Retelling Catastrophe

• In Event: Fugitive Text in Educational Research

Abstract

If catastrophe is an ongoing process, a narrative, then what does it mean to break from it? The presenter will demonstrate how disciplinary curricular learning standards inadequately address the entanglements embedded within place-based catastrophe such as cultural adaptation, racialized impact, and environmental justice. Put another way, universalized learning standards normalize extractive ecological damage and erase understanding of place with plants, animals, and territories (Whyte, 2018). The analytical tool of place-based fugitive ways of knowing and being cannot be conceptualized within universalistic frames. While at the same time, teaching and learning forms of fugitivity outside of coded knowledge are needed to survive in and beyond racialized climate catastrophe and the horrors of plantation pasts (Tallbear, 2016). Modern-day ecological emergencies are haunted by forms of plantocratic relations indicating a need to understand catastrophe as coded, iterative, repeating formulations tied to the expansion of plantation logics and racialized modes of production (Bhattacharyya, 2018; Robinson, 1983).

In this conceptual paper, the presenter utilizes method making from Black Studies, bringing unlike knowledge frameworks together; in this case scientific climate data are assembled in conversation within forms of Black narrative fiction from Louisiana writer Ernest Gaines. Climate data are juxtaposed by Gaines’s oral traditions of storying, a bridge between different ways of knowing. Layering fugitive knowledge systems on universalized Western logics counter and reveal how climate solutions that focus on logics of endless growth will never solve today’s climate catastrophe.

Through Gaines’s novel The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, the presenter demonstrates how interdisciplinary engagement with fugitive texts can rupture ways of viewing and conceiving place and catastrophe. Historical Black methods in the forms of oral tradition and literature create interdisciplinary relations that signal ways of living beyond crisis, a Black livingness (McKittrick, 2021) or aliveness (Quashie, 2021). What if entangled within the problem of flooding are also decolonial answers—through fugitive texts—rendering the unknowable knowable? Using a longer-view of time, though oral tradition, Ernest Gaines retells the local histories of the people and place, offering counter-epistemologies reflecting on early colonial logics that rendered ecologies unknowable:
I don't know when the first levee was built; but from what I heard from the old people the water destroyed the levee as soon as it was put there. Now, if the white man had taken heed to what the river was trying to say to him then, it would have saved a lot of pain later… Like you can tell a river where to go. (Gaines, 1971, p. 148-149)

Representing the fugitive fluidity of knowledge construction as connected to local place and practice reframes the relationship between learner and collective human and more-than-human worlds, rupturing presentation of a single-static truth. Within active re-presentation, traditions can be renewed and restored. The relationality of Black community placemaking plays critical roles in reconstructing the global community (McKittrick & Woods, 2007).

Author

• Benjamin D Scherrer, University of Massachusetts - Amherst