Academic Southernness as Affective Boldness: A Quarantined Testimonial

The Margin as Radical Openness and the Quarantine as Radical Enclosure

In the seminal and extremely sensitive piece “choosing the margin as a space of radical openness,” hooks elaborates on her positionality as a scholar, on moving out of one’s place while disrupting oppressive boundaries, and on inhabiting the margin, a conceptual space that defies realities of choice and location. In this text, hooks points towards the political question of offering marginal ways of seeing, theorizing, and making culture in hegemonic spaces of knowledge production.

While conceiving marginality, Hook’s piece theorizes from a position of evoked pain, emotional upheaval, and brokenness:

I have confronted silence, inarticulateness. when I say, then, that these words emerge from suffering, I refer to that personal struggle to name that location from which I come to voice - that space of my theorizing. Often when the radical voice speaks about domination, we are speaking to those who dominate. Their presence change the nature and direction of our words. Language is also a place of struggle. (Hooks, 2000, p. 304)

Since my first experiences in Europe, being a Brazilian was my most significant marker as a scholar. The openness with which I behaved, the empiricism of the research thematic and methods I engaged with, and the colloquiality of my writings were always evaluated by peers and supervisors according to their perceived Brazilianness.

During my first postdoc experience, as the academic service duties pilled on in my mailbox, I developed the strategy of creating a phrase bank for my communication with students and partner universities as a means to downsize its perceived colloquiality. As these communications were sent recurrently, I collected sentences already written by (northern) peers and supervisors, and replicated their previous announcements, letters, and emails. It was with great surprise that I saw these borrowed written pieces equally quarantined and scrutinized in endless revisions. As pointed by Hooks, language is a place of struggle, which is particularly true when it comes from a southern email address.

Mostly, of course, we are not there. We never ‘arrive’ or ‘can’t stay’. (Hooks, 2000, p. 306)

In this same experience, accumulating two part-time positions in different departments, I decided to write and apply for a full-time research-based interdisciplinary grant. In the same year that my PhD was granted an international prize in Mexico, I asked for the endorsement of my postdoc supervisor and the head of my research unit, as demanded by the funding institution to which I was planning to apply. Surprisingly, I received the answer that I was not going to be endorsed by either, because I did not have, and I quote, “the theory.” While mesmerized by the image of “the theory” being a token passed from generation to generation, from one northern scholar hands to another in secret rituals to which I was denied access to, I realized that despite being already there—I had a research position in that same department already—I was not really “there”. Even as an awarded scholar, I was quarantined, treated with mistrust and suspicion, and not (yet) allowed to be inside.

Reflecting on these and other similar encounters, I understand this form of marginality as a quarantine. As a quarantined southern scholar, I realized that I did not have the same worth, or the same values practiced by the northern academic culture.

For hooks, inhabiting the margins is understanding both the center and the periphery. Being in quarantine is being isolated even while being within. Despite being in an absolute privileged position, being one of the southern scholars working in the North, I was quarantined and confronted daily with the hierarchies of knowledge and the differences in the practices that constitute academia in one conceptual latitude and the other. This triggered a reflection on what are the fundamental distinctions between southern and northern scholarship. Action, embeddedness, and solidarity are offered, in the next sessions, as possible markers of an academic southernness.

Academic Southernness: Improvising Alternatives

Marginality (. . .) is also the site of radical possibility, a space of resistance (. . .) a central location for the production of a counter-hegemonic discourse that is not found in words but in habits of being and the way one lives. (Hooks, 2000, p. 306)

For Hooks, the marginal position, when chosen and not imposed, can open a path towards individual and collective transformation, making ways for a radically creative space of action and reflection. Marginality as a location is a space of radical openness and a multitude of improvised possibilities. In opposition to the quarantined location of Southern scholarship within global hierarchies of knowledge, I propose a formulation of an engaged and pragmatic academic southernness, based on the articulation of southern urban practice and successive affective bold re-territorializations.

In “Notes on a southern urban practice”, Bhan (2019) emphasizes the difficult and sometimes absent dialogue between theory and practice when it comes to engaging with cities and the field of urban studies, given theory’s claimed unrootednness on the one hand and a narrow understanding of practice on the other, which not only creates artificial separations between disciplinary knowledge but also defines strict positions of different practitioners, in this case “the planer”, “the activist”, and “the academic”. While in this essay Bhan aims to expand a vocabulary of urban practices as ways of theorizing the urban from the South, I am focused here in his conceptualization of southern urban practice and southernness.

In his argument, Bhan conceives the South as “moving peripheries” (Bhan, 2019, p. 4), as a conceptual latitude repositioning its boundaries within hegemonies of knowledge, dominant practices, and marginalities. Southernness, therefore, is the quality of confronting, repositioning, and shifting dogmatic and hegemonic positions and practices within a given location. A southern practice is, thus, contextual, rooted in a southern mode of inquiry, and actively engaging with the existing relationships in a place. Southernness, while being a notion entrenched in contexts of inequalities, precarities, and vulnerabilities, is embedded with pragmatism. The constant repositions and movements are brought by the everlasting sense of “urgency”, leading to uncertainty and the conceptual figure of improvisation:

Acknowledging the imperative to ‘do something’ is not just to imply action that seeks to fix or make better; it can equally suggest a constant moving to stay in place, to maintain status, to consolidate the ground beneath one’s feet for a little while longer. It also indicates that the ethos of such practice is more forgiving of imperfect, uncertain moves. (Bhan, 2019, p. 14)

Southernness, as the adjective of a southern practice, embodies being “incremental, uncertain, temporally fluid, speculative, transversal and rooted “ (Bhan, 2019, p.14) in a project in which practices and practitioners “challenge dominant forms of knowledge and practice, and a commitment to remaining rooted in the specific geographies of these peripheries at different historical conjunctures” (Bhan, 2019, p.15)

The emphasis on practices and practitioners leads us to the notion of affective bold re-territorializations. Writing on Brazilian scholarship facing moments of (successive) crises, Hutta (2019) interprets their way of maneuvering, reinterpreting, and re-enacting their positionality in a constantly unstable Brazilian academic environment as relentless affective boldness that constantly re-territorializes the spaces of academic practice and discourse.

Building a narrative that begins with the worldwide rise of ultra-right conservative movements gaining political power but, more importantly, de-territorializing spaces and subjectivities with the spread of disinformation, Hutta describes the resistance movements and the protagonism of scholars within the academic context and beyond in what he considers an increasingly affective political conjuncture. Such conjuncture invokes constant movements of (re)territorializing spaces as actions that bring “the material and semiotic conditions for inhabiting spaces” (Hutta, 2019).

Amidst a legitimacy crisis of academia, triggered by disinformation and defamation campaigns from conservative ultra-right supporters that have de-territorialized the public sphere in the Brazilian context, Hutta claims that there is a process of affective re-territorialization of academia, the space of university, and public debate, performed by academics and activists—which increasingly are the same practitioners. While the ultra-right mobilizes disenchantment, apathy, and anxiety—quite the same sentiments mobilized in a quarantine (both in figurative or literal terms)—transformative ways of engaging with the territory mobilize joy and boldness. I add here engagement and solidarity.

What struck Hutta in his encounter with the Brazilian academia’s territory was not only the way the different scholars paid a close attention to what he calls subaltern practices, but also the way their speech was “affectively delivered that conveyed to me a commitment to affirm the university as a space of resistance—and that instigated what I call ‘bold’ de- and reterritorializations” (Hutta, 2019). Demonstrating alternative ways of inhabiting academia, affective boldness shows different tactics to overcome a quarantined sentiment by boldly reclaiming hegemonic spaces:

These affirmations were re-territorializations, as they forged capacities to inhabit academic spaces otherwise, establishing multiple connections to subaltern territorialities that have already been crafted elsewhere(. . ..) Boldness is among the affects that seem of great relevance in reshaping agential capacities in the current political conjuncture(. . ..) While boldness implies an awareness of risks and dangers, it is simultaneously associated with a set of resistant everyday practices. (Hutta, 2019)

Combined, the boldness of affectively re-territorializing academia and the southern practice of being in constant movement, triggering, in many ways, improvised alternative ways of theorizing in general, and particularly the urban, builds what I here call academic southernness.

Academic Southernness and the Pandemic Crisis

Moving towards the end of my argument, I now elaborate on the abyssal difference between southern and northern academic approaches amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. The isolation started earlier in Italy, were I am currently virtually located, which gave me a couple of weeks of being ahead in observing how the different academic groups from which I belong to—located in the center and in the margin—rearticulated themselves, virtually reterritorializing, given the current crisis and its mandatory isolation.

Along the past weeks, in the anglophone northern context in which I am partially immersed, even if quarantined, several “quarantine schools” emerged, with syllabi being assembled as ways to move forward new theorization attempts. Readers available, live debates announced online, and several reflection pieces dominated passionate worldwide debates. Reflections of well-established names, such as Agamben ¹ and Harvey ² , were exhaustively scrutinized. Urgent calls for papers blossomed with the emerging COVID-19 Spring. The northern urge to theorize ahead presented itself in its best features.

Meanwhile, down “South”, while the right-wing conservative president continues in its affective deterritorialization of the public debate, to use Hutta’s categories, different groups of Brazilian scholars were in a nonstop articulation with social movements and leaderships of informal settlements, engaging in their response and preparation for the pandemic (figure 1).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Meeting of the community leaders in Paraisópolis, an informal settlement in Sao Paulo amidst the Covid 19. Author: Eduardo Knapp.

In Sao Paulo, an important collaborative cartographic effort emerged, mobilizing scholars via the Facebook group “Coronavírus, periferia e áreas precárias” (Coronavirus, periphery and precarious areas) ³ . While actively engaging in sharing data and building different cartographies to collectively identify priority areas of action, activists, academics, and social movement leaders co-organized crowed-funding initiatives, the collection of donations for the innumerous informal workers inhabiting quarantined territories in different Brazilian cities. In this network, I see relentless researchers pausing their own projects to engage in a collective effort of action towards minimizing the health and economic impacts on peripheral territories.

As I finalize my personal COVID-19 reflection, afar from my own southern context while quarantined in northern academia, I continually browse through my social media feeds searching for news and actions, from “here” and “there”. While the northern is “Othering the virus” (Meinhof, 2020), I am stroked by a message from a colleague, an environmental planning professor in a federal Brazilian university. Currently in self-isolation in Sao Paulo after having her own northern mission in Europe cancelled, this scholar is mobilizing the aforementioned social media group to help an informal worker that lives on her street—literally—safe-guarding parked cars. With none of its costumers out, the man has no income. With no personal documents, he cannot apply for the emergency universal income the Brazilian legislative power recently approved. This colleague and other scholars instead of formulating the next catch phrase or a bold critical argument, are now struggling to solve one man’s citizenship-less status. These are scholars in a constant move, daily embodying academic southernness.

Academic southernness implies acting. It means affectively engaging in practices and with practitioners throughout diverse territories of precarity, demonstrating personal engagement, embeddedness, and bold solidarities amidst a context of (endemic) crises.