Abstract
This analysis addresses the need to develop an ethos of decolonial refusal in Composition Studies and the academy in general, arguing that refusal is a livening rhetorical strategy of survival that challenges colonial futurity (Tuck and Yang), is generative and generous (McGranahan), and opens liminal space (Anzaldua, García-Peña, Lugones) for existing in predominantly white institutions — not at the margins nor centers but at the places of transformative possibility and deep relationality (Ahmed, Bilge and Collins). Focusing on refusal as performative, rhetorical, and undisciplined(Pough, Durham), and following in the lineage of Black and Third World feminist and Critical Race theories on narratives as political tools, I share a constellation of experiences from organizing spaces to graduate education to forward a multi-modal pedagogy of refusal in composition. More specifically, I share this piece, which bridges academic critique, with counternarratives, mini-diálogos, and art prints to signal to the composing practices that are possible and necessary in our shared classroom.
Highlights
We Refuse: Justice projects which require us to prove humanity or worth
What intra-University community organizingpedagogies can we develop to dismantle white supremacy, sexual assault, and abolish campus police?
What intra-University community organizingpedagogies can we develop to decolonize spaces of interaction? or rather, what intra
Summary
I was an 8th grader, newly back from Quisqueya and attending school in Harlem. Sleeping on the floor of la abuela’s bedroom, we would go to sleep listening to latenight Spanish radio comedy shows. At a university with deep ties to the military, it was not Rainy Cruz’s first time teaching composition to a soldier and while the specific political context was not new, racist and misogynistic students seemed emboldened by national rhetorics that espoused hate and violence. This deepened the tension of teaching composition to a soldier in training in full knowledge that soldiers were consistently being deployed to contain people of color such as in Ferguson and the Mexico-U.S border. To Rainy, Trump’s antics and bankrupt electoral politics were nothing new
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