Breonna Taylor and a Curriculum of Conviviality

• In Event: Conviviality, Coloniality, and the Making of the Other

Abstract

Purpose
This paper challenges common understood definitions of the term “conviviality.” It explores its limits and contradictions in the United States where police violence regularly produces the death of Black people. It argues that the police incident report depicting the death of Breonna’s Taylor (a young Black woman killed by police in the U.S. on March 20, 2020) as well as a television interview with one of the former policemen who shot Breonna constitutes discourses of conviviality as it can be understood within the context of living in the U.S. This research troubles the notion that conviviality is neutral, painless and without consequence as it continues colonial legacies of organizing knowledge about Black peoples’ deaths in the U.S.
This paper meets the criteria for this year’s call by challenging the notion of evidence that statements, assumption, and truths about people’s everyday “convivial” interactions are not natural, but actually constructed. It dives into the nuances ignored by scholarly debate.

Theoretical Framework and Modes of Inquiry
This presentation uses an embodied methodologies/theoretical approach that view the body and the subject as a vehicle for theorization using poetic representational devices to highlight multivocality and bodily contradictions that yield a richer theoretical analysis (Chadwick, 2017). I use performative writing (Pollock, 1998) to discuss conviviality in a way that humanizes and mitigates the making of Breonna into simply reflective object that language and academic writing makes of her being and her death. I mix my own experiences with analysis of three media pieces to communicate through the embodied and felt sensation of experience.

Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials
I detail what happened to Breonna and offer an embodied analysis of an episode of the Good Morning America television show that aired on October 21st, 2020, in which one of the anchors, Michael Strahan, a Black man, interviews one of the men who shot Breonna Taylor. I then theorize LMPD’s report and the interview as discourses of conviviality that are curricular and a continuation of colonial legacies of organizing silences as knowledge of Black peoples’ deaths in this country. Finally, I detail the effect of conviviality as a curricular discourse on my own thoughts and body.

Scholarly Significance
The results of this inquiry indicate that as a society, we must accept the visceral nature of being required to be convivial. Conversations of conviviality must not miss the felt experience of what that togetherness means in the context of state sanctioned Black Death. This analysis offers texture to the definition of the concept of convivialitywhen you take conviviality out of its popular frame of reference as a term describing “living and coming together in harmony” and place it in different context where the “coming together in harmony” is the violence itself. This work does so by offering a perspective that is left out of the current debate about conviviality: what a Black woman might feel and experience in the processes of participating in convivial interactions with others who (both purposefully and/or unwittingly) ground their identities in epistemic ignorance (Medina, 2017).

Author

• Sarah Ishmael, University of Wisconsin - Madison
  Presenting Author