“The idea is to remove hierarchy rather than deliberately behave as if there is no hierarchy. That is solid bad faith. There will never be a total absence of hierarchy. And that’s what’s fun in the classroom, it’s not that you’re being ethical, it’s that the ethical might flower.”
- Spivak in Mark Sanders’ Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Live Theory, p. 120
s0metim3s tags me for the Passion Quilt. What am *I* most passionate for students to learn about? Didn’t someone ask me that in an ‘Introduction to Tutoring’ workshop once? The theory being that if YOU just finds YOUR teaching passion YOU will be a happier and harder worker. Yes … I’m afraid that the very idea of ‘a passion quilt’ makes me think primarily of the uses or work of passion in the humanities and social sciences departments that employ me for tutorials and lectures from time to time. Passion is sacrificial labour for many of my colleagues; the more under-resourced the department, the more people I find who remind me of social workers (in all their compassion). I agree with s0metim3s that “passion cannot be imparted”; “it can be sparked” - I don’t really care whether I do that or not, especially in Weeks 11 & 12 of semester when the students who are still turning up demonstrate so much exhausted, bored passivity (enough to bring on social work burnout - after all I’ve done for them!).
I do feel passion in the classroom sometimes, I feel it spilling from me in the amorous and angry sense - bell hooks has spoken of the erotics of teaching (and I don’t mean in the sense that Helen Garner did in The First Stone). But it’s usually just because I’m cheerfully getting off on myself, what I know and what I care about. Who knows how and where the spark that ignites and connects burns; hopefully not only in my righteous breast. Then again, it worked for Lulu (third from the right).
In whipping the thread up and off, I don’t know any other “educators” with blogs to tag … so I will just say this - liberation from pedagogy!
(PS Let there be no doubt - the image is a still from To Sir With Love).
Some worry that it is somehow undiplomatic or impolite to speak the language of right and wrong. I disagree. (Applause.) Different circumstances require different methods, but not different moralities. (Applause.) Moral truth is the same in every culture, in every time, and in every place. Targeting innocent civilians for murder is always and everywhere wrong. (Applause.) Brutality against women is always and everywhere wrong. (Applause.) There can be no neutrality between justice and cruelty, between the innocent and the guilty. We are in a conflict between good and evil, and America will call evil by its name. (Applause.) By confronting evil and lawless regimes, we do not create a problem, we reveal a problem. And we will lead the world in opposing it. (Applause.)
From here.
*hides*
Just to lower the tone a little now that there is, all going well, only three months left for this blog.
“Roses are red, violets are blue, I forget the rest, but I rooted your Mum”
- graffiti down the road in enormous, beautifully drawn chalk letters*
“Melbournians think they’re so good with their nice art galleries and everything. But we’ve got race war and finance capital”
- my friend Chris
*I am SO jealous that I have never thought of doing this, especially smack bang in the midst of my rapidly gentrifying neighbourhood (which, consequently, bears many signs of race war and finance capital).
My ongoing fascination with the unfolding of Stuff White People Like led me here today; which in turn led me to Black People Love Us!, from 2002. I think it probably does similar work on white identities (i.e. reconfirming them through self-reflexivity), but as a deliberately political strategy it perhaps directs the debate with more precision. Compare the media that it got with that of SWPL.
When I google my surname in a fit of idle introspection I find it imprinted on a town in Haiti, a slave revolt in Louisiana, church registers in the Channel Islands, various papers in France and Canada, and a colonial governor’s family in Angola (which perhaps accounts for the Haiti connection). The indexing that the internets does is odd like that: a chain of random connections showing up the circularity of history as the-named, its shaping in and by violence, its traces of resistance and liberation, its surprising affects. A series of patented, popular links scream at me: FindYourPast.com and so on.
We don’t want to bear certain histories or historicities, we don’t want to make space for it in suspensions or sorries. But we will fight for our names (my good name, not in my name). Our misplaced names reflect the displacement of history onto us. It’s bigger than us, like our names. We wear it, we wear them.
Diversity Boat, World Social Forum, Porto Alegre 2005.
Big Gay Al’s Big Gay Boat Ride, South Park, 1997.
The “alternative thesis topic” being “Boats in Multiculture: a history from colonisation to activism”.
“… in short, the capitalism of global neoliberalism is based on exploitation, plunder, contempt and repression of those who refuse. The same as before, but now globalized, worldwide.
But it is not so easy for neoliberal globalization, because the exploited of each country become discontented, and they will not say, well, too bad, instead they rebel. And those who remain and who are in the way resist, and they don’t allow themselves to be eliminated. And that is why we see, all over the world, those who are being screwed over making resistances, not putting up with it, in other words, they rebel, and not just in one country but wherever they abound. And so, as there is a neoliberal globalization, there is a globalization of rebellion.
And it is not just the workers of the countryside and of the city who appear in this globalization of rebellion, but others also appear who are much persecuted and despised for the same reason, for not letting themselves be dominated, like women, young people, the indigenous, homosexuals, lesbians, transsexual persons, migrants and many other groups who exist all over the world but who we do not see until they shout ya basta of being despised, and they raise up, and then we see them, we hear them, and we learn from them.
And then we see that all those groups of people are fighting against neoliberalism, against the capitalist globalization plan, and they are struggling for humanity.”
- from The Sixth Declaration of La Selva Lacandona, 2005, Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional.
(Translation from Spanish by irlandesa).
Powered by WordPress
