#citationpracticeschallenge

Wow! Dr. Seuss books were a childhood favourite of mine, but no longer! 

This week’s post features an article from the AngryAsianMan blog that highlights youth resistance against erasures of racist histories in their curriculum. Two incredible siblings, Rockett (11) and Zoe (10) designed these gorgeous posters to educate their classmates and school about the author’s side job as a political cartoonist well known for racist cartoons during the school’s Dr. Seuss week. However, their school didn’t appreciate their intervention and tried to stop them from telling this alternate history.

“While Dr. Seuss, aka Theodor Geisel, is best known for enduring, beloved books like The Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham, he began his career as an illustrator and cartoonist who drew racist political cartoons expressing, among other things, vehement anti-Japanese sentiment. Geisel apparently had absolutely no problem with the incarceration of innocent Japanese Americans during World War II, depicting them in caricature as invading hordes and latent traitors loyal to the enemy.”

Luckily, the story doesn’t stop there. Zoe and Rockett’s parents in a brilliant show of intergenerational solidarity wrote back to the school in support of their kids. They explained how popular racist political cartoons like Geisel’s helped fuel the wartime panic and public support of Executive Order 9066 which led to Rockett and Zoe’s great grandparents’ forceful incarceration in US concentration camps among 120 000 other Japanese Americans. Part of their email read:

“This is not an opinion, much like Hitler's anti-Semitism is not an opinion, for Geisel's hatred of Japanese is well documented, and is chronicled in American history books. Unfortunately our family has had a direct impact and has suffered directly from Geisel's cartoons.

 We understand it is in your opinion that school is not for this type of "educational" encounter that Rockett attempted to present today. Perhaps trying to educate his fellow classmates with a flyer may have been a little unconventional and has placed you in an uncomfortable position. We respect your opinion and authority of what is deemed appropriate in your classroom, much as I would expect the same in my classroom, and will of course defer to you about what is appropriate. However I do have to say I disagree in principal with your standpoint that "school" is not the appropriate place to disseminate new, or differing ideas.”

 You must be wondering, what on earth does this have to do with challenging problematic citation practices?

As mentioned on a previous post, one of Citation Practices Challenge’s intentions is to highlight long standing erasures from dominant knowledges, alongside creative resistance (and there is always radical wonderful resistance) against different forms of historical erasure. What and who we choose to cite and not to cite applies not only to our writing, but to our classrooms and community work too. The school chose to cite Dr. Seuss, while choosing not to cite him as a racist. If it weren’t for Rockett and Zoe’s creative intervention, their classmates would be denied the chance to learn that a figure that they’re taught to celebrate and admire is a racist. Without knowing the full story, how could the students have chosen whether to accept or reject celebrating Dr. Seuss and accepting him as part of their learning?  

By creating and sharing these gorgeous posters that showed Dr. Seuss’ racist history, Rockett and Zoe were running critical interventions against their school’s reproduction of the depoliticized narrative of him. Plus, they were intervening with a learning environment that discourages students to resist and reject racist curriculum.

In solidarity with youth-led and intergenerational resistance,

“Although anti-Blackness and white supremacy have made many believe that Black Disabled/Deaf people don’t exist and that there is something dishonorable about the existence of Black Deaf/Disabled people, neither could be further from the truth.

The Truth is that disability has been with us, in us since the beginning of time. Disability has held and kept us. It is in our marrow, in our blood, our sweat and tears. Disability does not make us less than, it makes us who we are.

Ableism and anti-Blackness are the enemy. Disability is our kin.” (Talila A. Lewis 2017)

This week’s post features the refreshing and powerful writing of Talila A. Lewis, which begins by affirming the existence of Black Disabled people, then elegantly outlines the connections between ableism and anti-blackness, and then intervenes with anti-blackness done through ableism by asking for the retirement of 10 ableist phrases commonly used in the Black Community in the US context.

Talila’s writing teaches us about the politics of citation that are in our everyday conversations. The words that spill from us come from the same cultural fabric where anti-blackness, ableism, settler-colonialism, patriarchy, and many other systems of oppression are normalized. Even though we know systems of oppression work off of each other, it is often easy to “forget” in everyday casual conversations.

And forgetting does something. It forgets those who live, hope, and dream, within the intersections of different oppressive systems. It forgets that that those connections work to maintain White supremacy, settler-colonialism, ableism, homophobic, transphobic, racism, and classism as ongoing structures. It also forgets the futures we can make by dismantling systems of oppression together. As Talila pointed out, “disability and Blackness are part of the identities and lives of most of the Black community in the “United States.” This is why true liberation calls for a certain kind of dismantling that leaves neither oppression untouched.”

While Talila writes to the Black Communities in US contexts, I think her piece is a must read for all those interested in figuring out how to dismantle systems of oppression together. The structure will stay in place unless we address the hinges and bolts that connect it together.

Check it out!

Sharing a powerful poem that makes us think about the politics of citation by the poet, educator, scholar Isaac Ginsberg Miller published this fall 2017 in this radical volume of Propter N

May this piece nourish you as much as it nourished me.

Fi 

“Works Cited” by Isaac Ginsberg Miller

I chose not to cite [site of violence].  

I chose the sight of the Statue

of Liberty from the ferry. I chose Ellis Island

not La Frontera. I chose not to

cite Anzaldúa, Lorde, Fanon, Wynter, Du Bois, Spillers, Césaire, Boggs,  

Etcetera.

I chose the sight of the same.

I chose to avert my eyes. I chose to stare.  

 Choice is               fictive. It was

                              the slave ports

                               the lynch mobs

                               the red lines

                               that made us.  

 Europe is literally the creation

                of the Third World,

                 says Fanon.  

                  I chose to cite my Ethnic Studies major.  

I chose not to cite that one time in high school when my friends said…  

                   I chose to cite my ethnic friend.  

I chose not to cite that one time my aunt said…  

                   I chose to speak at the protest.  

I chose not to cite that one time my kind

                   old Hebrew School teacher started talking about…

 I chose to pick my battles.  

Is there a point at which art becomes betrayal,

                        a point where betrayal becomes an art?  

I chose not to cite.  

                             Or I did, out of guilt.  

                             Or I did, out of self-righteousness.

And when the Panthers held the gun.

And when AIM held the gun.

And when Mandela held the gun.

And when Leila Khaled held the gun.

And when Marissa Alexander held the gun.

And when Korryn Gaines held the gun.  

 What did I choose?”

  References:

“the logic of elimination of the native is about the elimination of the native as native. And yet, to exclusively focus on the settler colonial without any meaningful engagement with the indigenous—as has been the case in how Wolfe’s work has been cited—can (re)produce another form of “elimination of the native.” (Kēhaulani Kauanui 2016)  

This week’s post features Kēhaulani Kauanui ‘s insightful writing on the politics of citing Patrick Wolfe’s well-cited theory that, “settler-colonialism, is a structure, not an event.” Her work offers an important reminder that it’s not enough to just cite and acknowledge settler-colonialism as a structure. It’s not the same as engaging with it, if our citation ignores questions of indigeneity.

Kēhaulani Kauanui's work points out that citations can act as a place holder for seriously engaging with ways that this structure is impactful for indigenous and non-indigenous people to a settler-colonized Land and what it means to write, work, theorize, and live in a structure that asserts non-indigenous life through the erasures of indigenous life and continual presence. As a non-indigenous person to Turtle Island, it also reminds me of the importance of citing indigenous resistance as a counterpart. Just as settler-colonialism is an ongoing structure, struggles against it is also fiercely ongoing. 

How are we citing settler-colonialism in our own work? How are we thinking of the question of indigeneity when we cite it? How does settler-colonialism as a structure impact how we come to know our work, and its’ relationship to indigeneity?

Check it out,

Fall, a season of change and transformation, both in classrooms and outside. 

What better time to start thinking through radical transformation by thinking critically about the politics that are embedded in who we choose to cite, how we choose to cite, and how or who we refuse to cite?

Today’s post considers Patrick Dunleavy’s writing about the politics of and social importance of academic citation practices. According to Dunleavy, citations and references are about more than giving credit, but they also influence how your colleagues regard your work. He carefully lists seven things that citations do:

1.    “Specify sources for assumptions and their contextual legitimacy, and to contextualise arguments within a defined field

2.    set up a specialist discourse in an economical and highly-focused manner, and to show how the relevant literature defines concepts, terms or notations

3.    show that the author has read the relevant literature and has a good understanding of it

4.    guide readers seeking to follow the author’s extended chain of reasoning. Readers should be able to understand and “replay” the intellectual journey involved

5.    accurately assign credit to other researchers for key innovations and relevant prior findings or arguments, so that readers can also access this work for themselves

6.    allow readers to quickly find and precisely check sources of evidence or other tokens for themselves.

7.    show that the author has comprehensively surveyed work that is relevant in scope, approach and recency, and to specifically point out consistencies and inconsistencies between other work and the author’s own findings”

I find these seven points quite helpful for clarifying the importance of citations and references, and agree with them. BUT I can’t help but feel uneasy by his overall argument that, “it is simply unacceptable scientific or academic behaviour now to ignore immediately relevant research or argument already in the public domain just because it does not help your case, or suit your style of work, or comes from a different discipline.”

I believe that our citations and research do not take place in a sociological and ahistorical vacuum. Our projects don’t begin from a position of social and political neutrality. Western academic research, particularly in the social sciences and humanities, has a long lineage of problematic conversations that have justified and conditioned imperialistic expansion, capitalistic labor exploitation, racism, patriarchal violence(s), slavery, eugenics, ableism, and colonization (Fanon 1952; Said 1978; Smith 2013; Simpson 2007; Tuck and Yang 2012). I have posted elsewhere, “credibility has a lineage. It has an epistemology. It has a historicity. And most of all, it requires power to maintain its credibility” (Cheuk 2017).  How we choose to cite, who we choose to cite in, or cite out, is a political act that holds much potential for both radical transformation, and problematic reproduction.

As the original call-out for the Citation Practices Challenge stated,

“Indeed, our practices of citation make and remake our fields, making some forms of knowledge peripheral. We often cite those who are more famous, even if their contributions appropriate subaltern ways of knowing. We also often cite those who frame problems in ways that speak against us. Over time, our citation practices become repetitive; we cite the same people we cited as newcomers to a conversation. Our practices persist without consideration of the politics of linking projects to the same tired reference lists.” (Gaztambide-Fernandez, Tuck, & Yang 2015)

Citations are political. For radical social transformation we need to be intentional about the conversations that we’re continuing, or choose not to continue. Perhaps we might wonder at how did some conversations become “core” to our fields even if we know them to be problematic or harmful to our communities? And if we decide to continue them, how can we take part in problematic conversations that are considered “core” to our fields in ways that favor transformative theories of change, rather than reproduce it in ways that uphold the status quo?

Thinking with you,

Fi

References:

Cheuk, Fiona. Spring is Coming. Critical Ethnic Studies Journal Blog. 2017

Fanon, Frantz. Black skin, white masks [1952]. Grove press, 2008

Gaztambide-Fernández, Rubén., Tuck, Eve., & Wayne K. Yang. Critical Ethnic Studies Blog Post. (April 2015) http://www.criticalethnicstudiesjournal.org/citation-practices/

Said, Edward. "Orientalism. 1978." New York: Vintage 199 (1979).

Simpson, Audra. "On ethnographic refusal: indigeneity,‘voice’and colonial citizenship." Junctures: The Journal for Thematic Dialogue 9 (2007).

Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. Zed Books Ltd., 2013.

“Canada’s 150 years old—what does that mean for the First People? When I thought about it, I thought it includes the worst period, because it goes all the way back to the signing of the treaties, the beginning of the reserve system, this legacy of incarceration, residential schools, sickness, the removal of children in the ’60s, missing and murdered women. So there’s a lot of material in the show that tries to encompass and stitch together this narrative that reflects back on 150 years.” (Kent Monkman)

This week’s post features an interview of Kent Monkman, an artist of Cree and Irish descent by Caoimhe Morgan-Feir about his recent exhibit at the University of Toronto titled “Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience.”

I think it’s important to bring this up in the Citation Practices Challenge project as part of my mini-series around Canada’s upcoming 150th celebration because much of the state sanctioned commemorative events consistently chooses to forget that Canada is a settler-colonial project. 

Monkman’s work provides a powerful visual commentary that resists this forgetting. Having had the chance to visit it myself, I was in awe of how his pieces really highlighted and unsettles the problematic knowledges that are reproduced such that ongoing settler colonialism, including all the harms and violence, is framed as something to celebrate. What is really being celebrated in Canada’s 150? What relationships to each other, to the land, and to memory are being produced and reproduced when folks take part in this 150th anniversary? What kind of future is desired these celebrations? What resistances might be born in light of these “celebrations”?

Thinking with you,