Full Description
An inspiring personal testimonial woven with political analysis, Community as Rebellion offers a meditation on the possibilities of creating spaces of freedom within the university for students and faculty of color who often experience violence and unbelonging due to the colonizing, racializing, classist, and unequal structures that sustain academia and the university.
Sharing stories, personal reflections, and experiences, the author invites readers—in particular Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian women—to engage in liberatory practices of boycott and abolition, in contrast with the university's tokenizing and exploitative structures that shape our experiences in the academy, and hinder our possibilities of survival and success. Paired with radical community building, these practices are necessary for survival and critical for fighting back against a system that destroys us. One key site of freedom-making in the university is the classroom. Meditating on teaching ethnic studies, the author invites teachers to think about activism and social justice as central to what she calls "teaching in freedom," a progressive form of collective learning that prioritizes subjugated knowledge, silenced histories, and the epistemologies that come from the Global South and from Indigenous, Black, and brown communities. By teaching in and for freedom we not only acknowledge the harm that the university has inflicted on our persons and our ways of knowing since its inception, but also create alternative ways to be, to create, to live, and to succeed through our work.
Contents
Table of Contents:
1. On being "the One": The first chapter relates the challenges of being tokenized within the academy as a women of color scholar. The chapter provides personal examples and posits a proposition to contrast the individualistic model of success with one of community.
2. Complicity: This chapter lays out what the author considers a structure of complicity that sustains unequal labor practices that systematically affect women of color. Based on a series of interviews and autoethnographic interventions, the chapter takes on tenure, labor appropriation, mentoring as some of the main sites of complicity.
3. Freedom: This chapter proposes teaching as an act of freedom making and offers practical examples of how to teach in/for freedom, how to create communities that promote collective learning and engage in justice-making practices in the classroom that can lead to long-term positive changes in our society.
4. Ethnic Studies as Rebellion: This final chapter meditates on ethnic studies as a critical site from which to fight against the hegemonic practices of exclusion that uphold Eurocentric and Euro-American knowledge as the only way to see the world while relegating knowledge that comes from everywhere else to the periphery. The chapter is an invitation to rebel through centering subjugated knowledge and the epistemologies of oppressed peoples.
