(Re)Storying the Continuing Present: Homeplace, Hacking, and Colonial Jackets

• In Event: Decoloniality Dialogues Collective: (Re)storying, (Re)membering, and (Re)visioning Spirals for Decolonial Possibilities

Abstract

bell hooks taught us that communities, vibrant with resistance, require homeplaces to be, imagine, and challenge (2014, p. 61). The Decoloniality Dialogues Collective is still-developing home for our present breath, bodies, emotionalities, and inquiries. We name the present as an ever-being tense, requiring both open portals to the past and future, as well as a humility to confront our contradictions.

In this first paper, we collectively (re)story these individual and shared experiences, drawing on healing experiences of space-making, nurturing homeplaces, and liberatory transformation, as well as our ongoing work to disrupt and disinvest from institutions that sustain colonial, racialized, and patriarchal forms of violence. We share stories of our collective’s work to “hack” and “hospice” university spaces, which Stein and colleagues (2022) contend requires disinvestment from educational institutions by "acknowledging and acting responsibly" as we face the extent to which these institutions are mutually constituted with coloniality (p. 208). Hacking and hospicing require a “rearrang[ing of our] desires away from the continuity of the institution and toward the possibility of learning from its mistakes” (p. 208). Whether through hacking (redistributing institutions’ resources and using them for other purposes) or hospicing (caring for and learning from the mistakes and harms, as well as the successes and resistances, that occur within educational institutions), this approach is based on a recognition that our current educational systems are “inherently violent and unsustainable” (p. 209).

This type of engagement requires us to turn towards the affective, relational, material, and intellectual dispositions that draw us towards—and allow us to resist—these institutionalized spaces.
Although colonial institutions access extents of our breath, labor, and more, they cannot contain our wholeness. We are adequately capacious to make space for each other and extended community members to be together, ahorita. We are homeplacing as a vehicle to ourselves, collective liberation, and portals across time, and we invite others to join us in (re)storying these ongoing, present journeys.

Authors

• Jessica Reed, Michigan State University

• Rachel Lockart, Augustana College

• Utitofon Inyang, Binghamton University - SUNY