Storytelling and Spirals: (Re)storying, (Re)membering, and (Re)visioning for Collective Liberation and Refusal

• In Event: Praxis and Pedagogies of Liberation: Resistance and Re-Existence

Abstract

This paper is grounded in our collective work as an interdisciplinary and transnational group of learners, teachers, healers, artists, and dreamers who foster and nurture spaces for sustained engagement, questioning, and disruption beyond the constraints of academic institutions, disciplines, and geographies. We utilize storytelling, dreaming, and speculative visioning to imagine and materialize educational possibilities beyond current colonial structures and inheritances. We are guided by decolonial feminist visions towards cultivating “deep coalitions” based on “a loving connection toward liberation” (Lugones, 2003, p. 79). Using spiral as image, method, and praxis we move through different stories, weaving the past-present-future together as overlapping moments (Rivera Cusicanqui, 2012), similar to the cyclical nature of being within BIPOC traditions (e.g., Dillard, 2020; Toliver, 2021). We structure our paper in three collective overlapping storied spirals: 1) (Re)membering, 2) (Re)storying, and 3) (Re)visioning.

We enter the spiral by engaging in the work of (re)membering. We summon and honor our ancestors, loved ones, and spaces with which we are connected through our shared, inherited, and embodied matrilineal and transgenerational (re)memories. Our stories move in this spiral of (re)memberings that connect us to our mothers and teach us of the transgenerational insistence for healing, of laughter that defeats time, space, and social expectations, and of the gift of transgenerational boldness of such strength that we are reminded from whom we begin.

Next, we offer the practice of (re)storying individual and shared experiences, drawing on healing embodiments of unlearning, space-making, nurturing homeplaces, and liberatory transformation. We share stories that describe instances of embodied (re)storying across time, blending the past and present in order to rework, reinterpret, and re/know lessons learned as children. Spiral work allows us to collectively “hack” and “hospice” not only institutional spaces (Stein et. al, 2022), but also our own memories and our relationships to them.

The spiral continues, but in no way ends, as we engage in and model a decolonial feminist practice of speculative storytelling, dreaming, and reimagining (e.g., Machado de Oliveira, 2021; McKittrick, 2015; Lorde, 1984; paperson, 2017). Our individual and collective dialogic (re)visioning weaves together, builds on, and draws forward and back from our (re)membering and (re)storying in ways that simultaneously extend and compress the distance of space and time. Spiraling through this revisioning of our worlds, relationships, and futures, we revision our stories and worlds in ways that illustrate the possibilities of “dreaming of things (not/yet/necessarily) seen and unseen, felt and unfelt, known and unknown” (Pierre, 2020, p. 396) –a praxis of cutting and growing, holding, dreaming, refusing, and claiming joy and possibility.

In multiple small ways we continue to work to story and (re)imagine spaces where a collective dream and commitment to a liberatory decolonial past/present/future exist. It is inherently messy, challenging, but also nourishing work. We invite others to connect, story, and dream with us.

Authors

• Alexandra Allweiss, Michigan State University

• Yaa Oparebea Ampofo, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Unifier Dyer, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Olivia Ann Furman, Michigan State University

• Utitofon Inyang, Binghamton University - SUNY

• Harry Kiiru, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Rachel Lockart, Augustana College

• Romina S. Peña-Pincheira, Gustavus Adolphus College

• Jessica Reed, Michigan State University