Living With the Monsters and Ghosts: Theorizing Race Through Unresolved Writing

• In Event: Acts of Survival: Theory, Methods, and Lived Experiences in Writing Race

Abstract

future writing projects by writing with three concepts--monsters, ghosts, and orphans--that offer us tools for analyzing the ways race and power manifest in our writing lives. Last, we conclude with questions and implications that our unresolved life writing approach offers for scholars, in education; critical ways to write, think, and teach about race/racism with complexity and nuance in a rapidly evolving, increasingly stratified, progressively mobile, culturally interconnected, and globalized world.
We draw from Sharpe (2016) and la paperson (2017) because like us they recognize that our writing lives must attend to what haunts, the ghosts and monsters that have made us and our world. These theoretical works are transformative, political, and present various puzzles to and for us as writers who are haunted by the ways racial histories and lives are written in the field of education. Our conceptualization of puzzles is not something to solve or complete. Rather theoretical puzzles serve as something to sit with; we think about what gets solved when one does not complete a puzzle and what emerges from this partiality and fragmentation. We are naming this unresolved writing.

Authors

• Ezekiel Joubert, California State University - Los Angeles

• Oona Fontanella-Nothom, California State University, Los Angeles