Dismantling violence: Refocusing the Camera to BLM in South Asianist Humanities

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay is a first-person account of the material reality of being a South Asian scholar-activist, a university faculty who has been teaching at a Texas men’s prison for thirteen years now. It speaks to how the BLM has been always already a large part of this scholar’s pedagogical impulses and curricular design; for her graduate seminars in humanities, she centers black subjectivities in the texts, theories, and trajectories that are chosen. When the M4BL put out their philosophical vision, she brought, shared, and taught it in the prison classroom. Key themes of prison studies inform her classroom texts from abolition democracy to Afropessimism; her work critically reflects on these connections in classrooms that often have both black and brown students alongside white students, some of whom are declared white supremacists. Through a memoiristic-exercise of dwelling on the lived material reality of being a teacher who travels between the free and the carceral worlds, the knowledge transmitted as tools to dissemble walls, the essay attest to extant bridges of personal-political-ideological in which a brown immigrant woman can draw from a deep well of black epistemologies to speak about humanity in the last stops of the U.S. academy, its prisons.