Reading Self in the Wake: Memorializing New Orleans Education

• In Event: 79.020 - Division G Vice-Presidential Session: Educational Research in the Wake: Becoming "Undisciplined" Post-Truth, Post-Trump

Abstract

At the start of Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016), she notes that the academy often necessitates that Black scholars reinscribe dehumanizing practices in exchange for recognition. Her call to imagine, celebrate, and create other visions invites us to engage with loving critiques of self and others. As a Black queer woman of New Orleans, this tolls as I contend with the consumption of New Orleans and her peoples, of which education scholarship is not exempt. This paper, in seeking to answer such a summons, explores my conceptualization of wake work alongside my literacy research in the tradition of writing the ethnographic self. To engage in the work while holding that antiblackness is “the ground on which we stand” (p. 7) is to actively engage with my investment in antiblackness and cisherteropatriarchy, as well as my realization and anxiety of being held in the hold. Sharpe writes that it is in this hold, that I, “they, we, inhabit knowledge that the Black body is the sign of immi/a/nent death” (p. 71).

As a New Orleanian, teacher, and researcher, I am struck and immediately held by (my own) framings of educators and youth, and their, our, relationship to joy, trauma, and home. Drawing upon a myriad of scholarship, including Sharpe’s (2016) wake theory, McKittrick’s (2006) Black feminist geographies, and Wynter’s (2003) detangling of modes of humanness, I trouble recent scholarship and my own understandings of home and New Orleans education, “just as wake work troubles mourning… trauma and memory” (p. 19-20). I center wake theory in my writing as I (re)consider collected data to discuss humanizing self, communities, and s/place alongside “the always already defiled status of black geographies and corporealities within scholarly literature (and far beyond) [which] sustains the synaptic workings of the dominant episteme” (Ansfield, 2015, p. 125).

For example, as Sharpe (2016) elucidates that disaster is atemporal, arguing that "[t]he disaster and the writing of the disaster are never present, are always present" (p. 5), I strive to envision modes through which to discuss New Orleans and education in ways which reject the Pre-/Post-Katrina bifurcation of lives and s/place, ultimately seeking to understand how languaging Black New Orleans and her peoples often reinscribes violence and subjects Black subjects to the hold. Scholars show that such an examination is possible, as Love (2017) offers a humanizing and loving critique of self, sharing her working through of difficult knowledge, to open “a space to wrestle with the reality of teaching about violence toward Black women” (p. 206). Through acknowledging my complicitness in violent structures to make space for humanizing New Orleans, her peoples, and self, I hope to be in conversation with others who strive to divest from damage-centered modes (Tuck, 2009) imposed on communities and self, to reject treating past teaching and scholarship as fixed, and thus, ignoring opportunities for healing and learning.

Author

• Lauren Elizabeth Reine Johnson, Michigan State University