Mourning Cultural Identity: Race, Repair, and Resistance

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Wednesday 4:20 pm Four Seasons Ballroom 4
  In Roundtable Session: Re-membering Pedagogy: Mourning, Grieving and Healing as Part of Renewal (Table 1)

Abstract

Purpose
This autoethnography theorizes the racial melancholia of mourning cultural identity loss by exploring how assimilation has coerced the authors to undermine their consciousness and give up their heritage under U.S. legacies of colonization, displacement, and miseducation. Their individual and collective journeys as P-12 students and now doctoral students and instructors were shaped by U.S. schooling systems and processes that attempt to reconstruct human values and identities.

Theoretical Framework
This paper assumes the social construction and normality of race and prioritizes the critical perspectives of marginalized individuals and groups in understanding how to disrupt differential oppression and privilege within U.S. institutions such as schooling (Dell et al., 1995). Within such a society, racial melancholia (Grinage, 2019) explains how unresolved grief due to racialization and the loss of love, communities, and identities are predictable byproducts of dominant, colonial processes of assimilation and socialization.

Method and Data Sources
Utilizing collaborative autoethnography, the authors share similarly themed stories to “discover the meaning of the stories in relation to their socio-cultural contexts” (Chang, Ngunjiri, & Hernandez, 2016). They analyze moments of profound contradiction which intimately reveal how, for them, schooling processes produced a perpetual state of mourning their cultural identities— mourning their inherent wholeness.

Findings
The authors discuss how Eurocentric ideologies about “success” embedded within the P-12 and higher education academic ladder further incentivized their complicit participation while simultaneously provoking their resistance. They recognize mourning as a human right and experience with the potential to promote healing, growth, and agency. At the same time, understanding the dynamic, co-existing nature of trauma and possibility (Grinage, 2019), they also celebrate the lessons, nuance, and forms of resistance that are born from self-excavative and collective struggle. Deeply considering their dynamic cultures and pluralistic society, “Let’s see how you will do it when it is your turn” is the loving challenge they accept from their elders as they embrace their responsibilities to them and to their youth and communities.

Significance
The study will contribute knowledge about alternative orientations to teaching, learning, and being that recognize a collective need for wholeness and invite others to (re)member the parts necessary to (re)construct that wholeness. The authors emphasize the diverse orientations and practices they now take up in order to center their cultural assets, healing, and agency within their families, communities, and their work in higher education.

Authors

• Bisola A. Wald, University of Minnesota

• Diana Chandara, University of Minnesota

• Thong Vang, University of Minnesota