Read on Twitter
Hard to live tweet without childcare, but seeing @ProfChander, @zugenia, and @ronjaunee on the same screen is amazing. #Bigger6 #BIPOC19
Wow @zugenia: "Liberalism is COMPATIBLE with colonialism. They’re close siblings if not two faces of the same being. It’s impt for the survival of the humanities that it finally disentangle itself from the racist myths of liberalism..."
...Liberalism is not the answer to anticolonialism. It’s its lifeblood." - @zugenia
And @ronjaunee: "As 18th and 19th c scholars, We are scholars of liberalism... We should be able to speak to how they can be critiqued and dismantled. It should be part of our scholarly work."
And @zugenia talking about @NikkiHessell's reminder about the Six Nations land defenders currently being arrested as they insist upon rights defined in a C18 treaty: the C18 is with us NOW.
Gena cont.: "Think of yourself as someone manifesting the 18th c in the present – in the circuits of knowledge that are in you now. Where are you right now? And where is this thought happening? In North America – I can’t imagine how this exercise cannot be an exercise..."
"... in realizing that the thing we call the 18th c is here with us now. The past and present are intertwined problems, and that has to inform the responsibilities we take on in reading any literatures of that time." - @zugenia
. @ProfChander challenging "cancellation": "Saying 'fuck you' to the text IS an engagement with the text. I remind my students of this." This is a good reason to include Wordsworth on the syllabus lol.
On that note: donate to Six Nations Legal Defense Fund: https://www.gofundme.com/f/legal-fund-1492-land-back-lane (H/T @deephomework!)
Future essay by @ProfChander coming out in @ECFjournal addressing Tuck/Yang's "Decolonization is not a Metaphor": Should we consider metonymy though???
. @zugenia: "with and in relation to" is a way to work against "argument" and "intervention" and ploughing over -aka the competitive mode of academia. "Thinking alongside" changes things: "against" is "opposed to"/violence. In an economy of "alongsideness" - it can be abutting.
Changing up the syllabus is not just "adding" a BIPOC writer to spice it up. @zugenia suggests reframing the primary txts with secondary scholarship by BIPOC. A fundamental reframing, but also requires a commitment to working with texts from that new framework, says @ProfChander.
Question about anxieties over "needing to know the canon" before you explode it. Anxiety about being deficient bc you didn't read Bible-Chaucer-Shakespeare. @efreedgo reminds us that the canon is a recent invention anyway. And "We can reinvent it."
"The cultural capital of the British Literary Canon is more unimportant than EVER right now..." and "the structure of the imperial academy has always been to equip [students] with the cultural capital of this particular knowledge..."
"and that this is going to carry [students] into the next" thing..." and @zugenia suggest that instead we prepare students not just to survive going forward, but to make the future better than the present. "And maybe Wordsworth has a role," but that
"...cultural capital is not going to transfer into material prosperity." Is @zugenia suggesting, here, that Wordsworth is not going to make us rich!? Bad news for some of us lol.
Who are we complicit with? asks @kerry_sinanan, in this "pyramid scheme" of the academy. "None of us is really going to survive" what is coming for us, so what are we going to do toward not making this an imperialist structure. "How do we change what's valued" in the academy.
[Apologies to everyone for messing up what they said.]
"Solidarity across rank" says @ronjaunee. That's key to changing this.
We must ask, "What kind of cultural capital do students really acquire by reading Trollope? Virtually none." So we have to fight for a critical place in the humanities, & ask what is valuable and what isn't.
We must ask, "What kind of cultural capital do students really acquire by reading Trollope? Virtually none." So we have to fight for a critical place in the humanities, & ask what is valuable and what isn't.
To make cultural changes in academic disciplines we must change editorial practices; BIPOC belong in editorial positions - says @zugenia, editor of @ECFjournal. Because "you get remake" and "you get to be in charge." Even as an assistant professor.
From @ProfChander: important to have white scholars/editors who go to bat for their "darker cousins." "Commit to the expertise of scholars of color [gives shoutout to @RColesworthy!] - start with the assumption that we know what the fuck we're doing, & there's a space for us."
Big English depts with 2 or 3 lines for each period of British history, but then none left for AfAm or broader Anglophone studies. @efreedgo making me want to ask: Like, do you need 4 Victorianists? 3 Romanticists?
