This past Spring and Summer, I was on sabbatical, and have just recently returned to the hustle and bustle of thousands of students navigating the UMass campus—and way too many unanswered emails! It feels good to be back, having taken the last few months to both rest and get some work done. Academic sabbaticals can be a bit of an oxymoron, with the “sabbath” part, the restful part, sometimes in tension with the time to pursue your research, scholarship and/or creative practice. Yet somehow, I found that balance, travelling to visit family and friends in Florida, California, Oregon and Washington state—as well as attending some academic conferences and working on two projects locally.
As with much of my work, my sabbatical projects were collaborations. The first, designing an exhibition in collaboration with members of REAL (Racial Equity and Learning), a group of teachers, staff, students, and caregivers dedicated to deepening conversations about racism in the Northampton Public Schools and collectively visioning ways to build a more equitable and actively anti-racist school community. The second, a collaborative of several UMass faculty, graduate students and Holyoke community partners, led by my dear colleague Krista Harper from Anthropology, aims to develop a “Holyoke Community Energy Project” to create a just, equitable, and sustainable energy future for Holyoke by co-designing energy solutions that respond to residents' energy needs, center their voice, and seek to repair environmental injustices.
In addition, I continued work on the book, Anti-Racist Community Engagement: Principles and Practices, alongside an editorial team led by yet another friend and colleague, Christina Santana (who we are very excited to have at UMass this semester as a visiting lecturer at CESL). The book outlines a set of principles for anti-racist community engagement and showcases how a variety of students, community members, staff, and faculty put those principles into practice within and outside college and university campuses. The editors and authors (64 of them across 22 chapters!) are eager to share the book’s insights with a wide audience. The paperback is now available and there will be an on-line book launch on September 21 at 3 PM. We will also have an in-person book launch on the UMass campus later in the semester.
And, as usual, I threw myself into reading books that sometimes I just can’t get to when I’m on campus full time. My poetry reads included Claudia Rankine’s Just Us, which undoes and interrogates norms of poetic narrative to arrive at a depth and directness that can be startling. Reading her poetry, I am always caught by her quotidian honesty, her ability to ask questions about race and whiteness, to mull them over in her work, and to hold those questions, and those who instigate the questions, accountable. I also read Héctor Tobar’s Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino,” and was impressed by the way he speaks to the complexity of Latino identity and navigates the debates regarding Latino/Latinx nomenclature (what do we call ourselves?) with curiosity and openness. I especially liked his last chapter with its speculations on “utopias” and attention to queer futurities and joy—with a call-out to a one-time UMass colleague Kristie Soares who describes that joy (reflecting on Celia Cruz’s personal philosophy) as a “relentless dedication to sweetening the present moment.”
There are always books that captivate me and send me into a spiral of thought and reflection. This summer it was Rehearsals for Living by Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. This fascinating book—an exchange of letters between the authors during the pandemic—outlines the challenges currently faced by and continually (historically) faced by Black and Indigenous communities in Canada and North America. Through their clear insights on responding to harm, the connection to other Black and Indigenous writers and theorists, highlighting new practices, and the warmth and connection between the writers, it is an excellent book and a provocative read.
While their back-and-forth builds a strong case for the intersecting lives of Black and Indigenous people, one of their key points is that pathways to freedom and liberation are not available through the structure of the nation-state and a pursuit of the “American dream.” And that these frameworks can only lead to entrapment in a system that can never provide for freedom. Robyn Maynard outlines their argument as follows:
"I'm with you, Leanne: How are we going to live together? And in this place? Those that run this society have tried to lay that out for us. But Black queer folks, radicals, feminists, and other outlaws, I think, have long known that the nation-state form was an insufficient container to hold our most expansive dreams for freedom. And accordingly, that our appeals to the state for belonging, for the protections of citizenship--would be met with silence, and worse.
This is captured in a discussion between James Baldwin and Audre Lorde at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, in I984. They discussed the possibilities-and the limitations of Black people's freedom within the United States.
Baldwin says this to Lorde:
Du Bois believed in the American dream. So did Martin. So did Malcolm. So do I. So do you. That's why we're sitting here.
To which Audre Lorde replies:
I don't, honey. I'm sorry, I just can't let that go past. Deep, deep, deep down I know that dream was never mine. And I wept and I cried and I fought and I stormed, but I just knew it. I was Black. I was female. And I was out out-by any construct wherever the power lay. So if I had to claw myself insane, if I lived I was going to have to do it alone. Nobody was dreaming about me. Nobody was even studying me except as something to wipe out."
Maynard does an excellent job elaborating on this dialogue, and she notes that Baldwin was no “dupe,” and he well understood the unrelenting and merciless brutality of US capitalism, racism, and militarism. Yet she convincingly elaborates on how Lorde’s location outside of the US nation-state, puts her outside “of belonging, and of protection.” And this is a key insight of the entire book.
Yet I want to resuscitate something in what Baldwin is saying—and Maynard summarizes it, she writes about Baldwin’s “faith that there remains something, somewhere, somehow recuperable about the United States: if not in its past or present, in its future.” Maybe I carry something of that “faith” as well—even with complete understanding and recognition of Maynard and Simpson’s claims—and of course, for the critically compelling arguments Lorde made throughout all her work. But I do wonder if there is a “recuperable” project here that would need to be excavated from the centuries of injustice, and the layers of nationalistic jingoism that have accrued around our systems and founding beliefs. Does our future have such a possibility? And could it work to undo the harms of racial capitalism and create the relational-focused world that are the center of the Indigenous and Black communities that Maynard and Simpson describe? Is that possible? I really don’t know, but it is a guiding question that I’m bringing back to UMass and to CESL this semester, and one that I’m hoping we can all engage with as we start another year responding to the complexities and challenges of our world today—as well as relentlessly dedicating ourselves “to sweetening the present moment.”
Wishing you the best for the semester and the academic year ahead.