Abstract
In this methodological inquiry, I attune to the materiality of erasure and haunting. With Deleuze’s theories of difference/repetition as a theoretical tool, I examine the aftermath of the Sandy Hook school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut with the mantra, Never Forget. I structure this article around the concept of a pilgrimage, taking inspiration from Chaucer by selecting tales from my journey. Theories of re-membering and dis-membering are developed as embodied and affective responses to this troubled place. As such, I put forth this inquiry as response-able, a way to stay “with the trouble” and interrogate violence in settler colonial societies such as the United States.
Highlights
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain
As I walk up to the front door of the Newtown Bee, the local family-owned newspaper, to place a forrent advertisement, I am faced with this oval sign, about fifteen centimeters tall, shown on the left of Figure 2
Twenty stars are twinkling in the darkened sky, and six apples adorn the border. It memorializes the events of December 14, 2012, when twenty firstgraders—the stars—and six educators—the apples—were shot and killed in Sandy Hook Elementary School
Summary
As I walk up to the front door of the Newtown Bee, the local family-owned newspaper, to place a forrent advertisement, I am faced with this oval sign, about fifteen centimeters tall, shown on the left of Figure 2. Thinking with Deleuze in this methodological inquiry, I explore how repetition of a public pedagogy that takes the shape of a disciplining moral law, Never Forget, reveals singularities that transgress dominant narratives of a shooting massacre in a school. 12/14/12 is a manifestation of the violence that Newtown erases and so I ask, in a place whose name obscures histories of violence: How can Never Forget be put to work in disrupting, rather than normalizing, responses to school violence and trauma in settler colonial contexts? Attuning is “the densely felt textures of sensory worlding that fuel generativity” (p. 451), and I become-with methodologically by pilgrimaging in Newtown, visiting sites I have often been before but with a repetition Never Forgetting to unearth the virtual in the literal object, and in so doing become sentient to the how the past haunts the present and shapes the future
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