"Language Lives in Our Bodies Not Just Our Heads": Embodied Reading and Fluid, Anticolonial Becomings

• In Event: Cosmopolitical Approaches to Intersectional Readings of Literature

Abstract

Objectives
This paper focuses on one aspect of an anti-colonial book club research project: how reading is embodied and allows for fluidity and becomings outside of static, molar normative discourses. Focusing on one research participant, the analysis explains how Carolina (pseudonym) continues becoming outside of white settler colonial understandings of bilingual-immigrant-racialized-woman, and creates a more liveable life.

Theoretical framework
I borrow concepts from four theorists to ‘plug into’ the data (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Jackson & Mazzei, 2013). To understand the ways reading is an embodied process and a tool of resistance to molar/static discourses, I weave together the data and plug in Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) becomings and molecularity, Coloma’s (2008) constitutive subjectivities, and Sumara’s (1996) embodied action, and complicate colonial, molar assumptions about fluid, molecular subject positions.

Methods and data sources
I used a feminist Deleuzian methodological framework for the overall project (MacLure, 2013; Ringrose & Coleman, 2013), which allowed me to focus on the hot spots and create rhizomatic concept maps in the analysis (Alvermann, 2000; Ringrose & Coleman, 2013). The data was collected in an anti-colonial book club with six differently racialized and Indigenous women. The overall project had two aims: examine how reading anti-colonial fiction can help facilitate the negotiation of subjectivities and how reading fiction that is not white settler colonial in nature can create generative spaces for people to thrive and persist. In this paper, I use ‘plugging in’ by Jackson and Mazzei (2013) to think with theory and plug in “ideas, fragments, theory, selves, sensations” (p. 262) to open up the data, while calling attention to the multiple truths and ways one can analyze data.

Results
Reading Native Speaker, Carolina was able to destabilize molar understandings of what it means to be bilingual-immigrant-racialized-woman and through the embodied reading process and pre-discursive lingerings, light bulbs, and other sticky affects (Ahmed, 2004), Carolina understood in a new way the becomings of a Spanish and English speaker, Latinx, Venezuelan, immigrant-settler woman. This allowed for a reimagining of her own subject positions, creating a space for persistence and thriving. Similar to the main character in Native Speaker, Carolina is able to ‘play the game’ of molar/static settler colonial norms in order to survive within it, such as obtaining Canadian citizenship, but within these acts, there are “lines of flight [which] are immanently created, forming passageways for (temporary) escapes, transformations, becomings” (Jackson, 2013, p. 115). Carolina is subverting colonial discourses by living within them and creating these new, liveable narratives of being both in and outside of the culture, or as Coloma (2008) describes, “being both/and – also meant being neither one completely” (p. 24).

Scholarly significance
Creating a more liveable life beyond white settler colonial binaries through the embodied process of reading fiction that represent fluid, non-binary subject positions is important for education and extends conversations in critical and postmodern literacy studies about ways to shift dominant discourses (Giroux, 1992; Janks, 2010).

Author

• Shawna Carroll, Okayama University