(Un)Doing the Settler State With Place-Based Pedagogies: Exclusionary Tactics Across Three Temporalities

• In Event: The Curriculums of Settler (Un)Doing: Place, Historicity, and Deviance Across Educational Spaces

Abstract

In June 2019, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez described migrant detention camps as “concentration camps...for immigrants, where they are being brutalized with dehumanizing conditions and dying” (cited in Gessen, 2019). The subsequent social media backlash focused on the definitional accuracy and “inappropriate” historical analogizing to the Holocaust. Missing in these debates were offerings of pedagogical processes, ones which cultivate public engagement with broader, cross-historical questions of the exceptional state, carceral logics, and tactics of exclusion like the prison camp (Agamben, 1998; Schmitt, 1934/1985).

This paper examines the teaching and learning of the concentration camp and forced removal across multiple temporalities. Drawing on semi-structured interviews, observations, and researcher-generated photographs, I use Newell, California, a city on the California-Oregon Border, as a case study (Yin, 2009). During the late 19th century, Newell was the site of a prolonged attempt by U.S. Army to forcibly remove the Modoc people onto reservations, thus clearing the way for white settlement (Brown, 2011; Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014). Over seventy years later, the same land was used as a concentration camp for approximately 20,000 Japanese Americans considered military security threats in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. Following the war, the land was lotteried to returning veterans, many of whom still inhabit the place.

In this paper, I describe three (un)doings of the settler state through place-based pedagogies (Basso, 1996; Smith, 2002). Each of these (un)doings activates a shared historical affiliation among disparate actors. Moreover, these (un)doings foster sensorial responses to the exclusionary logic that is the foundation of the settler state:

(Un)Doing 1 / Barrack: In the aftermath of World War II, barracks from Tule Lake, a World War II-era Japanese American concentration camp, were re-purposed by white settlers as housing and storage facilities. These “diasporic” barracks (Wiatr, 2005) are surprising interjections of the carceral history into the surrounding landscape. They have an uncanny, ambivalent presence (Trigg, 2012), ultimately disrupting any tendency we might have to see the past as finished or redeemed.

(Un)Doing 2 / Emplaced Dissent: The second (un)doing describes a pilgrimage to Tule Lake, a World War II-era concentration camp. These visits started in the late 1970s by a group of Japanese American activists and have continued to meet bi-annually. In 2018, the pilgrimage honed in on border detention and child separation: Former prisoners and their families stood at Tule Lake, chanting, “Kodomo no tame ni. They’re our children, set them free.”

(Un)Doing 3 / Palimpsest: The final (un)doing, based on data collection walks in Newell (De Certeau, 1984; Springgay & Truman, 2005), examines how multiple histories of exclusion are layered within a single landscape (Huyssen, 2003). Signage, artifacts, and traces are critical touchstones for cross-historical analysis., revealing correspondences between the methods and modes of racial exclusion.

While not intentionally structured educational interactions, I read these three (un)doings as pedagogical interventions (Biesta, 2013). Participants, often through the most haphazard fashion, are brought into an encounter with place which, as Elizabeth Ellsworth (2005) calls it, act as a “pedagogical force” that shapes thinking and feeling.

Author

• Cathlin Bryn Goulding, City University of New York (CUNY); YURI / An Asian American Education Project