. Ultimately, Johnson and his supporters would see their life’s work crowned with Executive Order 9102 on March 18, 1942, interning Cali- fornia’s Japanese-Americans in desert concentration camps. As Daniels points out, “Mazanar, Gila River, Tule Lake, White Mountain and the other relocation camps are the last monuments to their patriotic zeal.”9

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Chapter Five

The Anti-Filipino Riots

I shall never forget what I have suffered in this country because of racial prejudice.

—Carlos Bulosan (1937)1

T he victories of the anti-Japanese exclusionists in 1920 and 1924 re- inforced an endemic shortage of cheap agricultural labor that the big growers attempted to remedy by importing Mexican and Fil-

ipino workers. If California history often seems like a relentless conveyor belt delivering one immigrant group after another to the same cauldron of exploitation and prejudice, the Filipino experience was perhaps the most paradoxical. As citizens of an American colony until 1934, the Fil- ipinos were not technically “aliens” and thus not excluded by the 1924 quota system; but unlike Mexicans or Japanese, they lacked the protec- tion of a sovereign mother country and were more nakedly at the mercy of California’s racist legislature and local governments. The Filipino labor migration of the 1920s, moreover, consisted almost entirely of young, single men whose natural gravitation to dance halls and red-light districts provoked racial-sexual hysteria amongst whites of such berserk intensity that it invites comparison with the Faulknerian South.2

No one fretted more about the honor of white girls or the dangers of “mongrelization” than Progressive mandarin V. S. McClatchy, who was again seconded in his racial phobias by Senators Hiram Johnson and Samuel Shortridge, ex-Senator James Pheland, and Governor

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Friend Richardson, as well as by the reactionary “Chandler-Cameron- Knowland” axis of newspaper publishers in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Oakland. This powerful alliance, whose prejudices continued to be endorsed by right-wing AFL unions, hammered away at the Filipinos as representing (in the words of a Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce of- ficial) “the most worthless, unscrupulous, shiftless, diseased, semi-bar- barians that ever came to our shores.”3 Filipinos, whose recreational in- terests were no different from tens of thousands of single, white sailors, day laborers, and hoboes who flocked to Los Angeles’s Main Street or San Francisco’s Tenderloin, were depicted (again, in images that prefig- ured Nazi calumnies) as obsessed, serial miscegenators.

Anti-Filipino agitation, however, also had a functional, economic dimension: the ferocity of the appeal to white sexual fear was generally calibrated to labor-market conditions as well as the militancy of Fil- ipinos in defending their rights. By the late 1920s, Carey McWilliams claimed, “the feeling against the Filipino [had] been intensified by rea- son of the desire of the large growers to get rid of him as a worker.” As one contemporary agribusiness leader complained: “It costs $100 per head to bring the Filipino in. And we cannot handle him like we can the Mexican: the Mexican can be deported.” Moreover, adds McWilliams, “Filipinos no longer scab on their fellow workers, and they no longer underbid for work.… The Filipino is a real fighter and his strikes have been dangerous.”4 It was precisely this economic “danger” that the class enemies of the Filipinos transmuted into a legend of sexual danger.

Association with white women thus provided the pretext for a small riot in Stockton on New Year’s Eve in 1926, and then full-scale vigilan- tism organized by the American Legion against Filipino farmworkers in the Tulare County town of Dinuba in August 1926 after “the fruit pick- ers insist[ed] on their rights to attend dances and escort white girls around the city.”5 The onset of the Depression ignited white resentment already made highly inflammable by the ceaseless, lurid innuendo of nativist groups like the Native Sons and the American Legion. “On 24 October 1929, the day of the Wall Street Crash,” writes Richard Meynell in his “Little Brown Brothers, Little White Girls,” “Filipinos were shot with rubber bands as they escorted white girls at a street carnival in Ex- eter, southeast of Fresno. A fight broke out, a white man was stabbed, and a riot ensued in which vigilante whites, led by Chief of Police C. E. Joyner, beat and stoned Filipinos in the fields.” Three hundred vigilantes

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burnt down the Filipino labor camp on the nearby Firebaugh Ranch.6

Six weeks later, Watsonville police discovered two underage white girls in the room of a twenty-five-year-old Filipino worker; it was soon revealed that the girls’ parents were themselves prostituting the older child. White rage crystallized around the lurid accounts of the affair in the local paper, including a provocative photo of the older girl in the em- brace of the young worker. Judge D. Rohrback, the shrill voice of race ha- tred in the Pajaro Valley, warned that “… if the present state of affairs continues … there will be 40,000 half-breeds in the State of California be- fore ten years have passed.” But, as Howard DeWitt has shown in an im- portant study, violent attitudes toward local Filipinos were also shaped by the fact that they worked on large lettuce farms, controlled by out-of- town corporations, that had marginalized local farmers and white work- ers.7 In his incessant incitements to vigilantism, Judge Rohrback empha- s i ze d a bi z a r re e qu a t i on b e t we en m i s ce g en a t i on a n d e con om i c displacement. “He [the Filipino] gives them silk underwear and makes them pregnant and crowds whites out of jobs in the bargain.”8

The local paper, the Pajaronian, which printed Rohrback’s fulmina- tions as well as vicious, distorted accounts of relations between Filipinos and white girls, publicized the opening on January 11, 1930, of a taxi dancehall catering to Filipinos in Palm Beach, twenty minutes southwest of Watsonville. It soon became the rallying point for angry white youth and unemployed men, spurred on by the Pajaronian’s calls to vigilantism (“State Organizations Will Fight Filipino Influx into Country”). On the weekend of January 18–19, whites made repeated, unsuccessful attempts to disrupt the dances in Palm Beach, followed by rock-throwing in down- town Watsonville. “Whites,” writes Meynell, “then formed ‘hunting parties’ … after an ‘indignation meeting’ at a local pool hall.” While hundreds of spectators watched from the nearby highway, the mob tried to sack the dancehall but were driven off by buckshot and teargas. The next day vigi- lantes took their revenge:

On Wednesday, 22 January, the riot reached its peak with mobs of hun- dreds dragging Filipinos out of their homes, whipping and beating them, and throwing them off the Pajaro River bridge. The mobs ranged up the San Juan road, attacking Filipinos at the Storm and Detlefsen ranches.… At Riberal’s labor camp, 22 Filipinos were dragged out and beaten. This time mob had leaders and organization—it moved ‘mili- tary-like’ and responded to orders to attack or withdraw….

E a r ly t h e n ex t m or n i n g ( t h e 2 3 rd ) bu l l e t s were f i re d i n to a

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bunkhouse on the Murphy ranch on the San Juan Road. Eleven Fil- ipinos huddled in a closet to escape the fusillade. At dawn they discov- ered that a twelfth, Fermin Tobera, had been shot through the heart. 9

DeWitt explains that the vigilantes who killed twenty-two-year-old Tobera were in fact youths “from well-to-do families,” not jobless tramps as later portrayed.10 Although Watsonville authorities deputized Ameri- can Legionnaires (some of them probably vigilantes) to restore order, the pogrom in the Pajaro Valley had immediate aftershocks in Stockton, where a Filipino club was dynamited; Gilroy, where Filipinos were driven out of town; and San Jose and San Francisco, where Anglos attacked Fil- ipinos on the street. Filipino bunkhouses were dynamited near Reedley in August and in El Centro in December. In 1933 the legislature bowed to nativist pressure and amended the state’s 1901 miscegenation law, which already banned the marriage of whites with “Negroes, Mongo- lians, or mulattoes”—to include “members of the Malay race” as well.

Meanwhile, as tens of thousands of Mexican residents were being co- ercively “repatriated” across the border in 1933–34, pressure increased to deport Filipinos as well. As the flood of white Dust Bowl refugees began to arrive in California’s valleys, growers had less need of the two groups who had demonstrated such audacity and fortitude in recent agricultural strikes. In August 1934, for example, three thousand striking Filipinos had managed to win a wage increase from Salinas lettuce growers, an al- most unprecedented victory in the violent early Depression years. But the following month armed farmer-vigilantes attacked the Filipino camps, nearly beating one worker to death, and forcing eight hundred of the for- mer strikers to flee the county. When the expelled workers tried to find work in the Modesto-Turlock area, they were turned back by other vigi- lantes. Although transformed into unemployed pariahs, hunted by vigi- lantes and vilified by the press, California’s young Filipinos overwhelm- ingly rejected the “free boat ride home” offered in repatriation legislation sponsored by exclusionists.11 Indeed, some would stay in the fields, where thirty years later they would reemerge in struggle as the earliest and most fervent supporters of the National Farm Workers Association union.

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Chapter Six

The IWW versus the KKK

During the visit of the Industrial Workers of the World they will be ac- corded a night and day guard of honor, composed of citizens armed with rifles. The Coroner will be in attendance at his office every day.

—Harrison Gray Otis (1912)1

A s in other Western states, the Industrial Workers of the World in California were the favorite target of California vigilantes. The Wobblies’ original sin, even more than their declared aim

of overthrowing the wage system, was their willingness to organize all t h e p a r i a h l a b orer s — w h i te t r a m p s , Mex i c a n s , Ja p a n e s e , a n d Filipinos—whom the conservative AFL unions spurned. Between 1906 and 1921, the radical egalitarianism and rebel spirit of the IWW spread with evangelical velocity through the state’s harvest camps, railroad bunkhouses, hobo colonies, and skid rows. The Wobblies championed the cause of oppressed workers regardless of ethnicity, and rejected the wages of whiteness in favor of “solidarity forever.” In contrast to some AFL unions that secretly sanctioned dynamite sabotage, the IWW was unwavering in its commitment to non-violent resistance. Yet no other group, not even the Communist Party in the 1930s or 1950s, managed to so enrage employers, or arouse more hysteria amongst the proper- tied middle classes, than the IWW in its heyday; but, then again, no other group ever fomented such courageous or far-reaching rebellion in the lower depths of California society.

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The first large-scale tests of strength between the IWW (organized in 1905) and the vigilantes occurred in Fresno in 1910 and San Diego in 1912. Local 66 in Fresno, like other IWW branches, used downtown street meetings to dramatize its presence and preach the creed of One Big Union to local laborers (“home guards” in Wobbly parlance) as well as the migrant farm and construction workers who constantly streamed through the San Joaquin Valley city. Within a year it had organized the Mexican laborers at a nearby dam and led a group of Santa Fe Railroad workers on strike. Alarmed employers pressured the police chief to re- voke Local 66’s speaking permit and jail its organizers. Frank Little, the one-eyed, part-Indian hero of an earlier IWW free-speech battle in Spokane, Washington, arrived in Fresno to lead the struggle. Little and the Wobblies defied the ban and packed the local jail with scores of spir- ited fellow workers. When their landlord evicted them from their skid row headquarters, they erected a large tent on a lot rented from a sympa- thizer and called for IWWs from all over the West to hop the next freight train to Fresno. Faced with an inundation of his jail by out-of-town radi- cals, the chief of police, as Philip Foner explains in his history of the IWW, abdicated to vigilantes:

On December 9, a mob of over 1,000 vigilantes attacked and severely beat a number of IWW men who sought to speak on the streets, then ad- vanced on the IWW tent headquarters, burned the camp and all the sup- plies, marched to the county jail and threatened to break into the jail and lynch the Wobbly prisoners. The mob had been encouraged by a state- ment by Police Chief Shaw that “if the citizens wished to act they might and he would not interfere.” Shaw’s statement followed the discovery that the city of Fresno had no ordinance prohibiting speaking on the streets, and that the actions of the police were entirely without authority.2

To the astonishment of the vigilantes and police, the Wobblies, stiffened by the calm courage of Frank Little, refused to abandon the fight. The 150 prisoners in Fresno jail held out for weeks in the face of a sadistic regime of beatings, drenchings with fire hoses, and bread-and- water diets. With “armies” of hundreds of fresh IWW volunteers on their way to join the fight from all corners of California and the North- west, Fresno authorities reluctantly rescinded the ban and gave the street corners back to free speech.

If Fresno was an inspiring—though hardwon—victory for the IWW, their bitter experience in San Diego in 1912 forewarned of the pitiless repression and vigilante terror that Wobblies and other Califor-

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nia radicals would face from 1917 onwards. In San Diego, the courage of the IWW free-speech fighters collided with a granite wall of reaction erected by California’s two most uncompromising robber barons: Gen- eral Harrison Gray Otis, proprietor of the Los Angeles Times and chief architect of the open shop, and John D. Spreckels, the publisher of the San Diego Union and Tribune and owner of almost anything of value in the city of San Diego.

Since the bombing of the Times by AFL unionists in 1910, Otis had stumped the Pacific Coast cajoling fellow capitalists to militarize local in- dustrial relations along the lines of Los Angeles’s Merchants and Manu- facturers’ Association (M&M), which he had founded. Otis, one of the most rabid union-haters in American history, advocated an “industrial freedom” (which was the masthead slogan of the Times) that left no room for soapboxes, picket lines, or unions. In December 1911, he met confi- dentially with San Diego business leaders at the U.S. Grant Hotel, urging them to crush the IWW by adopting Los Angeles’s draconian bans on street-speaking and picketing. The city’s foremost capitalist, John D. Spreckels, needed little convincing. His morning and afternoon papers had been regularly blasting the Wobblies ever since they participated in a brief revolutionary invasion of Baja California in 1911 (supporting the anarchist Liberal Party of Ricardo Flores Magon), and more recently Spreckels had been outraged to discover that the IWW’s San Diego Local 13 was trying to organize the employees of his street railroad. Although there was little love lost between the rival publishers, Spreckels supported the extermination of the IWW and soon brought a captive city council and the rest of the business class to the same point of view.

As in Fresno, the Free Speech fight started one-sidedly in February 1912 with a repressive ordinance, mass arrests, fire hoses, and brutal jail conditions, while the Spreckels papers doled out murderous bile that gourmets of innuendo compared to the very best of the Los Angeles Times:

Hanging is too good for them [editorialized the San Diego Tribune] and they would be much better dead; for they are absolutely useless in the human economy; they are waste material of creation and should be drained off in the sewer of oblivion there to rot in cold obstruction like any other excrement.3

The Tribune recommended shooting IWW members in jail, while the more moderate Union was content with advocating beatings and de-

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portation. In the meantime, hundreds of Wobblies, with a fearlessness and daring that only further enraged their persecutors, continued to pour into “Spreckelstown” by freight car and shank’s mare. This time, however, they discovered that the vigilantes were more than a one-act show. With a Union reporter amongst the identified ringleaders, a heav- ily-armed force of several hundred vigilantes, some of them obviously seconded by their employers, maintained an unprecedented reign of terror for three months. One contingent acted as an ad hoc border pa- trol, camped at the county line at San Onofre to intercept Wobblies headed south; another gang worked with brutal Police Chief Wilson to terrorize prisoners—often driving them out to the Imperial Desert where they were beaten and abandoned to the cactus and rattlesnakes.4

One IWW member, kicked mercilessly in the testicles by his jailers, died of his injuries, and then the mourners in his funeral procession were clubbed. Several other free-speech fighters were maimed and hundreds more were savagely beaten. Al Tucker, a salty member from Victorville, sent IWW National Secretary-Treasurer Vincent St. John an account of the routine treatment dealt out by the vigilante reception committee:

It was then about 1 o’clock AM. The train slowed down and we were be- tween two lines of something like 400 men armed to the teeth with rifles, pistols and clubs of all kinds. The moon was shining dimly through the clouds and I could see pick handles, axe handles, wagon spokes and every kind of a club imaginable swinging from the wrists of all of them while they also had their rifles leveled at us.… We were ordered to unload and we refused. Then they closed in around the flat car which we were on and began clubbing and knocking and pulling men off by their heels, so inside of a half hour thay had us all off the train and then bruised and bleeding we were lined up and marched into the cattle corral … now and then picking out a man they thought was a leader and giving him an extra beat- ing. Several men were carried out unconscious and I believe there were some killed, for afterwards there were a lot of our men unaccounted for and never have been heard from since. The vigilantes all wore constable badges and white handkerchiefs around their left arms. They were all drunk and hollering and cursing the rest of the night. In the morning they took us out four or five at a time and marched us up the track to the county line … where we were forced to kiss the flag and then run a gaunt- let of 106 men, every one of which was striking at us as hard as they could with their pick axe handles. They broke one man’s leg, and every one was beaten black and blue, and was bleeding from a dozen wounds.5

Kevin Starr has written that “the San Diego free speech battles re- vealed the depths of reaction possible in the threatened middle- and

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lower-middle classes of California.” He argues that vigilantes were re- cruited from an anxious petty bourgeoisie, “who were uncertain and insecure in what they had gained or thought they had gained by com- ing to California.” As in late Weimar Germany, “the oligarchy, which is to say, the upper-middle and upper classes, loathed and feared the IWW; but oligarchs did not take to the streets as vigilantes. They did, however, encourage the lower-middle classes to do such work.”6

But according to a key eyewitness, Starr is wrong: the “oligarchy” both instigated and physically participated in San Diego’s festival of vigilante violence. Abram Sauer was the editor of a little weekly paper called the Herald which alone supported the free speech movement. He was kidnapped, threatened with lynching, and told to leave town (and later his press was damaged). Sauer, however, courageously refused to run away and instead published an article about his kidnapping which identified the vigilantes as prominent bankers and merchants as well as “leading Church members and bartenders, Chamber of Commerce and Real Estate Board … as well as members of the grand jury.”7 Although Starr’s theory of vigilantism may have applied in other historical situa- tions, San Diego’s antiradicals (bartenders aside) seemed to have been a cut above the “shopkeepers, the small-scale realtors, the upper-level clerks and first-level supervisors” whom he identifies as the core social stratum.8 The ordinary middle class, however, was subject to consider- able pressure to choose sides.

In an anticipation of witch hunts yet to come, the Spreckels press cajoled San Diegans to monitor each other’s “loyalty.” So “his neighbors will know just where he stands on a question that just now is of vital important to San Diego,” the Union advised loyal citizens to wear little American flags on their lapels, with the sinister implication that those who refused to display their patriotism or gave undue consideration to the Bill of Rights might think about relocation.9

A famous lynching was narrowly averted in mid-May when Amer- ica’s most celebrated anarchist, Emma Goldman, arrived in San Diego ostensibly to lecture on Ibsen, but obviously to show her defiance of vigilante rule. Goldman’s steel nerves were legendary and she didn’t flinch in the face of the bloodthirsty mob outside her hotel room chanting: “Give us that anarchist; we will strip her naked; we will tear out her guts.” But her lover and manager, Ben Reitman (also a sex edu- cation pioneer and author of Boxcar Bertha), was kidnapped and then

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tortured in a manner that betrayed his captors’ considerable enjoyment of sexual perversion. His abductors (“leading Church members and bartenders”?) took him to a remote mesa, where they urinated on him, stripped him, hit and kicked him. Then “with a lighted cigar,” Reitman later told reporters in Los Angeles, “they burned the letters IWW in my buttocks … they poured a can of tar over my head and, in the absence of feathers, rubbed sagebrush on my body. One of them attempted to push a cane into my rectum. Another twisted my testicles. They forced me to kiss the flag and sing ‘The Star Spangled Banner.’”10

In the face of such sadism, the Wobblies, incredibly, continued their fight, supported by Socialists and eventually by outraged AFL unionists and some Progressives. But the toll of terror was overwhelming. Even the lawyers who attempted to represent the IWW were jailed, and when other jurists protested to Governor Hiram Johnson, the champion of the Progressives, he retorted that “the anarchy of the IWW and their brutality are worse than the anarchy of the vigilantes.” When Goldman and Reitman tried to return a year later, they were again almost lynched and had to flee to Los Angeles. Although the City Council eventually re- scinded the anti-open-meeting ordinance and free speech returned to the street corners of downtown San Diego, it was a strictly pyrrhic vic- tory for the IWW. As Philip Foner points out, some leading IWWs began to object to the huge human and organizational cost of such or- deals; while many rank-and-file members heartily agreed with the bat- tered Al Tucker who swore that if he ever took part in another free speech fight “it will be with machine guns or aerial bombs.”11

In the end, however, the IWW continued its defiant but nonviolent campaign to organize harvest tramps, garment workers, construction crews, sailors, and the unemployed. The Wobblies probably posed the greatest threat in the Central Valley, where each attempt to destroy their leadership—such as the framing of “Blackie” Ford and Herman Suhr following the so-called Wheatland Riot in 1914, when deputized vigi- lantes fired upon a mass meeting—was countered by the emergence of a new cadre of “camp delegates” and itinerant organizers. Although the IWW failed to build durable locals, its agricultural nucleus remained intact, threatening to fan any spark of discontent into strike action. Growers agreed with General Otis and other open-shop leaders: selec- tive repression of the IWW’s leadership was ineffective and the organi- zation would only be defeated by the application of San Diego–type

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methods on a statewide scale. The First World War conveniently provided the patriotic pretext for

such a crusade. Nationally, the American Protective League (APL), which eventually counted 350,000 members, became a “largely out-of-control quasi-governmental, quasi-vigilante agency which established a massive spy network across the land,” with the approval of the Department of Jus- tice. In California as elsewhere, the APL focused on “disloyal” Wobblies and Socialists, as did the editorial page of every paper in California. Mobs sacked the IWW offices in Oakland and Los Angeles in August 1917, and in September, the National Guard was sent to crush an IWW-led cannery strike in San Jose. Federal and local officials raided Wobbly offices throughout central California and arrested scores of activists. Forty-six were jailed in Sacramento, where “editorials in the Sacramento Bee advo- cated lynching the prisoners, and rumors of wholesale lynchings filled the air.”12 The IWW was effectively made an illegal organization and assaults on its facilities and members were applauded as admirable patriotism.

The end of the war brought no respite. 1919 was the year of great strikes as well as the Palmer Raids and the mass deportation of “alien rad- icals.” Against the background of a general strike in Seattle, which for the first time allied AFL unionists with the IWW, the California legislature passed a “criminal syndicalism” law. Crafted by the Los Angeles M&M and the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, it allowed authorities to send dozens of Wobblies to San Quentin simply for their stubborn belief, to quote the preamble to the IWW constitution, that “the working class and the employing class have nothing in common.”13

A few months later, the Los Angeles Times—the Wobblies called it the “Los Angeles Crimes”—published a series urging renewed vigilan- tism against the IWW. Citrus growers in the San Gabriel and Pomona Valleys had already obliged, by raiding and deporting IWW orchard strikers. Then a mob of soldiers and civilians attacked a Los Angeles IWW meeting in November, wrecking the hall and seriously injuring four people while the police arrested the rest of the victims for “inciting a riot.”14 According to Philip Foner, the American Legion in Los Ange- les had organized a paramilitary wing “which specialized in raiding radical bookstores, beating up Wobblies, and harassing the landlord of their meeting hall.”15 IWW meetings of any kind in Los Angeles were then banned for the superbly Kafkaesque reason that public sentiment made it “unsafe for enemies of peace and government to gather in pub-

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lic.”16

Yet in the very maw of such terror, the Wobblies began to grow again. Labor had lost all the big battles of 1919, leaving many AFL unions broken and the open shop enshrined everywhere on the Pacific Coast, even in San Francisco. The most militant elements of the labor movement blamed this epic defeat on narrow craft unionism and the right-wing AFL leadership. The Wobblies, with their dogged, no-surren- der devotion to class struggle and their religious advocacy of industrial unionism, suddenly became an attractive alternative, and the IWW won impressive numbers of new adherents, especially on the strife-torn Cali- fornia waterfronts, where the IWW Marine Transport Workers Indus- trial Union (MTWIU) led resistance to the open shop. Despite the widespread myth that the Wobblies had died in 1918 when the federal government jailed its national leadership, the actual “final conflict”—at least on the West Coast—was the bold, if quixotic, “general strike to free class war prisoners” that the IWW launched on April 25, 1923.

Although the strike affected both coasts, and indeed was echoed by worldwide solidarity actions from Montevideo to Yokahama, its princi- pal arena was San Pedro. Here MTWIU seamen and longshoremen, supported by sympathetic oil workers, shut down the Los Angeles har- bor to the complete surprise of employers and AFL unions alike. While ninety ships lay idle, “a red painted airplane flew over the docks and the oil fields, dropping leaflets, while a red painted automobile, called ‘Spark Plug,’ drove around the city bringing speakers to address thou- sands of workers at open air meetings.”17 In Los Angeles, at least, the IWW was suddenly alive and kicking back.

Indeed, the strike turned into an extraordinary and protracted test of strength between opposing class forces. On one side was the harbor area working class, supported by Los Angeles trade unionists and Social- ists. On the other side stood the employers (especially the arch-reac- tionary Hammond Lumber Company), backed by the Los Angeles Times (now generaled by Otis’s son-in-law, Harry Chandler), the M&M, and the M&M’s “military wing,” the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). The LAPD, proclaiming that strike rallies and meetings had “grown in- compatible with public security,” arrested so many IWW members and their supporters that the city was forced to construct a special stockade in Griffith Park to handle the overflow. A local sympathizer, Mrs. Minnie Davis, then allowed the Wobblies to meet on a spectacular knoll that she

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owned, soon christened “Liberty Hill” by the strikers.

Rising two hundred feet above the level of Third Street, Liberty Hill had several flights of stone steps leading up to it. At its top were hand- made wooden benches seating about 800 people, a small platform, six by nine feet, and standing room for several thousand. There, on the hill, the IWW held five meetings each week, with the meetings in Eng- lish usually attended by between 1000-3000 people and those in Span- ish by from 500-800.18

LAPD chief Louis Oakes responded to Liberty Hill with totally ille- gal mass arrests, warning that “all idle men at the harbor must explain their loafing and show that they are not IWW’s or go to jail.” Pasadena’s most famous resident, the muckracker and novelist Upton Sinclair, promptly challenged the chief, whom he described as a stooge for the M&M, to a constitutional duel, and was arrested while reading from the U.S. Constitution. But the jailing of Sinclair only enraged a wider radius of progressive opinion and brought five thousand people to Lib- erty Hill a few days later. At this point, with the police failing to break the strike with arrests alone, vigilantes in white hoods suddenly ap- peared—the open shop’s deus ex machina.19

In previous postwar confrontations, the American Legion had been the reliable source of antiradical mobs, but by early 1924, the Ku Klux Klan had grown astronomically throughout California and was rumored to control the electoral balance of power in Los Angeles. Ex- actly how or by whom the Klan was conscripted to fight the harbor workers is unclear, but presumably the motive was nativism as well as antiradicalism, since the IWW had a large Mexican membership in the harbor area, and many waterfront workers spoke with Serbo-Croat, Italian, and Scandinavian accents.

The KKK made its debut in the area in March 1924 when several thousand hooded visitors encircled the IWW hall in San Pedro; two weeks later, police broke into a meeting of the Oil Workers Industrial Union, arrested several leaders, and then evicted the rest of the union- ists, while several dozen KKK members set to work completely wrecking the hall.20 Police cooperation with the hooded terrorists was completely blatant. On June 14, following bogus rumors that IWW members had rejoiced after hearing news of a deadly explosion aboard the USS Missis- sippi, 150 vigilantes, KKK members, and probably off-duty cops as well again attacked the IWW hall at Twelfth and Center Streets.

Three hundred men, women, and children were in the hall attend-

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ing a benefit for several members who had died in a recent railroad ac- cident. The vigilantes viciously sapped down the surprised men and women, then turned their fury upon the terrified IWW kids, some of them barely more than toddlers.

They seemed to take a special delight in dipping the children into the urn of boiling coffee. This treatment was given to Lena Milos, age 10, known as the “Wobbly song bird,” Lillian Sunsted, age 8, May Sunsted, age 13, John Rodin, age 5, Andrew Kulgis, age 12, and Joyce Rodilda, age 4. Andrew Kulgis received an additional “hot grease” application from one of the sadists in the mob. All the children received beatings as well.21

Young Andrew Kulgis was nearly scalded to death, while the other children suffered severe burns. Meanwhile, seven of the men were kid- napped and taken to a remote spot in Santa Ana Canyon, where they were savagely beaten, then tarred and feathered. The vigilantes were never prosecuted (indeed, they were praised by the Times), but when several ACLU lawyers attempted to speak at a rally in downtown San Pedro protesting the atrocity, they were punctually jailed. By the end of 1924, the dynamic San Pedro affiliate of the MTWIU was in its death throes, the most dedicated IWW organizers, now convicted of “crimi- nal syndicalism,” were leading strikes inside San Quentin, and Harry Chandler’s Los Angeles Times was declaring victory in the “thirty years’ war between labor and capital.”22

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Chapter Seven

In Dubious Battle

“You red son of a bitch,” Livingston hollered, “arguing constitutional law. We’ll give you a taste of our constitutional law!”

—Vigilante in El Centro (1934)1

O n the eve of the Great Depression, California might have been a middle-class “paradise to live in or see,” as Woody Guthrie put it, but for those without the “do re me”—farm workers and labor

radicals, especially—it was a semi-fascist, closed society whose employ- ing classes, especially in the Central Valley and Southern California, were habituated to vigilante violence as a normal mode of industrial relations. The crusade against the IWW had reinforced the already widespread belief that subversives had no consequent civil liberties and that the bourgeois citizenry was perfectly entitled to brandish shot- guns, parade in hoods, and smash up union halls.

The great battles of the 1930s, moreover, would leave an ambiguous legacy: the urban labor movement, led by new CIO unions like the ILWU and UAW, would overthrow the open shop and put a union label on wartime mass production; in the valleys, however, the militarized As- sociated Farmers, together with Sunkist (the citrus growers), would beat down every attempt to establish durable agricultural unionism. In de- fense of California’s system of corporate farming and huge family lati- fundia, vigilantism would soar to a level not seen since the bloody 1850s.

After the final defeat of the IWW’s locals in the Central Valley in

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1917–19, growers began to replace white harvest tramps (“bindlestiffs” in IWW parlance) with Mexican family labor. As with ethnic groups like the Chinese and Japanese who had previously occupied the niche of agricultural helots, the Mexicans were first extolled by the growers as paragons of hard work and docility, then excoriated as riff-raff and a racial menace when they began to organize and strike. Despite efforts by local Mexican consuls to promote exclusive ethnic unions (which often, as Gilbert Gonzalez emphasizes, were little more than company unions), the campesinos in the fields united with other groups, includ- ing whites, African-Americans, and especially the militant Filipinos, to stage some forty-nine different walkouts in 1933–34, involving almost seventy thousand farm and cannery workers.2

The most important of these battles—including the epic 1933 cot- ton strike and the 1933–34 struggles in the Imperial Valley—were fought under the banner of the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union (CAWIU), one of the Communist “Third Period” unions estab- lished after 1928. To the growers, CAWIU was a tentacle of a vast “red” conspiracy: an ultimate menace to be expunged by any means necessary. In fact, the union was a shoestring operation, financed not by Moscow gold but by members’ fifty-cent dues and the extraordinary dedication of a handful of organizers. In contrast to the right-wing myth of a carefully prepared plan of subversion, hammered out by William Z. Foster and his underlings in their Union Square, New York, offices, the CAWIU was a little red fire brigade that responded to spontaneous rebellions in the fields, helping shape them into sustained campaigns and organized strikes. It possessed scant resources—just a few automobiles, mimeo- graph machines, and pro bono left-wing lawyers—but managed to galva- nize the struggle of fieldworkers who owned virtually nothing except the tattered clothes on their backs and their children’s hunger.

The real threat of the CAWIU, as some growers acknowledged, was that it represented a supercharged version of the IWW, with an urban support base that the Wobblies had lacked. Indeed, the senior organizer, Pat Chambers, was a tough ex-Wobbly, and the CAWIU retained the IWW’s participatory organizing model: “each member as he joined be- came an organizer … with strike leaders and committee chairmen elected by the workers and all major decisions put to a vote. The union carefully limited strike demands to those desired by the workers.” More- over, the CAWIU, in contrast to white supremacist AFL unions, preached

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a gospel of interethnic solidarity and antidiscrimination, which it backed up with the consistent courage and sacrifice of its organizers.3 (“Only fa- natics,” cynically observed an AFL leader, “are willing to live in shacks or tents and get their heads broken in the interests of migratory laborers.” 4)

Originally named the Agricultural Workers Industrial League (AFIL), the CAWIU’s baptism by fire was the 1930 lettuce strike in the Imperial Valley. The Trade Union Unity League, the parent of the AFIL/CAWIU, sent some of its most experienced organizers to help build this strike of Mexican and Filipino field hands, but the Commu- nists became targets of criminal syndicalism prosecutions that ulti- mately sent six of them to San Quentin. A year later, Communists helped lead a big cannery walkout in the Santa Clara Valley that was quickly crushed by the police and deputized American Legionnaires (“vigilantes with badges”), despite supporting protests of the unem- ployed in San Jose. The first half of 1932 was equally grim. In May, a desperate CAWIU-led uprising of pea-pickers near Half Moon Bay was efficiently broken by the now standard deployment of police and depu- tized farmers. In June, one of the CAWIU’s veteran organizers, Pat Callahan, was almost beaten to death by deputized goons during a hopeless strike of cherry-pickers in the Santa Clara Valley.5

The CAWIU regrouped in September around a series of walkouts that followed the grape harvest northward in the San Joaquin Valley. Al- though a strike in the Fresno area was quickly broken, four thousand grape-pickers in the Lodi vineyards showed impressive grit in the face of the usual wave of arrests and beatings. The growers, in turn, mobilized their own army. “Scores of growers, local businessmen, and American Legionnaires,” writes Cletus Daniel, “were deputized as soon as the strike call was issued, and placed under the command of Colonel Walter E. Garrison, a leading farm employer and retired military man. Once this special strikebreaking force was formed, duly constituted law en- forcement officials in the region faded into the background.” Garrison’s vigilantes went after the strike leadership, jailing thirty CAWIU organiz- ers and picket captains. They also forced relief agencies to cut off aid to the strikers’ families and blocked every attempt to hold strike meetings or rallies. But the CAWIU responded inventively with guerrilla tactics, using “hit and run” pickets that stymied the introduction of scabs and forced several growers to accede to strike demands. The growers, in turn, appealed to mob violence.

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On the evening of October 2, approximately 1500 vineyardists, busi- nessmen, American Legionnaires, and other Lodi residents met in a local theater to perfect plans to end the strike without further delay. After much debate, a “Committee of 1500” was established to drive strikers out of the area on the following morning.…

At six o’clock the following morning several hundred vigilantes armed with a variety of clubs and firearms gathered in the center of Lodi to carry out their plan. When a group of about 100 strikers assem- bled in front of the CAWIU headquarters to plan the day’s picketing ac- tivities the storm broke. Abandoning their pledge of nonviolence, vigi- lantes led by a small group of local cowboys charged into the strikers’ midst with clubs and fists flailing. As vigilantes drove the frightened and battered strikers toward the edge of town, strikers offered no resistance. However, when a few strikers sought to defend themselves against their attackers, the police intervened to arrest them for “resisting an officer” or “rioting.” Assaults continued throughout the morning as vigilantes cruised the area in automobiles routing strikers from their camps. Later in the day when strikers attempted to regroup they were attacked by vigilantes and local authorities using fire hoses and tear gas bombs.6

The defeat of the grape strike fed an already intense debate amongst Communists about the need to prioritize organizing targets rather than just chasing spontaneous strikes around the state. In No- vember, after careful preparation, the CAWIU dug in its heels in Vacav- ille where four hundred fruit-pickers—Mexican, Filipino, Japanese, and Anglo— walked out in a pre-arranged protest against wage cuts. The response was predictably brutal and followed the same tactics used by San Diego vigilantes a generation earlier. “In the first week of De- cember,” wrote Orrick Johns, “when the strike was a few weeks old, a masked mob of forty men in a score of cars, took six strike leaders out of the Vacaville Jail, drove them twenty miles from town, flogged them with tug straps, clipped their heads with sheep clippers, and poured red enamel over them.” Yet the striking orchard workers held out for two months against overwhelming odds, even defying AFL officials who came to Vacaville to denounce them. In the end, the “pinch of hunger,” and death threats against Filipinos in particular, forced a return to work, but CAWIU organizers were encouraged by the strikers’ solidar- ity and heroic stamina. Many were buoyed by the possibility that farm fascism might be defeated after all, if such fearlessness could be alloyed with efficient organization and—most importantly—sympathetic pub- licity about the strikers’ conditions and grievances.

As it turned out, the great agricultural strike wave of 1933, in the

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very nadir of the Depression, caught growers and trade unionists alike by surprise. Agribusiness, according to Donald Fearis, believed that Spanish-speaking farm workers were too terrified by the mass deporta- tions of Mexican nationals (and their citizen children) then taking place in Los Angeles and other areas to stick their necks out in a strike.7

But in the event, la raza was enraged, not intimidated. The cotton walk- out was the largest agricultural strike in American history, and was, as we saw earlier, a partial success: failing to win union recognition but overcoming the growers’ vow never to yield to strikers’ wage demands.

The fighting spirit of the field workers of all races was magnificent, but it was virtually impossible to defeat the growers as long as local courts and sheriffs were firmly aligned with the vigilantes, and the state and federal governments stood on the sidelines. Despite innumerable protests to Governor Rolph about the terror in the cotton counties, he refused to order California’s state police, the Highway Patrol, to protect strikers’ civil liberties and lives. Both Sacramento and Washington, to be sure, sent fact-finders and official emissaries to the agricultural bat- tlefields, most of whom corroborated the grievances of workers strug- gling to survive in the face of vicious wage cuts while growers were being bailed out by new federal agricultural subsidies. But fact-finding alone could not remove the iron heel from the neck of farm labor.

Moreover, the growers were not tempered by the unexpected tem- pest in the fields. In the Imperial Valley, where the CAWIU rallied in fall 1933 to support a new struggle of the lettuce workers, farm fascism assumed its definitive form. Whereas in previous struggles, the vigi- lantes tended to group themselves in posses of 40 to 150 men—usually farmers, ranch foremen, and local businessmen with personal stakes in the strike—the big grower-shippers in El Centro sought complete mili- tarization of the Valley’s middle and skilled working classes. The Impe- rial Valley Anti-Communist Association, formed in March 1934, re- fused to tolerate neutrality in the class struggle: “Operating on the coercive principle that anyone not willing to join the association was almost by definition a Communist or communist sympathizer, the group’s leaders reported that within a little more than a week of its founding the association had between 7,000 and 10,000 members in the Imperial Valley.”8 Newspaper reporters were soon calling the Valley “California’s Harlan County” in reference to the notorious Kentucky mining county where free speech had been extinguished by company

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gunmen.9

Indeed, the CAWIU soon lost any vestige of protected legal or pub- lic space in which to operate. “Officials announced that no meetings of any kind, anywhere, would be allowed in the Valley,” A. L. Wirin, the chief counsel of the Southern California ACLU, told his members. “Meetings on a private lot, or in a private meeting hall have come under the ban. Half a dozen Mexican workers chatting on a street are a ‘public meeting’ and dispersed by the police.”10 When attorney Grover Johnson arrived in El Centro to file a writ of habeas corpus on behalf of jailed strike leaders, he and his wife were attacked and beaten in the street by anticommunists and then nearly lynched after seeking refuge in the jail. Public beatings were also administered to two other out-of- town lawyers, and Wirin, one of the most prominent civil libertarians in the state, was kidnapped by vigilantes (“one of whom he later claimed was a state highway patrolman in full uniform”), roughed up, robbed, threatened with death, and abandoned barefoot in the desert. Even Pelham Glassford, an anticommunist retired general who was the personal representative of Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, was re- ceived with hostility and treated to anonymous death threats. As a Highway Patrol captain told two agents of the state labor commissioner after they had been detained and interrogated by vigilantes, “You men get out of here. You are hurting our work. We don’t want conciliation. We know how to handle these people and where we find troublemakers we will drive them out if we have to ‘sap’ them.”11

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Chapter Eight

Thank the Vigilantes

The California farm workers emerged from the 1930s as political “for- gotten men.” They could not count on any of the protections afforded their industrial co-workers, neither the assurance of minimal eco- nomic security nor the guaranteed right to help themselves through collective action.

—Donald Fearis1

I n the summer of 1934, the San Francisco Embarcadero was the scene of the most important labor struggle in California history. It took the form of a three-act drama, beginning with a longshoremen’s revolt

that quickly grew into a maritime strike that closed every port on the Pacific Coast, then finally became a San Francisco general strike that lasted three days. A fourth, Armageddon-like act was only narrowly avoided. With employers screaming that a “red insurrection” was in progress, Governor Frank Merriam sent forty-five hundred heavily armed National Guard troops to San Francisco under the command of “outspokenly anticommunist” Major General David Barrows, whose military curriculum vitae, as Kevin Starr points out, included “the American Expeditionary Force sent to assist the White Russians in their counter-revolution against the Bolsheviks.”2

The entire country watched in anxious suspense to see if General Barrows, as many conservatives hoped, would order his machine-gunners to massacre the local “Bolsheviks” on the waterfront. In the event, the

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maritime strikers, backed by a general strike representing the entire fam- ily of San Francisco labor, calmly crossed their arms and refused to back down, even after a major raid on the headquarters of the Marine Workers Industrial Union. But if a bloody showdown between the troops and strikers was averted, the Industrial Association, representing the city’s largest employers, used the military occupation to unleash goon squads masquerading as “irate citizen vigilantes” upon the local Communist Party and other progressive groups, including Upton Sinclair’s Epic (End Poverty in California) movement, whom it blamed for instigating and supporting the strike. In The Big Strike, radical journalist Mike Quinn re- called the notorious, week-long “anti-red” raids that began on July 17:

The plan of attack was identical in every instance. A caravan of auto- mobiles containing a gang of men in leather jackets, whom newspapers referred to as “citizen vigilantes,” would draw up to the curb in front of the building. They would let fly a hail of bricks, smashing all windows, and then crash into the place, beating up anyone they found, wrecking all furniture, hacking pianos to pieces with axes, throwing typewriters out of windows, and leaving the place a shambles.

Then they would get back into their cars and drive off. The police would arrive immediately, arrest the men who had been beaten up, and take command of the situation.3

With the complicity or participation of the San Francisco police, the vigilantes smashed up the offices of the Western Worker, beat three men senseless at the Workers’ Open Forum, wrecked the Mission Workers’ Neighborhood House, and were in the process of demolishing the interior of the Workers’ School when they unexpectedly encoun- tered Homeric resistance.

Here [at the Workers’ School] the vigilantes wrought havoc on the first floor, but when they attempted to mount the narrow staircase leading to the upper stories they were confronted by the huge bulk of David Meri- hew, an ex-serviceman who worked as a caretaker in the building. Meri- hew brandished an old cavalry saber in one hand and a bayonet in the other. Flourishing his weapons he beckoned to them to come ahead. They took a few steps forward and he slashed out with his saber, taking a huge chip out of the banister. The raiders discreetly retired and left the field to the police, to whom Merihew surrendered after striking a bargain with them not to turn him over to the vigilantes if he yielded his weapons.4

While Captain Joseph O’Meara of the San Francisco Red Squad was boasting that “the Communist Party is through in San Francisco— the organization can’t face such adverse public sentiment,” other com-

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munities were panicking at the specter of further general strikes and “Communist invasions” as luridly predicted by the press.5 Employer groups in the East Bay and other areas sponsored “Leagues Against Communism” and debated how to best combat the “Red Menace”:

Vehement demands were made that public libraries be “purged” of all allegedly Red books. Other patriots wanted to reorganize the public school system on a basis of rigid censorship to make certain that no Red ideas were lurking in the primers. Some urged the institution of concentration camps, either in Alaska or on the peninsula of Lower California, to which all communists would be exiled.6

For veteran labor activists, of course, the return to vigilantism was déjà vu, recalling the free speech fights of 1910–12, the patriotic pogroms in fall 1917, and the attacks on the IWW in 1919 and 1924. But the outcome, this time around, was radically different: despite the threat of injunctions, machine guns, and vigilantes, the maritime core of the upheaval remained impregnable in the face of repression. To the surprise and consternation of employers across the country, the rank- and-file longshoremen led by Australian immigrant Harry Bridges won a spectacular victory over the shipping magnates and opened the door to new industrial unions. Within the next five years, this urban labor insurgency would sweep away most of the repressive apparatus of the open shop, including the shadowy urban vigilantes, the unconstitu- tional anti-picketing laws, even the “red” squads and labor spies.

But rural California was a different story. Here, to borrow an ex- pression of Regis Debray’s from the context of Latin America in the 1960s, the “revolution revolutionized the counterrevolution.” What was universally perceived by agricultural elites as the “Communist victory” in San Francisco massively reinforced their determination not to yield an inch even to moderate unionism. Private violence, always in tandem with repression by local sheriffs, became better organized and more centralized than ever before in California history.

Camouflaged by the hysteria surrounding the general strike, Sacra- mento police—advised by William Hynes, former chief of the LAPD’s infamous Red Squad—raided the state headquarters of the CAWIU, ar- resting veteran leader Pat Chambers, twenty-one-year-old Caroline Decker (“La Passionara of the cotton strike” according to Kevin Starr), and more than a dozen others. Eventually eighteen organizers would be indicted under the Criminal Syndicalism Act and eight convicted and

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imprisoned after the longest trial in state history. The CAWIU was forced to divert its resources from organizing in the fields to a desper- ate defense of its key personnel. Later their sentences would be reversed on appeal, but this “anti-red carnival,” as McWilliams called it, “crip- pled and destroyed the Cannery and Agricultural Workers’ Industrial Union. With their leadership in prison, the workers were momentarily demoralized, and the great wave of strikes subsided.”7

Meanwhile a sinister new organization had emerged to regionally coordinate the struggle against striking farm workers and their embry- onic unions. After defeating the CAWIU’s last stand in the melon fields in spring 1933, the Imperial Valley growers decided to franchise their strikebreaking methods and militant antiradicalism to farmers in the rest of the state. The Associated Farmers of California—also inspired by Los Angeles’s Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association and its statewide offspring, the Industrial Association—were “pledged to help one another in case of emergency. They agreed to cooperate to harvest crops in case of strikes and to offer their services to the local sheriff im- mediately as special deputies in the event of disorders arising out of picketing and sabotage.”8

Although the roots of the organization were in the American Le- gion halls of El Centro and Brawley, the Associated Farmers—as Carey McWilliams emphasized—only became a statewide power because Cal- ifornia’s largest corporations (as well as reactionary newspapers like the Los Angeles Times) favored the institutionalization of the vigilante movement:

The initial funds were, in fact, raised by Mr. Earl Fisher, of the Pacific Gas and Electric Company, and Mr. Leonard Wood, of the California Packing Company. At this meeting [the Associated Farmers’ founding convention in May 1934], it was decided that farmers should “front” the organization, although the utility companies and banks would exercise ultimate control.… When one realizes that approximately 50 percent of the farm lands in Central and Northern California are controlled by one institution—the Bank of America—the irony of these “embittered” farmers defending their “homes” against strikers becomes apparent.9

The Associated Farmers provided a Pinkerton-like infrastructure of industrial espionage and employee blacklists to local growers, and acted as a powerful legislative lobby in all matters concerning farm labor. The organization opposed not only radical unionism, but collective bargain- ing and industrial mediation per se. It also agitated against urban work-

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ers and their new unions. The Associated Farmers stood, in short, for the untrammeled despotism of agribusiness over its workforce. With the Bank of America, Calpack, and the Southern Pacific Railroad as its ultimate ventriloquists, the organization asserted the hegemony of larger, labor-hating growers over the smaller farmers, Grangers, and businessmen who might incline toward negotiation or settlement with the unions. Philip Bancroft, the folksy grower son of the famous nine- teenth-century historian who had mythologized the original vigilance committees, impersonated the “voice of the small farmer” when circum- stances demanded nostalgic appeals to agrarian mythology, but the real decisions were made in bank chambers and corporate boardrooms.

One of the Associated Farmers’ first projects was hiring LAPD Red Squad veteran William Hynes and Imperial County District Attorney Elmer Heald to assist Sacramento authorities in the aggressive prosecu- tion of the CAWIU defendants. Indeed, the extensive application of the Criminal Syndicalism Act to destroy the left wing of the labor move- ment was one of the Associated Farmers’ principal aims, and the group pledged each member as a special deputy to help quell organizing cam- paigns and strikes.10 More ambitiously, it urged the mobilization of an- tilabor “citizen armies” along the lines of the Imperial Valley’s Anti- Communist League. Across the state, these so-called California Cavaliers or Crusaders (with the American Legion halls as their recruit- ing depots) began to arm and drill. Meanwhile, with the Associated Farmers warning that the “Reds would be back,” county supervisors passed anti-picketing ordinances; spies infiltrated harvest crews; ranch- ers strung barbed wire and even dug moats; and local sheriffs stocked tear gas and built stockades for the expected overflow of prisoners.

But the militarized Associated Farmers did not wait for strikes to come to them; they proposed to preempt through “systematic terror- ization of workers in the rural areas” the very capacity for sustained class struggle. “We aren’t going to stand for any more of these organiz- ers from now on,” boasted one grower. “Anyone who peeps about higher wages will wish he hadn’t.” Another leader of the Associated Farmers returned from Germany full of praise for Adolf Hitler (who “ha[d] done more for democracy than any man before him”) and the admirable Nazi definition of citizenship: “you simply say that anybody who agrees with you is a citizen of the first class and anybody who does not agree with you is a non-voting citizen.”11 Fascism had become the

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explicit model for agricultural labor relations in California, and as the 1935 summer harvest season began, crosses burned on hillsides across the state, warning field hands that vigilantes were nearby and watching.

In Orange County, several hundred Mexican citrus strikers were rounded up by a small army of what McWilliams described as “special armed guards, under the command of former ‘football heroes’ of the University of Southern California masquerading as amateur storm troopers.” Growers’ sons were cheerfully advised by the Orange County sheriff to “shoot to kill” if necessary, and strikers’ camps and meetings were teargassed. A few months later, a mob of Cavaliers in Santa Rosa seized five pro-labor “radicals,” whom they paraded through the streets and then forced to kneel and kiss the American flag on the courthouse steps. When two refused to agree to leave town, they were beaten, tarred, and feathered, all to the editorial delight of the Hearst papers in San Francisco and Los Angeles.12

By 1936 the Associated Farmers exercised an extraordinary surveil- lance over every aspect of life in rural California. “There is no parallel,” McWilliams wrote, “in any state for this interlocking network of farm employer organizations which represents a most unique combination of social, economic and political power.”13 Moreover, the organization was flush with cash from “a list of major backers reading like a Who’s Who of California enterprise,” while the arrival of a huge labor surplus of desperate Dust Bowl refugees made it easier than ever to find re- placements for striking field hands or cannery workers.14

1936’s most dramatic, if completely one-sided, battle took place in the lettuce-growing Salinas Valley, classic Steinbeck country. Here the Vegetable Packers Association—which followed its seasonal workforce from the Imperial Valley to the Salinas Valley and back each year—was the only agricultural union still active in the state. A whites-only affili- ate of the AFL, it represented the largely Texan and Okie workforce in the packing sheds. (The field hands, ineligible to join the Association, were largely Mexican and Filipino.) The Associated Farmers of Mon- terey County, operating through a well-financed front group, the Citi- zens Association of the Salinas Valley, decided to lock out and destroy the union, replacing its core membership and “trouble raisers” with more docile workers.

The murder of the Vegetable Packers Association was planned with such meticulous precision, and involved such overwhelming superior-

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ity in firepower and legal resources, that it recalls the monstrous mas- sacre of poor immigrants by millionaire ranchers chronicled in Michael Cimino’s epic 1980 film, Heaven’s Gate (a loose retelling of Wyoming’s Johnson County Land War). To assure complete coordina- tion between growers, police agencies, and citizen vigilantes, the Asso- ciated Farmers persuaded state officials to let Colonel Henry Sanborn, a notorious anticommunist who had trained vigilantes (called the “Na- tionals”) during the 1934 San Francisco general strike, go to Salinas as generalissimo of all the antiunion forces. In that role, he stockpiled tear gas, installed machine guns in packing plants, and coordinated a “regu- lar army” of local sheriffs and Highway Patrol officers whom Sacra- mento officials had placed at his disposal.

Sanborn also conscripted a vigilante militia, Imperial Valley–style. “On September 19 [1936],” writes Carey McWilliams, “the Sheriff emerged from his temporary retirement, and ordered a general mobi- lization of all male residents of Salinas between the ages of 18 and 45, and threatened to arrest any resident who failed to respond. In this manner the celebrated ‘Citizens’ Army’ of Salinas was recruited.”15 In Sanborn’s view, no one was too young to help defend white civilization in Salinas: the Boy Scouts were drafted as auxiliaries while the wood- shop students in Salinas High School manufactured heavy clubs for bashing strikers. At one point, the town was barricaded and all highway movement was subjected to a strict dragnet: pedestrians and motorists wearing Roosevelt campaign buttons (it was an election year) had them ripped from their lapels.16

Not surprisingly, the lettuce lockout unfolded as a hyperbolic show of force tending toward atrocity. Chemical warfare was the order of the day and no privilege was attached to the workers’ white skins. Police used copious quantities of tear gas and vomiting gas to disperse picket lines, then chased unionists down and savagely beat them. When eight hun- dred frightened people took refuge in the Salinas Labor Temple, “the po- lice, deputies and highway patrolmen bombarded the Temple with tear gas, then, under protection of this barrage, moved in closer to toss tear and nausea gas and sulphur into the union headquarters. Hundreds of strikers fled the building, only to be met by police with even more tear gas bombs or deputized vigilantes wielding axe handles and clubs.”17

The editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, Paul Smith, visited Sali- nas after two of his reporters had been seriously injured and threatened

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with lynching by vigilantes. He was incredulous to discover that the governor and attorney general of California, along with local officials, had willingly ceded the state’s monopoly of legitimate violence to the fanatic Colonel Sanborn and the Associated Farmers. “For a full fort- night,” he wrote, “the ‘constituted authorities’ of Salinas have been but the helpless pawns of sinister fascist forces which have operated from a barricaded hotel floor in the center of town.”18

For the Okies, meanwhile, the lockout was a brutal mirror that re- flected back not their traditional self-image as rugged white pioneer folk, but the growers’ contempt for them as a “white trash” caste. They discovered that there were no exemptions, even for ancient Anglo-Sax- ons, from the racialized stereotypes structurally associated with farm labor in California. “I can remember,” recalled one organizer, “the biggest impression I had of those days was watching those white people coming in from Oklahoma and Arkansas and Texas, coming in with their ingrown prejudices and hatred, and learning in the course of the strike that they had more in common with that worker with the brown skin and black skin than they had with the vigilantes with the white skin who were beating everybody up.”19

The Salinas lockout, whether it was a preemptive strike against the AFL’s involvement in agricultural unionism or a dead-serious rehearsal for American fascism, was a decisive victory for the Associated Farmers. It inspired the blitzkrieg tactics used the following year when another AFL affiliate, the Cannery Workers Union, attempted to strike the Stockton Food Products Company. “Instantly the call went forth for the usual ‘citi- zens’ army,’” writes McWilliams, and fifteen hundred loyal burghers, armed with shotguns and axe handles, punctually responded. Colonel Garrison, the hero of the El Centro vigilantes, was now president of the Associated Farmers, and he personally led the attack on the picket lines on April 24, 1937. “For over an hour, 300 pickets continued to fight ‘coughing and choking,’ as ‘vigilantes’ and ‘special deputies’ poured round after round of tear-gas bombs at them.” When tear gas proved ineffective, Garrison’s troops used buckshot, seriously injuring fifty workers.20

Kevin Starr observes that when some Stockton businessmen, sup- ported by the local district attorney, realized that they lived in an occu- pied city subject to the whim of the Associated Farmers, they protested to Sacramento, asking that the National Guard be sent to restore order. “As in the case of Salinas, [Governor] Merriam refused; and Colonel

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Garrison and his army remained the preeminent force in the area.” The governor, in other words, ratified the vigilantes as a legitimate author- ity: a dangerous recipe, complete with shades of shirts brown and black, for ceding all power to the growers and cannery owners.21

But it was hard to argue with success: in California’s cities, as in the rest of the country, 1938 was a legendary year of sit-down strikes, mass pickets, and CIO fever. Yet the fields and packing sheds were eerily quiet, with no more than a dozen small strikes that involved less than five thousand workers, a bare fraction of the 1933–34 turnout. Nor did New Deal victories in Washington and Sacramento translate into any fundamental amelioration for farm laborers, who were excluded from the coverage of both the Wagner Act (NLRA) and the Social Security Act. The election of Democrat Culbert Olson as governor in 1938 may have been a victory for city unions (his first act in office was to pardon radical trade unionist Tom Mooney, who had been wrongfully impris- oned for twenty-two years). But legislative initiatives to help farm labor—even measures as seemingly non-controversial as forbidding the Highway Patrol from taking sides in labor disputes or assuring that relief was provided “solely on the basis of need”—were easily scuttled by a coalition of rural Democrats and Republicans.22

Although two union movements—the AFL’s “federal” locals and the CIO-chartered United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Work- ers of America (UCAPAWA)—were now active in California agriculture, they shied away from apocalyptic confrontations in the fields. They fo- cused their efforts instead on the organization (successful in Northern California) of town-based food-processing workers whose bargaining rights were protected by the NLRA and whose strike power was leveraged by the clout of powerful allies like the Teamsters or the Longshoremen.

If there was any doubt about the fundamental role played by pri- vate and state repression in turning field workers into the New Deal’s pariahs—without a home in either its social programs or within the or- ganized labor movement—it should have been dispelled by the fate of the strikes in the Marysville area, north of Sacramento. The first strikes took place during the spring and summer of 1939, followed by a large cotton strike in the fall in the San Joaquin Valley. The last great farm strikes of the 1930s, these were also the crowning victories of the Asso- ciated Farmers.

In Marysville, the fruit workers who lived in “Okieville” faced off

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against Earl Fruit, a subsidiary of the giant DiGiorgio empire—the Gen- eral Motors of California agriculture. Only a minority of the members of the Associated Farmers in the area were actually farmers; the rest were realtors, publishers, mayors, and cops, including the Marysville po- lice chief and the local Highway Patrol commander. Earl Fruit’s bullying owner, Joseph DiGiorgio, could count on a vigilant, fully mobilized local ruling class to back up his ranch foremen and armed guards.

The first dispute broke out in the spring when, according to histo- rian Donald Fearis, a popular foreman quit in protest over the com- pany spies (a major Associated Farmers’ initiative) who now infested every level of agricultural production. Earl lured striking crews back to work with the promise of higher wages and no sanction against strike leaders; when retaliatory layoffs quickly followed, angry workers called in the CIO, and by the beginning of the pear harvest in early July, Local 197 of UCAPAWA had put up picket lines around the orchards. The Sutter-Yuba Counties Associated Farmers immediately responded with the usual arrests, beatings, and death threats; the growers had earlier weighed the idea of a “citizens’ army,” but preferred the selective depu- tization of foremen and ranchers. They were temporarily foiled, how- ever, when Okie women began to replace their arrested fathers and husbands on the picket lines. “The tenacity of the women and the sup- plying of food by friendly farmers and state agencies,” writes Fearis, “momentarily kept the strike alive.” But a raid on the union headquar- ters soon lopped the head off the strike and forced the workers either to return to work or leave the area.23

The fall UCAPAWA strike, detonated as in 1934 by wage-slashing, spread from an initial uprising at Madera across the entire San Joaquin cotton belt. Despite the passionate response from the largely Okie work- force, the union was unable to withstand the Associated Farmers’ patent recipe of mass arrests, evictions, and vigilante terror. The fatal blow was delivered in the form of a furious attack on a strike rally in Madera in late October by three hundred growers armed “with clubs, tire chains, fan belts, and pick handles while the local sheriff stood by.”24

The 1939 cotton strike was a last gasp: UCAPAWA soon abdicated field organizing to concentrate on processing and canning workers protected by the NLRA, while the Okies eventually found their way into supervisory jobs or moved to the cities to work in war plants.25

Their place was taken from 1942 onwards by Mexican braceros as the

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racial caste system in California agriculture was restored under the aegis of an international treaty to address the wartime labor shortage.

Vigilantism, raised to the level of a science by the Associated Farm- ers, had inflicted a historic defeat not just on the super-exploited field workforce, but upon the entire project of progressive labor and New Deal reform in California. A U.S. Senate committee chaired by Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin, which investigated labor relations in Califor- nia agriculture in 1939–40, would later conclude that the Associated Farmers had organized a conspiracy “designed to prevent the exercise of their civil liberties by oppressed wage laborers in agriculture, [which] was executed ruthlessly with every device of repression that antiunionism could muster.” Moreover, when the employers’ “complete monopoly in controlling labor relations”—a euphemism for a monop- oly of violence—was combined with the workers’ equally complete lack of political clout or legal status, “local fascism was the result.”26

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Road from Altar to Sasabe. A fee of $3.00 is charged to

all using the unpaved road. It is the path going north for

vans packed with immigrants and sometimes for trucks

loaded with marijuana.

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Chapter Nine

The Zoot Suit Wars

Let’s get ’em! Let’s get the chili-eating bastards!

—Anglo mob (Santa Monica, 1943)

P earl Harbor gave California’s anti-Japanese forces the license to execute the ethnic cleansing that had been their chief goal for more than a generation. No one argued more fiercely for the re-

moval of the Nisei and their parents than the attorney general of Califor- nia, Earl Warren, a longtime member of the Native Sons of the Golden West and political protégé of chief “Jap-swatter” V. S. McClatchy. De- scribing Japanese-Californians as a “fifth column” and an “Achilles heel,” Warren convened a conference of state law enforcement officers in early February 1942 to demand relocation and internment of the Japanese. When it was pointed out that not a single instance of treason or sabotage had been attributed to the group, Warren responded that this was simply “ominous” proof of the Japanese refusal to report disloyalty.1

Meanwhile self-appointed vigilantes were throwing rocks through the windows of Japanese-owned stores and attacking Nisei teenagers in the streets, with warnings of greater violence to come. The campaign of intimidation was most serious in rural counties, as indicated in a memo sent to Sacramento in early January 1942 by state Department of Agriculture field staff: “They [Japanese-Americans] do not leave their homes at night.… The police authorities are probably not sympa- thetic to the Japanese and are giving them only the minimum protec-

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tion. Investigations of actual attacks on Japanese have been merely per- functory and no prosecutions have been initiated.”2

In testimony before Congress, Earl Warren invoked these attacks as an argument for internment, warning that widespread and uncontrol- lable vigilantism would be inevitable unless President Roosevelt signed an executive order to deport the Japanese from the coastal area. Cali- fornia’s chief law enforcement officer made it clear that he was com- pletely sympathetic to the vigilante instinct: “My own belief concerning vigilantism is that the people do not engage in vigilante activities so long as they believe that their Government through its agencies is tak- ing care of their most serious problems.”3

German- and Italian-Americans, of course, were not interned on the West Coast, nor did Westerners seem to find anything unusual in the spectacle, common by late 1943, of Italian and German prisoners of war picking fruit and working on local farms. The real menace of the Nisei had been their economic success, and their internment forced a fire sale of their hard-earned assets, including farmland situated in areas already targeted for postwar residential development, like West Los Angeles. In the name of patriotism, their enemies were able to cherry-pick the fruits of two generations of diligent labor. Although some Nisei would return to farming after the war, they would never regain the influential posi- tion in California agriculture they had occupied in 1941.4

Despite the internment of the Japanese, bigotry took no rest. But the once despised Okies were now white citizens again, usefully toiling in aircraft plants or fighting with the U.S. Marines at Guadalcanal, and the “heroic’” Chinese and Filipinos were temporarily exempted from the Yellow Peril while it suited wartime propaganda purposes. Instead, the brunt of wartime racial prejudice and mob or vigilante violence, es- pecially in the Los Angeles area, was directed against Chicano and African-American youth. The vigilante movement—deliberately insti- gated by the Los Angeles press—that is customarily recalled as the “zoot suit riots,” was, of course, only the local franchise of a nationwide outburst of white violence during 1943’s “summer of hate.” In this larger context, two distinct species of white grievances—one rooted in workplace white privilege, the other in the social imaginary—were al- loyed in different proportions in different cities.

First was the backlash of rank-and-file white war workers against the Fair Employment Practices Commission that Roosevelt had estab-

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lished in the face of threats by Black leaders to lead a march on Wash- ington in 1941. By 1943, some real progress was finally being achieved in integrating shipyards, aircraft plants, and urban transit despite protests by segregated AFL locals and local demagogues. In defense boomtowns on the West Coast or in the Midwest, incoming streams of white and Black labor migrants from the Mason-Dixon states were competing over housing and services as well as seniority and skills. As a Life magazine article warned in a 1942 headline, “Detroit is Dynamite. It can either blow up Hitler or blow up the U.S.”5 Oakland and Los An- geles (where ten thousand Black in-migrants from Oklahoma and Texas arrived every month during 1943) were almost as volatile.6

Urban public space was the other arena where racist agitation sowed seeds of violence in different North American cities. Thanks in large part to reactionary newspaper campaigns, the “swing kid” subculture of the early 1940s, with its jive talk and “zoot suit” attire, had been conflated with a racialized and almost entirely imaginary menace of teenage gang- sters and draft dodgers. Unlike the anti-Black backlash in the war plants, hysteria about “zooters” targeted different ethnic groups. In New York, despite hordes of similarly attired white youth, the problem zooters were largely identified as Black delinquents, and in Los Angeles, Blacks and es- pecially Chicanos were singled out. In wartime Montreal, which had its own “zoot suit riot” in June 1944, the English-language press incited sol- diers to violence against supposedly “anti-patriotic” Francophone youth who hung out (and competed for the attention of young females) in the same clubs and dancehalls as the military.7

The roots of the wartime zoot suit obsession go back to the na- tional economic recovery in 1940–41, when newspaper editors, police chiefs, and ministers across the country began to complain about the rise of a flamboyant, antiauthoritarian youth culture based on the fash- ions of big-band swing and showing its most dangerous inclinations among minority youth. The chief complaint was that a new racial pride and generational insolence no longer acknowledged traditional color lines or segregated ethnic boundaries in public spaces like amusement parks, theaters, and transportation. (We have already seen, of course, a preview of this in the case of the proud and unsubmissive young Fil- ipinos who collided with white supremacy in rural California dance- halls and honky-tonks in the late 1920s.) As Spike Lee portrays in the vivid, opening scenes of his film Malcolm X, the uninhibited exuber-

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ance of the zooters represented both embryonic cultural nationalism as well as the stirrings of an interracial youth culture. In response, a truly extraordinary amount of newsprint was expended in stern laments about declining social control of youth and wrathful tirades against the “new delinquency.” In the opinion of local authorities, the children of color were out of control.8

The death of a Chicano teenager under confused circumstances near a ranch pond called Sleepy Lagoon in August 1942 provided the pretext for a sustained campaign by the Los Angeles daily press—especially the Hearst papers and the Los Angeles Times—against Chicano gangsters, pachucos, and zooters. Although the alleged crime wave was largely an ed- itorial fabrication, it provided a lurid core for the coalescence of all kinds of wild allegations, including claims that Eastside youth were being groomed into a fifth column by the shadowy Sinarquista movement (a Mexican fascist group with only a handful of actual members in Southern California) and that “the Japanese, upon being evacuated, had incited the Mexican population of Los Angeles to violence.” Such calumnies, of course, were nonsense—obscene, even—in the face of the number of posthumous Congressional Medals of Honor and Navy Crosses being awarded to Chicano youth in the Pacific. But as Carey McWilliams, who became the chair of the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee, emphasized, the Mexican-American contribution to the war effort was obscured by the incessant front page equation of Mexicans with crime. “Every Mexi- can youngster arrested, no matter how trivial the offense and regardless of his ultimate guilt or innocence, was photographed with some such caption as ‘Pachuco Gangster’ or ‘Zoot-suit Hoodlum.’”9

By the spring of 1943, Los Angeles public opinion had been per- suaded that gang violence was raging almost uncontrolled in the “dis- loyal” neighborhoods around the downtown area and east of the river. At the same time, Black-white workplace tensions were peaking over the impending federal integration of Los Angeles street car crews: a conflict that would eventually require army intervention to prevent mob vio- lence. Added to this fraught mix was the chronic and unavoidable fric- tion between different groups of young men—sailors, marines, war workers, neighborhood youth—as they competed for fun and female at- tention in crowded entertainment districts downtown, in Hollywood, and at the beach. What might have been, at most, minor scuffles or small riots between white sailors and Chicano and Black youth were magnified

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by newspaper hysteria with police complicity into a large-scale, if short- lived, vigilante campaign against Los Angeles’s youth of color.

The foreshock was a riot at Venice Pier in mid-May. According to historian Eduardo Pagan, a false rumor that Chicanos had stabbed a sailor incited a mob hunt for revenge at the Aragon ballroom:

As one eyewitness later said, “They didn’t care whether the Mexican kids wore zoot suits or not, and for that matter most of the kids danc- ing were not in drapes—they just wanted Mexicans.” When the dance ended and the Mexican-American teenagers started to leave the ball- room, a crowd of about five hundred sailors and civilians began to chase them down the boardwalk. “Let’s get ’em,” the mob shouted as they ran past the bingo parlors and concession stands. “Let’s get the chili-eating bastards!”10

Several weeks later, following further small-scale confrontations be- tween sailors and Chicano youth, a group of sailors returning to the Naval Armory in Elysian Park claimed they were attacked by zoot-suited youth from a nearby slum neighborhood. When the assault was reported to the LAPD, the cops formed a “Vengeance Squad,” as they called it, but were unable to find the supposed assailants. As McWilliams points out, “the raid accomplished nothing except to get the names of the raiding officers in the newspapers and to whip up the anger of the community against the Mexican population, which may, perhaps, have been the rea- son for the raid.” The next night, several hundred sailors in a fleet of twenty taxicabs cruised around the downtown and Eastside areas, beat- ing up any zoot-suited Mexican youth they encountered; a ritual that was repeated for the next two nights without interference from the po- lice, who, instead, “mopped up” after the military vigilantes by arresting any zooters or neighborhood youths they encountered.11

Egged on by papers like the Los Angeles Daily News, which warned “Zoot Suit Chiefs Girding for War on Navy,” thousands of white ser- vicemen and civilian youth, unimpeded by the police, gathered down- town on Monday, June 7, for a culminating night of infamy. Any young Chicano was fair game.

Pushing its way into the important motion picture theaters, the mob ordered the management to turn on the house lights and then ranged up and down the aisles dragging Mexicans out of their seats. Street cars were halted while Mexicans, and some Filipinos and Negroes, were jerked out of their seats, pushed into the streets, and beaten with sadis- tic frenzy. If the victims wore zoot suits, they were stripped of their

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clothing and left naked or half-naked on the streets, bleeding and bruised. Proceeding down Main Street from First to Twelfth, the mob stopped on the edge of the Negro district. Learning that the Negroes planned a warm reception for them, the mobsters turned back and marched through the Mexican east side spreading panic and terror.12

Although the servicemen wisely decided not to attack the Central Avenue ghetto, a Black war worker was pulled off a street car and one of his eyes gouged out. Carey McWilliams, a lawyer and civil-rights ac- tivist as well as a journalist, took affidavits from many of the victims, not more than half of whom were actually wearing zoot suits. Like the outbreak of a disease that spreads and becomes a national epidemic, the Los Angeles violence was immediately followed by other race riots and attacks on people of color across the country, finally culminating in the terrifying Detroit events of June 20–21, which took the lives of twenty-nine people. McWilliams, whose contemporary articles were unsurpassed in their honesty and passion, claimed that the riots had exposed “the rotten foundations upon which the City of Los Angeles had built a papier-mâché facade of ‘Inter-American Good Will.’”13

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Chapter Ten

Beating the UFW

It was like being in a war. They arrested farmworkers; they hit them with sticks. Everywhere you looked there were Teamsters. If the truck- ers saw that you had eagles on your car, they would stop you and break your windshield.

—UFW supporter (1973)1

A s the war ended, sporadic racist attacks continued—terrorism against returning Nisei, arson against Blacks attempting to buy homes in white neighborhoods, and so on—but vigilantism

appeared to have been put in mothballs. Its major constituency, the corporate farmers, no longer had to mobilize shotgun-wielding “citizen armies” when they could manipulate the Bracero Program to import strike-breaking labor and then, if the braceros themselves organized, call upon the Border Patrol to deport them. Indeed, the Border Patrol now became integral to the repressive relations of production in Cali- fornia agriculture: vigilante violence seemed less necessary when de- portation could so easily dispose of impudent strikers.

Postwar attempts to organize farm labor, like the October 1947 strike against giant DiGiorgio in Kern County, were thus efficiently re- pelled by the use of imported strike-breakers, mass arrests, selective de- portations, evictions of strikers’ families, red-baiting by the California House Committee on Un-American Activities, and employer terrorism (one strike leader was shot in the head). The Associated Farmers also or-

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ganized a Citizens’ Committee in support of DiGiorgio, but felt no need to arm its members with axe handles or send them out to storm workers’ camps. After the defeat of the DiGiorgio strikers and a massive purge of the pro-union labor force in the Imperial Valley, any further attempt to bring collective bargaining to California agriculture seemed fruitless.

But the end of the Bracero Program in 1964 and the reemergence of a settled, family workforce made possible the new revolt in the fields led by the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA). The great De- lano grape strike that began in 1965 was as unexpected as the 1933 cot- ton uprising and mobilized equal passion and commitment from an exploited workforce. The extraordinary endurance of the strikers and the charisma of the new union, with its appeal to both class and ethnic pride, shook the growers’ belief in their own omnipotence. The strike faced the classical repertoire of intimidation by ranch foremen and se- curity guards, who turned dogs on them, ran them down in their pickup trucks, shoved shotguns in their bellies, and beat them with near impunity; yet such tactics only seemed to infuse la huelga with more energy. Eventually, agribusiness with the biggest corporations, like United Fruit and DiGiorgio, in the fore decided to resurrect the Depression-era “armies of the night.” The vigilantes this time around, however, weren’t growers’ sons or American Legionnaires, but highly paid members of the Teamsters’ Union, imported by the hundreds to intimidate, beat, and drive away NFWA strikers.

By 1967, major employers had decided to sign sweetheart contracts with the Teamsters in order to preclude and sabotage organization by the farmworkers. Because farmworkers were not protected by the Na- tional Labor Relations Act, “there were no unionization elections or even attempts to ascertain the preferences of field workers covered by the [Teamster] contracts. Nor were the workers given an opportunity to ratify the contracts, although they were required to join the Teamsters and have weekly union dues deducted from their paychecks.”2 More- over, the Teamsters made little effort to conceal their disdain for their new, involuntarily conscripted members: “I am not sure,” said Einar Mohn, head of the powerful Western Conference of Teamsters, “how effective a union can be when it is composed of Mexican-Americans and Mexican nationals with temporary visas.”3

The Teamsters immediately enforced their scab agreements with such pervasive strong-arm tactics that farmworker leader César Chávez

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had great difficulty preventing his own outraged members from retali- ating in kind. Confrontations in 1970 between the Salinas-area Grower- Shipper Association and the Teamsters, on one side, and the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee (UFWOC, formed when the NFWA merged with the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee), on the other, evoked the worst memories of the 1936 lockout.

Growers hired guards armed with shotguns to patrol their property, and Teamsters sent in thugs wielding baseball bats to frighten off the Chavistas. One of the most infamous of these goons … was Ted “Speedy” Gonsalves, who wore black-and-white pinstriped suits and drove an armored limousine.… The imported thugs menaced pickets, pounded on the walls of rooms where UFWOC negotiators were meet- ing, and knocked over coffee cups and cursed at UFWOC members whom they encountered in restaurants.4

The terror was meant to remind farmworkers that growers and their v ig ilante henchmen were still the kings of the valle y. The UFWOC’s attorney, for instance, was hospitalized after being beaten unconscious by Teamster goons; meanwhile, a foreman ran his tractor into pickets and the UFWOC (soon to be the United Farm Workers, or UFW) office in Hollister was dynamited. César Chávez was jailed for refusing to comply with a one-sided court injunction to stop the boy- cott of scab lettuce. When Ethel Kennedy (Robert F. Kennedy’s widow) came to visit Chávez in the Salinas jail, she was mobbed and physically threatened by several hundred opponents of the strike, including a large contingent from the local John Birch Society.

The growers’ deployment of Teamsters as vigilantes and goons came to a climax during the brutal spring and summer of 1973, when UFW strikers attempted to picket the grape harvest as it moved from the Coachella Valley near Palm Springs to the San Joaquin Valley. Under the “mobbed-up” leadership of Frank Fitzsimmons, the Team- sters had become major supporters of Richard Nixon, supplying mas- sive donations and even physical muscle to his notorious reelection campaign in 1972. Now the Nixon White House, via Chief Counsel Charles Colson (later to be hired by the Teamsters), ordered the Justice Department and the National Labor Relations Board to side with Fitzsimmons and the growers against César Chávez’s strikers.

The Pentagon first tried to break the UFW boycott by forcing American troops to consume huge quantities of scab grapes: “the quantity of grapes shipped to U.S. forces in Vietnam increased from

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555,000 to 2,167,000 pounds from 1968–69.”5 Then the Justice Depart- ment looked the other way as hundreds of Teamster goons, paid sev- enty dollars per day and wielding tire irons, terrorized the picket lines, beating up scores of strikers and their sympathizers, including a Catholic priest. When FBI agents learned from one of their informants that the Teamster leadership had ordered their beer-bellied thugs to “escalate the violence” by singling out strike leaders and picket captains for vicious hit-and-run attacks, the Justice Department did nothing to warn or protect the victims.

In Coachella, at least, the Riverside County sheriffs maintained neutrality and occasionally came to the aid of the UFW, but when the picket lines moved north to the San Joaquin, the strikers faced local sheriffs—shades of 1933, 1939, and 1947—who sided shamelessly with the growers and Teamster goons. Almost thirty-five hundred strikers were arrested and two were murdered. Twenty-four-year-old Nagi Dai- fullah, a Yemeni immigrant and UFW picket captain, was clubbed to death by a Fresno County deputy in August, and soon afterwards Juan de la Cruz was shot to death on a picket line near Arvin, not far from where one of the cotton strikers had been killed in 1933.

But 1973 was not 1933, and the UFW rank and file were eager to move toward a more active self-defense. In contrast to the situation forty years before, there was now a militant Chicano power movement in the cities that was ready to aid, and if necessary to raise hell on behalf of, the struggle in the fields. Precisely because he feared such counter-vi- olence and likely radicalization, César Chávez made a fateful decision to shift the union’s scarce resources away from the primary strike and to- ward intensification of the grape boycott. The union’s sympathizers across the world, rather than its own rank and file in the fields, became the key actors in a struggle that was increasingly centralized and led by a small clique around Chávez. Although this strategy preserved nonvio- lence and generated huge public sympathy—some which helped win passage of the Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1976 that finally pro- vided farm labor with a modicum of rights—the growth of the boycott was matched by the atrophy of membership activism at the base. De- spite an eventual peace treaty with the Teamsters (who promptly lost in- terest in agricultural labor), the union was unable to consolidate its gains or hold the ground it had won by heroic mass struggle.

Chávez had become an American saint by the time he died in 1993,

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and the UFW had become a beloved liberal cause. Yet paradoxically, most farmworkers remained unorganized, desperately poor, and largely invisible. In those heartlands of traditional farm fascism—the Salinas, San Joaquin, and Coachella-Imperial Valleys—indigenous immigrants from Mexico, Mixtecs especially, continue to labor in the early twenty- first century under conditions little different from those that the IWW protested in 1914 or against which the CAWIU rebelled in 1933. Indeed, looking back on the 1970s, it is hard not to conclude that once again, vigilantism and private violence, allied with local law enforcement and a tolerant federal government, had defeated an epic uprising of farm labor.

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A group of twenty-seven people leave Sasabe, Mexico.

Women and children are among them. The U.S. side of

the border and the Buenos Aires National Wildlife

Refugee and Arivaca are in the background. Daytime

temperatures in the area reach 115 degrees. June 2004.

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Chapter Eleven

The Last Vigilantes?

Americans Doing the Job Government Won’t Do.

—Slogan of the Minuteman Project

T here is extraordinary consistency in white prejudice over the last 150 years of California history. The wrath of nativists and vigi- lantes has always been focused on the poorest, most powerless,

and hardest-working segment of the population: recent arrivals from Donegal, Guangdong, Hokkaido, Luzon, Oklahoma, and now Oaxaca. And the rant, as broadcast daily on dozens of AM hate radio programs in California and the Southwest, remains virtually the same as described by Steinbeck in 1939: “Men who had never been hungry saw the eyes of the hungry.… They said, ‘These goddamned Okies are dirty and ignorant. They’re degenerate, sexual maniacs. These goddamned Okies are thieves. They’ll steal anything. They’ve got no sense of property rights.’”1

The most publicized of today’s neo-vigilantes are the so-called Min- utemen (actually a fissiparous miscellany of grouplets and leaders) who began their armed patrol of the Arizona-Mexico border, appropriately, on April Fools’ Day 2005. The media-oriented, Tombstone, Arizona–based movement is the latest incarnation of anti-immigrant patrols that have plagued the borderlands for more than a decade. Vowing to defend na- tional sovereignty against the “Brown Peril,” a series of shadowy paramili- tary groups, led by racist ranchers and self-declared “Aryan warriors”— and egged on by r ig ht-w ing r adio jocks—have har assed, illegally

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detained, beaten, and probably murdered immigrants crossing through the boiling cauldrons of the Arizona and California desert.

The Minuteman Project was a theater of the absurd as well as a canny attempt to move vigilantism back into the mainstream of con- servative politics. The Tombstone organizers—a retired accountant and a former kindergarten teacher, both from Southern California —mes- merized the press with their promise of one thousand heavily armed super-patriots bravely confronting the Mexican hordes along the inter- national border in Cochise County. In the event, they turned out 150 sorry-ass gun freaks and sociopaths who spent a few days in lawn chairs cleaning their weapons, jabbering to the press, and peering through military binoculars at the Saguaro-covered mountains where several hundred immigrants perish each year from heatstroke and thirst. “Armageddon on the border” that April was never very likely, if only because undocumented immigrants read or hear the news like everyone else. Confronted with the Minutemen and the hundreds of extra Border Patrol agents sent to keep them out of trouble, campesinos simply waited patiently on the Sonora side for the vigilantes to get sun- burned and bored, and go home.

Yet it would be a mistake to underestimate the impact of the fanat- ics in camouflage suits: their successive farces in the desert (different Minutemen factions repeated their border patrols near San Diego in 2005 and 2006) have had an electrifying impact on the conservative grassroots. For the first time, the Bush administration has felt seriously embattled—not by Democrats (they would never be so impolite)—but by the anti-immigrant rebellion on its own flanks. In the fervid world of suburban Republican politics, the Minutemen have become super- heroes fighting a criminal conspiracy (shades of the original “Yellow Peril”) to flood the country with brown-skinned welfare cheats and fu- ture street gang members. The contradiction between shabby dema- gogues passing as vigilante warriors and their larger-than-life image in right-wing rhetoric, of course, is no greater than the contradiction be- tween the Republican herrenvolk’s abhorrence of illegal immigration and their personal dependence upon Spanish-speaking slaves to blow- dry their lawns and wipe their babies’ behinds.

The roots of this neo-vigilantism go back to 1996 and California’s polarizing debate about Proposition 187, which proposed to deny pub-

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lic education and health services to undocumented people. The anti- Latino backlash which that evil sorcerer, former California governor Pete Wilson, helped summon to life, has failed to quietly die away as Karl Rove and other White House electoral strategists might have wished. Over the last decade, instead, the campaigns that originated in California—against immigrant social rights and the use of Spanish in the schools—have been exported to Arizona, Colorado, and several southern states with growing Latin American populations. Like earlier antiabortions protests (which culminated in right-wing terrorism), the vigilante movement offers a dramatic tactic for capturing press atten- tion, galvanizing opposition to immigration, and shifting the balance of power within the Republican Party.

Moreover, to the discomfort of the White House, the Minutemen found a gushing (if inarticulate) admirer in California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger: “I think they’ve done a terrific job. They’ve cut down the crossing of illegal immigrants a huge percentage. So it just shows that it works when you go and make an effort and when you work hard. It’s a do-able thing.” Later, after furious Latino leaders accused him of “scapegoating and immigrant bashing,” and even after President Bush had characterized the group as “vigilantes,” Schwarzenegger defiantly re- iterated that he would welcome the help of the Minutemen on the Cali- fornia border. (As he so often does, the “Governator” followed this with the non sequitur reassurance that he was a “champion of immigrants.”2)

Veteran political observers who thought this was all just a tempest in a teapot were subsequently stunned in November 2005 when one of the founders of the Minuteman Project, Jim Gilchrist, running as a third-party candidate with the endorsement of the Border Patrol union, won almost as many votes as the Democratic nominee in an Or- ange County congressional race. In subsequent Southern California races, like the 2006 special election for a successor to that disgraced crook, Congressperson “Duke” Cunningham, Republicans have com- peted for endorsements from prominent vigilantes and Brown Peril demagogues. Meanwhile Gilchrist and his supporters have made Costa Mesa, an Orange County town with a large Latino minority, into a showpiece for their policies—especially the deployment of local police to check immigration status. In their Manichaean worldview, there are no neutrals: you’re either part of the border patrol or a felonious alien.

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Such bigotry in a state with a rapidly emerging Latino majority might seem like the last gasp of a dying culture, and indeed it probably is. But for the moment, at least, the neo-vigilantes are high in the sad- dle, their eyes firmly turned backward to that glorious California past exemplified by the Glanton gang, the Order of Caucasians, the Native Sons of the Golden West, the American Protective League, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Associated Farmers.

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Strega & Brown AND Porter & Brown 2005.pdf

Sudeesh et al 2015 How to Write A Research Proposal.pdf

Address for correspondence: Dr. Devika Rani Duggappa,

314/2/5, Durganjali Nilaya, 1st H Cross, 7th Main, Subbanna

Garden, Vijayanagar, Bengaluru - 560 040,

Karnataka, India. E-mail: [email protected]

INTRODUCTION

A clean, well-thought-out proposal forms the backbone for the research itself and hence becomes the most important step in the process of conduct of research.[1] The objective of preparing a research proposal would be to obtain approvals from various committees including ethics committee [details under ‘Research methodology II’ section [Table1] in this issue of IJA) and to request for grants. However, there are very few universally accepted guidelines for preparation of a good quality research proposal. A search was performed with keywords such as research proposal, funding, qualitative and writing proposals using search engines, namely, PubMed, Google Scholar and Scopus.

BASIC REQUIREMENTS OF A RESEARCH PROPOSAL

A proposal needs to show how your work fits into what is already known about the topic and what new paradigm will it add to the literature, while specifying the question that the research will answer, establishing its significance, and the implications of the answer.[2] The proposal must be capable of convincing the evaluation committee about the credibility, achievability, practicality and reproducibility (repeatability) of the research design.[3]

Four categories of audience with different expectations may be present in the evaluation committees, namely academic colleagues, policy-makers, practitioners and lay audiences who evaluate the research proposal. Tips for preparation of a good research proposal include; ‘be practical, be persuasive, make broader links, aim for crystal clarity and plan before you write’. A researcher must be balanced, with a realistic understanding of what can be achieved. Being persuasive implies that researcher must be able to convince other researchers, research funding agencies, educational institutions and supervisors that the research is worth getting approval. The aim of the researcher should be clearly stated in simple language that describes the research in a way that non-specialists can comprehend, without use of jargons. The proposal must not only demonstrate that it is based on an intelligent understanding of the existing literature but also show that the writer has

Review Article

K Sudheesh, Devika Rani Duggappa, SS Nethra Department of Anaesthesiology, Bangalore Medical College and Research Institute, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

How to write a research proposal?

ABSTRACT

Writing the proposal of a research work in the present era is a challenging task due to the constantly evolving trends in the qualitative research design and the need to incorporate medical advances into the methodology. The proposal is a detailed plan or ‘blueprint’ for the intended study, and once it is completed, the research project should flow smoothly. Even today, many of the proposals at post-graduate evaluation committees and application proposals for funding are substandard. A search was conducted with keywords such as research proposal, writing proposal and qualitative using search engines, namely, PubMed and Google Scholar, and an attempt has been made to provide broad guidelines for writing a scientifically appropriate research proposal.

Key words: Guidelines, proposal, qualitative, research

Access this article online

Website: www.ijaweb.org

DOI: 10.4103/0019-5049.190617

Quick response code

How to cite this article: Sudheesh K, Duggappa DR, Nethra SS. How to write a research proposal?. Indian J Anaesth 2016;60:631-4.

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License, which allows others to remix, tweak, and build upon the work non-commercially, as long as the author is credited and the new creations are licensed under the identical terms.

For reprints contact: [email protected]

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thought about the time needed to conduct each stage of the research.[4,5]

CONTENTS OF A RESEARCH PROPOSAL

The contents or formats of a research proposal vary depending on the requirements of evaluation committee and are generally provided by the evaluation committee or the institution.

In general, a cover page should contain the (i) title of the proposal, (ii) name and affiliation of the researcher (principal investigator) and co-investigators, (iii) institutional affiliation (degree of the investigator and the name of institution where the study will be performed), details of contact such as phone numbers, E-mail id’s and lines for signatures of investigators.

The main contents of the proposal may be presented under the following headings: (i) introduction, (ii) review of literature, (iii) aims and objectives, (iv) research design and methods, (v) ethical considerations, (vi) budget, (vii) appendices and (viii) citations.[4]

Introduction It is also sometimes termed as ‘need for study’ or ‘abstract’. Introduction is an initial pitch of an idea; it sets the scene and puts the research in context.[6] The introduction should be designed to create interest in the reader about the topic and proposal. It should convey to the reader, what you want to do, what necessitates the study and your passion for the topic.[7]

Some questions that can be used to assess the significance of the study are: (i) Who has an interest in the domain of inquiry? (ii) What do we already know about the topic? (iii) What has not been answered adequately in previous research and practice? (iv) How will this research add to knowledge, practice and policy in this area? Some of the evaluation committees, expect the last two questions, elaborated under a separate heading of ‘background and significance’.[8] Introduction should also contain the hypothesis behind the research design. If hypothesis cannot be constructed, the line of inquiry to be used in the research must be indicated.

Review of literature It refers to all sources of scientific evidence pertaining to the topic in interest. In the present era of digitalisation and easy accessibility, there is an enormous amount of relevant data available, making it a challenge for the researcher to include all of it in his/her review.[9] It is crucial to structure this section intelligently so that the reader can grasp the argument related to your study in relation to that of other researchers, while still demonstrating to your readers that your work is original and innovative. It is preferable to summarise each article in a paragraph, highlighting the details pertinent to the topic of interest. The progression of review can move from the more general to the more focused studies, or a historical progression can be used to develop the story, without making it exhaustive.[1] Literature should include supporting data, disagreements and controversies. Five ‘C’s may be kept in mind while writing a literature review[10] [Table 1].

Aims and objectives The research purpose (or goal or aim) gives a broad indication of what the researcher wishes to achieve in the research. The hypothesis to be tested can be the aim of the study. The objectives related to parameters or tools used to achieve the aim are generally categorised as primary and secondary objectives.

Research design and method The objective here is to convince the reader that the overall research design and methods of analysis will correctly address the research problem and to impress upon the reader that the methodology/sources chosen are appropriate for the specific topic. It should be unmistakably tied to the specific aims of your study.

In this section, the methods and sources used to conduct the research must be discussed, including specific

Table 1: Five ‘C’s while writing a literature review Cite Keep the primary focus on the literature pertinent

to your research problem Compare The various arguments, theories, methodologies

and findings expressed in the literature: What do the authors agree on? Who applies similar approaches to analysing the research problem?

Contrast The various arguments, themes, methodologies, approaches and controversies expressed in the literature: What are the major areas of disagreement, controversy or debate?

Critique the literature

Which arguments are more persuasive and why? Which approaches, findings, methodologies seem most reliable, valid or appropriate and why? Pay attention to the verbs you use to describe what an author says/does (e.g. asserts, demonstrates, etc.)

Connect The literature to your own area of research and investigation: How does your own work draw upon, depart from, or synthesise what has been said in the literature?

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references to sites, databases, key texts or authors that will be indispensable to the project. There should be specific mention about the methodological approaches to be undertaken to gather information, about the techniques to be used to analyse it and about the tests of external validity to which researcher is committed.[10,11]

The components of this section include the following:[4]

Population and sample Population refers to all the elements (individuals, objects or substances) that meet certain criteria for inclusion in a given universe,[12] and sample refers to subset of population which meets the inclusion criteria for enrolment into the study. The inclusion and exclusion criteria should be clearly defined. The details pertaining to sample size are discussed in the article “Sample size calculation: Basic priniciples” published in this issue of IJA.

Data collection The researcher is expected to give a detailed account of the methodology adopted for collection of data, which include the time frame required for the research. The methodology should be tested for its validity and ensure that, in pursuit of achieving the results, the participant’s life is not jeopardised. The author should anticipate and acknowledge any potential barrier and pitfall in carrying out the research design and explain plans to address them, thereby avoiding lacunae due to incomplete data collection. If the researcher is planning to acquire data through interviews or questionnaires, copy of the questions used for the same should be attached as an annexure with the proposal.

Rigor (soundness of the research) This addresses the strength of the research with respect to its neutrality, consistency and applicability. Rigor must be reflected throughout the proposal.

Neutrality It refers to the robustness of a research method against bias. The author should convey the measures taken to avoid bias, viz. blinding and randomisation, in an elaborate way, thus ensuring that the result obtained from the adopted method is purely as chance and not influenced by other confounding variables.

Consistency Consistency considers whether the findings will be consistent if the inquiry was replicated with the same participants and in a similar context. This can

be achieved by adopting standard and universally accepted methods and scales.

Applicability Applicability refers to the degree to which the findings can be applied to different contexts and groups.[13]

Data analysis This section deals with the reduction and reconstruction of data and its analysis including sample size calculation. The researcher is expected to explain the steps adopted for coding and sorting the data obtained. Various tests to be used to analyse the data for its robustness, significance should be clearly stated. Author should also mention the names of statistician and suitable software which will be used in due course of data analysis and their contribution to data analysis and sample calculation.[9]

Ethical considerations Medical research introduces special moral and ethical problems that are not usually encountered by other researchers during data collection, and hence, the researcher should take special care in ensuring that ethical standards are met. Ethical considerations refer to the protection of the participants’ rights (right to self-determination, right to privacy, right to autonomy and confidentiality, right to fair treatment and right to protection from discomfort and harm), obtaining informed consent and the institutional review process (ethical approval). The researcher needs to provide adequate information on each of these aspects.

Informed consent needs to be obtained from the participants (details discussed in further chapters), as well as the research site and the relevant authorities.

Budget When the researcher prepares a research budget, he/she should predict and cost all aspects of the research and then add an additional allowance for unpredictable disasters, delays and rising costs. All items in the budget should be justified.

Appendices Appendices are documents that support the proposal and application. The appendices will be specific for each proposal but documents that are usually required include informed consent form, supporting documents, questionnaires, measurement tools

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Sudheesh, et al.: How to write a research proposal

634 Indian Journal of Anaesthesia | Vol. 60 | Issue 9 | Sep 2016634

and patient information of the study in layman’s language.

Citations As with any scholarly research paper, you must cite the sources you used in composing your proposal. Although the words ‘references and bibliography’ are different, they are used interchangeably. It refers to all references cited in the research proposal.

SUMMARY

Successful, qualitative research proposals should communicate the researcher’s knowledge of the field and method and convey the emergent nature of the qualitative design. The proposal should follow a discernible logic from the introduction to presentation of the appendices.

Financial support and sponsorship Nil.

Conflicts of interest There are no conflicts of interest.

REFERENCES

1. McGranaghan M. Guidelines on Writing a Research Proposal. Available from: https://www. 2.hawaii.edu/~matt/proposal. html. [Last accessed on 2016 Jun 25].

2. Nte AR, Awi DD. Research proposal writing: Breaking the myth. Niger J Med 2006;15:373-81.

3. Saunderlin G. Writing a research proposal: The critical first step for successful clinical research. Gastroenterol Nurs 1994;17:48-56.

4. Klopper H. The qualitative research proposal. Curationis 2008;31:62-72.

5. Singh MD, Cameron C, Duff D. Writing proposals for research funds. Axone 2005;26:26-30.

6. Burns N, Grove SK. The Practice of Nursing Research: Conduct, Critique and Utilization. 5th ed. St. Louis: Elsevier Saunders; 2005. p. 667-8.

7. Sandelowski M, Barroso J. Writing the proposal for a qualitative research methodology project. Qual Health Res 2003;13:781-820.

8. Krathwohl DR. How to Prepare a Dissertation Proposal: Suggestions for Students in Education and the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press; 2005. p. 45-7.

9. Balakumar P, Inamdar MN, Jagadeesh G. The Critical Steps for Successful Research: The Research Proposal and Scientific Writing: A Report on the Pre-Conference Workshop Held in Conjunction with the 64th Annual Conference of the Indian Pharmaceutical Congress-2012. J Pharmacol Pharmacother 2013;4:130-18.

10. Labaree RV. Organizing Your Social Sciences Research Paper: Writing a Research Proposal. Available from: http:// www.libguides.usc.edu/writingguide. [Last accessed on 2016 Jun 25].

11. Research Proposal. Available from: http://www.web.stanford. edu/~steener/gendertech/assignments/ResearchProposal. pdf. [Last accessed on 2016 Jul 04].

12. Burns N, Grove SK. The Practice of Nursing Research: Conduct, Critique and Utilization. 5th ed. St. Louis: Elsevier Saunders; 2005. p. 40.

13. Sliep Y, Poggenpoel M, Gmeiner A. A care counselling model for HIV reactive patients in rural Malawi – Part II. Curationis 2001;24:66-74.

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Northern Journal of ISA

Now! Opportunity for our members to submit their articles to the Northern Journal of ISA (NJISA)! The NJISA, launched by ISA covering the northern zone of ISA, solicits articles in Anaesthesiology, Critical care, Pain and Palliative Medicine. Visit http://www.njisa.org for details.

Dr. Sukhminder Jit Singh Bajwa, Patiala Dr. Zulfiqar Ali, Srinagar Editor In Chief Co-Editor

Announcement

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Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities

EV E TUCK State University of New York, New Paltz

In this open letter, Eve Tuck calls on communities, researchers, and educators to reconsider the long-term impact of “damage-centered” research—research that intends to document peoples’ pain and brokenness to hold those in power accountable for their oppression. This kind of research operates with a flawed theor y of change: it is often used to leverage reparations or resources for marginalized communities yet simultane- ously reinforces and reinscribes a one-dimensional notion of these people as depleted, ruined, and hopeless. Tuck urges communities to institute a moratorium on damage- centered research to reformulate the ways research is framed and conducted and to reimagine how findings might be used by, for, and with communities.

Dear Readers,

Greetings! I write to you from a little desk in my light-filled house in New York State, my new home after living in Brooklyn for the past eleven years. Today, New York does not seem so far from St. Paul Island, one of the Pribilof Islands of the Aleutian chain in Alaska, where my family is from and where my relations continue to live. Something about writing this letter closes the gap between these disparate places I call home.

I write to you about home, about our communities. I write to identify a per- sistent trend in research on Native communities, city communities, and other disenfranchised communities—what I call damage-centered research. I invite you to join me in re-visioning research in our communities not only to recog- nize the need to document the effects of oppression on our communities but also to consider the long-term repercussions of thinking of ourselves as broken.

This is an open letter addressed to educational researchers and practi- tioners concerned with fostering and maintaining ethical relationships with disenfranchised and dispossessed communities and all of those troubled by the possible hidden costs of a research strategy that frames entire communi- ties as depleted.

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Thank you to those who have encouraged me to write this letter. I am hum- bled by the prospect of writing to such a rich, diverse audience. Each word struggles to be adequate, to convey my respect and urgency.

This is a good time to write. It is meaningful that I write to you at the close of the International Polar Year (IPY). Actually spanning two years (March 2007– March 2009), the IPY program brought over 200 research projects from more than 60 different nations to the Arctic and Antarctic. Reports from Indigenous polar peoples and Western-style scientists on the severity of climate change and the dramatic loss of polar ice mark this as a critical time for research in polar regions.

This fourth IPY (the first from 1882 to 1883 and the most recent from 1957 to 1958) was actually the first in which Indigenous peoples in polar regions were considered part of the focus of inquiry—a mixed signal of progress. It was a step toward redressing the omission of Indigenous polar peoples as integral to polar places, and it was recognition that the relationships between polar peoples and polar places hold deep knowledge. Yet it also ushered scholars into Indigenous communities that may be wary of “scientists” because of their and their ancestors’ prior experiences with researchers.

Though there is no designated International Urban Center Year, the orga- nizers and educators working in youth and community organizations across the United States have told me that they, too, have seen a striking increase in the number of researchers knocking at their doors hoping to do research on them and their communities. The lives of city youth—already under the watchful eyes of police and school security officers, already tracked by video cameras in their schools, on the streets, and in subways—are pursued by (well- intentioned) researchers whose work functions as yet another layer of surveil- lance. What will be the outcomes and effects of this research in and on our communities? Are we certain that the benefits will outweigh the costs? What questions might we ask ourselves before we allow researcher entry?

As letter-writing timing goes, we are in significant times for other reasons, too. Around the world there are new efforts to secure the rights of historically oppressed peoples and to make amends for the wrongs of the past. In Septem- ber 2007, after twenty years of negotiations, the United Nations (UN) Dec- laration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples was adopted with 143 votes in favor and 4 votes of objection (from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States). This declaration addresses many issues germane to educational research, including issues of intellectual property, sovereignty, difference, and reparation—all critical in terms of educational policy, practice, and theor y. The declaration also provides that “all doctrines, policies and practices based on or advocating superiority of peoples or individuals on the basis of national origin or racial, religious, ethnic or cultural differences are racist, scientifically false, legally invalid, morally condemnable and socially unjust”—a statement that holds powerful implications for education and educational research (UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 2007).

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Several months later, in March 2008, the UN issued a report blasting the United States as a “two-tiered society” in terms of education, health, land and housing, and criminal justice (Rizvi, 2008). It condemned U.S. treatment of Indigenous, black, and Latino/a peoples and other racial groups who repre- sent a numeric minority. The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination that conducted the investigation was the same body that denounced the United States for treading on Indigenous peoples’ land rights in March 2006. To account for the breaking of the 1969 Convention of the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (an international treaty that the United States did sign), “Bush administration officials held that the treaty obligations do not apply to laws or practices that are race-neutral on their face but dis- criminatory in effect” (Rizvi, 2008, para. 10).

In Februar y 2008, many people across the globe watched as Kevin Rudd, prime minister of Australia, made a formal apology to the Indigenous peoples of that land for the actions and policies of his government and prior govern- ments, stating:

As Prime Minister of Australia, I am sorry . . . I know that, in offering this apol- ogy on behalf of the government and the parliament, there is nothing I can say today that can take away the pain you have suffered personally. Whatever words I speak today, I cannot undo that. (Rudd, 2008)

After Rudd’s closing words, opposition leader Brendan Nelson delivered quite a different address. He, too, spoke of an apology, of shame, but he insisted that no generation can fully anticipate the long-term impact of its actions, undermining his own words of reconciliation. In a powerful gesture, the Indigenous peoples in the room and those watching the proceedings out- side on giant screens stood and turned their backs to him. Non-Indigenous peoples turned with them, and together they began a slow, rhythmic clapping to drown out the rest of Nelson’s speech. It was an effective display of the end of patience extended to those who think of colonization as merely the unfor- tunate sins of our fathers. In spring 2009, Rudd’s administration officially backed the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, a step that echoes sentiments proffered in his 2008 address but remains only a gesture until the ratification is enacted by policies, court decisions, and practices.

This year is also one in which a new presidential administration has been installed in the United States. It may also be a capstone year, or a recommit- ment year, for policies such as No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and “data-driven decision making” that make sizable impressions on the lives and work of com- munities, educators, and educational researchers. It is a ver y good year to write a letter.

I write this letter to communities—primarily Native communities and/or urban communities—that have troubled relations with research and research- ers. The trouble comes from the historical exploitation and mistreatment of people and material. It also comes from feelings of being overresearched yet,

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ironically, made invisible. My colleague, Yasser Payne (personal communica- tion, June 2007), has educated me in the ways that urban young men engaged in street lives, though visible in the literature, are invariably portrayed as either victims or perpetrators. These characterizations frame our communities as sites of disinvestment and dispossession; our communities become spaces in which underresourced health and economic infrastructures are endemic. They become spaces saturated in the fantasies of outsiders.

I write knowing that the designations I employ—urban and Native, disen- franchised, overresearched but underseen—do not quite capture enough of the experiences about which I am writing. Nonetheless, I use these categories to draw attention to the experiences of our communities. I write to you now because I believe that our communities can exercise a bounty of decision- making power in these issues. Further, because so many outsiders benefit from depicting communities as damaged, it will have to be these same communi- ties that hold researchers accountable for the frameworks and attitudes they employ. It is too tempting to proceed as usual.

Designating Damage

Isolate the seers. Make their dream seem like a nightmare. Fix their tongues so they can’t get their story straight. Sekou Sundiata, Space: A Monologue (1997)

For many of us, the research on our communities has historically been dam- age centered, intent on portraying our neighborhoods and tribes as defeated and broken. For example, on the Aleutian Islands, those of my grandmoth- er’s generation were forced subjects in a range of studies, the purposes of which were concealed from them. Extending the long arm of the eugenics movement on behalf of colonization, white scientists entered Aleut communi- ties with the full support of the U.S. government and with the arrogance and absence of reflexivity afforded by white supremacy:

For most of the five centuries [of U.S. colonization], whites have had unrestricted power to describe Indians in any way they chose. Indians were simply not con- nected to the organs of propaganda so that they could respond to the manner in which whites described them. (Deloria, 1992, p. 66; see also Selden, 1999)

Stories of teeth counting, rib counting, head measuring, blood drawn, bones dug up, medical treatment withheld, erroneous or fabricated ethnography, unsanctioned camera lenses, out-and-out lies, empty promises, cover ups, betray- als, these are the stories of our kitchen tables. (Tuck & Fine, 2007, p. 159)

These are the stories of First Alaska and Native America and of many com- munities across the United States and the globe. They are the finger-shaped bruises on our pulse points.

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This is certainly damage-centered research and damaging research: “It is a history that still offends our deepest sense of our humanity” (Smith, 1999, p. 1). However, though related, it is not this kind of research that my letter seeks to address. Rather, here I am concerned with research that happens much more surreptitiously, research that invites oppressed peoples to speak but to “only speak from that space in the margin that is a sign of deprivation, a wound, an unfulfilled longing. Only speak your pain” (hooks, 1990, p. 152).

In damaged-centered research, one of the major activities is to document pain or loss in an individual, community, or tribe. Though connected to deficit models—frameworks that emphasize what a particular student, family, or com- munity is lacking to explain underachievement or failure—damage-centered research is distinct in being more socially and historically situated. It looks to historical exploitation, domination, and colonization to explain contempo- rary brokenness, such as poverty, poor health, and low literacy. Common sense tells us this is a good thing, but the danger in damage-centered research is that it is a pathologizing approach in which the oppression singularly defines a community. Here’s a more applied definition of damage-centered research: research that operates, even benevolently, from a theory of change that estab- lishes harm or injury in order to achieve reparation.

Let’s pause for a bit and think through this idea of a theor y of change. Theories of change are implicit in all social science research, and maybe all research. The implicit theory of change will have implications for the way in which a project unfolds, what we see as the start or end of a project, who is our audience, who is our “us,” how we think things are known, and how others can or need to be convinced. A theory of change helps to operationalize the ethi- cal stance of the project, what are considered data, what constitutes evidence, how a finding is identified, and what is made public and kept private or sacred (Tuck, 2009).

I believe that for many well-meaning people, it is actually a de facto reliance on a potentially problematic theory of change that leads to damage-centered research. In a damage-centered framework, pain and loss are documented in order to obtain particular political or material gains. In many ways, the under- lying theory of change is borrowed from litigation discourse. One of the most famous examples is the Kenneth and Mamie Clark doll test done in the 1940s, some of the results of which were submitted as evidence for the plaintiffs and later quoted in the ruling of Brown v. Board of Education (Cross, 1991). This test, initiated in part as Mamie Clark’s master’s thesis, helped to give credence to the concepts of internalized racism and black self-hatred (through use of the term “wishful thinking”) by documenting the preference of black chil- dren, aged three to five, for white dolls. The Clarks used a range of items that included asking the children to identify the doll “you like to play with best,” “that is a nice doll,” “that looks bad,” “that is a nice color,” and “that looks like you” (Clark & Clark, 1947, p. 169).

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Thurgood Marshall explained his use of the Clark and Clark doll test data in his argument for desegregation in these terms:

If your car ran over my client, you’d have to pay up, and my function as an attor- ney would be to put experts on the stand to testify to how much damage was done . . . Ken Clark’s doll test was a promising way of showing injur y to these segregated youngsters. (Kluger, 1975, p. 397)

This theory of change, testifying to damage so that persecutors will be forced to be accountable, is extremely popular in social science research—so popu- lar that it serves as a default theory of change, so ubiquitous that folks might think that it is entirely what social science is about. In educational research this is especially true: it is not difficult to recall scores of studies that portray schools and communities primarily as broken, emptied, or flattened. It’s also prevalent in community organizing and youth organizing where a group illus- trates, for example, the harms caused by environmental racism and systematic isolation and neglect.

Even if at first glance it appears to be a leap, I think we can also link research intent on documenting damage to educational policies such as No Child Left Behind. Certainly, schools and communities would benefit by bolstered accountability of public officials for school quality and student learning. How- ever, NCLB, in its insistence on 100 percent proficiency for all students in all states by 2014, marked by adequate yearly progress (AYP), is designed to docu- ment failure or deficit rather than to provide opportunities to redress existing inequities (Noddings, 2007; Rebell & Wolff, 2008). As Rebell and Wolff (2008) note, “Although the drafters recognized initially the importance of both [the] objectives [of opportunity and proficiency] the law’s actual provisions largely ignore the first goal—opportunity—and skew heavily toward carrying out the second goal—accountability” (p. 63). This policy and others, such as mayoral control in New York City that has systematically closed down all avenues for community participation in school decision making (YRNES, 2008), collude in the production of damage-driven data and, indeed, in the production of damage. (See also Gilborn [2005] for an analysis of white supremacy and edu- cation policy.)

Some scholars have built their careers around producing damage narratives of tribalized and detribalized peoples. Though it is no longer in fashion to frame research as “the problem with (insert tribe or urban community here)” as it was in past generations, the legacy of this approach is alive and well. (See also Harvey [1999] on “civilized oppression.”) Native communities, poor com- munities, communities of color, and disenfranchised communities tolerate this kind of data gathering because there is an implicit and sometimes explicit assurance that stories of damage pay off in material, sovereign, and political wins. Many communities engage, allow, and participate in damage-centered research and in the construction of damage narratives as a strategy for cor- recting oppression. However, I worry that the theory of change itself may be

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unreliable and ineffective. It is a powerful idea to think of all of us as litigators, putting the world on trial, but does it actually work? Do the material and politi- cal wins come through? And, most importantly, are the wins worth the long- term costs of thinking of ourselves as damaged?

To offer a counterstor y, my friend and Indigenous scholar Sandy Grande (personal communication, April 2008) shared with me that some of the narra- tives I would categorize as damage centered, she would categorize as stories of colonization; the after-effects and the colonizing are inextricably linked. Ear- lier, Grande (2004) wrote:

The “Indian Problem” is not a problem of children and families but rather, first and foremost, a problem that has been consciously and historically produced by and through the systems of colonization: a multidimensional force under written by Western Christianity, defined by White supremacy, and fueled by global capi- talism. (p. 19)

Contemporar y damage-centered narratives (of abuse, addiction, poverty, illness) in the United States can be directly tied to 400-plus years of occupa- tion of Native lands, genocide, and colonization. Like Sandy, I can’t help but hear these stories within the context of this history, but I suspect that for many people, Native and non-Native, this context has been made invisible and natu- ral. As in African American communities that have been coarsely expected to have “gotten over slavery by now,” Native American and First Alaskan commu- nities are expected to have gotten over the past, which is reduced to the unfor- tunate birth pangs of a new nation, thus dismissing the very real and ongoing colonization of these communities to the corners of our imaginations (Tuck & Fine, 2007).

Although, as I have noted, damage-centered research involves social and historical contexts at the outset, the significance of these contexts is regularly submerged. Without the context of racism and colonization, all we’re left with is the damage, and this makes our stories vulnerable to pathologizing analyses (Kelley, 1997). Our evidence of ongoing colonization by research—absent a context in which we acknowledge that colonization—is relegated to our own bodies, our own families, our own social networks, our own leadership. After the research team leaves, after the town meeting, after the news cameras have gone away, all we are left with is the damage.

I want to recognize that, particularly in Native communities, there was a need for research that exposed the uninhabitable, inhumane conditions in which people lived and continue to live. My ability to articulate this critique is due to the lessons and accomplishments that have been made on the backs of prior generations of communities and researchers. I have boundless respect for the elders who paved the way for respectful, mutually beneficial research in Indigenous communities. I appreciate that, in many ways, there was a time and place for damage-centered research. However, in talking with some of these elders, they agree that a time for a shift has come, that damage-centered

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narratives are no longer sufficient. We are in a new historical moment—so much so that even Margaret Mead probably would not do research like Mar- garet Mead these days.1

Researching for Desire

In my own autobiographical performance projects, I identify this chiasmatic shift in the possibility that all those performances I did about getting bashed only pro- vided knowledge of subjugation, serving almost as an advertisement for power: “Don’t let this happen to you. Stay in the closet.” . . . I decided to write more about the gratifications of same-sex relationships, to depict intimacy and desire, the kinds of subjugated knowledges we don’t get to see on the afterschool spe- cials and movies of the week that parade queer bruises and broken bones but shy away from the queer kiss. Craig Gingrich-Philbrook, “Auto-ethnography’s Family Values” (2005)

One alternative to damage-centered research is to craft our research to capture desire instead of damage. I submit that a desire-based framework is an antidote to damage-centered research. An antidote stops and counteracts the effects of a poison, and the poison I am referring to here is not the supposed damage of Native communities, urban communities, or other disenfranchised communi- ties but the frameworks that position these communities as damaged.

As I will explore, desire-based research frameworks are concerned with understanding complexity, contradiction, and the self-determination of lived lives. Considering the excerpt from Craig Gingrich-Philbrook (2005), desire- based frameworks defy the lure to serve as “advertisements for power” by doc- umenting not only the painful elements of social realities but also the wis- dom and hope. Such an axiology is intent on depathologizing the experiences of dispossessed and disenfranchised communities so that people are seen as more than broken and conquered. This is to say that even when communities are broken and conquered, they are so much more than that—so much more that this incomplete story is an act of aggression.

Several solid examples of such depathologizing work come to mind.2 In these examples, typical scripts of blame are flipped, and latent assumptions about responsibility are provoked. For instance, in her study of the relation- ships between privatization of the public sphere and constructed public per- ceptions of women who are responsible for the death of their children, Sarah Carney (2006) argues:

Race, class and gender work in combination within a current (U.S.) social and political moment that favors privatization and the withdrawal of public support to frame and construct various images of “natural” women, of “good” and “bad” mothers, and of female responsibility; and these now-familiar images work to support/bolster state policies regarding shrinking social assistance, and allow the state to place the burden for caring back on the backs of women, particularly women who are poor and of color. (p. 11)

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Depathologizing studies such as Carney’s resist all-too-easy, one-dimensional narratives of damage in order to expose ongoing structural inequity. Desire- based research frameworks, by contrast, can yield analyses that upend com- monly held assumptions of responsibility, cohesiveness, ignorance, and paraly- sis within dispossessed and disenfranchised communities. Desire, yes, accounts for the loss and despair, but also the hope, the visions, the wisdom of lived lives and communities. Desire is involved with the not yet and, at times, the not any- more. In many desire-based texts (Anzaldúa, 1987; Cheng, 2001; Didion, 2005; Williams, 1992) there is a ghostly, remnant quality to desire, its existence not contained to the body but still derived of the body. Desire is about longing, about a present that is enriched by both the past and the future. It is integral to our humanness.3

To play out the in-the-real differences between damage and desire a bit, recently I took students in a graduate course on research methodology and writing to see the exhibit “Stereotypes vs. Humantypes: Images of Blacks in the 19th and 20th Centuries” at the Schomberg Center for Research on Black Cul- ture at the New York Public Library in Harlem. The exhibit was divided between two rooms. The first side, the stereotypes side, featured historical ever yday examples of advertising, entertainment, science, and educational images of black Americans—images that I am reluctant to describe here because I am sickened by my potential to perpetuate this hateful part of U.S. history. (Here again we arrive at a paradox of damage: to refute it, we need to say it aloud.) In one home-decorative wall hanging, a line of black toddlers is depicted with the words, “Alligator Bait.” In a 1927 film poster for Uncle Tom’s Cabin, “The Greatest Human Drama Ever Filmed,” a “Colorama Features release with a cast of thousands,” invites us to “Hate Simon ‘Legree’; Pity Uncle ‘Tom’; Love little ‘Eva’; Laugh at ‘Topsy’” and gives us insight into the overdetermined ways in which white America might respond to black film characters and the everyday people who were “represented” by these characters.

In the other room of the exhibit, the “humantypes” side, we learned that many African Americans and U.S.-born Africans living in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries engaged in photography, mostly by captur- ing daguerreotype images, in part in order to refute prominent stereotypes. This section featured compelling, dimensional, nuanced images of African American people, such as the 1919 image of the Harlem Hell Fighters, beauty pageant contestants at Pacific Beach in 1925 by F. A. Weaver, James Latimer Allen’s (1930) “Brown Madonna,” and the captivating 1932 image of a woman titled “The Boss” by Prentice H. Polk. In “The Boss,” a black woman in worn, textured work clothes poses, hands on the back of her hips, with driving cer- tainty. Her expression reveals impatience, self-knowingness, careful watching, defiance—all of these, none of these.

The self-crafted images of black men, women, and children in the photo- graphs and daguerreotypes are profoundly different than images in “Darkie” toothpaste (still available in some parts of the world) and “Black Up” burnt

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cork−based makeup. These humantypes are layered in composition and mean- ing. They are determined to show complexity and often reveal contradiction. Though posed, they feature real bodies and faces—real skin in place of the cartoonish illustrations of the stereotypes. The photographs and daguerreo- types are images of desire, while the stereotypes are flat damage.

Poststructuralist theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987) teach us that desire is assembled, crafted over a lifetime through our experiences. For them, this assemblage is the picking up of distinct bits and pieces that, without losing their specificity, become integrated into a dynamic whole. This is what accounts for the multiplicity, complexity, and contradiction of desire, how desire reaches for contrasting realities, even simultaneously. Counter- ing theorists that posit desire as a hole, a gap, or that which is missing (such as, and somewhat famously, Foucault) Deleuze and Guattari insist that desire is not lacking but “involution” (p. 164).4 Exponentially generative, engaged, engorged, desire is not mere wanting but our informed seeking. Desire is both the part of us that hankers for the desired and at the same time the part that learns to desire. It is closely tied to, or may even be, our wisdom. In the Schomberg Center exhibit, stereotype images depicted African American peo- ple as subhuman, as objects, as jokes, as static. Conversely, as images of desire, humantype photographs and daguerreotypes portrayed African American people as having pasts and presents and futures, as dignified in work clothes, as simultaneously serious and exuberant.

To anchor this discussion, I turn back briefly to the Clark and Clark doll tests. In the damage framework that resulted, the emphasis was on the finding that black children aged three to five years preferred white dolls in a variety of ways. As Thurgood Marshall attested, this streamlined version of the study results was crucial in arguing that African American youth, like victims of a car accident, were damaged by racial segregation of schools (Cross, 1991). How- ever, a desire framework—one that seeks to construct a fuller representation of children’s views about the dolls, one that is open to complexity and con- tradictions—would have provoked further analysis of other wise overlooked findings. For example, an earlier version of the Clark and Clark study found that white children aged three to five preferred black dolls. Further, that same study found that although black children aged three to five preferred white dolls, the trend reversed itself among black youth at age seven, who preferred black dolls (Cross, 1991). A desire-based framework that recognizes desire as multiplicitous and as assembled from prior experiences, and that utilizes depathologizing analyses, would have recast the interpretation of the same data Marshall cited. Further, regarding study design, in a desire framework, whether or not preference among three- to five-year-old children can really be used to project feelings of self-worth and self-hatred in adults would be examined. Although the Brown v. Board case has had a tremendous and pow- erful impact on the equality of public schooling and, more, the promise of equality in public schooling in the United States, I think it is worthwhile to

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consider the impacts and limitations of the underlying theor y of change at work in the suit. This reflection may help shed light on why and how, fifty-five years after Brown v. Board, the transformation of persistent racial hierarchies is incomplete.

In a real-life update to the Clark and Clark doll tests, the humantypes sec- tion of the “Stereotypes vs. Humantypes” exhibit also featured a short film called A Girl Like Me that Kiri Davis, then seventeen years old, made as part of her graduation portfolio at the Urban Academy public high school in New York City. Davis’s film replicates the findings of the Clark and Clark doll tests, showing young black children consistently preferring white baby dolls over black baby dolls. However, Davis splices this footage together with footage of young women of color talking about their hair, their bodies, their moth- ers, and their identities. It is this splicing that captures the critical desire of young black women (including Davis)—the complexity and wholeness of their selves—rather than their “damage” (Davis, 2005).

A Cautionar y Note I am not arguing to install desire as an antonym to damage, as if they are oppo- sites. It is important not to make the mistake of merely swapping one frame- work for another, nor is this merely an issue of political correctness or linguis- tic correction. Rather, it is an argument for desire as an epistemological shift.

It is certainly not a call for another “d” word: denial. It is not a call to paint everything as peachy, as fine, as over. In Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), a memoir on the mournful aspects of desire, she writes, “The singer of the song about looking for the silver lining believes that clouds have come her way. The singer of the song about walking on through the storm assumes that the storm could other wise take her down” (p. 171). Desire is the song about walking through the storm, a song that recognizes rather than denies that pain doubtlessly lies ahead.

As a theoretical concept, desire interrupts the binary of reproduction ver- sus resistance. In social science, it is often believed that people are bound to reproduce or replicate social inequity or, on the flip side, that they can resist unequal social conditions. Critics on both sides accuse the other of oversim- plifying, of underestimating the immense and totalizing power of systematic oppression on the one hand and the radical power of the human spirit and human agency on the other. It seems that the positions are irreconcilable.

Edward Soja (1996), deploying Henri Lefebvre’s 1991 concept of the third- space, has described a process of thirding as a way to break the closed circuit of an irreconcilable binary: “Critical thirding as othering is the first and most important step in transforming the categorical and closed logic of either/ or to the dialectically open one of both/and also . . .” (p. 60). Further, he characterizes the thirdspace as introducing “a critical ‘other than’ choice that speaks and critiques through its otherness” (p. 61). Desire is a thirding of the dichotomized categories of reproduction and resistance. It is neither/both/

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and reproduction and resistance. This is important because it more closely matches the experiences of people who, at different points in a single day, reproduce, resist, are complicit in, rage against, celebrate, throw up hands/ fists/towels, and withdraw and participate in uneven social structures—that is, everybody. Desire fleshes out that which has been hidden or what happens behind our backs. Desire, because it is an assemblage of experiences, ideas, and ideologies, both subversive and dominant, necessarily complicates our understanding of human agency, complicity, and resistance.

On Complex Personhood In part, a framework of desire can do all of this because it accounts for that which Aver y Gordon (1997) calls complex personhood, which means that people

get stuck in the symptoms of their troubles, and also transform themselves . . . that the stories people tell about themselves, about their troubles, about their social worlds, and about their society’s problems are entangled and weave between what is immediately available as a story and what their imaginations are reaching toward. (p. 4)

Gordon (1997) describes complex personhood as “conferring the respect on others that comes from presuming that life and people’s lives are simulta- neously straightforward and full of enormously subtle meaning” (p. 5). In my application of this concept as part of a framework of desire, complex person- hood draws on Indigenous understandings of collectivity and the interdepen- dence of the collective and the person rather than on the Western focus on the individual.

I have learned a great deal about complex personhood from my colleague, Monique Guishard, who tells a story about working with her youth coresearch- ers on issues of critical consciousness during the day, tracing the legacy of their mothers’ and grandmothers’ work for social justice (Guishard, 2009). Later, Monique accompanied the same youth coresearchers to stand overnight in a long line outside of a shoe store, waiting for the anticipated release of a new sneaker. Monique was taken aback by the irony of the situation: on the same day these youth were openly critical of corporate capitalism and globalization, they waited with hundreds of other youth and adults to purchase an item that represents some of the worst elements of global capitalism and exploitation. But she was even more taken aback by her youth companions’ awareness and ease in/side that irony. In a damage framework, one might surmise that, even when faced with options, youth are pliant to the consumerist status quo. How- ever, in a desire-based framework that draws on the idea of complex person- hood, we see that “all people remember and forget, are beset by contradiction, and recognize and misrecognize themselves and others” (Gordon, 1997, p. 4). We can desire to be critically conscious and desire the new Jordans, even if those desires are conflicting.

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TABLE 1 A Comparative Look at Frameworks—the Gate-ways and Get-aways Project

Within collectivity, recognizing complex personhood involves making room for the contradictions, for the mis/re/cognitions, usually in an effort to sustain a sense of collective balance. For tribal peoples, this can mean resisting char- acterizing one another in ways that tacitly reduce us to being either trapped in the irrelevant past or fouled up by modernity and by acknowledging that as twenty-first-century peoples, it is our collective duty to ensure that any and ever y member who chooses can engage in traditional sustenance practices, use science and Indigenous ecologies to understand the world around us, and attend relevant, respectful, and responsive schools. In sum, it is our work to afford the multiplicity of life’s choices for one another (Grande, 2004).

In another example from my own work with a New York City−based youth participator y action research group called the Collective of Researchers on Educational Disappointment and Desire (CREDD), we refused to accept damage- or deficit-centered views on the General Educational Development (GED) credential. We called our project the Gate-ways and Get-aways Project (Table 1) because we explored the GED as a gateway to higher education and employment and also as a getaway route from inadequate high schools.

Existing research on the GED positioned it as a depleted credential, inef- fective in getting its recipients through college or fully employed. Yet, at the same time, studies reported ever-increasing numbers of youth across the United States and especially in New York City flocking to the GED rather than a high school diploma. CREDD’s research took a desire and complex person- hood approach by insisting that there must be other values that youth place in the GED—that youth aren’t being duped into getting a meaningless creden- tial but, rather, that the meaning they place in it isn’t understood by existing research (Tuck et al., 2008).

My youth coresearchers and I found an important link: with an increased reliance on the New York Regents tests as exit exams, the number of students opting for the GED also increased. We found that youth—especially those seen as disruptive, as not going to pass the tests, or as not good enough speakers of English—are encouraged to leave school and get a GED by administrators, teachers, and guidance counselors. Finally, we found that youth value the GED

Damage-Centered Interpretations Desire-Based Interpretations

Value of GED is depleted. The value of GED is related to its role as an emergency exit from negative high school experiences.

Youth are making bad choices or are being duped into getting a GED.

Youth make the best choices they can based on the information available to them.

Youth are lazy, unable to make wise decisions, or nihilistic.

Youth care deeply about their futures as well as their current situations.

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not only as a gateway to higher education and employment but also, impor- tantly, as a get-away from disappointing and dehumanizing high schools (see Tuck, 2008; Tuck et al., 2008).

CREDD’s research was grounded in the assumptions that New York City students are worthy of respect and consideration as complex, whole people. It draws on a theor y of change that posits a need to understand the intrica- cies of people’s lives in order to point toward ways of becoming more of who we are (Anzaldúa, 1987). It is our work as educational researchers and prac- titioners, and especially as community members, to envision alternative theo- ries of change, especially those that rely on desire and complexity rather than damage.

Suspending Damage: A Call for a Moratorium on Damage-Centered Research

Regeneration means that we will reference ourselves differently, both from the ways we did traditionally and under colonial domination. Taiaiake Alfred, Wasase: Indigenous Pathways of Action and Freedom (2005)

I close this letter with two earnest questions. Is it time for our communities to call a moratorium on damage-centered research? How might this moratorium be useful to us?

I humbly submit that the time has come for our communities to refuse to be complicit in our further categorization as only damaged, as only bro- ken. In many communities, such a moratorium is already under way, and both “insider” and “outsider” researchers who employ a damage framework are being turned away at the gate.

Let’s face it. Some folks out there are always going to think of us as dam- aged, and not because they are so convinced of the devastating after-effects of colonization. But it is crucial to recognize that our communities hold the power to begin shifting the discourse away from damage and toward desire and complexity. We can insist that research in our communities, whether par- ticipatory or not, does not fetishize damage but, rather, celebrates our surviv- ance (Brayboy, 2008; Grande, 2004; Vizenor & Lee, 1999). More importantly, damage can no longer be the only way, or even the main way, that we talk about ourselves.

Survivance is a key component to a framework of desire. Gerald Vizenor’s (1994) concept of survivance is distinct from survival: it is “moving beyond our basic survival in the face of overwhelming cultural genocide to create spaces of synthesis and renewal” (p. 53). Elsewhere Vizenor (1998) writes,

Survivance, in my use of the word, means a native sense of presence, the motion of sovereignty and the will to resist dominance. Survivance is not just survival but also resistance, not heroic or tragic, but the tease of tradition, and my sense of survivance outwits dominance and victimry. (p. 93)

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Related to this point, for Indigenous peoples—and for peoples in places such as the Ninth Ward, the South Bronx, South Dallas, and Oakland—a framework that accounts for and forwards our sovereignty is vital. We can prac- tice our sovereignty within a framework of desire but cannot within a damage framework. By this I mean that a framework of desire recognizes our sover- eignty as a core element of our being and meaning making; a damage frame- work excludes this recognition.

To for ward our survivance, to deepen our sovereignty, I believe it is time for a moratorium on damage-centered research in our communities. This morato- rium will put a freeze on damage-centered research efforts while stakeholders in our communities take some time to reflect on the positive and negative out- comes of past damage-centered research on our peoples; to create and imple- ment guidelines for researchers working in our communities; and to (re)con- sider the roles of research in our communities. I believe that a moratorium on damage-centered research in our communities could give us the time to accomplish three goals:

Re-vision our theories of change. The first goal for a proposed moratorium is to re-vision and firm up our theory(ies) of change and to determine what role, if any, research has in making our dreams come true for our communities. It is important to ask, when considering a new community research project, “What can research really do to improve this situation?” The answers might reveal that research can do little in a particular situation or quite a lot in another. Or they may reveal that it is not the research that will make the difference but, rather, who participates in the research, who poses the questions, how data are gathered, and who conducts the analysis. This is a call to not take theories of change for granted, but to be sure that our actions make steps toward our purposes.

Establish tribal and community human research ethics guidelines. Another goal of the proposed moratorium is to learn from and build on the work happening in tribes and communities all over the globe to establish tribal or community human research ethics guidelines and to develop and strengthen the commit- tees or other structures to maintain these guidelines. Communities might also consider guidelines that protect cultural, intellectual, and sacred knowledges from being stolen, appropriated, or handled in ways that are disrespectful. Further, communities might consider guidelines that are extended to land, flora, and fauna that hold meanings unobser ved by the “whitestream” acad- emy (Battiste, 2008; see also appendix A). The work to establish and enforce ethical guidelines and conditions in research on tribes and urban communities has been under way for more than a decade, but the guidelines do not usually address the framing of the research. Communities might consider establish- ing guidelines that insist on frameworks of desire and work with researchers to reframe damage-centered projects as desire-based inquiries.

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Create mutually beneficial roles for academic researchers in community research. A third goal of the proposed moratorium could be to reassess the role of the academy in community research—to consider, in Orlando Fals-Borda and Ansuir Rahman’s (1991) words, “breaking the monopoly” the academy has on research and community self-knowledge. In many ways, this is a call for a remembrance of the true purpose of knowledge in/for our communities. Through this (re)consideration, tribes and communities might decide that there is no role, or a diminished role, for academic researchers in certain kinds of inquiry projects and a larger (even a leadership) role for academic researchers in other kinds of studies. Regardless of the size of the role, rela- tionships among the academy and tribes and communities should be mutually beneficial, with an emphasis on the real, positive outcomes for communities in both the short and long term.

For some, a moratorium may signal an end or a sense of finality. To me, a moratorium provides an opportunity for what Indigenous scholar Taiaiake Alfred (2005) calls regeneration, “the direct application of acting against our ingrained and oppressive fears” (p. 151). It is simultaneously an acknowledg- ment of historic pain and taking action against that pain in order to reframe that histor y. This duality is represented by the Raven—to some the Raven is a fearsome signal of mortality, but to many Indigenous peoples Raven is the embodiment of curiosity and the full picture of truth. As Alfred (2005) elaborates:

We will self-consciously recreate our cultural practices and reform our politi- cal identities by drawing on tradition in a thoughtful process of reconstruction and a committed reorganization of our lives in a personal and collective sense. This will result in a new conception of what it is to live as Onkwehonwe [original people]. (p. 34)

Alfred’s work ties regeneration to integrity, to recapturing, recommitting to a life, to lives, walked in integrity. I think of the thousands who turned their backs on the remarks of the Australian opposition leader—theirs was a step along a path of integrity. This moratorium—a turning of our own backs on narratives that insist that we are ruined, that we are broken, that we are dam- aged—is a step, too. Dear readers, I hold that in these ways we can carve out the future legacy of our relationships to research.

In hope and solidarity,

Eve Tuck Summer 2009

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Notes 1. This epiphany arose from a conversation that I had with another researcher who has

worked with Native communities in the United States for several decades. 2. For examples, see Carney (2006), Fine (1991), Fine and McClelland (2006), Graham

(1992), Haney (1997), Kelley (1997), Lamb (1996), Tuck et al. (2008). 3. My theorizing of desire draws from the works of Sondra Perl (1980), Ann Anlin Cheng

(2001), Julia Kristeva (1980), Gloria Anzaldúa (1987), Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guat- tari (1987), Joan Didion (2005), bell hooks (1990), Patricia Williams (1992), and Toni Morrison (1987), among others.

4. This philosophical divergence is best captured in a series of letters that Deleuze wrote to Foucault in 1977, published in Davidson (1998).

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Tuck, E., & Fine, M. (2007). Inner angles: A range of ethical responses to/with Indigenous and decolonizing theories. In N. Denzin & M. Giardina (Eds.), Ethical futures in quali- tative research: Decolonizing the politics of knowledge (pp. 45–168). Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.

United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007, September 13). Retrieved April 16, 2008, from http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/en/declaration. html

Vizenor, G. (1994). Manifest manners: Post-Indian warriors of survivance. Middleton, CT: Wes- leyan University Press.

Vizenor, G. (1998.) Fugitive poses: Native American Indian scenes of absence and presence. Lin- coln: University of Nebraska Press.

Vizenor, G., & Lee, A. R. (1999). Postindian conversations. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Williams, P. J. (1992). The alchemy of race and rights. Cambridge, MA: Har vard University Press.

Youth Researchers for a New Education System (YRNES). (2008). The YRNES Report. Retrieved May 13, 2009, from http://yrnes.justlikedat.com

Appendix A: Resources on Tribal and Community Human Research Ethics Guidelines Alaska Federation of Natives guidelines for research. Alaska Native Knowledge Network.

http://www.ankn.uaf.edu/IKS/afnguide.html Copyright issues. Sealaska Heritage Institute. http://www.sealaskaheritage.org/programs/

copyright_issues.htm Cultural and intellectual property rights. Alaska Native Knowledge Network. http://www.

ankn.uaf.edu/rights.html Guidelines for respecting cultural knowledge. Alaska Native Knowledge Network. http://

www.ankn.uaf.edu/standards/knowledge.html Hansen, S., & VanFleet, J. (2003). Traditional knowledge and intellectual property. Washington,

DC: American Association for the Advancement of Science. http://shr.aaas.org/tek/ handbook/handbook.pdf

Mataatua declaration on cultural and intellectual property rights of Indigenous people. Alaska Native Knowledge Network. http://www.ankn.uaf.edu/mataatua.html

Principles for the conduct of research in the Arctic. Alaska Native Knowledge Network. http://www.ankn.uaf.edu/IKS/conduct.html

Source note: Qagaasakung to Dr. Ray Barnhardt of the Alaska Native Knowledge Network and Uni- versity of Alaska Fairbanks for compiling this list.

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