Longing as Method : A Rant on Yearnings for Our World,Academia,and Utopian Futurities Beyond Liberalism(s)

The World

What does it mean to be of use in today’s world? A world where extractive forces of capitalisms, imperialisms, and colonialisms have humans and other-than-humans on the brink of extinctions. A world ravished by carceral institutions; police, prisons, the military; by settler and racial capitalisms (Robinson, 1983) and cannibal economies (The Red Nation, 2021) that that put profit over people, death over health, antagonism over empathy, and competition over cooperation. A world whose sanctioned imperialist warfares, anti-immigrant sentiments, occupations, and ruling nationalisms subjugate, disenfranchise, immobilize, disrupt, and exploit (Walia, 2021); spurring border brutalities—keeping us out, keeping us in, literally caging our humanities.

A world where the ongoing processes of deathmaking (Fortier, 2021), dispossession, and wastelanding continue on stolen lands rendering environments and bodies “pollutable,” (Voyles, 2015, p. 9) as extractable resources—humans as inhuman extractable matter-for-profit. A world where accumulating settler deathscapes (Barker, 2018) obscure lines between the living and the dead, conferring peoples and lands as ghosts (Razack, 2012) or hauntings (Dean, 2010); the “unmaking of subjects,” the biopolitical establishment of “non-beings” (Yusoff, 2018, p. 5). The strategic targeting of Indigenous, Black, two spirit, trans, queer, disabled, racialized, aging, street involved, migrant, imprisoned, mad, fat, sick, and poor folk—that liberal multicultural listing for which there are not sufficient alternatives (Berbary, 2020; Tuck & Yang, 2018). The violent construction of the inhuman race to uphold facades of security, economic development, and nation-making for the few. How easy it has become for coercive forces of governmentality to ignore peoples deemed mere apparitions of another time and place.

And even to this very day, the need for some to be convinced toward Black liberations, rematriation of Indigenous lands, redistributions of wealth, and climate justice shows the hypnotic force of upholding such ghost stories by those whom benefit from them. And disturbingly, still for many, especially those with bureaucratic power, such fictional tales are entwined with selective perspectivisms (Yusoff, 2018) and eurowashings which coalesce to shut down and limit meaningful engagements with, teachings of, and possible reimaginings toward worldstoryings or worldsenses (Oyéwùmi, 1997) otherwise. Violent closures of expansive potentialities simply because such possibilities emerge outside of or in departure from narrowly procured, taken-for-granted sur-realities of whiteness—whiteness as a concept, an antagonistic mode, a political formation of power, an extractive ontological state of relationality. And if anything is clear, it is that such whiteness has fallen out of right relation with anything but itself, its own destructive assimilative lure, its own encapsulating dominance; stagnant in its own lack of imagination.

Such lack of right relations otherwise has rendered whiteness out of touch, distracted, unaccountable, and disconnected from pluriversal realities, ways of being, knowing, flourishing, surviving—and ways of humility and humbleness. Whiteness as a mode demands supremacy; demands being apparent. Hegemonic whiteness finds itself seen, heard, and valued; uplifted, recognized, immortalized—even and often in infamy; bolstered by its often-linked structural perks of accumulated wealth, ownership of production, and colony. Whiteness balances between “the scale of structure (apparatus) and the scale of the personal” (la paperson, 2017, p. xv), among the simultaneous temporalities of yesterday, now, tomorrow. Its regime is felt everywhere. And whether structurally or intimately, whiteness as a mode of relationality demands dominance as its deepest desire; as the necessity of its own insecurity.

Living in well relations with whiteness, then, especially when articulated along with wealth, has often protected from threat, making the dangers of the Earth now at times feel new to those previously protected as shifts occur. As deathmaking (Fortier, 2021) finally draws closer to one’s own door. Perhaps the few begin to feel what the many have presently already felt. In particular, the Anthropocene and its promise of extractive capitalisms, fossil fuel economies, and climate destruction has invigorated what some call “new” threats—conjures new dystopic realities of concern. But what privilege that requires. What relations must be refused in order to see dystopias as new. For the ending of worlds has not just begun. Mourning dystopic futurities is only “new” to those who have too easily been able to turn their backs, while the rest have had to watch ours—for many, living under threat has often had to become a constant state of flourishing. As Yusoff (2018) reprimanded,

If the Anthropocene proclaims a sudden concern with the exposures of environmental harm to white liberal communities, it does so in the wake of histories in which these harms have been knowingly exported to Black and Brown communities under the rubric of civilization, progress, modernization, and capitalism. The Anthropocene might seem to offer a dystopic future that laments the end of the world, but imperialism and ongoing (settler) colonialisms have been ending words for as long as they have been inexistence. (p. xiii)

And so, when extinction feels threatening, may instead depend on geopolitical location, racial formations (Omi & Winant, 1994), nationmaking regimes, and capital accumulations or not. The luck of interpellation (Althusser, 1949/1971) being born where you are—you are either called to write history, or to right history as your storied memories are erased, gentrified, denied, unhistoried, and buried over.

Multiple extinctions then, have always already been here, now, present due to the atrocities of imperialist worldmaking that actively and deliberately make death of what we have been, what we are, and what we might become (The Red Nation, 2021; Yusoff, 2018). Threats to humans and more-than-humans are not new. What may feel new is that world unmaking violences may now be able to reach us all. Black and Brown bodies will no longer be the only ones charged with “buffering the violences of the earth” (Yusoff, 2018, p. xiii). And even more complicated, as The Red Deal (The Red Nation, 2021) reminded, is that to blame such threats on all of humanity, is totalizing and accuses the wrong protagonist:

Framing this [crisis] as a panhuman problem or a problem of the species—such as the term “the Anthropocene,” . . .—misses the point. A select few are hoarding the life rafts while also shooting wholes in a sinking ship. Class hatred is warranted. The immiseration of billions sustains the gilded lives of the few . . . we have to draw lines of separation between us and them . . . they aren’t going to put themselves out of business. Nor will the ruling elite put their own system up for debate. (p. 20)

And yet, how else could we expect it to be under capitalism? For as the People’s Agreement wrote, “capitalism . . . is an imperialist system of colonization of the planet” (The People’s Agreement, 2010 in The Red Nation, 2021, p. 43). An imperialist system we all must resist for anything better to become—resist its predation, its monetization and corporatization of relations, its logic of commodification, its resource extraction, and its closures of restoration. Predatory capitalism (West, 2020), which is to simply say; capitalism, has disrupted how we connect, give care, build community, and share wealth (Spade, 2020). It has forced us into systems of under wage exploitation, privatization of property, and competition where giving care itself—for oneself, for each other, for the earth—absurdly somehow has become contradictory to survival.

And as Robinson (1983) taught, capitalism has always been built on such antagonistic relations among ourselves, each other, and our world. And more so those relations have always relied on constructed racial differences—forming and reforming racial identities into necessary hierarchies to deem who owns the means of production and whose labor must be exploited within it—reinventing novel ways to racialize shades and colorisms to maintain “mandatory” differentiations of human value. Wynter (1994) reminded, “this code of ‘Race’ [shades or colourisms] can only be brought to an end with the bringing to an end of ‘our present mode of truth,’ together with an end to the absolutism of its economic categories” (p. 52).

The power of capitalism is fierce, and equally fierce is its correlated necessity of colonialism(s), spurring Estes (2019) to regrettably ask,

Why is it easier for some to imagine the end of fossil fuels than settler colonialism? To imagine green economies and carbon-free [worlds], wind turbines, solar power, and electric bullet train utopias, but not the return of Indigenous lands? It’s not an either/or scenario. Both are possible—and necessary. (Jacobin)

And so, in the entangled mess, we realize we can’t undo racism without undoing capitalism. We can’t undo capitalism without undoing imperialism. We can’t undo imperialism without undoing colonialism. Such mess leaves us all, as Wilson Gilmore (2022) is known to say, having to change everything. And this is something we all can and must work toward if we want a better world than the one in which we currently live. Kaba (2020) reminded us that, “changing everything might sound daunting, but it also means there are many places to start, infinite opportunities to collaborate, and endless imaginative interventions and experiments to create . . . what can we imagine for ourselves and the world” (p. 5)? So back to the opening question. Amid a world wrought with unending division, hierarchies of worth, and politics of desperation; during continued climate destruction, COVID-19 death, housing and health crises, systemic racisms, uprisings, and protests, what is our use?

The Institution

Where’s the use of the institution of academia among it all? How can we, those in but perhaps not of the institution (Harney & Moten, 2013, p. 26), be of use in making mess of this colonial apparatus? How can we queer our own use as academics, as researchers, as teachers? How can we use our bodies, ideologies, discourses, and relations toward terrains of alternatives—as Ahmed (2019) explained, “in ways other than for which they were intended [to] or by those other than for who, they were intended [for]?” (p. 199). How might we disrupt current meanings of professor, academic, scholar, and age-old notions of excellence, success, research, and teaching by making their usage or reusage strange, reorienting, disorienting, disabling; by reflecting, diffracting, and reorganizing through those leaky unhistories, politics, and loving relations that “might otherwise be assumed apart” (Ahmed, 2019, p. 198) from or outside of academia’s concerns, focus, and usefulness?

As Abolition Collective (2018) asked, how might we “refuse to abandon the resources of academia to those who perpetuate the status quo” (p. 5), drawing those of us who are subversive scholars (Halberstam, 2011), radical thinkactors (Berbary, 2020), and renegades harbored within academic spaces toward action for Black, Indigenous, and Queer futurities, and liberatory spaces of encounter (Ahmed, 2019) that bring drastic politic to the forefront for worldsaving possibilities; everywhere. Might we reverse the directionalities of knowledge production to extract from the university toward sustaining ongoing resistances already at work in our communities? Or, as Becoming Coalition et al. (in press) questioned,

Could we reverse the extractive forces of the colonialist institution—reject research that takes from local communities to benefit the academy? Could we refuse research that simply gives back to local community that which is most easily offered yet often excess?

Could we leave behind the need to be “dominant, primary, and expert” to instead become supportive, coalitional, and useful through our labour in solidarity with on-going struggles already begun within our communities?

Could we redirect our academic lives towards offering ourselves, our skills, and our academic learnings to those communities already doing liberatory work? Could we enter in the middle of on-going stories rather than trying to re-write them from the start? Might we, in fact, become justice as embodied knowledge mobilisations put-to-use?

Yet thinking such possibilities within the suffocating frame of the neoliberal institution is hard—and perhaps impossible. And yet, while we might not ever be able to claim real abolition or true decolonization within a capitalist institution on stolen land—could we change something? Strive toward anti-colonialist knowing; detours around exploitation; and liberation of those “incarcerated knowledges” of counter-hegemonic ideas (Halberstam, 2011)? Would even that be worth staying with (Haraway, 2016)? Worth undoing, and unbecoming to turn in another direction, to create cracks toward larger collapse, eventually? Maybe, maybe not—often we think perhaps our liberatory work has to occur outside the academy, in our community, through our parenting—yet, we can’t help but let our politic lead us/follow us/be us everywhere—even into spaces it may fall victim to overwhelming power; in moments where it may be contradictory, juxtaposed, or compromised—it is still at work; judging us, evaluating us, questioning us, motivating us to be better, do better, to keep becoming of more use.

Yet, when we read James (2013) we contend with the possibility that true radical work simply cannot take place within the academy and that in fact

radical subjects seeking activism outside the academy do not try to create a space inside as a final destination point or as an identity marker for radicalism . . . since our institutions are incapable of providing the conditions for radicalism as anything other than performance. (p. 220)

We recognize the impossibility of radicalness beyond mere performance within the academy—performance that works too often to benefit the institution itself by granting the possibility of claiming a radical politic within the walls of the ivory tower. And yet we keep gathering radical thinkactors in our colleagues, students, and communities, accepting “our engagement with academic institutions while asserting our responsibility to be more than mere performers. Hence, we offer ourselves, and encourage our students, to labor for justice” outside of the institution, connected to collectives and coalitions where the potential for radical politic beyond performance is possible (James, 2013, p. 221). And as Walcott (2022) reiterated, even among those “radical subjects” within the academy,

I don’t trust us. We talk about precarity within the university but I’m thinking that maybe it’s not for us to end precarity, it is maybe that all of us MUST become precarious. Which then opens up the question of what kind of risk each of us differently will take according to our own relationship and standing within the universities. And I say that because I’ve been increasingly frustrated by looking at and watching how our struggles have been sold out in the university. What what I call the Trayvon to George Floyd dividend, which has played itself largely out to the language and rhetoric of EDI—but what really is just a kind of distribution of white superiority. That’s what EDI is masking right now. It’s a distribution of white superiority to Black, Indigenous, and POC faces.

And yet, regardless, even if true radicalness within the academy is impossible, it is easy to recognize that there is much work to be done through from within to strive, as Davis (2008) reminded, to “adopt critical habits that require the constant criticism not only of those things we want to change, but of the ways we want to change them and of the tools we use to conceptualize that change” remembering always that “this is not the way [things] are supposed to be and they do not need to remain this way.”

And so, can we do that work, can we try to do something more? To be honest, some days we throw our hands up and think we might just need abolish academia—or at the very least abolish the conditions under which education has become an unattainable, privatized, bourgeoisie, corporate state apparatus made only for the few. The epitome of Denny’s (2021) fears of edutocracy where imperialist sense-making reins as intellectual hegemony emboldened through co-dependency on anti-intellectualisms, persistent acriticalities, and EDI initiatives that simply support liberal moves to innocence (Tuck & Yang, 2012), rather than unsettle the organizing structures of the machine of empire itself. All moves toward a form of what Bristol (2010) might call, “pedagogy of hopelessness” toward any possibility for truly diverse academic futurities (p. 172).

For some, education itself then may feel under threat. Threatened anew by censorship, liberatory revolutions, critique, refusals, and resurgences of students wanting more, wanting different; demanding otherwise. Threatened by the deconstruction of dominant traditions, normalities, and status quo; threatened by diversity, Black initiatives, so-called decolonizing curriculums, and shifts in representation, even in innocuous liberal forms. Fear, guilt, fragility, saviourism—all converging to create for some a loss of positionality, loss of footing, loss of confidence and security in the institution itself, in the abilities to heal, teach, and respond to the world; in the role of professors, supervisors, staff, and students—in our purpose and usefulness.

Where must we each turn as the embodied enactments of that institution? What must we reject, resist, move from, while we move toward, reimagine, liberate, and pluralversalize (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018) what has become, what is to come? How must we here today transform to be more useful bodies, activators, animators, or defenders against violent status quo (Ahmed, 2019)? And can we do it in time? Can we expand from and resist against the violence of ordinariness that persists in the academy, and instead engage toward more radical values that get at the root of what must become otherwise of us to be of or remain of use—and, in particular, we must, especially in the current moment, begin with more robust expectations of what promoting diversity means and does—or more importantly, doesn’t do.

Capitalist re-branding, re-marketing, or re-presenting are simply moves toward institutional preservation—not moves to liberation (Mowatt, 2022). Such acts simply shift ocularist effects by infusing racialized bodies or commodify equity as slogan-esque “stuff” to be owned as performative consumption. Both moves render diversity corrupt and simply insert bodies and representation into existing violent structures—ideological and economical (Nash, 2019). And as James (2013) reminded, “if capital is financing our freedom movements, they are not freedom movements.”

Such moves instead render diversity as lacking grounded coalitional politics, as lacking specific structural demands, and as lacking a move outside of, what Taiwo (2021) would call, elite capture—the dangerous practice of directing attention away from changing social systems, toward instead simply speaking on the behalf of the most marginalized folks who haven’t even entered the rooms. Elites, rather than building new rooms in new places with all peoples, simply engaging in trickle down justice by just doing those acts that are easily surrendered, seeding ground as to relieve guilt, create public acceptance, and “appear” liberatory. In this sense, current academic diversity initiatives rarely rework the ecology of precarious existence toward true structural liberation; at best they promote tokenism, isolation, and conformity; where diverse bodies “merely register the performance of diversity, a box university administrators can check, a requirement the university can fulfill” (Davis, 2020). To continue, Davis (2008) discussed,

That word diversity upsets me . . . the word has colonized so much of what we were once able to talk about with much greater specificity—all we have to do now is evoke diversity. And what does diversity mean? Is it precisely only about that visual effect?—I’m not an opponent of diversity, I am an advocate for strong conceptions of diversity. You can have difference that truly makes a difference . . . but you can also have difference that doesn’t make a difference, difference that allows the machine to keep functioning in the same way and at times even more efficiently and effectively. If we embrace weak notions of diversity, it is a concept that promotes a hidden individualization of problems and solutions that ought to be collective. It is a concept that unless we redefine it can leave structures of inequity and injustice intact.

Diversity then has become a catch all for performative allyship—and while many importantly support targeted hires of those who have be systematically excluded in academic spaces, we must also do the work to change the unwelcoming climates, colonialist expectations for scholarship, capitalist relations, and conceptualizations of professionalism, excellence, and impact grounded in hegemonic whiteness, English supremacy, elitism, competition, and individualism—ways of being that hurt us all, that keep us from rest, and pit us against each other, even among friends. And while so much of this work has fallen onto the shoulders of those who already did the work, lived the work, and required the work to be done for their own humanity or their own hopes for humanity; this work is everyone’s—everyone reading, this is ours together to bear in various magnitudes. As Lopez (Personal communication for class Rec 201: Leisure and liberation, September, 2020) reminded, “we are all part of these events, none of us are exempt from these political conversations” and we all must take responsibility for them.

Yet for so many, their identity has held them back, out of fear, out of indifference, out of “staying out of the way” with so many mixed messages about whose work this is to do, whose voices must be loudest, who should lead and who should follow. So many deferring responsibility and so many others carrying the load they should instead unload and rest from. And this is where identity politics has been misappropriated, misunderstood, and used as an escape from joining the struggle. And even more dangerous, as in a recent interview, Barbara Smith (2021), who coined the term Identity Politics in the Combahee River Collective (CRC) Statement reminded us, today many are relying on the identity, without the politic; identity does not always equate to political consciousness, it does not mean one can always articulate the ways in which power relations manipulate our possibilities for existence. And shared identity does not secure being on the same page, connecting as kin, or sharing political desires. As Taylor (2017) wrote,

The CRC was clear that identity politics was not exclusionary whereby only those experiencing a particular oppression could fight against it. . . Rather it was an analysis to validate Black women’s [identity] experiences while simultaneously creating an opportunity to become politically active to fight for the issues most important to them . . . [it was to] call for solidarity, not by subsuming your struggles to help someone else; it was intended to strengthen the political commitments from other groups by getting them to recognize how the different struggles were related to each other and connected under capitalism. It called for greater awareness and understanding [across identity] not less. (p. 11)

Identity was seen as a step toward political consciousness, but becoming politically active was the goal. Similarly, hooks (2003) warned,

the ability to see and describe one’s own reality is a significant step in the process of self-recovery, but it is only a beginning. When the idea that describing one’s own woe becomes synonymous with developing critical political consciousness, the progress of movements are stalled. (p. 3)

And finally, as Taiwo (2020) reiterated, “Contra the old expression, pain whether borne of oppression or not is a poor teacher. Suffering is partial, short-sighted, and self-absorbed. We shouldn’t have a politics that expects different: oppression is not a prep school” for political development. And while shared experiences due to identity can absolutely build bridges among us, they are not necessary to build the politic we need. Politic itself can be enduring, responsive, rooted, and coalitional, it can connect us even athwart identities.

Reliance then on identity exclusive formations for liberatory futurities is perhaps what must actually be diversified; and this is not against “safe spaces” or the desire for specified identity convergences—but diversified in that rather than focus only on identity to bind us, the focus could perhaps more usefully be on building a strong shared politic across identities, regardless of identities—a politic of coalition, of radical hope; a politic of solidarity. As West (2020) reminded,

In the end we say, we are going to be in solidarity. And that’s all we’ve ever had in human history . . . there’s never a guarantee that what we’re trying to do is something we can put off . . . but it is a gift we build on and say, yes, that is worth our energy, our vitality, how we look at the world, how we feel, how we act. That’s what it is to be a revolutionary, or a radical, or somebody who wants to be decent enough to fundamentally transform the structures of domination that are coming at us.

What then if our greatest tool for liberation is politic not shared identity? Strong shared politic that solidified us in deep solidarity across identities, across social locations? What if we stood together against those social violences that eventually hurt us all by recognizing that, as Moten put it, “it’s fucked up for you, in the same way that we’ve already recognized that it’s fucked up for us . . . that this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly, you stupidmotherfucker, you know?” (Harney & Moten, 2013, p. 10). What then if identity wasn’t what gave us permission to act toward justice? What. If. Identity. Wasn’t. What. Gave. Us. Permission. To. Act. Toward. Justice? Can we trust shared politic more than we can trust shared identity. Can more of our organizing rely less on the basis of shared identity or experience for solidarity? For we are reminded that “white people trying to ‘ally’ with Black people on the basis of being proletarians isn’t solidarity; that’s not what solidarity means. Struggling alongside someone because you see yourself in them is at best empathy, struggling alongside someone when you can’t see yourself in them is solidarity (disney was a mistake, 2020, July 28). Such politic requires collective commitment against domination, period.

Utopias

Such politic must be felt, supported, and valued within the academy—and even though some will argue the academy is no place for enacting change, we may just simply need to read or live more—because for now, we want a radical politic everywhere in whatever form is possible. For us, right now, strong liberatory politic must become part of our existence, academic and otherwise, wherever it finds itself, and must resound from all corners of the institution—a rejection of the maintenance of what Lee (2018) might call the tradition of the “establishment men” (p. 4)—those policing and privileging eurocentric epistemologies of empire at the expense of pluriversal notions of everything else. Education must change everything. Education must be enacted and embodied ethics. As Singh (2018) argued, “education must be ‘a transformative act of becoming profoundly vulnerable to other lives, other life forms, and other ‘things’ that we have not yet accounted for or that appear only marginally related to us” (p. 67).

To heal itself then, the current university must dismantle itself as is. Transform, and eventually severe its ties to empire, engage in deep relations, and divest from its traditions of apolitical neutrality. It must sit down, sit back, listen, unlearn, and join in the struggle alongside movements toward another world; or render itself and ourselves, useless. And academics of all identities must not defer such responsibility. As Taiwo (2020) taught, “accountability is all of ours to bear” (p. 4) realizing that if we are to be of use to human and more-than-human alike, it requires us all to acknowledge that our worlds have not been, and are not now, the way they are supposed to be. We must strive collectively toward critical habits that reverse, (re)use, and reorient those tools often relied on for mere performative justice within those spaces in which we find our livelihoods embedded (Becoming Coalition et al., in press; Bristol, 2010; Denny, 2021).

To be of use, we must work together toward reconfiguring those tools and ourselves into alignments that make more meaningful, less extractive uses of our connections to power and resources, engaging our academic privileges, while igniting a radical politic to retaliate against that which was designed to silence, erase, insulate, burn us down (Canning, 2021), and fragment us toward inaction. We must not leave justice up to someone else—to someone else’s class, to someone else’s research, to a week that may easily be skipped. Instead, as Zora Neale Hurston commanded, “Speak up. Rage. Because the time for silence has passed” (Martis, 2020, p. 238).

For now, as always, we are left with more questions than answers. More openings than closures. And, luckily, more hope than hopelessness. As Ahmed (2017) reminded,

Hope animates a struggle; hope gives us a sense that there is a point to working things out, working things through. Hope does not only or always point toward the future, but carriers us through when the terrain is difficult, when the path we follow makes it harder to proceed. Hope is behind us when we have to work for something to be possible. (p. 2)

And so, with an educated hope, we move forward not toward “new” dystopias but toward the anticipatory not-yets of utopias-to-come. Bloch’s notions of “concrete utopias” that are insurgent, transformative, and filled with potentials of our coalitional struggles (in Muñoz, 2009). Defiant utopias, guided by the “hopes of a collective, an emergent group, or even the oddball who is the one who dreams for many” (Muñoz, 2009, p. 3). And as Halberstam (2011) explained,

The dream of an alternative way of being is often confused with utopian thinking and then dismissed as naïve, simplistic, or a blatant misunderstanding of the nature of power in modernity. And yet the possibilities of other forms of being, other forms of knowing, a world with different sites for justice and injustice, a mode of being where the emphasis falls less on money and work and competition and more on cooperation, trade, and sharing, animates all kinds of knowledge projects and should not be dismissed as irrelevant or naïve. (p. 52)

Then, like Belcourt’s (2020) book A History of my brief body, this writing is “for those for whom utopia is a rallying call,” encouraging us to ignite the “need to write against the unwritability of utopia . . . to detonate the glass walls of habit that entrap us all” (pp. 9–10). Perhaps turning toward utopia through our collective longings is what it means to be of use in today’s world.