Sovereign Speech and the Psychic Space of the Classroom: Black Bodies, White Space

• In Event: Interrogating Sovereignty: Settler Colonialism, Antiblackness, and Language Across Educational Research

Abstract

This paper interrogates the English Literature classroom as a sovereign space of whiteness in which the racialized bodies of both professor and student are constructed in multiple ways when they collectively encounter nigga at the center or margins of the classroom. I explore racialized language and subjectivity through a focus on the racialized utterance nigga, and ultimately question how conceptualizations of sovereign speech might be disrupted. While nigga is the unit of analysis, I focus on the ways in which Black peoples are constructed based on sovereign white modes of linguistic colonization. I ask: Is it possible to (de)colonize the languages and discourses that constitute racialized subjects? What futural possibilities exist for teaching and pedagogy when racialized utterances irrupt in the classroom space?

My overall theoretical framework marries Henry Louis Gates’ (1988/2014) theory of Signifyin(g) to Judith Butler’s (1997a) interrogation of excitable speech. Theorizing Gates’ Signifyin(g) through a Butlerean lens is meant to explore the dialogic process of rhetorical troping while also acknowledging the specificity of the psychic power (Butler, 1997b) of the marginalized, oppressed racialized subject, constituted and constituting through the very language meant to oppress. I am grappling with the Butlerean problem of how the racialized subject reiterates “the discursive conditions of its own emergence” (Butler, 1999, as cited in Bell, 1999, p. 165), and how the subjugated subject has psychically internalized the historical discourses of the West, reiterating these unequal, antagonistic sites (Bhaba, 1991) for one’s own materialization. Through this theoretical lens I explore how nigga subjugates and subjectifies racialized bodies disrupting the ideological white space of the classroom as well as the discourses of white sovereign speech.
For this paper I utilize rememory, a return to and revisitation of memory (Morrison, 1989), classroom observations of two Introduction to Literature courses during a three-week summer session, and non-participant observations of in-the-moment speech events/acts of students and/or colleagues articulating nigga. These methods of inquiry weave together my own memories, vulnerabilities, subjectivities and relations with nigga, the racialized subject-object in the English classroom in which erudite knowledge is an ontologically privileged space, and the classroom-campus as sovereign white linguistic space(s).

While I acknowledge that education research is fraught with ambiguity about how and when nigger-nigga is sayable and/or unsayable, my conclusion will not consist of a “findings” section, nor does my research necessarily allow for replication. My post structural orientations suggest that there are multiple possibilities (not necessarily conclusions) which are unfixed, malleable, and constructed based on the current discourses that “govern” education research. I do not offer answers but pose questions for futural imaginings of the ways in which the classroom space allows for intellectual inquiry of historicized and contemporary racialized language.

Author

• Joyce Maxwell, Teachers College, Columbia University