Table Of ContentLiminal Traces
TRANSGRESSIONS: CULTURAL STUDIES AND EDUCATION
Series Editor:
Shirley R. Steinberg, University of Calgary, Canada
Founding Editor:
Joe L. Kincheloe (1950-2008) The Paulo and Nita Freire International
Project for Critical Pedagogy
Editorial Board
Jon Austin, University of Southern Queensland, Australia
Norman Denzin, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, USA
Rhonda Hammer, University of California Los Angeles, USA
Nikos Metallinos, Concordia University, Canada
Christine Quail, McMaster University, Canada
Ki Wan Sung, Kyung Hee University, Seoul, Korea
This book series is dedicated to the radical love and actions of Paulo Freire, Jesus “Pato” Gomez, and Joe L.
Kincheloe.
Cultural studies provides an analytical toolbox for both making sense of educational practice and extending the
insights of educational professionals into their labors. In this context Transgressions: Cultural Studies and
Education provides a collection of books in the domain that specify this assertion. Crafted for an audience of
teachers, teacher educators, scholars and students of cultural studies and others interested in cultural studies
and pedagogy, the series documents both the possibilities of and the controversies surrounding the intersection
of cultural studies and education. The editors and the authors of this series do not assume that the interaction of
cultural studies and education devalues other types of knowledge and analytical forms. Rather the intersection
of these knowledge disciplines offers a rejuvenating, optimistic, and positive perspective on education and
educational institutions. Some might describe its contribution as democratic, emancipatory, and transformative.
The editors and authors maintain that cultural studies helps free educators from sterile, monolithic analyses that
have for too long undermined efforts to think of educational practices by providing other words, new
languages, and fresh metaphors. Operating in an interdisciplinary cosmos, Transgressions: Cultural Studies and
Education is dedicated to exploring the ways cultural studies enhances the study and practice of education.
With this in mind the series focuses in a non-exclusive way on popular culture as well as other dimensions of
cultural studies including social theory, social justice and positionality, cultural dimensions of technological
innovation, new media and media literacy, new forms of oppression emerging in an electronic hyperreality,
and postcolonial global concerns. With these concerns in mind cultural studies scholars often argue that the
realm of popular culture is the most powerful educational force in contemporary culture. Indeed, in the twenty-
first century this pedagogical dynamic is sweeping through the entire world. Educators, they believe, must
understand these emerging realities in order to gain an important voice in the pedagogical conversation.
Without an understanding of cultural pedagogy’s (education that takes place outside of formal schooling)
role in the shaping of individual identity–youth identity in particular–the role educators play in the lives of
their students will continue to fade. Why do so many of our students feel that life is incomprehensible and
devoid of meaning? What does it mean, teachers wonder, when young people are unable to describe their
moods, their affective affiliation to the society around them. Meanings provided young people by mainstream
institutions often do little to help them deal with their affective complexity, their difficulty negotiating the rift
between meaning and affect. School knowledge and educational expectations seem as anachronistic as a ditto
machine, not that learning ways of rational thought and making sense of the world are unimportant.
But school knowledge and educational expectations often have little to offer students about making sense
of the way they feel, the way their affective lives are shaped. In no way do we argue that analysis of the
production of youth in an electronic mediated world demands some “touchy-feely” educational superficiality.
What is needed in this context is a rigorous analysis of the interrelationship between pedagogy, popular
culture, meaning making, and youth subjectivity. In an era marked by youth depression, violence, and suicide
such insights become extremely important, even life saving. Pessimism about the future is the common sense
of many contemporary youth with its concomitant feeling that no one can make a difference.
If affective production can be shaped to reflect these perspectives, then it can be reshaped to lay the
groundwork for optimism, passionate commitment, and transformative educational and political activity. In
these ways cultural studies adds a dimension to the work of education unfilled by any other sub-discipline.
This is what Transgressions: Cultural Studies and Education seeks to produce—literature on these issues that
makes a difference. It seeks to publish studies that help those who work with young people, those individuals
involved in the disciplines that study children and youth, and young people themselves improve their lives in
these bizarre times.
Liminal Traces
Storying, Performing, and Embodying Postcoloniality
Devika Chawla
Ohio University, USA
Amardo Rodriguez
Syracuse University, USA
A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN: 978-94-6091-588-8 (paperback)
ISBN: 978-94-6091-589-5 (hardback)
ISBN: 978-94-6091-591-8 (e-book)
Published by: Sense Publishers,
P.O. Box 21858,
3001 AW Rotterdam,
The Netherlands
www.sensepublishers.com
Printed on acid-free paper
All Rights Reserved © 2011 Sense Publishers
No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or
otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material
supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system,
for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction 1
Devika Chawla
Part I: Challenging Epistemologies
Between Stories and Theories: Embodiments, Disembodiments,
and other Struggles 13
Devika Chawla
Predicaments, Dilemmas, and the Challenge of Knowledge 25
Amardo Rodriguez
Notes on Orality, Performativity, and Postcoloniality 35
Amardo Rodriguez
Part II: Our Stories/our Histories
Two Journeys 47
Devika Chawla
The Performative Nature of Knowledge 65
Amardo Rodriguez
Monologues in Brown: A Mystory Performance 75
Devika Chawla
Part III: Liminal Pedagogies
Narratives on Longing, Being, and Knowing: Envisioning
a Writing Epistemology 97
Devika Chawla
New Imaginations of Difference: On Teaching, Writing, and Culturing 113
Devika Chawla & Amardo Rodriguez
Epilogue 125
Amardo Rodriguez
References 127
v
DEVIKA CHAWLA
INTRODUCTION
I speak as a south Asian Indian, living, writing, and teaching in middle America. I
speak as a woman intellectual who desires organic and sensual theories—the kind
invoked by Gloria Anzaldúa when she speaks of her borderlands—theories of
flesh, where mind and body emerge from one another. I speak as a teacher who is
compelled to explain to students that our colors, our histories, our subjectivities,
and are passions will always mismatch because all categories invariably leak
(Trinh, 1989). I speak to show the beginnings of our project which is rooted in our
histories. We both speak as nomads seeking homes of the future, homes that reside
on the borders of possibility. We speak and we perform—sometimes together and
sometimes apart. We live in these pages, not as a single voice, but in multivocal
unison. We take many voices, varied tones, different genres, and distinct frames.
We speak to resist, to reinvent, and to reframe. But, more importantly, we speak to
create and imagine.
…sometime in the year 2000…
It is a humid heartland afternoon. Too warm to be talking about
community, obligation, trust, and other such serious matters. I am sure we
are all here for different reasons. I enrolled in this doctoral seminar because
it sounded different. I have always involved myself in matters that seem to
defy convention. Perhaps I do so in order to find if I can slide into margins,
corners, and crevices. This class seems full. The catch phrases in the class
description were “diversity” and “multi-culture.” I know my peers are
hungry for these words and their meanings. I know that they are hoping that
in 16 weeks the words will get into their marrow and they will begin
performing them, indeed living them. Perhaps that is why I take these
classes—to experience this desperate and almost comedic search for
diversity. It does seem fuller than any doctoral seminar that I have taken.
This professor must be popular. Does he promise his students “instant
diversity?”
I am sitting in a corner anticipating a rigorous doctoral seminar that will
demand theoretical dialogue and argument. I am ready for the seminar battle-
call—a theory is thrown into the center— unraveled, examined, and finally
problematized. It is never thrown out of the battle. Apparently everything
must be included and like good liberals we must study all approaches. After
doing so, we must congenially critique them. Like in our politics, we must
know everything and be tolerant. It is a disciplining that I am becoming
D. Chawla and A. Rodriguez, Liminal Traces: Storying, Performing, and Embodying
Postcoloniality, 1–9.
© 2011 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.
DEVIKA CHAWLA
accustomed to, and a style of pedagogy that I know I will be required to
imbibe in a few years. Unless something gives.
Amardo Rodriguez walks into the class. He is Latino or black or both. I
never know anymore. He could be all or one or two. I could be Indian,
Italian, Latino, Egyptian, and Pakistani. Or so I am told. At least we seem to
share this ambiguity of physicality. We are brown. That is a surety. He asks
us to take a pen and paper and write out a one-sentence definition of
community. This too, is not unusual. We do it all the time—we define things
and then match them up with what the books are saying. I know the game.
So, I write a definition that seems appropriate. It does not include being
Indian, being an immigrant, being brown, being a woman, or being anything.
It includes few anxieties, stresses, or complexities. It is fairly apolitical and
entirely unemotional. I write myself out of it. I write a tolerant definition
about participation in a group. I must have written something like, “a
community is a group of people who share similar ideas”—something fairly
benign and certainly predictable.
I will not reveal the truth. I cannot and will not write that community to
me is about home/s—intellectual, political, emotional. I do not include that
community is an organic space that invigorates and gives life. I shy away
from suggesting that at the heart of it all, community to me provides calm
and comfort. It is life-giving in its movements, and its rhythms. And yet, it
may not be stable. It may be argumentative, conflicted, and tension-filled.
And then again, it may be a temporary space of solace that can change, a kind
of temporary exile. It may even be exile, but not a final one. If I am honest
about these matters, my peers will laugh at me. How can exile ever be home?
It speaks to silence and isolation. It is a place of inertia—for them. They fear
it. I, on the other hand, long for it. I don’t long for the home that it may find
for me. I don’t long for all those commonalities that we bear. I am tired of
such longings and such commonalities. My peers are imagining community
as utopia. I am imagining community as movement. But, the definition I
provide is about their utopia. I know that the two can never meet.
A few minutes later I realize that I am stuck. Amardo informs us that the
one sentence we have written a few minutes ago will remain the theoretical
framework that we will work with for the rest of the semester. I raise my
hand and ask, “What if we change our mind?” He replies, “Then you will
discuss, examine, and investigate why, where, and when that change
occurred.” Ah…what a nice way to trick your students, I think. Should I be
honest, or can I continue the charade? The dance, if you will, begins.
***
Liminal Traces took root that humid hinterland afternoon. A curious beginning, but
then beginnings are always hard to pin down. When does the root of an idea take
shape? It is really not as important as the intellectual evolution it pushes us into. The
idea for this book took birth in those afternoons as Amardo and I battled—in his
2
INTRODUCTION
corner office with Salsa playing in the background—about the ways that I had
imprisoned myself in politically correct theories. I proclaimed the necessity of all the
post-isms, after all they were about multiple-realities that were socially constructed. I
claimed to have a staunch belief in language communities in which one could live
and let live. No matter if one of those communities believed in killing, it was their
custom, so why would I care. I kept insisting that my “discursive self” defined who I
was. I wondered why Amardo was struggling with my ideas, urging me to abandon
them, pointing out to me that I was not allowing myself to emerge intellectually, that
I really did not believe this stuff I kept ranting about. I know now, of course, that I
was speaking from places that were not mine. At that time, I did not know what was
mine and what was not. I did not know much about intellectual honesty—a quality
much sacrificed during our disciplining in the academy.
I know now that he was battling as hard as I was. He was trying to encourage
me to think with an intellectual integrity by admitting to myself that I did not see a
fit between what I read and what I was/am. He wanted me to come to a realization
(on my own) that these theories would never be home for me. That I would always
reside in crevices, and that belonging was not as important as traveling the in-
between spaces; because these crevices were spaces of imagination, creation, and
innovation. To not belong was to be my/our liberation.
I suppose one meets someone when the time is right. The community seminar was
that time of reckoning for Amardo and myself. From the start, ours has been a
somewhat curious intellectual kinship. Yet, in many ways, it is an obvious coming
together. We are from two very far off corners of the world that were both colonized by
the British—Trinidad & Tobago and India. The fact that we are immigrants in America
was a commonality at the outset, albeit a categorical one. We shared some histories that
were beyond our control. We were both born into some politically forced transitions—
in countries that were formal British colonies. We were exposed to institutions that
were always naturally alien to us, and yet in being alien were also natural to us.
Amardo moved to the U.S in the late eighties. It was only later that he began an
academic career. While in graduate school, he had been at war with himself and all
that he read; searching for himself in the theories he was forced to study. Here in the
United States, he was supposed to find homes in race, critical, and postcolonial
theories. He was supposed to carry the burden of the black colonized man.
I, an Indian, who moved to US in the later nineties for the purpose of higher
education, found myself entangled in similar dilemmas. The difference being that I
was not resisting the discourses. I was trying to get by. I felt compelled (and still do)
to carry the brown woman’s burden in the U.S. I was clinging to immigrant literature,
exile` narratives, Third World feminist theories, postcolonial, postmodern, and post-
structuralist frames. I was moving along not knowing or even desiring to know why
these texts did not cut deeply into me when I read them. I only experienced emotional
mismatches when I encountered these frameworks. I would seek resonance in what I
read, but the literature and the stories seemed to be about some other brown people—
those found in the corridors and conference rooms of university halls. I could not
smell the smells and hear the sounds of brownness. I found more “others” in the
readings. They were not my “others.” I was merely human.
3
