Papers by hari stephen kumar
This triple autoethnography evidences a process of associative memory, akin to spinstorying or ge... more This triple autoethnography evidences a process of associative memory, akin to spinstorying or generative autoethnography, that allows the triggering of memory to evolve into a collective sharing of experiences. Each turn in the associated exchanges deepens the authors’ argument about the nature of memory as both singular and shared. This performance script is drawn from a longer performative essay that began with a triggering idea, an entry made by the first contributor sent to the next, without comment or discussion. The second contributor then narrated a triggered memory and then forwarded the document to the third contributor, who, upon reading the contributions of the first and second, offered his responsive and critical memory.
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What are the stakes for colonized bodies in an allegedly postcolonial world where institutions st... more What are the stakes for colonized bodies in an allegedly postcolonial world where institutions still use the term non-native to classify those who speak a “first language” other than English? In this autoethnographic performance, I connect critical cultural theories with embodied linguistic negotiations of identity as a “multilingual” person teaching students at a public university in a predominately White region called “New England” in the United States. By tracing my visceral encounters with the power relations between my five languages (English, Arabic, Tamil, Malayalam, and Hindi), I seek to decolonize ideologies that enforce a stable origin for language itineraries.
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What do the narratives of the West(ern) say about which bodies are celebrated and which bodies ar... more What do the narratives of the West(ern) say about which bodies are celebrated and which bodies are warned away in the West(ern)? And how do such narratives echo globally while reinforcing American patterns of racist violence against nonwhite bodies? In this autoethnographic cultural analysis, I interweave songs and visuals with personal narratives of growing up in the Middle East and with continued incidents of racial violence in America. I seek to show how West(ern) ideologies celebrate a narrow kind of white masculine vigilantism that affords most white people the luxury of seeing themselves nostalgically and sympathetically portrayed as individuals in West(ern) narratives while condemning members of nonwhite races as collectively criminal.
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Racialicious, Aug 14, 2013
In the month since the Zimmerman case, the mainstream conversation has morphed into a personal ve... more In the month since the Zimmerman case, the mainstream conversation has morphed into a personal verdict on Trayvon's behavior and a cultural indictment on black people more broadly. Here are five keys that explain how this shift fits into a longer American history of racial injustice.
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Liminalities, Aug 2013
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Qualitative Inquiry, Oct 2013
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Cultural Studies <=> Critical Methodologies, Dec 2012
This coperformed autoethnographic inquiry explores “the West” as both a seductive and a subjugati... more This coperformed autoethnographic inquiry explores “the West” as both a seductive and a subjugating narrative terrain on which betweener identities must navigate the colonizing structures of Western epistemologies. On this terrain, we collaboratively engage the metaphors and tropes of “Cowboys” and “Indians” within a broader critique of knowledge production in the Western academy. As a decolonizing performance, our journey invites a collective turning of the academic gaze away from objectifying the Other and toward making Western systems of knowledge themselves the objects of inquiry.
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This is a triple autoethnographic text written by three men of differing racial and cultural back... more This is a triple autoethnographic text written by three men of differing racial and cultural backgrounds with the purpose of exploring the nature of their relationships with their fathers. The authors reflect on experiences with their fathers seeking to find answers that might help them resist the replication of pain in their own parenting as well as (in one instance) the resistance to parenting altogether. In each intersecting movement the voices are both singular and plural, featuring experiences that press against each other in ways that are simultaneously familiar and strange, building a case study of how the critical practice of autoethnography provides an opportunity for a personal scrutiny that is both private and public, and individual and communal.
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I write performance autoethnography as a methodological project committed to evoking embodied and... more I write performance autoethnography as a methodological project committed to evoking embodied and lived experience in academic texts, using performance writing to decolonize academic knowledge production. Through a fragmented itinerary across continents and ethnicities, across religions and languages, across academic and vocational careers, I speak from the everyday spaces in between supposedly stable cultural identities involving race, ethnicity, class, gendered norms, to name a few. I write against colonizing practices which police the racist, sexist, and xenophobic cultural politics that produce and validate particular identities. I write from the intersections of my own living experiences within and against those cultural practices, and I bring these intersections with me into the academic spaces where I live and labor, intertwining the personal and the professional. Within the academy, colonizing structures manifest in ways that value disembodied and objectified Western knowledges about people, while excluding certain bodies and lived experiences from research texts. My thesis locates the academy as both a site for struggle and an arena for transformative work, turning from Others as objects of study and toward decolonizing academic knowledge production, making Western epistemologies themselves the objects of inquiry (Smith 1999; Denzin 2003; Moreira 2009). Connecting with a tradition and community of scholars in the ‘seventh moment’ of qualitative research (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005b), I disrupt acts of academic(s) writing as the textual labor most privileged in the academy. In this thesis I write messy acts of embodied knowledges (Weems 2003; Moreira 2007), including this abstract itself, while each act resists and breaks forms of ‘traditional’ academic writing to varying degrees, ranging from subtle to overtly transgressive. My ‘fieldwork’ invokes my 35 years of perpetual migration: observed through my messy and unvalidated perspectives, recorded and transcribed through my messy and unreliable body, distorted by my messy and deceptive memories, and experienced every single day in messy encounters out of my control, while I live and labor as a perpetual betweener. I write visceral texts as performance acts that invite us all, as betweeners, to write and read from the flesh in order to turn our gaze toward decolonizing academic knowledge production.
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Part of special edition issue of IRQR on "Metaphors as Methodological Tool for Performance Studie... more Part of special edition issue of IRQR on "Metaphors as Methodological Tool for Performance Studies", edited by W. Benjamin Myers and Bryant Keith Alexander.
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I should say, abstractly, that this is about racism, if only I knew what races I should tattoo on... more I should say, abstractly, that this is about racism, if only I knew what races I should tattoo on my transnational post-colonial narcissistic sub- altern brown body that so enjoys being white. I should rather say this is about silences invoked in my body during moments of misconstructed identity, si- lences between belonging and betrayal, if only I did not love dancing in the tensions between boring and exotic. I am saying much now, but I said little then, while so much was said by me in me for me. So all I have for you here are maddening silences.
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Conference Presentations by hari stephen kumar
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This paper examines how and why a group of "religiously convicted" New England churchgoers organi... more This paper examines how and why a group of "religiously convicted" New England churchgoers organized to enact social change in the wake of Rev. Jeremiah Wright's portrayals in the national media during the 2008 presidential election cycle. While media accounts problematized then-Senator Barack Obama's association with Rev. Wright, thereby motivating several religiously convicted groups and individuals against Mr. Obama, this particular group of white Christians (and the brown author) were motivated by their religious convictions in quite opposite directions. In particular, through several communicative practices ranging from critical pedagogy sessions to publishing a book of personal narratives, they/we engaged local politics and culture with the goal of fighting against racism. This paper historicizes, problematizes, and critiques their rhetorical discourses, while de-essentializing their religious-political representations, through an ethnographic case study of their public political and social performances.
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Teachers and students in public speaking courses often find themselves involved in a multiply lay... more Teachers and students in public speaking courses often find themselves involved in a multiply layered and continuous mix of performance and rhetoric in the classroom space. On that stage, which is often a space of everyday life for teachers and students, various pedagogies bring plurally constituted bodies and theories together in ways that frequently lead to interesting and productive tensions. In this paper I explore, in particular, the tensions of democracy and citizenship that arise in the specific act of the Deliberative Speech whereby a community is rhetorically constituted for the performance of civic deliberation by citizens who persuade each other to undertake particular actions.
However, instead of an imagined “that” audience, what happens when a deliberative community is composed from the particular identities gathered in a specific “this” class? That is, instead of acting ‘as if’ we were citizens in some imaginary forum asked to agree or disagree with hypothetical arguments, what happens when the students and teacher in this particular class are addressed as citizens already enacting work together as members of various intersecting communities brought together by discourses in this course? What happens when the arguments being made are about particular material actions that the students and teacher are asked to actually carry out as a result of the deliberation process, before the end of the semester? What happens when an imagined ideological resistance to a proposed idea translates into an embodied physical resistance in the classroom to a subsequent proposed course of action? How do we deliberate in ways that divide the community into those who are “for” or “against” particular actions, but then persuade all members of the community to engage together in performing whichever action “won” the debate? And, finally, what happens when an alienating ‘banking model’ of grades and evaluation continually breaks the alienating spectacle of speaker and audience deliberating democratic choices in an educational setting?
In this paper I describe an assignment that I designed for my public speaking course that engaged various aspects of the above questions. I draw from experiences and reflections with the particular group of students who explored and challenged those questions with me during the Fall 2009 semester. Motivated by a blend of theorists from rhetoric, composition, and performance, we engaged in a multi-week deliberative exercise that both drew us together as a community and cast us against each other in debating opposing choices that each carried explicit material actions for us to do, together, before the semester was over. In doing so, we experientially teased out aspects of democratic theory and felt the viscerality of the binary divides that polarize contemporary American political consciousness. With the benefit of hindsight and critical reflection, by both myself and my ex-students, I briefly analyze performative aspects of the exercise that were contingent, unpredictable, and transformative. In conjunction with other critical pedagogies of engagement, I outline ways that such “deliberately democratic” performances can bring students and teachers together in experientially rupturing and questioning the spectacularly consequential assumptions of civic life in contemporary American society.
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In this performance autoethnography I invite us toward decolonizing the disparate narrative conne... more In this performance autoethnography I invite us toward decolonizing the disparate narrative connections between colonial constructions of English as First/Foreign/Second Language and their implications for postcolonial subjects navigating transnational citizenships. I trouble the intersections of nationalism with masculinity involved in my lived experiences navigating the powerful linguistic identities in between communities for whom English fluency is a mark of treachery to one’s “mother tongue.” Speaking from an acknowledged position of unspeakable privilege accessed by performances of hegemonic complicity, I seek to disrupt the stability of multiple subject positions through an always moving polyvocal co-performance text.
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Book Chapters by hari stephen kumar
Moving Beyond Racism: Memories, Transformations, and the Start of New Conversations, 2008
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Papers by hari stephen kumar
Conference Presentations by hari stephen kumar
However, instead of an imagined “that” audience, what happens when a deliberative community is composed from the particular identities gathered in a specific “this” class? That is, instead of acting ‘as if’ we were citizens in some imaginary forum asked to agree or disagree with hypothetical arguments, what happens when the students and teacher in this particular class are addressed as citizens already enacting work together as members of various intersecting communities brought together by discourses in this course? What happens when the arguments being made are about particular material actions that the students and teacher are asked to actually carry out as a result of the deliberation process, before the end of the semester? What happens when an imagined ideological resistance to a proposed idea translates into an embodied physical resistance in the classroom to a subsequent proposed course of action? How do we deliberate in ways that divide the community into those who are “for” or “against” particular actions, but then persuade all members of the community to engage together in performing whichever action “won” the debate? And, finally, what happens when an alienating ‘banking model’ of grades and evaluation continually breaks the alienating spectacle of speaker and audience deliberating democratic choices in an educational setting?
In this paper I describe an assignment that I designed for my public speaking course that engaged various aspects of the above questions. I draw from experiences and reflections with the particular group of students who explored and challenged those questions with me during the Fall 2009 semester. Motivated by a blend of theorists from rhetoric, composition, and performance, we engaged in a multi-week deliberative exercise that both drew us together as a community and cast us against each other in debating opposing choices that each carried explicit material actions for us to do, together, before the semester was over. In doing so, we experientially teased out aspects of democratic theory and felt the viscerality of the binary divides that polarize contemporary American political consciousness. With the benefit of hindsight and critical reflection, by both myself and my ex-students, I briefly analyze performative aspects of the exercise that were contingent, unpredictable, and transformative. In conjunction with other critical pedagogies of engagement, I outline ways that such “deliberately democratic” performances can bring students and teachers together in experientially rupturing and questioning the spectacularly consequential assumptions of civic life in contemporary American society.
Book Chapters by hari stephen kumar
However, instead of an imagined “that” audience, what happens when a deliberative community is composed from the particular identities gathered in a specific “this” class? That is, instead of acting ‘as if’ we were citizens in some imaginary forum asked to agree or disagree with hypothetical arguments, what happens when the students and teacher in this particular class are addressed as citizens already enacting work together as members of various intersecting communities brought together by discourses in this course? What happens when the arguments being made are about particular material actions that the students and teacher are asked to actually carry out as a result of the deliberation process, before the end of the semester? What happens when an imagined ideological resistance to a proposed idea translates into an embodied physical resistance in the classroom to a subsequent proposed course of action? How do we deliberate in ways that divide the community into those who are “for” or “against” particular actions, but then persuade all members of the community to engage together in performing whichever action “won” the debate? And, finally, what happens when an alienating ‘banking model’ of grades and evaluation continually breaks the alienating spectacle of speaker and audience deliberating democratic choices in an educational setting?
In this paper I describe an assignment that I designed for my public speaking course that engaged various aspects of the above questions. I draw from experiences and reflections with the particular group of students who explored and challenged those questions with me during the Fall 2009 semester. Motivated by a blend of theorists from rhetoric, composition, and performance, we engaged in a multi-week deliberative exercise that both drew us together as a community and cast us against each other in debating opposing choices that each carried explicit material actions for us to do, together, before the semester was over. In doing so, we experientially teased out aspects of democratic theory and felt the viscerality of the binary divides that polarize contemporary American political consciousness. With the benefit of hindsight and critical reflection, by both myself and my ex-students, I briefly analyze performative aspects of the exercise that were contingent, unpredictable, and transformative. In conjunction with other critical pedagogies of engagement, I outline ways that such “deliberately democratic” performances can bring students and teachers together in experientially rupturing and questioning the spectacularly consequential assumptions of civic life in contemporary American society.