The Mothership Connection: Utopian Funk from Bethune and Beyond Boni Wozolek The Urban Review Issues and Ideas in Public Education ISSN 0042-0972 Urban Rev DOI 10.1007/s11256-018-0476-7 1 23 Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer Nature B.V.. This e-offprint is for personal use only and shall not be self-archived in electronic repositories. If you wish to self-archive your article, please use the accepted manuscript version for posting on your own website. You may further deposit the accepted manuscript version in any repository, provided it is only made publicly available 12 months after official publication or later and provided acknowledgement is given to the original source of publication and a link is inserted to the published article on Springer's website. The link must be accompanied by the following text: "The final publication is available at link.springer.com”. 1 23 Author's personal copy The Urban Review https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-018-0476-7 The Mothership Connection: Utopian Funk from Bethune and Beyond Boni Wozolek1 © Springer Nature B.V. 2018 Abstract In this paper, educational pathways emerge from the nexus of ancient narratives and future possibilities. Such imaginings are as much attributed to the African American intellectual tradition as to contemporary Afrofuturisms, including those born in histories of Blackness. The overlay of what was and what is not yet is signiicant because it engenders educational potentialities that are central to aesthetics and onto-epistemological wonderings. The author uses seminal dialogues from scholars like Sojourner Truth, Mary McLeod Bethune and Anna Julia Cooper as a springboard for envisioning Afrofuturisms in which schooling functions to transgress the assemblages of violence and capital of shame that pervade classrooms and corridors contemporary education. Not unlike the call of Sylvia Wynter, Sun Ra, bell hooks, Octavia Butler and other Afrofuturist activists of the feminine, this paper (re)imagines schooling from the roots of its past and the future conditional they portend. Keywords Schooling · African American intellectual tradition · Afrofuturism · Critical race feminisms · Assemblages of violence · Capital of shame Well you better listen my sisters and brothers, Because if you do, you can hear There are voices still callin’ across the years. And they’re all crying across the ocean And they’re crying across the land And they will till we all come to understand… None of us are free None of us are free None of us are free, if one of us are chained, None of us are free (Burke 2002) * Boni Wozolek blwozolek@loyola.edu 1 Loyola University Maryland, 4501 North Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21093, USA 13 Vol.:(0123456789) Author's personal copy The Urban Review What would education be if, as Taliaferro Baszile et al. (2016) wonder, the phrase “black lives matter” was the guiding principle in schools and schooling? How would our schools function? How would we do curriculum theorizing and the work of educational foundations diferently? In the context of schooling, sociocultural norms and values are informed by historical forms of oppression (Quinn and Meiners 2009; Valente 2011; Watkins 2001; Winield 2007) and by contemporary inluences (Crichlow 2013; Giroux 1997; Yosso 2005). Imagining the “not yet” (Pinar 1998, p. 1) of schools is therefore the conluence of historical, contemporary and future possibilities. It is, as Solomon Burke (2002) popularized, but Ray Charles (1993) irst sang, a “calling across the years” that brings us to the possibilities of educational ideals, the “not yet” of schooling. Further, as foundational scholars of color have articulated (e.g.: Cooper 1892; Woodson 1933), the roots of these omissions are often irmly entrenched in everyday schooling (Watkins 2001; Winield 2007). Attending to the way that society and culture inluence what happens in schools, and how schools reinscribe sociocultural norms, this article speaks to historical and contemporary questions of equity and access in schooling as well as the everyday experiences of marginalized students. Similar to recalling an original tune, this process of evoking historical perspectives and voices is signiicant. As Robin Thicke and Pharell claiming that their Blurred Lines didn’t overly “borrow” from Marvin Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up,” ignoring voices is often marginalizing and a colonization of cultures and ideas, even when done by those “in group”. What is complicated about these issues is that there is a long past of reappropriation of chord histories, structures, rhythms, and melodies in various black arts traditions. For example, in jazz, there are many songs written of the changes of “I got rhythm” and hip hop regularly samples other songs to create something anew. The diiculty here is that Robin Thicke and Pharell plagiarized and while claiming an homage to Marvin Gaye. Such coopting and colonizing is particularly signiicant in schools because, much like discussing aesthetics and education through Dewey’s (1934) scholarship without either being in conjunction to or in critical discourse with DuBois’ (1926) dialogue, the omission of histories becomes a tool for marginalization. In schools, leaving out such voices not only eliminates intellectual and social histories but, over time, it appropriates narratives, ideas, and ways of knowing. The omission of ideas and histories is therefore not only an epistemological but an ontological colonization. The inclusion of these voices complicates cultural memories (Winield 2007) that have normalized the current moment in schooling while actively engaging in the imagining of educational futurisms. This paper irst evokes “what was” in aspects of the African American intellectual traditions in order to more deeply explore “what is” and what “might be” as expressed through the lens of Afrofuturisms. This is done to more deeply consider potential pathways of being and knowing for people of African descent in American schools. Like focusing a kaleidoscope, the braiding of historical and contemporary dialogues converges into a picture of emergent possibilities in schooling that are an assemblage of its sociohistorical and cultural parts. This is signiicant because much like a kaleidoscope allows diferent constructions of the possibly by unfolding 13 Author's personal copy The Urban Review diferently each time using parts of the whole mechanism, using assemblages of historical and contemporary dialogues reveals the possibilities of schooling while attending to past and present educational contexts, ideas, and ideals. This argument begins by addressing questions of ontology and epistemology both theoretically and practically, clearly articulating the multiple understandings through which ontologies are often discussed in and outside of educational research and practice. The work of envisioning potential educational utopias in the works of early twentieth century Black intellectuals is an analysis of a series ontological questions rather than a set of epistemological steps: How do schools be? How do they be with students? How do students be with schools? How do students be in broader contexts? To answer such questions, I attend the ways that foundational scholarship within African American intellectual traditions have outlined ontological notions of schooling. Speciically, this lineage is explored through what I have come to think of as assemblages of violence (Wozolek 2018b) and an accompanying curriculum of ontological resistance at the nexus of race, gender and schooling. The signiicance of this curriculum deeply resonated in the context of the late 1800 to early 1900s amid the consistent, normalized violence against people of color and women. At this time, scholars like Cooper, DuBois and Woodson articulated theories and practices that were in friction with connections between schooling and the pervasive physical violence that was coupled with a sociocultural practices and policies of social exclusion that were levied against people of color. Such concerns are central to our contemporary experiences and are abundantly evident in the continuing maiming and killing unarmed bodies of color. It is present in #blacklivesmatter and other associated movements that seek to call much needed attention to this continuing onslaught of assaults, and the ways in which the greater public is often more consumed with gestures like the removal of a Confederate lags from Amazon than attending to the deep-seated cultural iterations that have normalized these issues. Next, this article attends to the ways that foundational scholarship is imbricated within Afrofuturisms to explore how such understandings resonate with past and potential future ideals of schooling. Like many robust dialogues that are complicated by sociopolitical, historical, and cultural ideas and ideals, Afrofuturisms is discussed here at the nexus of conversations centered on such sociocultural precepts as they intersect with various forms of the arts. As it is discussed further below, this paper uses Afrofuturistic dialogues—or a focus on the African diaspora as it intersects with technology across the arts in popular culture—to argue for representations of blackness that have been historically whitewashed from educational spaces. As these forms of blackness have been excluded from schooling, it has caused ontological trauma for communities of color in general and African American communities speciically. The purpose here is to use African American intellectual traditions as they intersect with Afrofuturistic dialogues to think about what might be if black lives mattered in school as they do in these traditions. It is important to note that this paper attends to systemic injustices that disproportionately impact marginalized youth. While these injustices happen across spaces and places, it is important to remember that physical and emotional violence found in schools and schooling consistently plays out in urban schools alarmingly high 13 Author's personal copy The Urban Review rates (Ladson-Billings 2009; Meiners 2016; Morris 2016). Following Gershon’s (2017) dialogue on urban schools and schooling, this paper similarly understands urban schools as places located in cities that are predominantly comprised of economically, socially, and politically disenfranchised students of color. Gershon writes that “although this deinition is explicit or implied, it is worth noting because some of the most elite and expensive schools are also in many major U.S. cities, often but a few short blocks from some of the most underserved, underserviced schools in the nation” (p. 4). The theorization of violent assemblages as they intersect with African American intellectual traditions, and the potential corrective lens for schooling within Afrofuturisms is signiicant to urban youth is because these are the very conversations meant, as Garvey (1922) consistently argued, to positively impact black youth across contexts but, as it is explored here, in urban spaces speciically. Because what counts as “urban” is often luid and easily contested, this paper also attends to Gershon’s (2013a) discussion on vibrational afect, using the terms “resonance” and “dissonance” to call attention to the way ideas inter-act (Schwab 1969) within and between individuals. As Gershon (2103a/c) notes, these terms are a deliberate move away from ideas of relevance. In this case, I am arguing that resonance attends to individuals’ subjectivities while relevance focuses on dominant ideas and ideals. This is because relevance is always a consensus perspective where those in the majority conirm to one another that a given perspective is valued over other possibilities. As is the case with Afrofuturisms, a historical and contemporary dialogue that is complicated by resonance and dissonance is central to recovering “histories of counter-futures created in a century of Afrodiasporic projection and as a space within which the critical work of manufacturing tools capable of intervention within the current political dispensation is undertaken” (Eshun 2003, p. 301). What follows is an examination of transgressive positionalities in schooling that are deeply rooted in historical narratives, contemporary ideas, and conditional futures. Assemblages of Violence: Onto‑epistemologies and the Matter of Doing How are ways of being ordered within systems of schooling? While there are many approaches to discuss ontology, here I focus on two constructions of “being” and “becoming” as they are resonant with the scholarship of within African American intellectual traditions and Afrofuturisms. Although ways of knowing are central to these traditions in general and to African diasporic dialogues speciically, ways of being are also irmly rooted in these conversations and their many artistic representations. However, as schools across the United States continue to focus on knowledge production through standardization, this paper attends to ontological challenges and possibilities within these conversations to examine the knotted nature of being, knowing, and schooling (Nespor 1997) as it can be understood through histories related to the African diaspora. The irst construction used here is Massumi’s (2002) discussion of the ontogenetic. Similar to the work of scholars like Anzaldúa (1987), Johnson (1987), Sharpe 13 Author's personal copy The Urban Review (2016), Simpson (2014), to name a few, Massumi argues that one’s way of being is constantly in an emergent state of being and becoming. Echoing Maxine Greene’s statement, “I am not yet” (Pinar 1998), Massumi discusses the ever-emergent process of becoming. For example, students, teachers, and administrators are both independently in a personal state of becoming while being afectively knotted with each other and the sociohistorical systems of schooling. Being and becoming is therefore deeply personal and necessarily relational. Ontogenetics is as much about space and place as it is about relations, especially in places like schools where such factors are knotted (Nespor 1997) with everyday experiences. Second is Barad’s (1999) framing of the onto-epistemological. Barad argues that emergent states of being are always embedded in socio-political ways of knowing and therefore tied to ethical decisions that ultimately inluence the onto-epistemological. In the example using the hidden curriculum,1 Barad might note that all people are performative agents, making decisions on how to act, react and enact as local actors within a school. By using the ontogenetic alongside the onto-epistemological, I am underscoring the multiple ways that these scholars’ work recognizes an individual’s onto-epistemology as both emergent and tied to the socio-political. For example, as I have argued elsewhere (Wozolek 2012), although a mother’s ways of being, knowing, and doing is nested with her child’s growth, it is also tied to sociocultural, historical, and political understandings of m/othering. In other words, who we are is always “not yet” and emergent in a socio-political process. Although African American intellectual traditions have been helpful in contemporary scholarship as a foundational step toward complicating questions of schooling (Brown and Brown 2010; Gordon 1993; Grant et al. 2015), these traditions tend to be addressed through arguments that focus on students’ ways of knowing. After all, it is posed as an “intellectual tradition” and, despite the contemporary dismantling of the Cartesian split, the tradition still tends to be used in epistemological frameworks. For example, in some educational contexts, African American intellectual traditions are used to address questions of achievement and policies (e.g., Harper et al. 2009; Perry et al. 2004) rather than ontological possibilities for students of color. While there are several examples of these traditions being used to talk about ontologies, particularly in critical feminist traditions, the use of African American historical scholarship tends to be used through an epistemological rather than ontological lens. Yet, the nested and layered complications of what we know and who we are is central to African American intellectual traditions. As it will be discussed in detail later in this article, authors like DuBois and Woodson often discussed ways of knowing through ontological scopes. The framing of ontology and epistemology as being knotted (Barad 1999) in this case is signiicant as scholars like Cooper, Bethune, Truth, DuBois and Woodson also argued for the messiness of knowing and being within a socio-political context. 1 The hidden curriculum, or the cultural norms and values that underscore schools, is used here not only through Jackson’s (1968) arguments of compliance to culture but also Apple’s (1971) hidden norms and values. 13 Author's personal copy The Urban Review One possible way to address these knotted understandings within our contemporary moment, particularly within feminist traditions, is through the constructs of intersectionality (Crenshaw 1991; Yuval-Davis 2006). This is because intersectionality provides a lens that focuses on questions of race, gender, and schooling in ways that destabilize normalized identities of whiteness and considers identities of schooling through counternarratives, or critiques of dominant constructions of meaning expressed in the lived experiences of marginalized peoples. However, as Puar (2013) argues, “intersectionality always produces an Other… who must invariably be seen as resistant, subversive or articulating a grievance” (p. 53). In this construction, the other that is produced is the complex intersection of identities of individuals and groups that are already marginalized. In the production of the Other in schools, women of color and queer youth of color tend to be particularly impacted and further marginalized for their narratives and everyday interactions within the systems of schooling. This is not to say that dialogue on intersectionality is not resonant within the scope of imagining educational utopias: Quite the opposite, as intersectionality, and understanding the ways it unintentionally creates Others, is central to unpacking marginalization in schools. Transgressing historical and current trends in schooling means acknowledging the systematic and ongoing Othering of marginalized populations to imagine new possibilities. By recognizing the limitations of intersectionality, it can be used in dialogues as a tool to correct the all-to-familiar epistemological violence (Puar 2013) taken against marginalized populations. In conjunction with intersectionality, Puar (2013) ofers Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) construction of assemblages as a critical framework to undergird conversations on ways of being, knowing, and how they interact through intersectional dialogues. Puar (2013) writes that “intersectionality attempts to comprehend political institutions and their attendant forms of social normativity…while assemblages, in an efort to reintroduce politics into the political, asks what is prior to and beyond what gets established” (p. 60). Similar to Barad’s (2003) discussion of performative metaphysics, where matter is not considered through its being but by its doing, Puar (2013) conceptualizes the framework of assemblages through the human and nonhuman interactions where the assemblage is employed as a complex set of sociocultural, political, historical and deeply personal interactive crossings. Keeping in mind Haraway’s (1985) Manifesto for Cyborgs a theoretical possibility that was contested in feminist spaces for the human-nonhuman binary the cyborg image creates, Puar argues that the framework of assemblages and the image of the cyborg push at what the body signiies rather than how it was materialized. In this space, assemblages and cyborgs are explored not for what they are but for what they represent. To be clear, this is not an argument that people exist like cyborgs. As ChudeSokei (2015) argues, the characterization of people of color through this lens tends to reinscribe the very racialization and dehumanization that the cyborg metaphor is meant to disrupt and dismantle. Black feminists, especially those whose daily experiences include the normalization of rape, might critique a conlation of human and non-human parts to describe on one’s way of being, particularly as these parts land on and between bodies. In the context of this paper, this critique of the cyborg is consciously noted and used in conjunction with assemblages to discuss parts of 13 Author's personal copy The Urban Review being that exist on, with, and near bodies as a framework to critique social institutions. This is particularly necessary for students in urban schools who are often reduced to the bottom line of neoliberal education, caught between being represented as a test score and be-ing in schools with minimal funds that were crafted through sociohistorical and political policies that intentionally enacted inequitable funding models in and for cities (Harvey 1973; McKittrick and Woods 2007) and their schools (Helfenbein and Huddleston 2013). Whether it’s through a post-human or critical feminist lens, assemblages are often complicated through the experiences of marginalized people and groups. An example of the complication of assemblages can be found in a narrative inquiry study I conducted in 2016 in India. There I spent time listening to women who were victims of domestic violence and were currently residing at the only running women’s shelter in the state. In the context of this shelter, there were multiple pathways to culturally normalized violence against women’s bodies and minds that impacted their ways of being and knowing. Similar to Ahmed’s (2010) discussion of afect existing in, on, and between bodies, violence was a medium through which sociocultural norms and values negatively afected and impacted these women, their young children, and their extended families. It is important to note that the purpose is not to compare the context of domestic violence victims in India to the continuing violence against African Americans in the United States. Rather, the reason I have used this study is to show how violence exists across contexts and cultures, falling intentionally on particular bodies and beings as a form of social, interpersonal, and political control. Although I have written about violence against queer ways of being (Wozolek 2018a; Wozolek et al. 2016) and youth of color (Wozolek in press), there is signiicance in using an international context to think about the multiple ways violence proliferates and is entangled in everyday interactions in the United States and subsequently its schools. Forming a Violent Assemblage with/in Shame: An Indian Context Aside from the appalling physical treatment the Indian women who lived at the shelter received in their homes, many explained that simply moving out was not an option as their husbands would harass the woman in her new home, or temporary location (such as her parent’s house) until the family would, out of shame, send her back to her husband to avoid what ranged from daily calls, to he or his family and friends shouting loudly outside the house until she was sent home. These are examples where, despite the husband’s violent actions, it was the woman who felt publicly shamed through loud displays of a husband’s legal and marital possession of the woman. She became culturally culpable for his violence if she ignored these displays and he could use the public attention to garner community support. This was not support of the violence but support of marital vows and sociocultural norms. Not unlike Bourdieu’s (1973) discussion on cultural capital, where people utilize non-inancial forms of resources to gain social, economic and cultural status, here the men utilized what I call a capital of shame to force women to return home. Capitals of shame are how those with privilege and power negatively employ 13 Author's personal copy The Urban Review sociocultural norms and values that at once cultivate criteria for shaming, then utilize those criteria as a means to declare people or groups publicly noticeable in their incompetence or impotence across all manner of interactions, possibilities, and/or ways of being, knowing, and/or doing. In this speciic model, capital of shame is a construction where the man’s ability to shame a woman extends to family. Her decision for physical or emotional safety became tied to familial and patriarchal shame and this shame would in turn mean some kind of physical or emotional punishment—either through returning home or being social excluded by not fulilling her familial obligations. However, given that the shelter existed outside of the men’s personal or familial reach, the husbands lost their capital of shame and often did not attempt to force the shelter to send the women back home. Shame became a signiicant aspect in the daily interactions that these women experienced which formed what can be understood as an assemblage imbued with social, emotional, and physical violence. If, as Puar’s framework of assemblages asserts, an assemblage is a metaphor for considering the complex, entangled interrelations of things, ecologies, ideas, and ideals, then, “assemblages of violence” (Wozolek 2018b) can serve as a framework to describe the overlapping parts that normalize physical, verbal, and emotional atrocities like those experienced by women at the shelter. Additionally, if, as Barad (2003) argues, categories like being, like race, gender, and sexuality are events, then the culmination of violent interactions are encounters between bodies, in ways that conspire to create an event-ness of identity. Although this may seem like a step too far, Massumi’s (2002) retelling and analysis of an incident of domestic violence is but one example of the process and events that constitute assemblages of violence. In this event, a woman is beaten for interrupting a husband who was watching a sporting event on television. While the recounting the exact details of this story is not as signiicant as attending to the clash of sociocultural norms and values permitted the incident to occur, what is resonant is the way that the assemblage of violence facilitated the event itself in the entanglements of being, both human and non-human, in that moment. As Massumi explains, the context is an entanglement of not only the couple and their histories, it is punctuated by non-human factors like the television and the room. Not unlike Weheliye’s (2014) dialogue on racializing assemblages, which “construes race as a sociopolitical process” (p. 4), assemblages of violence represent, among other things, the (in)visible modalities through which the normalization of dehumanization is practiced and lived. For example, whether the violence it is seen, heard, felt, or tasted, the entangled networks of pain remain: violence is painful and such pain is an inescapable part of a violent event. Assemblages of violence attend to what is seen and what is felt across the senses, the multisensual-ness of dehumanization. It is this attention to the physical and emotional bruises that emerge in these women’s narratives and the scars it leaves on their ways of being. A representation of how they could possibly be, know, and inter-act in the world. Additionally, through my work with this group, it became clear that assemblages of violence are sociocultural and practical tools that women could both use and feel. Much like Wynter’s use of critical feminisms to examine assemblages, assemblages of violence retain the possibility to step out of and even work against 13 Author's personal copy The Urban Review assigned categories and constructions that are necessarily generated from patriarchal understandings. Returning to the narratives of Indian women, where participants described moving back and forth between the shelter and their outside lives, the women who lived in the shelter often had daily lives that were diametrically opposed to local and less local sociocultural expectations, norms and values. This is because by utilizing the shelter over familial ties to escape violence, they were cutting against the husband’s capital of shame. Though the assemblages in which they were entangled were indelibly entwined with acts of violence and the cultural ideals that engendered and maintained such actions and reactions, the agency of these women to move against, and in some cases past, these norms is also imbricated in their assemblages. The construction assemblages of violence therefore attends not just to processes of being and becoming under hostilities but also to the possible outcomes of resistance to such aggressions. It is a process of making and remaking something that is and is not still. An empirical articulation of sociocultural norms and values that afect and are afected by violence, the, as Gershon (2013a) writes, beingknowingdoing of living with/in violence in the global south, an inescapable assemblage of violence. Relecting on the assemblages of violence that have afected our systems of schooling and our sociocultural norms and values is an examination into “what is prior” (Puar 2013, p. 60). Imagining educational utopias cannot begin until the historical components that have normalized violence in schools and in broader social contexts against people of color has been analyzed. Much like the assemblages of violence that normalized brutality against the women in India, assemblages of violence play out in the classrooms, corridors and schoolyards across the United States. They exist because of the interactions of these political and historical parts that have engendered racialized aggression. Transgressing these assemblages starts with an analysis of African American intellectual traditions. Sankofa: (Re)Imagining Educational Beings from Historical Narratives Sankofa: Se wo were i na wosankofa a yenkyi It is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten. (The Spirituals Project at the University of Denver 2004) Scholars within African American intellectual traditions provide arguments and activism that functioned to ight against sociocultural norms and values that socially excluded people of color while excusing constant psychological and physical violence toward brown and black bodies. Perhaps more signiicantly to the charge of Afrofuturisms, and a way of pushing back on the assemblages that function to normalize hatred and aggression, scholars within this tradition worked to normalize blackness itself. This construction of socioculturally normalized blackness spans from ways of being to ways of knowing within communities of color and broader social contexts. When envisioning the possibilities of 13 Author's personal copy The Urban Review schooling, examining this work is central to understanding “what was” in education and how these scholars used their present context to see their own Afrofuturistic educational possibilities. In order to grasp the signiicance of Afrofuturism in educational utopias, a relection on foundational scholars’ understandings of the multiple ways schooling is central to broader norms and values is important. Scholars like Anna Julia Cooper, Mary McLeod Bethune, W.E.B. DuBois and Cater G. Woodson engaged in a variety of issues from women’s rights to racial equity, from sociopolitical segregation to curricular criticism. For example, Cooper’s (1892) work clearly articulates the necessity for women to be represented in positions of power in educational systems, from the schoolhouse to the academy. She does so by drawing parallels between the inequities in education as they relate to women and African American’s role in politics, the economy and sociocultural norms. DuBois (1903) similarly attends to questions of racial prejudice and its impact on African American individuals as well as its inluence on sociocultural values. For example, DuBois asserts that curricular policies and practices, particularly those of Booker T. Washington, are counterproductive to sustainable changes in racial progress. Finally, continuing a trajectory in many ways set by Cooper and DuBois, Woodson (1933) ofers a criticism of the educational system for African Americans that was layered in social critique of the boundaries and borders people of color faced at the time. Woodson’s arguments about possible trajectories for education and his nuanced attention to social reform that was central to people of color and curricular challenges not only hold true today but are in many ways practical expressions of Cooper and DuBois’ arguments that were made before and in tandem with Woodson’s work. What these scholars provided were counternarratives, long before counternarratives were conceived in their contemporary sense, that necessitated questions of equity and access in schools. Speciically, scholars like Cooper, Bethune, DuBois and Woodson all wrote counternarratives that served to exist against the current “racial imagery during this time in K-12 texts and academic discourse” (Brown and Brown 2010, p. 60). To this end, the texts considered here are foundational examples of oppositional discourse that draw on exceptionally progressive pedagogies for their time that proposed cultural and educational shifts. These texts were not only foundational and progressive in their content and timing, but the signiicance of this work and their resonance with contemporary problems in schooling have, to a large degree, been overlooked in educational histories and reviews. This is not to say that these voices have been historically lost. Scholars such as Grant and Sleeter (1986), Gordon (1993), Winield (2007), Watkins (2001), Berry (2010), and Brown and Au (2014), to name a few, have built upon the work of these foundational scholars to continue dialogues of resistance, resilience, equity and access within schools. Further, foundational theorists have used this work to explicate the contemporary experiences of students of color (e.g., Berry 2010; Gershon 2013b; Wozolek in press). However, to some degree, what has been lost is a focus on how this scholarship relexively looked at the contexts that surrounded their writing as a means to engender black ontologies as central to schooling and therefore as a backdrop to broader sociocultural ideas and ideals. 13 Author's personal copy The Urban Review How do schools afect our ways of being and, in turn, how do our ways of being afect broader systems of schooling? The answer to these interrelated questions exists in iterations and recursions where the student is an acting agent on the system of schooling and schooling exists in-action (Schwab 1969) with the student’s ways of being and knowing. A longstanding dialogue to this point exists across educational literatures (Cooper 1892; Jackson 1968; Truth 1851; Watkins 2001; Winield 2007). The roots of these arguments can be traced back to scholars like Woodson (1933), who wrote that schools doom children of color to lives of vagabondage and crime, and Cooper (1892) who expressed concern about the many ways that schools imprint negative ideals of femininity and submission on girls. Additionally, literatures like those that focus on the forms of curricula (particularly the hidden and enacted curricula) tend to unpack the how students afect school ecologies and systems (Apple 1971; Nespor 1997; Schwab 1969). As Schwab (1969) expressed, within these recursions schools exists in-action with its parts, including content and local actors who live the everyday of schooling. The study of ontology has taken a prominent role in contemporary educational scholarship, particularly over the past 20 years (e.g.: Au 2012; Eisner 1992; Gershon 2013a; Kincheloe 2003; Pinar 2014; Weenie 2008). Through understanding the facets of one’s being that are simultaneously a sociocultural and personal construction, or a person’s “is-ness” (Gershon 2013b), scholars can more efectively unpack the multiple, nested layers between individual and group relationships. For example, because the hidden curriculum is the underlying culture of norms, values, and beliefs that are taught in and through school ecologies (Apple 1971; Giroux and Penna 1983; Jackson 1968), the study of ontology becomes central to understanding how the hidden curriculum afects one’s ways of being and, in turn, how one’s being afects the broader hidden curriculum. Woodson (1933) provides a salient example of the onto-epistemological framing within the hidden curriculum when he argues that the educational system justiies “slavery, peonage, segregation and lynching” (p. 5). He continues by stating that “if you control a man’s thinking, you do not have to worry about his actions…He will ind his ‘proper place’ and will stay in it” (p. 5). Woodson is arguing that by controlling what one knows, one also controls parts of a person’s way of being. In addition, he is evoking an image of social responsibility for the development of an onto-epistemology that elicits oppression over people of color. One’s way of being is therefore emergently dependent on sociopolitical control and the way she decides to respond to such power. This is similar to DeLanda’s (2006) discussion on the braided roles of assemblages on one’s ontology. DeLanda ofers female refugees or children diagnosed with behavior disorders as examples of how labels, social expectations and perceptions, and historical contexts form the assemblages that afect one’s ontology. Woodson’s image of control is but one example of how assemblages of violence use these overlapping and interacting parts to predetermine one’s “proper place” in schools and society. To Woodson’s point, the interaction between marginalizing parts has strong historical implications and actions in “controlling a man’s thinking”. While Foucault (1978) argues that there is no outside of power, the discussion within the onto-epistemological is more closely related to Ortner’s (2006) discussion 13 Author's personal copy The Urban Review on power and agency. Ortner argues that while local actors may never ind an outside to institutionalized power, they have a degree of agency that allows them to act within such structures to enact some degree of change or create space for one’s being. To this end, the individual has the ability to enact wiggle room within the system in order to make signiicant decisions about responding and living within such institutions. Again, much like assemblages interacted with and were a part of the women in the shelter, African American scholars have longstanding histories of attending to the agency that is central to responding to normalized violence (e.g., hooks 1994; Watkins 2001; Weheliye 2014; Woodson 1933) in schools. Cooper’s (1892) scholarship varies from Woodson and DuBois in regards to the ontogenetic and the onto-epistemological. She argues that women “can think as well as feel, and who feel none the less because they think” (p. 50). This argument on one hand discusses the onto-epistemological facets of knowing and being and, on the other, touches on afect as layered within one’s ways of knowing and being. Cooper’s work, like Bethune’s (1938) Clarifying our Vision with the Facts, posits afective tensions in, between and through bodies, groups and cultures as knotted within the onto-epistemological. This is not to say that DuBois and Woodson do not attend to afect. However female scholars of color, like Cooper, Bethune and Truth, utilized afective understandings in their construction of counternarratives that served to “recount in accurate detail the story of the Negro population and…its societal contributions” (Bethune 1938, p. 3). As hooks (1999) argues, it was through such narratives that women of color worked to promote a “fundamental goal of liberation for all people”2 (hooks 1999, p. 9). These counternarratives not only deconstruct historical ideals of equity and access, particularly as they relate to schooling but they are deeply entwined with assemblages of violence and the intersectional dialogue that imbricates such assemblages. A poignant example of these dialogues can be found in DuBois (1903) argument for a double consciousness. Through this term, DuBois is arguing that through understanding the psycho-social divisions of one’s identity, one can analyze social injustices that cause the double-binds of one’s way of being. This is not unlike Woodson’s (1933) description of the multiple ways of being an African American. Similar to DuBois point on double consciousness, Woodson argues that the experience of being “African American” often resides in the challenges of being “African” and “American”, a social construction that is often complicated by questions of class and sociocultural ideals. Cooper (1892) engaged in dialogue in and around assemblages through slightly diferent inroads than DuBois and Woodson. In A Voice from the South Cooper does not parse her identity in order to make her arguments. Rather, Cooper, much like Sojourner Truth (1851) in her speech Ain’t I a Woman, utilizes the intersection of feminist thought with critical race dialogues of the time to discuss educational 2 To be clear, I am using hooks (1999) work here as a means to point out how scholars within the African American intellectual tradition, particularly women attended to questions of inclusion within social justice movements. It is not a parallel to tensions within the #alllivesmatter or #blacklivesmatter movements. 13 Author's personal copy The Urban Review practices as they relate to broader social contexts. The messiness of intersectionality and the framework of the sociopolitical aggressions that constitute assemblages continues to resonate in the scholarship of women of color such as hooks (1999), Lorde (1984), McKittrick (2015) and Minh-ha (1989). As such, there is a tradition of feminists attending to intersectional and assemblage dialogues that is signiicant not only in their scholarship toward intersectional ends but also in their speciic attention to intersectionality as a complex mess, as inseparable facets of being and knowing is signiicant (e.g.: Cooper 1892; Bethune 1938; McKittrick 2015; Min-ha 1989; Truth 1851). While there are debatably multiple ingresses toward these intersectional dialogues (e.g.: indigenous studies, feminist studies, queer theory), here I am attending to complex intersectional dialogues through the feminist lens within the African American intellectual tradition. This is because there is importance in the way that traditional feminists of color constructed questions of identity and intersectionality by attending to self, afect, and knowing as a messy state of becoming. As scholars become more critical of intersectional work, inherent tensions arise within identity politics (Crenshaw 1991; Keith and Pile 2004; Malewski 2009). By this I mean that questions about who has the power to determine the relevancy of another individual’s experiences, who can identify with particular ways of being and what parts of being are necessary for “good” intersectional scholarship has become folded into the discourse. These dialogues through the feminist lens, particularly within the traditional roots of the African American intellectual tradition, avoid these pitfalls of identity politics by honoring the messy nature of being and knowing with an understanding that one’s being is signiicant as it is resonant to her experiences, rather than relevant to a ield. While scholars like Cooper wrote about identities as an imbricated whole, other scholars tended toward thinking of ways of being as a series of identities that were in parallel play. As previously discussed, DuBois’ (1903) discussion on doubleconsciousness is but one example of scholarly ontological divisions. Another salient example can be found in Frederick Douglass’ (1855) autobiography, My bondage and my freedom, when he writes about opening his eyes for the irst time to the cruelty of slavery and, in particular, the violence of his old master and explains that brutality was “a part of the system, rather than a part of the man” (p. 35). Conversely, female scholars of color at the time identiied with an onto-epistemological framing, where local actors are as responsible for their role in the system as the system is for maintaining sociocultural oppression. The framework of assemblages of violence, speciically as local actors in schooling use their capital of shame to marginalize youth of color, is particularly resonant within this historically seminal literature because of the multiple ingresses and interactions with racialized ideas and ideals that were and continue to be normalized. As I have written elsewhere (Wozolek 2015a, b), resistance to assemblages of violence that both physically and emotionally impact students are both a reaction to the violence itself but to the shame enacted against students of color for their ways of being and knowing. The act of “controlling a man’s thinking,” through systems of schooling can be physically and psychologically based. It is carried out as much through policing and surveillance in schools as it is through a capital of shame that 13 Author's personal copy The Urban Review emotionally afects youth of color. This framework of assemblages and shame is certainly not absent in African American intellectual traditions. Further, questions of racist social normativity that play out in violent interactions in schools is not only present in this literature but is central to ideals of justice that are threaded throughout this tradition. Afrofuturisms compliments the African American intellectual tradition as we move away from what was and toward “what is” or “what might be” in schools. This is because it resonates with historical and political questions that are fundamental to this tradition while inter-acting with the heterogeneous parts that engender assemblages of violence. Further, Afrofuturisms illuminate the sets of possibilities that are central to educational imaginations in a way that is unique to prospects within popular cultural that are built from Afro-historical wonderings. Afrofuturisms can be understood as a kind of imaginative assemblages through which futures are considered in ways that are counternarratives to contemporary injustices. These counternarratives are examined through assemblages of violence and schooling below. Connecting Afrofuturisms to the Classroom “Not exactly crushed.” “I know, but that seemed to be a good word to use on them – to show my ignorance. It wasn’t all that accurate either. They wanted me to tell them how such a thing could happen. I said I didn’t know… kept telling them I didn’t know. And heaven help me, Dana, I don’t know.” “Neither do I,” I whispered, “Neither do I” (Butler 1974, p. 11) Assemblages of violence exist across contexts and systems of schooling. They are the human and non-human interactions that engender and maintain raced and racist paradigms of education and the daily interactions that are normalized under racist ideals and values. The function of these assemblages has not changed since African American scholars like Anna Julia Cooper or Carter G. Woodson used their cultural capital to argue against the sociocultural preservation of these assemblages. Assemblages of violence in the context of schooling serve to excuse racialized hostilities, and devalue female, black, and brown ontologies of color. This is often enacted through the use of teacher, administrator, and Anglo students’ capital of shame. The consistent tensions between police oicers and students of color serve as but one example of assemblages of violence being played out in schools. Although these violent assemblages have been discussed across contexts in this paper, it should be noted that there is a longstanding history of such violence being engendered and maintained in urban schools. Not unlike the assemblages of violence that maintain normalized brutalities against women in India, assemblages of violence function in urban schools through the conluence of historical, political, and cultural norms and values. The assemblage is as much the interaction of the police oicer, who was not taught to value black lives in schools, as it is the current curriculum that has pressed the student of color into the event. It is at once the audience, many of whom record 13 Author's personal copy The Urban Review the event on their phones not as documentation but as part of the spectacle as it is the afective tensions that stick and preserve racism in that moment and moments that follow. As I have argued elsewhere (Wozolek 2018b), the impact of these assemblages can be physical and emotional, epistemological and ontological, and can stick on the bodies of students and broader social norms indeinitely. Schools function as the multi-sensual assemblage of violence that enacts and maintains the dehumanization of students of color through what we learn and how we learn it. Afrofuturisms are one possible venue through which schooling can be reimagined through assemblages where black and brown lives matter. Afrofuturisms, a term irst coined by Dery (2008) in his essay Black to the Future, imbricates questions of race and futuristic iction. Afrofuturistic scholarship seeks to connect historical dialogues and studies of African diasporic culture with science iction, historical iction, fantasy, and magic realism (Womack 2013). In the scope of this paper, it is signiicant to note that “Afrofuturism” is not conined to popular culture in cinema and literature but instead encompasses the arts as a whole and extends to the wide array of the arts, including new medias, visual arts, music and performing arts. This is important because although some branches of Afrofuturism scholarship predominantly critiques iction, particularly for its dominant White, male contributions (Morris 2012), Afrofuturism as envisioned through a broader arts-based perspective tends to be centered on larger historical questions of voice, power, and relexivity (Eshun 2003; Morris 2012; Nelson 2002; Womack 2013; Yasek 2006). Afrofuturisms in this context is used through a “both/and” rather than a “neither/nor” of arts that critique past, present, and future possibilities for people of color. One example of this “both/and” inclusion of ideas can be found in Morris’ (2012) argument that Afrofuturisms can exist in dialogue with critical black feminist scholarship. Morris writes that both Afrofuturism and black feminisms can “airm, rearticulate, and provide a vehicle for expressing a public consciousness that quite often already exists while…[examining] the possibilities that open up when blackness is linked to futurity” (p. 153). Imagining educational futures at the intersection of black feminisms and Afrofuturisms is critical because it seeks to reimagine education from voices that have visibility achieved that which might be unfathomable from some historical perspectives. One only need to relect on Soujourner Truth’s (1851) seminal speech, Ain’t I a Woman?, or Anna Julia Cooper’s (1892), A Voice from the South, to know how blackness and womanhood have been articulated as signiicant while being culturally and historically shamed over time. The conversation between Afrofuturisms and black feminist scholarship (both historical and contemporary) is used here to envision schooling as a space for a polyphony of voices (Bakhtin and Holquist 1981) that resides in simultaneous resonance and dissonance with each other and sociocultural future possibilities. Therefore, as explored earlier in this article, to ind “how such a thing [can] happen” (Butler 1974, p. 11), the roots of black intellectual thought and schooling were articulated as a foundation for futuristic possibilities. Like African American intellectual traditions, Afrofuturisms functions to reclaim histories rooted in the diaspora through counternarratives (Eshun 2003; Morris 2012). Though there are many examples of how these counternarratives are resonant with African American intellectual traditions and schools as they exist today 13 Author's personal copy The Urban Review and may exist tomorrow, here I focus on two salient examples of how schools might reimagined through an Afrofuturistic lens-science and art. While sociocultural shifts toward equity are central to both the African American intellectual tradition and Afrofuturisms, Afrofuturism scholarship and art tend to focus on connections to popular culture and, more speciically, to themes often found in the realm of science iction. This emphasis on the nexus of science, technology, and the arts is signiicant because it reclaims the important role of people of color3 in historically grounded, scientiic achievements (Ramírez 2008) in schools and broader contexts. Much like Gill Scott-Heron’s (1970) Whitey on the Moon that resisted the sociocultural norm in the “space race that showed us which race space was for” (Bould 2007), or Marvel’s recent reboot of the Ironman series with Ironheart, Afrofuturistic dialogues have repossessed science spaces for people of color in popular culture. Given the achievement gap that negatively impacts students of color across subjects but particularly in the sciences (Howard 2015; Flores 2007), an attention to Afrofuturistic dialogues in schools and teacher education programs becomes salient in an attempt to reimagine schooling. One only needs to recall the extreme dearth of scientists of color that are a core part of the K-12 curriculum, let alone the female scientists of color who are generally absent from what is taught, and therefore valued, in schools. Images like that of Shuri, the young princess and accomplished scientist in the Black Panther series is but one example of imagining blackness (and more speciically black feminisms through Afrofuturistc images) that are positive for students and communities of color. In addition to an emphasis on science iction as an expression of social imaginings, Afrofuturistic art often recounts tales of diasporic pasts as a historical reminder that envisions the future. Carrie Mae Weems’ Ebo Landing, Ellen Gallagher’s Preserve, and the murals of Joshua Mays are but a few examples visual art that pulls the observer into future realms through past and present contexts. In schools, there is an all-too-familiar absence of art that focuses on diasporic narratives and value black aesthetics and histories, a point raised by DuBois (1926) and continued by scholars like Gordon (1993) and Ladson-Billings (2009). Attending to Afrofuturistic arts again resists white curricula that is an erasure of black cultures, aesthetics, and histories. In short, Afrofuturism art expresses blackness as normal. As it has been historically argued, it is diicult to value blackness if it is absent from schools and other social contexts (e.g., Bethune 1938; Douglass 1855; hooks 1994; Lorde 1984; Woodson 1933). The African American intellectual tradition imaged “blackness as usual” in schools. Afrofuturisms picks up on this notion and reclaims schooling as a site of possibilities born from diasporic histories and narratives. 3 Although the focus of this paper is on the contribution of Afrofuturisms to sociocultural norms and values, “people of color” is still used broadly as the contribution of all groups of color to several ields has been historically marginalized in the United States. 13 Author's personal copy The Urban Review Conclusion: Cyborgs and Classrooms When Haraway (1985) and Puar (2013), argue for the inclusion of cyborgs as an image that reimagines the possibilities of being through human and non-human parts, they presciently articulated a moment where the complexities of being call for a multiplicity of intersections and assemblages. Similarly, the everyday of schooling for students of color exists in a moment that is an assemblage of its sociopolitical and historical parts. This assemblage of violence is not new, nor is the consistently wielded capital of shame that opens up spaces and places for its existence. Speaking broadly about culture in the United States, assemblages of violence have historically had both physical and emotional manifestations on black and brown individuals and groups. To the point of scholars within African American intellectual traditions, and as these points have been continued by critical contemporary scholars, assemblages of violence start in the school room and continue with deadly resonances in the daily lives of marginalized peoples. Afrofuturisms, as it can be imagined in the classroom, picks up and maintains both the counternarratives about race and education and the incarnations of a classroom that attends to such narratives. Afrofuturistic dialogues in education are at once grounded in black feminist ideals while attending to contemporary conversations of reimagining what schooling can be from its historical roots. This is signiicant because, just as Woodson worked to write a curriculum that was centered on black intellectual achievements and Bethune argued for black epistemologies to undergird schooling, Afrofuturisms can take up a path set by these scholars that has been obstructed by the violent assemblages that pervade whiteness in schools. To these ends, I have intentionally not articulated what a utopian educational paradigm might be in this article as I feel it has already been well-articulated through African American intellectual traditions. From the curriculum theorizing to the formal curriculum to be enacted in schools, the work has already been done. Although this work can be easily (re)imagined through Afrofuturisms, attention to the carefully articulated historical scholarship from the “mothership” of men and women of color is important. Arguing for educational utopias without such attention unintentionally marginalizes over 110 years of black voices who have already articulated utopian schooling and society that is centered on the histories and narratives of people of color. If, to return to the question that started this article, we were to ask what schooling would be if educators and politicians alike truly believed and acted like black and brown lives mattered, how might the ield be diferent? Could assemblages of violence be transgressed or would they still exist in other forms in schools? Transgressing assemblages of violence means an attention to the imbricated parts that are nested in the assemblage. In schools, these parts are historical, sociocultural and always deeply political. They are a product of their human and nonhuman parts and therefore students’ ways of being are wrapped up in the assemblages, the cyborgs that exist with/in classrooms and corridors. 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