Writing Democracy: The Political Turn in and Beyond the Trump Era 2019944174, 9781138603103, 9780429469169

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
List of Images
List of Contributors
Acknowledgments
1 Introduction: What Does Democracy Look Like?
PART I: Mapping the Political Turn
2 Composition’s Left and the Struggle for Revolutionary Consciousness
3 “Organize as If It Were Possible to Create a Movement That Will Change the World”: An Interview with Angela Davis
4 Marxist Ethics for Uncertain Times
5 A Pedagogy for the Political Turn
PART II: Variations on the Political Turn
6 “I’d Like to Overthrow Capitalism, But Meanwhile, I Would Like the Nazis to be Completely Demoralized”: An Interview with Dana L. Cloud
7 Audience Addressed? Audience Invoked? Audience Organized!
8 Taking a Lead from Student Movements in a “Political Turn”
9 Nudging Ourselves Toward a Political Turn
10 Sustainable Audiences/Renewable Products: Penn State’s Student Farm, Business Writing, and Community Outreach
11 The Political Turn and the Two-Year College: Equity- Centered Partnerships and the Opportunities of Democratic Reform
PART III: Taking the Political Turn
12 How Does It Feel to be a Problem at the 9/11 Museum?
13 Dismantling the Wall: Analyzing the Rhetorics of Shock and Writing Political Transformation
14 Pass the Baton: Lessons from Historic Examples of the Political Turn, 1967–1968
15 The Visa Border Labyrinths: 310 Colombian and U.S. Artists and Scholars Write Their Way Through
16 Conclusion: Further Notes on the Political Turn
Index

Citation preview

Writing Democracy

Writing Democracy: The Political Turn in and Beyond the Trump Era calls on the field of writing studies to take up a necessary agenda of social and economic change in its classrooms, its scholarship, and its communities to challenge the rise of neoliberalism and right-wing nationalism. Grown out of an extended national dialogue among public intellectuals, academic scholars, and writing teachers, collectively known as the Writing Democracy Project, this book creates a strategic roadmap for how to reclaim the progressive and political possibilities of our field in response to the “twilight of neoliberalism” (Cox and Nilsen), ascendant right-wing nationalism at home (Trump) and abroad (Le Pen, Golden Dawn, UKIP), and hopeful radical uprisings (Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, Arab Spring). As such, this book tracks the emergence of a renewed left wing in rhetoric and activism post-2008, suggests how our work as teachers, scholars, and administrators can bring this new progressive framework into our institutions and then moves outward to our role in activist campaigns that are reshaping public debate. Part history, part theory, this book will be an essential read for faculty, graduate students, and advanced undergraduate students in composition and rhetoric and related fields focused on progressive pedagogy, university-community partnerships, and politics. Shannon Carter is a professor of English at Texas A&M-Commerce, where she teaches courses in community writing and digital storytelling. Her publications include articles in College English, CCC, and Community Literacy Journal, and The Way Literacy Lives: Rhetorical Dexterity and the “Basic” Writer (SUNY Press, 2008). With Deborah Mutnick in 2012, she edited a special issue of Community Literacy Journal emerging from the first Writing Democracy conference in 2011, which won the 2012 Best Public Intellectual Special Issue from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. Her current book project traces the history of community writing alternatively designed to reify and resist racial injustice in her conservative, relatively isolated university town, which is also the subject of a digital humanities project funded, in part, by NEH.

Deborah Mutnick is a professor of English at Long Island University Brooklyn and author of Writing in an Alien World: Basic Writing and the Struggle for Equality in Higher Education. Other publications appear in a range of journals and edited collections. She is a member of the Editorial Board of Science & Society: A Journal of Marxist Thought and Analysis and a co-founder with Shannon Carter of Writing Democracy. Currently, she is researching and writing about Richard Wright’s political, intellectual, and literacy development and his enduring cultural and political relevance. Stephen Parks is the author of Class Politics: The Movement for the Students, Right to Their Own Language and Gravyland: Writing Beyond the Curriculum in the City of Brotherly Love, as well as a textbook, Writing Communities. He is the founder of New City Community Press; co-founder/board chair of Syrians for Truth and Justice; and the editor of Studies in Writing and Rhetoric as well as Working and Writing for Change, Parlor Press. Jessica Pauszek is an assistant professor of English and Director of Writing at Texas A&M University-Commerce. Her work has appeared in CCC, Community Literacy Journal, Literacy in Composition Studies, and Reflections. She is the coeditor of Best of the Journals in Rhetoric and Composition and Writing and Working for Change series. Her current book project explores working-class community literacy practices of the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers as well as examines an archival curation project alongside community members in the context of precarity.

Routledge Research in Writing Studies

Writing Center Talk Over Time A Mixed-Method Study Jo Mackiewicz Writing Support for International Graduate Students Enhancing Transition and Success Shyam Sharma Rhetorical Strategies for Professional Development Investment Mentoring in Classrooms and Workplaces Elizabeth J. Keller Digital Reading and Writing in Composition Studies Edited by Mary R. Lamb and Jennifer Parrott Writing Democracy The Political Turn in and Beyond the Trump Era Edited by Shannon Carter, Deborah Mutnick, Stephen Parks, and Jessica Pauszek

Writing Democracy The Political Turn in and Beyond the Trump Era

Edited by Shannon Carter, Deborah Mutnick, Stephen Parks, and Jessica Pauszek

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Shannon Carter, Deborah Mutnick, Stephen Parks, Jessica Pauszek to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Library of Congress Control Number: 2019944174 ISBN: 978-1-138-60310-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-46916-9 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Contents

List of Images List of Contributors Acknowledgments 1 Introduction: What Does Democracy Look Like?

ix xi xiii 1

S H A N N O N C A RT E R , D E B O R A H M U T N I C K , S T E P H E N PA R K S , A N D J E S S I C A PAU S Z E K

PART I

Mapping the Political Turn

25

2 Composition’s Left and the Struggle for Revolutionary Consciousness

27

JOH N T R I M BU R

3 “Organize as If It Were Possible to Create a Movement That Will Change the World”: An Interview with Angela Davis

51

L AT OYA LY D I A S AW Y E R A N D B E N K U E B R I C H

4 Marxist Ethics for Uncertain Times

60

NA NCY W ELCH

5 A Pedagogy for the Political Turn

82

DEBOR A H M U T N ICK

PART II

Variations on the Political Turn

109

6 “I’d Like to Overthrow Capitalism, But Meanwhile, I Would Like the Nazis to be Completely Demoralized”: An Interview with Dana L. Cloud

111

S T E P H E N PA R K S

viii Contents 7 Audience Addressed? Audience Invoked? Audience Organized!

123

SETH KAH N

8 Taking a Lead from Student Movements in a “Political Turn” 130 VA N I K A N N A N

9 Nudging Ourselves Toward a Political Turn

138

PAU L F E I G E N B AU M

10 Sustainable Audiences/Renewable Products: Penn State’s Student Farm, Business Writing, and Community Outreach

150

GEOFFR EY CLEGG

11 The Political Turn and the Two-Year College: EquityCentered Partnerships and the Opportunities of Democratic Reform

162

DA R I N L . J E N S E N

PART III

Taking the Political Turn

175

12 How Does It Feel to be a Problem at the 9/11 Museum?

177

TA M A R A I S S A K

13 Dismantling the Wall: Analyzing the Rhetorics of Shock and Writing Political Transformation

192

S T E V E N A LVA R E Z

14 Pass the Baton: Lessons from Historic Examples of the Political Turn, 1967–1968

206

S H A N N O N C A RT E R

15 The Visa Border Labyrinths: 310 Colombian and U.S. Artists and Scholars Write Their Way Through

235

TA M E R A M A R KO

16 Conclusion: Further Notes on the Political Turn

261

D E B O R A H M U T N I C K , S H A N N O N C A RT E R , S T E P H E N PA R K S , J E S S I C A PAU S Z E K

Index

273

List of Images

15.1 PBM South Fronteras 2018: art, conversations, and research collaborations with immigrants in East Boston

235

List of Contributors

Steven Alvarez  is an associate professor of English at St. John’s University. He is the author of Brokering Tareas: Mexican Immigrant Families Translanguaging Homework Literacies and Community Literacies en Confianza: Learning from Bilingual After-School Programs. Geoffrey Clegg is an assistant professor of Business and Technical Writing at Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Texas. Dana Cloud is an independent scholar-activist and former Professor of Communications and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University and the University of Texas. Her scholarship engages with the connections between Marxism, Feminism and Public Sphere theory, with a continual focus on how truth is established in the context of collective activism and social movements. Paul Feigenbaum is an associate professor in the Department of English at Florida International University and Co-Editor of the Community Literacy Journal. Tamara Issak is an assistant professor in the Institute for Core Studies-­ First Year Writing at St. John’s University in New York City. Darin L. Jensen teaches writing at Des Moines Area Community College in Iowa. He researches professional and pedagogical issues in writing studies. Seth Kahn  teaches courses in writing and rhetoric, writes about academic labor activism, and “serves as a union thug” at West Chester University of PA. Vani Kannan  is an assistant professor of English at Lehman College, CUNY. She teaches composition, literature, and creative writing courses, and co-directs the WAC program. Ben Kuebrich is an assistant professor of English and Journalism at West Chester University.

xii  List of Contributors Tamera Marko specializes in transnational writing in social justice arts. She is the Elma Lewis Center Executive Director in the Social Justice Center at Emerson College. LaToya Lydia Sawyer, assistant professor of English at St. John’s University, researches Black women’s agency in online spaces. Her Ph.D. is in Composition and Rhetoric from Syracuse University. John Trimbur  is a professor in the Writing, Literature & Publishing department at Emerson College. His latest book is the forthcoming Grassroots Literacy and the Written Record: Asbestos Activism in South Africa. Nancy Welch  is the author of Living Room: Teaching Public Writing in a Privatized World and co-editor of Composition in the Age of Austerity and Unruly Rhetorics. She is a professor of English at the University of Vermont where she also helped found the faculty union.

Acknowledgments

This collection represents a culmination of conversations that began in earnest in 2010 with an application for a National Endowment for the Humanities, Building Bridges Grant, intended to promote “civil discourse.” Deborah and Shannon proposed an ambitious, three-day event designed to revive the American Guide Series, a series of travel books about everyday life in each state funded by the Federal Writers, Project (FWP), an offshoot of the New Deal era Works Progress Administration in the 1930s. To that end, we invited more than twenty of the scholars who most influenced our own work to serve as featured speakers and discussion leaders, many of whose work with communities beyond the university anticipates what we are here calling the “political turn.” Even though NEH declined to fund our proposal, the immediate and unreserved enthusiasm expressed by these same individuals helped propel us forward with what would become the Writing Democracy Project. Thus, we persisted. From the very beginning, some participants strongly encouraged us to unapologetically politicize our project; Nancy Welch, for example, immediately challenged the NEH program’s focus on “civil discourse” as serving the neoliberal impulse that guides all US policy. In response, she proposed we consider instead how “uncivil rhetoric” can disrupt injustice in ways civil discourse perpetuates it. We continued to pursue an increasingly politicized version of the FWP at a coffee shop at CCCC in 2010, where we met with others who had expressed interest in working with us. There, we birthed the idea of holding a significantly scaled-back version of the NEH-funded conference we originally envisioned as a way to launch this quickly evolving concept of what would soon become Writing Democracy with the conference theme “Writing Democracy: A Rhetoric of (T)here” to be hosted at Texas A&M University-Commerce, Shannon’s home institution and, by 2017, Jess’s as well. We remain eternally grateful to those who conspired with us in a crowded corner of the conference hotel in Louisville, Kentucky, as well as the more than 100 participants who joined us in Texas the following March in 2011, an event that would ultimately mark the official launching point for Writing Democracy (WD).

xiv Acknowledgments Thanks, especially, to the seven featured speakers who helped set the tone for this emerging project, including Jerrold Hirsch, the historian from Truman State University who most informed and inspired ­Deborah and Shannon’s understanding of the original FWP with his book, Portrait of America: A Cultural History of the Federal Writers Project (2003) as well as David Gold, John Duffy, Nancy Welch, Michelle Hall Kells, David Jolliffe, and Elenore Long – all of whom remained involved in the WD project at various points in the intervening years. Nor would the inaugural WD conference in 2011 have been possible were it not for the generous funding and related support of Texas A&M-­Commerce, the College of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Art (CHSSA), the ­Federation of North Texas Area Colleges and Universities, and Humanities Texas. We wish to thank Michael Moore, then editor of the Community Literacy Journal, who was a dream to work with over the next year as we collaborated with several of the keynoters to expand their presentations in Commerce into articles for our special issue titled, “Writing Democracy.” Contributors include Jerrold Hirsch, Nancy Welch, Elenore Long, David Jolliffe, and Michelle Hall Kells. We are also grateful to Michael Moore for submitting this issue to compete for the Council of Editors of Learned Journal’s award for Best Public Intellectual Issue, which we were honored to receive in 2012. Thanks for this honor go to Michael, Community Literacy Journal, CELJ, and the Modern Languages Association. Every year since, we’ve been able to host workshops at CCCC ­(2012–2017), which drew growing audiences and increasingly animated discussions. For these opportunities, we express much gratitude to past CCCC chairs, the Executive Board, and reviewers, and, of course, the expansive, hard-working staff upon whose labor absolutely everything else depends. The inspiration, depth, breadth, and complexities represented in this volume came from the many faculty, graduate students, and community activists who participated in and presented to these annual workshops, many of whose work appears in this volume. We’re especially grateful to previous CCCC chairs Howard Tinberg (2013) and Adam Banks (2014), whose support and advocacy made it possible for us to bring to our field’s flagship conference human-rights activists John Carlos (2013) and Angela Davis (2014), who spent afternoons in deep, animated conversations with us in crowded conference rooms during our Writing Democracy workshops before delivering their own keynote addresses at the CCCC opening sessions. We could not be more grateful to Drs. Carlos and Davis for the significant contributions they made to our developing vision for Writing Democracy. Further driving our vision and determination as we began taking the explicitly political turn represented in this volume are the many direct contributions made by featured speakers at our WD workshops over the years. In addition to those speakers already mentioned, we extend our

Acknowledgments  xv ­ arvey gratitude to Carmen Kynard, Patrick Berry, Kurt Spellmeyer, H J.  Graff, Laura Rogers, Ralph Cintron, Laurie Grobman, and Wendy ­Hesford. We are especially grateful to Jacqueline Jones-Royster who has been a generous, kind mentor throughout much of the life of this project. We are indebted, as well, to our editors at Routledge, especially our original editor, Felisa Salvago Keyes, who expressed much enthusiasm for the project from the outset, encouraged us to submit, and ushered it through the outside-review phase with lightning speed, and Richa Kohli, who has patiently guided us through the complex procedures required at the other end of this process as our collection works its way into print. Equally important: this book would not have been possible—literally but also conceptually—without the thoughtful, careful, helpful, and encouraging feedback from the anonymous reviewers who responded to our proposal quickly and with much enthusiasm. Finally, we’re incredibly grateful to the final round of outside reviewers who kindly agreed to respond to this project once complete, generously agreeing to a lightning-fast timetable and accepting no compensation beyond our gratitude: Darin Jensen, Des Moines Area Community ­College; Liz Lane, University of Memphis; Elenore Long, Arizona State University; Tony Scott, Syracuse University; Don Unger, University of Mississippi. Their feedback made all the difference.

1 Introduction What Does Democracy Look Like? Shannon Carter, Deborah Mutnick, Stephen Parks, and Jessica Pauszek Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand. –Karl Marx (1858) Throughout the history of this country, democracy has always been practiced as a democracy of the minority, a democracy of the property owners, a democracy of the racially dominant. […] We cannot allow “democracy” to be colonized by those who assume that democracy is always a democracy of the elite (emphasis added). –Angela Davis (2014)

Beginnings What does democracy mean? And what does it mean to work toward its fulfillment? These questions inspire and inform the essays in Writing Democracy: The Political Turn in and Beyond the Trump Era. In concert with others, two of us—Shannon and Deborah—founded Writing Democracy (WD), a seat-of-the-pants response to the Great Recession, in 2010, and began to trouble the meaning of the term “democracy” soon thereafter when it became clear that discussions we had convened in various settings produced more questions than answers about its definition. This volume continues those conversations in print, bringing to the surface what were often muted disagreements not only about the role of democracy in U.S. history and its current manifestations and deformations but also about the place of these questions in composition and ­rhetoric—our field—as well as across the disciplines and in ongoing political struggles for social and economic justice. That we all seemed to support the goal of social and economic justice yet had different perspectives on what that meant and how to achieve it, much less how best to address the even murkier question of its role in the classroom, gave WD direction as Steve, Jessica, and others joined in planning for annual workshops at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC). In 2013, we explicitly called for a “political turn” to

2  Shannon Carter et al. “deepen the conversation about democracy that began in 2011 and continued at the 2012 CCCC Workshop,” asking “How can we contribute to the unfinished project of ‘writing democracy’?” While we have focused our attention on the public and pedagogical role of teachers, specifically those in composition and rhetoric, we have consistently drawn insight and strength from historical struggles for social and economic justice in labor, civil rights, Black Power, women’s rights, and national liberation struggles, and emergent movements, such as the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, climate justice, and Me Too. It will be useful at the outset to state clearly what we mean by a “political turn” and why we invoke the trope of turns here. First, we are proposing a political turn (a left turn) informed by Marx’s theory of historical materialism and his critique of capitalism as inherently exploitative and unequal. However, we take to heart Marx’s own profound understanding that as the material world evolves so will our conceptions of reality and our methods by which to investigate it. Second, we do not see our call as entirely new to the field or to higher education, even though its invocations have been relatively sporadic and peripheral (see Trimbur in this volume), and we thus pay tribute to the many who pave the way for those who follow (e.g., Ohmann 1987; Smitherman 1999; Hunt 2015). Third, we recognize and are heartened by vibrant signs of political consciousness in pedagogical, theoretical, and activist insights in our field and across disciplines rooted in earlier, pioneering theory and critique, especially with respect to race, gender, indigeneity, and the painful legacies of Western colonialism, imperialism, and slavery (e.g., Combahee River Collective 1977; Horner et al. 2011; Ruiz and Sánchez 2016; Condon and Young 2017). Fourth, we note that the phrase “political turn” has been invoked before (e.g., Wiley et al. 1996; Blyler 1998), sometimes disparagingly (e.g., Donoghue 1989; Fish 2008). Mark Wiley et al. (1996) invoke the idea of a political turn to describe the direction the field took in the 1980s, noting that “the number of articles that seem overtly political appeared in journals with increasing frequency from mid-1980 onward. Some might call this the ‘political turn’ in composition and rhetoric” (417, emphasis added). He goes on to describe how the social turn might have inevitably led to a political one given increasingly heated debates about writing instruction as access to higher education expanded to masses of first-generation, immigrant, black, Latinx, and working-class students. These blurred boundaries between the far more influential social turn (Bizzell 2009), as well as cultural, linguistic, and public turns, and our call for a political turn reflect the complicated intellectual and political history of the late 20th century, inflected by Cold War anti-communism that chilled academic freedom and further troubled by postmodern rejections of “grand narratives” of history, including Marxist theory (Lyotard 1979), and black critiques of Marxism as replicating Western history’s racialized, white supremacist ideologies (C. Robinson 2000).

Introduction  3 We cite these critiques here to encourage left-leaning scholars and activists who may have renounced Marxism to reconsider a historical materialist perspective, especially now, in a time when it has much to offer by way of explaining the crises we face and guiding political activism. We thus hope this book will encourage teachers and scholars to study these complex theoretical histories and assess whether previous academic “turns,” despite their acuity in some respects, have often obscured rather than clarified the historical tasks of achieving true democracy. We hope, too, that it will foster efforts to work through often contentious disagreements and differences in order to forge unity and common cause where possible and develop new understandings that inform what and how we teach, write, and seek to change the world. Our book’s overarching aim is to contribute to efforts to reclaim (or redefine) democracy as an egalitarian, inclusive political economic system that supports human and all planetary life and well-being. Yet, such a world seems all but impossible in light of the 21st-century global exigencies of climate change, unprecedented economic inequality, deeply rooted racist, sexist, and homophobic ideologies, and resurgent fascist movements and world leaders like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro. The “political turn” underscores our view that solutions to these escalating world problems will mean economic restructuring of global inequalities intensified by capitalist accumulation and dispossession, tenacious colonial legacies, and political cultures that sow difference as division locally and globally. In addition, this book is both a collective effort to analyze the current conjuncture and a call to build academic alliances across disciplines, institutions, and levels of education, as well as with social movements and political struggles committed to fully inclusive, participatory democracy and a truly democratic, sustainable economic structure. In this effort, we are joined by authors who represent a range of higher education institutions, labor pools, and student populations, and whose contributions illuminate the challenges and possibilities for ongoing struggles for democracy. Together, we portray the complex identities and contexts out of which such collaboration must grow with the aim of mapping out a political turn that highlights variations of what we can do and offers concrete examples of how such work might be done. It would be presumptuous to imply that our collective work to date in WD or any other academic forum has generated definitive answers, formed more than embryonic collectivities, or attained more than the most modest goals in relation to the monumental tasks that confront us. Likewise, we acknowledge the absence of international perspectives here even though we presume that comprehending our situation in the U.S. means addressing global capitalism and its effects. That we focus on U.S. contexts and feature U.S. authors thus reflects not our analysis of the problems but rather the constraints of addressing both the broader

4  Shannon Carter et al. context of what Laurence Cox and Alf Gunvald Nilsen (2014) call “the twilight of neoliberalism” (vii) and the specific moment of the 2016 presidential election. Chapters situated in the contexts of Chilean history (Alvarez) and the visa application process across U.S.-Colombian borders (Marko) are included, and we look forward perhaps to a sequel that further develops the idea of a political turn through international dialogue. As Audre Lorde (1984) reminds us, “Revolution is not a onetime event. It is becoming always vigilant for the smallest opportunity to make a genuine change in established, outgrown responses; for instance, it is learning to address each other’s difference with respect” (140–141). We want this collection of voices to enact such vigilance and concern and to animate possibilities for future collaborations and collectivities. First, however, we believe that it will be useful briefly to discuss the current conjuncture in light of the rise of neoliberal capitalism over the last 50 years and the theoretical framework that informs our response to that economy, as well as how both led to the WD project and our call for a “political turn.”

How We Got Here: The Rise of Neoliberal Capitalism For the past 50 years, we have existed within a neoliberal global marketplace. As a governing practice, neoliberalism initially emerged in the 1970s beginning with Augusto Pinochet’s economic policies in Chile, migrating to Margaret Thatcher’s policies in the United Kingdom, then informing Ronald Reagan’s policies in the U.S., before ultimately expanding into a global framework inclusive of institutions, such as the World Bank, and treaties like NAFTA. Neoliberalism is an interlocking network of state and transnational government and ­extra-governmental entities. As a set of policies and practices, neoliberalism stands for laissez-faire economic measures, including austerity, deregulation, ­fi nancialization, and privatization, linked to a conception of society as consisting of individuals, whose interests eclipse those of collective identities. From a neoliberal perspective, political and economic equality is supposedly produced by integrating the profit motive into all aspects of society, which is then assumed to be the best lever for raising the living standard for the greatest number. Consequently, neoliberalism strips “democracy” of values such as the “public good,” human and civil rights, and relative economic equality to allow for a free-market economy in which individuals are supposedly free to gain unlimited amounts of wealth. As policy and practice, then, neoliberalism works to undo many of the collective gains of the New Deal and the Civil Rights Movement, such as progressive tax structures, bank regulations, social welfare programs, and voting rights, as well as to privatize remaining government functions through outsourcing to for-profit businesses. It protects capitalism by maximizing accumulation

Introduction  5 for the transnational capitalist class and leaves virtually nothing for the 80% of the world’s population that faces increasingly precarious conditions of existence. Neoliberalism reminds us, if we grasp its fundamental goal, of the underlying forces and relations of production that have always required capital to expand and seek profits and militate against social welfare reforms. These policies have significantly increased both social unrest and Western governments’ exercise of power through staggering levels of militarization. The U.S. dedicates more than half its entire budget to the military, insisting its actions are designed to protect “democracy” and “freedom” instead of lining the pockets of the global elite. Meanwhile, the wealth gap, coupled with shrinking social programs, has produced significant unrest at home and abroad. In response, over the past 50 years, the U.S. has armed police forces with military equipment and expanded police powers not only to search and seize property without cause but also to use deadly force with reckless abandon. The “war on drugs,” declared by President Richard Nixon in 1971, led to spiraling incarceration levels of people of color that Michelle Alexander (2010) famously called the “New Jim Crow,” accompanied by a steady stream of extrajudicial murders that gave rise to the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013. At the same time, neoliberalism disenfranchises minority voters through racial gerrymandering, criminal records, and voter suppression laws. Globally, in response to World Bank demands to “modernize,” this same set of neoliberal policies has been forced upon the Global South producing huge income disparities and a youth population with few economic opportunities. The Arab Spring, in part, grew out of this disenfranchisement and called for a democratic state that ensured social welfare and economic equality. The ultimate return of dictatorial states in this region, such as in Egypt, and a global refugee/humanitarian crisis, such as in Syria, speak to the inability of neoliberalism to address such calls for democratic and human rights, a pattern we see repeating in Venezuela as we prepare to go to press, which some Latin American scholars are describing as at risk for “Syrianization” (William I. Robinson 2019, email) and others as a linchpin in global climate justice give its oil reserves, the largest in the world, now under threat of extraction by American oil companies (Schwartzman and Saul 2019). These decades of intensifying neoliberal policies (and their effects) at home and abroad, we believe, explain the forces that led to the election of President Trump. When the housing bubble burst in 2007 and the stock market crashed the following year as a result of decades of deregulation, unemployment levels spiked and banks assumed to be “too big to fail” predictably went under. Rather than respond with government programs to reshape the economy and the government role in supporting collective rights and welfare, state and international bodies

6  Shannon Carter et al. “backstopped” financial organizations, allowing individuals to suffer bankruptcy and homelessness. Since then, people worldwide have experienced an increasingly obscene wealth inequality not seen since the Gilded Age. According to Oxfam, “In 2015, just 62 individuals had the same wealth as 3.6 billion people”—more than 50% of the entire world population (Oxfam). The impact of this astounding wealth gap can be seen in deteriorating conditions for masses of people here and across the globe. In America, one of the wealthiest countries in the world, nearly 40 million people live below the poverty line. Into this massive dislocation of opportunity for the majority, Trump entered with a populism premised on white supremacist nationalism and demonization of the “other.” In response to damage wrought by neoliberal globalism, he nostalgically offered to “make America great again,” appealing to key constituencies within the Republican base as well as energized elements of the electorate and working-poor adults who had sat out prior elections. Since the election, Trump has only heightened the nationalist and racist elements of his platform, and yet, as we write, he has failed to pass significant legislation with the exception of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Job Act, neither of which benefit working poor. However, he has, of course, significantly altered the judicial branch, including the Supreme Court, and used his executive authority to persecute undocumented immigrants attempting to flee political violence. While he has pushed some voters to the far right and the politics of resentment, he has convinced others, disgusted by his vile rhetoric and regressive policies and frustrated by the moral and political bankruptcy of the mainstream Democratic Party, to repudiate “softened” neoliberal candidates and engage in reinvigorated, leftist politics. A related surge of grassroots activism resulted in the election of 89 women to Congress in 2018, including left-leaning Alexandria Octasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar. Though heartened by this resurgence of left-wing activism, we remain deeply dismayed by the cracked foundations of American democracy, which no longer support “the essential conditions of democratic existence”: a relative degree of economic equality, a commitment to the “public good,” and a knowledgeable citizenry (Brown 2017). At the same time, the rise of new grassroots social movements from below denotes widespread organization, collective agency, and growing potential for transformative action. This awakening of a new layer of activists following the 2016 election signals both intensifying struggles here and abroad and growing awareness of the high stakes for the planet and humanity if capitalism continues on its reckless course. Today, an opening exists for the consolidation and expansion of social movements from below that have been building capacity among communities worldwide in diverse places from Bolivia and Ecuador to Ireland, India, Greece, Mexico, Canada, and the U.S., places which must also contend with

Introduction  7 hegemonic forces from above with far greater military, economic, and political power and resources. Such movements invoke forms of organizing and frameworks for human rights that draw not only on more tra­ on-Western ditional Western models but also on indigenous and other, n heritages. The political turn we imagine would enable us to work in, with, and across such popular struggles to achieve true democracy in the United States and, with allies around the world, demonstrate that this is what democracy (should) looks like globally.

Historical Materialist Analysis and Intersectional Practice At this moment of disruption and transformation, we feel an acute need for greater clarity in our analysis of systemic inequalities and injustices and confidence in our direction in political practice. American educators and policymakers have generally expressed a commitment both to the “public good” and to democracy. Despite a tendency to reinforce bourgeois liberal ideology, this commitment has enabled successive generations of teachers and administrators to enact the idea that schooling at all levels should teach the value of civic participation, collective rights, and democratic decision making; as such, it has inscribed Enlightenment values in institutional histories, practices, and missions. Under the current neoliberal regime, however, even these liberal ideas have been undermined, along with rhetorics and pedagogies designed to implement them, by the erosion of the preconditions for democracy. Consequently, even as we insist on our commitment to social justice, our capacity to investigate and help develop adequate responses to the crises occurring within and beyond the United States is attenuated by attacks on liberal democracy and the contraction and corporatization of higher education. Given these worsening conditions, our work in general as academics seems to be insufficiently linked to the political tasks of defending and expanding democratic rights and activist struggles for social, economic, and environmental justice. Within mainstream professional discourse, disciplinary identity too often supersedes our role as politicized, public intellectuals. Our commitment to political action, it seems, regularly ends at the classroom door. Radical critiques that link neoliberal devastation writ large to the workings of our classroom consistently remain at the level of academic publication. We recognize and are deeply sympathetic to the risks embedded in such work in a period of right-wing backlash from groups like Turning Point USA, which sponsors the Professor Watchlist and attacks on academic freedom in general, especially for unprotected groups like adjuncts, untenured faculty, and graduate students. Moreover, tensions between Marxist analysis and theories and practices of intersectionality and decoloniality have surfaced in often polarizing academic and

8  Shannon Carter et al. public debates. It is our hope that this book illuminates how alliances can be forged despite unresolved theoretical disagreements. What the two points of view have in common is their resolute, unequivocal rejection of racist, sexist, heterosexist, ableist, and other forms of oppression; where they remain in tension is their analysis of the sources of such oppression. Indeed, that very tension is taken up in several contributions to this volume—a tension that we hope will lead to productive dialogue at the levels of theoretical analysis and activist struggle in simultaneous and mutually informative efforts to achieve systemic change. We argue that it is only through such critical, activist orientation and engagement in inquiry and debate that our pedagogy and our public and political work can foster productive interventions for our students and communities. In our view, Marxist analysis is a vital tool for analyzing the current moment and for developing a concrete set of actions and alliances to inform our work. It provides an answer for America’s failure to live up to its promises, whether to rectify economic inequality or to remedy racial, gender, and other forms of discrimination and oppression: liberal democracy based on the right to property and free-market principles can never achieve true egalitarian, just, democratic conditions for all. Nevertheless, as we hope is evident from the variety of perspectives represented in this volume, the political turn we advocate encourages inclusive coalition-building and activist organizing that will take different forms under different conditions at different times. As Marx (1845) puts it in the Theses on Feuerbach: The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. It is in practice that human beings must prove the truth—i.e., the reality and power, the this-worldliness of their thought. (emphasis added) That is, we envision “this-worldliness of [human] thought” as the basis for understanding the dialectical relationship of knowledge and experience within the material world. This perspective enables us to take up and subject to critical analysis larger theoretical themes and political struggles, such as extrajudicial murders of black people, the “New Jim Crow” of post-Civil War forms of black servitude, terrorization, and mass incarceration, and the Black Lives Matter movement and other forms of struggle to end them. At the same time, this framework positions us to connect classrooms and communities more effectively by engaging in reflection and action, the “constitutive elements” of the word “praxis” (Freire 2000), in radical dialogue with one another: according to Freire, “There is no true word that is not at the same time a praxis. Thus, to speak a true word is to transform the world” (87). We see the practice of this self-reflexive, self-problematizing, critical dialogic

Introduction  9 practice, always situated and sensitive to who is in the room, as strategically necessary in multiple sites, extending beyond the classroom to activist movements and organizations, local community groups, and other diverse publics. In this sense, we aim to reconnect and deepen existing scholarship on Marxist theories in composition and rhetoric and across the disciplines to collective actions for change. Such a framework, we believe, allows work which moves beyond the typical frameworks of “identity politics,” a term often used by the conservative right to diminish the intersectional interests of marginalized and colonized populations. Attention to the experience of oppressed groups is a vital historical and political project, a project that highlights ways in which the left has been complicit in racist, sexist, and other oppressive practices often identified with the right. Yet, we also contend that oppressed groups have traditionally organized according to a deeply intersectional understanding that links specific forms of oppression to political economic histories and structures. The work of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE)/CCCC Black Caucus, for instance, has involved a focus on language politics and racist institutional structures; the work of the American Indian Caucus has focused both on survivance, efforts to nourish indigenous ways of knowing, and decolonial delinking from colonialist epistemological and institutional practices. Such groups work to align interests within their systemic critiques to maximize power. Our commitment to Marxism similarly has a foundational focus on class division and capitalist accumulation and exploitation, informed, critiqued, and aligned with the work of scholars and activists of African American, American Indian, Latinx, and LGBTQI theories and collectivities. Moreover, we understand our work to be expanding the Marxist ­tradition—criticized by some as an inherently Eurocentric model—to address non-Western contexts. In The Wretched of the Earth, for ­example— based, in part, on his experiences in the Algerian Revolution—Franz Fanon ([1963] 2004) reframes Marxism for “a colonial context,” calling attention to the particular role played by the very “fact of belonging to or not belonging to a given race, a given species.” He continues, In the colonies the economic substructure is also a superstructure. The cause is the consequence: you are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich. This is why Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched every time we have to do with the colonial problem. (40) Likewise, in Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, Cedric Robinson (1983) demonstrates how capitalism and racism evolved together to produce a system of “racial capitalism” dependent on

10  Shannon Carter et al. ­ oediger genocide, slavery, violence, and imperialism (9). As David R. R (2017) argues in Class, Race, and Marxism, racial division is not only part of the history of capitalism but also the logic of capital. Within this context, we believe Marxism provides for us a way of thinking about the world in relation to 20th- and 21st-century a­ nti-colonial ­anti-racist, anti-sexist, heteronormative, environmental, class struggles and the specific work we must undertake, as Cox and Nilsen (2014) bluntly put it, “to win” (6). A productive tool for reflective critique and action, Marxism for us is always already in the process of revision, always in dialogue with aligned movements for justice. In this collection, we aim to raise and begin to answer questions in our programs, classrooms, communities, and scholarship by engaging in such critique and praxis. Our goal for this collection is to provide an opening for ongoing dialogue about how best to respond to our current context, demarcating both a continuation of unremitting forms of exploitation and oppression and a sharp, alarming turn to the right. To that end, broadly speaking, we offer a critical lens and vocabulary through which to identify and respond to the pressing issues of our day; strategies and insights from past and present social movements that can inform how we teach in and beyond the classroom; and further theorization of praxis as crucial to the enactment of the dialectic between word and world, theory and action. Taken together, the contributors illustrate the possibilities and complexities of working from lived experiences across institutional, cultural, social, gendered, racial contexts in pursuit of more democratic practices. As with any collection, the pieces here offer various frameworks for historical, pedagogical, and organizing work, nor do they always align. Indeed, the contributions here show the intricacies of responding to the current moment across professional rank, institutions, and communities.

A Political (Re)Turn and WD WD was our response to the 2008 financial crisis. Initially, WD was conceived as a vehicle to create a 21st-century version of the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) created during Great Depression nearly 75 years earlier. We imagined an FWP for the 21st century that could document the Great Recession just as the writers who inspired us, like Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph ­Ellison, Meridel Le Sueur, and Richard Wright, among others, had done for the Great Depression. Their work left us with a fine-grained portrait of America in a period of global upheaval that resonates powerfully with our own time. At that moment of 2008, we believed renewing the project would provide similar support for emerging writers, capture the historical moment for later generations, and speak to a need for governments to act in the interests of the many rather than the few.

Introduction  11 As such, we envisioned WD as a vehicle for collectively “writing” democracy into everyday American life that could bring together the many, social justice-oriented, community-based, often deeply interdisciplinary, text-driven projects spread (and rapidly spreading) across the country. Typically built on reciprocal university-community partnerships, ­fueled by campus resources and, most importantly, local needs, such efforts included community publications based on oral history interviews with local, historically marginalized groups and composed by students ­(Grobman 2015, 2017), as well as those written by community members with student support, such as stories of and by incarcerated women (Jacobi and Folwell Stanford 2014) and about policing practices in ­Syracuse’s Westside (Kuebrich 2015). Such work also moved beyond the classroom and university time frame, drawing together faculty expertise and the needs of specific communities into extended projects focused on cultural and political rights, like Ellen Cushman’s (2013) work with the Cherokee Nation and Chris Wilkey’s (2009) work with the Over-the-Rhine community. We also understood this work to be part of a longer history within our professional organizations and within our fields, work that was ­directed outward toward achieving systemic justice. For example, in the 1930s, the NCTE worked closely with the League of American Writers, launched by the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) as part of its Popular Front strategy (Folsom 1994, 78), and was led by CPUSA member and NCTE President Holland Roberts from 1936 to 1937 (Hunt 2015, 28). During the 1960s, NCTE and CCCC were transformed by the social movements of the 1960s, which fought for the creation of equal opportunity programs and the advent of open admissions “to redress the academic exclusion of and past injustices inflicted upon Blacks, Browns, women, and other historically marginalized groups” (Smitherman 1999, 354). To a great extent, it could be argued, these efforts initiated the emergence and growth of our field in the 20th century. Yet it would be incorrect to imagine such efforts occurred only as a result of outside organizations or social movements. Important changes also occurred through CCCC membership actions. Responding to King’s assassination in the pivotal year of 1968 at the annual CCCC meeting, for example, Ernece Kelly (1968) decried the eradication of “the dialects of Black students” with endemic violence against people of color, pronouncing both “the murder of the American dream” and her personal feeling of being “pushed further into a blackness which approaches ­violence” (108). Such arguments took collective form in the creation of caucuses focused on the systemic need to address the status of black, Latinx, Native American, Asian/Asian American, LGBTQI and working-­class students and faculty, as well as special interest groups such as ­R hetoricians for Peace, the Council on Basic Writing, and the Progressive Caucus (see Kirklighter et al. 2016; Sano-Franchini et al. 2017 for

12  Shannon Carter et al. more caucus history). Indeed, in some respects, these collective efforts mimic the FWP in their attempts to help faculty find employment, record their community’s histories, and argue for an activist governing organization. And, here, we should reiterate our understanding that such work must be seen in dialogue with the tradition of Marxist scholarship being developed within the field across this same time period and in the current moment, including Marxist-informed work by scholars such as Richard Ohmann (1987), James Berlin (1996), Sharon Crowley (2006), Patricia Bizzell (1991), Ira Shor (1992), Carmen Kynard (2007), Eileen Schell (1998), and Nancy Welch and Tony Scott (2016). Indeed, theoretical influences on the field range from the actual work of Marx and Engels to their many followers to thinkers whose work, to varying degrees, has spawned whole subfields of composition and rhetoric like Lev ­Vygotsky, Mikhail Bakhtin, Paulo Freire, Henri Lefebvre, Brian Street, and Kenneth Burke (see Hunt 2015). We thus understand Marxist theory as having explicitly and implicitly influenced theories and practices of composition and rhetoric and the wider disciplines in consistent and important tension with grassroots social movements and the currently accelerating corporatization and marketization of higher education. The results of these collective efforts can be seen in numerous ways. As Geneva Smitherman (1999) notes in her essay on CCCC’s role in the struggle for language rights starting in the 1950s, the organization “was a forum for linguistic debates and language issues” (351), culminating in the passage of the Students’ Right to Their Own Language resolution in 1974 (see, e.g., Parks 2000; Bruch and Marback 2005; ­Kynard 2007). Likewise, recent scholarship on World Englishes calls for an internationalist perspective on language instruction and challenges popular and professional assumptions about “the unidirectional and monolingual acquisition of literacy competence” (Canagarajah 2006, 586; see also Trimbur and Horner 2002; Matsuda and Matsuda 2010). In addition, NCTE and CCCC have been compelled to take up issues of labor rights and economic justice, such as the Wyoming Resolution and Indianapolis Resolution. Finally, the emergence and rapid growth of the biannual Conference on Community Writing since its inception in 2015 provides a key site for ongoing critical dialogue, theorizing, and organizing in response to the politics of the current moment and to the public role of teachers and scholars. And yet the complexity of the political moment—the ­“this-worldliness of thought”—kept informing our work as WD developed into a community. For instance, our inaugural WD conference in March 2011 began on the heels of the Arab Spring uprising and massive demonstrations in Wisconsin against attacks on organized labor and drew to a close as the news broke of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, signaling both the potential for genuinely democratic social transformation and

Introduction  13 the powerful forces standing in its way. In 2012, when we held our first workshop at the CCCC, Occupy Wall Street had galvanized a new wave of nationwide protest in response to its slogan “We are the 99%” and George Zimmerman had shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. Against this backdrop, the discussion of WD’s goals revealed both the ambiguity of the term “democracy” and its capacity to open a space for critical dialogue. Thus, as WD set out to “write/right democracy,” we quickly understood that one of our key challenges was to analyze and reclaim the term “democracy” as a call to action to achieve the kind of world—one committed not to profit but to satisfying human need and protecting the environment—that all of us in the room agreed we wanted. And here, while much of the history we have described above provided powerful models, it also had limitations which required new models, renewed efforts. For instance, as a subfield, community writing’s engagement with local activist groups on a wide range of issues from homelessness to ­urban gentrification is necessarily a political project. Yet, as Stephen Parks (2014) has argued elsewhere, such efforts too often rely on nostalgic views of democracy and participation to frame their efforts and to assess their results. As such, unlike elements of the work of the caucuses/ special interest groups, community engagement work—despite the best of intentions—too often underscores the problem of supporting social justice movements absent a critique of systemic inequality, escalating state repression and surveillance, and a rapacious market indifferent to human suffering. We suggest that a thorough model of critique offered by an inclusive, consciously feminist, anti-racist Marxism is necessary to achieve genuine democracy. After the WD Workshop in St. Louis in March 2012, therefore, we shifted our focus from a mechanism for “writing democracy” (community engagement) to the contested nature of the term “democracy.” And as we realized the difficulty of defining this “essentially contested idea” (Foner 2006), we came to understand that the goals of democracy could neither be agreed on nor achieved without a “political turn” capable of deep analysis and participatory and collective activism across academic, institutional, movement, and even national boundaries. For, like Angela Davis, featured speaker at our workshop in 2014, we “believe we have to hold on to the term [democracy].” In a featured interview appearing in Part I of this volume, Davis observes: Throughout the history of this country, democracy has always been practiced as a democracy of the minority, a democracy of the property owners, a democracy of the racially dominant. […] We cannot allow “democracy” to be colonized by those who assume that democracy is always a democracy of the elite. (emphasis added)

14  Shannon Carter et al. Since that time, then, our annual workshops have foregrounded both the complexity and importance of reclaiming the term and practice of democracy. We have focused on explanations for wealth inequality, racism, and environmental collapse; and what it means to work collectively for social and economic justice, civil and human rights. We have explored what strategic actions best suit our collective abilities and needs. We have studied and debated what media—channels of communication—we can use, create, and amplify to build solidarity, critical consciousness, and resistance, especially after Edward Snowden’s revelation of the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance of local citizens and the stream of news that has followed about incessant electronic invasions of our privacy. This work has continued as WD met yearly through 2017 in the context of rapidly changing local and global realities: 2012, Black Lives Matter emerges in response to Trayvon Martin’s murder and his killer’s subsequent acquittal; 2013, Snowden’s revelations rattle the surveillance state; 2014, the nation takes to the streets in response to the racial profiling and police brutality suffered primarily by African American men in a wave of murders, including those of Michael Brown, an unarmed teenager shot to death in Missouri, and Eric Garner, choked to death on Staten Island by police officers while being arrested for allegedly selling untaxed cigarettes; 2015, the world responds to nearly a million refugees seeking to escape the horrors of the devastating wars in the Middle East; 2016, British voters choose the British exit from the European Union (Brexit) and Donald Trump wins the presidential election; 2017, white supremacist nationalists march on the lawn of the University of Virginia carrying tiki torches and shouting racist and anti-Semitic slogans in a two-day event, culminating in the death of anti-racist activist Heather Heyer after a car driven by a white supremacist deliberately rams into her amid a crowd of counter-protesters. We understand the work of WD and its participants, then, as existing within a tradition of work focused within and beyond the discipline of composition and rhetoric but responding to a limited vision of democracy which currently produces gross wealth disparity, violence against marginalized populations, and imminent climate collapse. We also see ourselves as speaking against a narrow sense of composition and rhetoric which frames “professional identity” within neoliberal logics in its entrepreneurial and managerial consciousness. The contributions to this collection help us imagine how a political turn can impact our teaching, classrooms, and programs. We reiterate that it is our sense that any work to expand the meaning of democracy must include activism beyond the academy, in concert with likeminded colleagues across the disciplines, and in partnership with local and global activist movements and community groups. We also want to emphasize that composition and rhetoric teachers and scholars are usefully situated to take up this work. As a discipline, our focus is “the available means of persuasion,” as practiced

Introduction  15 by both indigenous and classical rhetoricians, among others; we study best practices to create and present a discourse which explains the exigency of the “rhetorical situation” and which can “produce action or change in the world” (Bitzer 1968, 4). Moreover, many of us take on this important work of persuasion within already existing networks of ­university-community partnerships that, despite institutional, structural limits, provide a passport into local activist movements and campaigns. Such work in building resistance in this crucial period depends on intelligible critiques of dominant cultural and political ideologies designed to persuade disaffected and marginalized communities to adopt right-wing populist answers as solutions to their misery. It depends upon networks of activated residents and communities. As such, we believe we can be a field that participates in reclaiming democracy.

Lessons Learned and Futures Projected As should be clear, our aim for this collection is to offer an examination of what a political turn might produce for our work in composition and rhetoric, in and out of the classroom, as well as for other academic disciplines, social movements, and community groups. We thus imagine a political turn that grounds itself in the material needs of the current moment and draws theory from activist practices inside and outside the academy—a turn that goes beyond theorizing to: • • •

• •

establish the groundwork for a set of practices designed to interrogate the word and the world more critically (Freire [1979] 2000; Mutnick 2018, forthcoming); circulate texts, rhetorical tools, and material resources more democratically among local publics (Banks 2005, 2011; Carter 2012; Cushman 2013; Carter and Conrad 2013); enable participation, resistance, and ultimately social transformation among diverse publics by establishing and maintaining educational and communication networks in support of democratic deliberation and action (Parks 2014; Gries 2019); engage with, value, and respect the contributions of everyday, ordinary people, and always look to social movements for leadership and political insight (Ganz 2010; Pauszek 2017); attend to the local and its particulars in relation to the universal or abstract while at the same time locating historically specific conditions and realities in global and theoretical contexts; and, where we can, help produce systemic change (Achcar 2013).

We believe such a political turn begins not with abstract principles but rather with the productive activities of real people in everyday, ordinary situations over time (Marx and Engels 1894), emphasizing the dialectical

16  Shannon Carter et al. relationships between individual, lived experiences and ­socio-ecological systems including partially, though never entirely, socially created (cultural, political, economic) and evolutionary, bio-environmental ones (Tsing 2005, 2015). And it is to provide an accounting of such activities that this collection aspires. To this end, the collection is divided into three parts: “Mapping the Political Turn,” “Variations on the Political Turn,” and “Taking the ­Political Turn.” Throughout, contributors take up the political turn from a myriad of angles. Together, they represent a critical starting point for the political turn we advocate. They do not, however, represent a singular, collective articulation of what a political turn might mean nor even the particular shape(s) it might take. Nor do they—or we—offer preconceived, static answers to the questions we have raised in our introduction. As such, these contributions map out actions across and beyond institutions—beginning in classrooms and programs, moving to colleges and disciplinary organizations, and going beyond the border of the college into various communities. Contributors include writing teachers, scholars, and activists, addressing the politics of education and the role of education—especially composition and rhetoric—in forming a new, critically conscious body politic. Throughout, contributors consider the intensification of capitalist accumulation as evidenced in the impact of austerity measures on labor and human rights struggles, the intersections of race, gender, and class, the corporatization of higher education, flexible labor and precarity, and, together, the relevance of these conditions to the teaching of writing. Part I, “Mapping the Political Turn,” works to deepen and further theorize what a political turn in our field means in the current historical moment. Here, contributors map some of the field’s history of political work while charting the possibilities for where we might continue. Part I begins with “Composition’s Left and the Struggle for Revolutionary Consciousness,” in which John Trimbur considers composition’s historical accommodation to notions of national interest, market forces, and professionalization that prefigure current neoliberal pressures. Trimbur also examines “the episodic appearance of left formations” in postwar U.S. college composition in contrast to the field’s compromises and concessions to suggest what political lessons we might extend to the Trump era. Next, we turn to a featured interview with Angela Davis, lifelong activist, scholar, prison-abolition activist, and former Communist Party USA leader who worked closely with the Black Panther Party in the late 1960s and 1970s. Together with a preface by interviewers LaToya Sawyer and Ben Kuebrich, “Organize as If It Were Possible to Create a Movement That Will Change the World: An Interview with Angela Davis” consists of a public dialogue with Davis at the WD Workshop in 2014 in which she responds to questions about the keyword “democracy,” the role of scholar/activists in a period of increasing austerity,

Introduction  17 mass incarceration, privatization and mechanization of schooling, and her view of the most promising movements and political tendencies at home and abroad. Part I continues with Nancy Welch’s discussion of “Marxist Ethics for Uncertain Times.” In response to the field’s recent engagement with and concern about civility, rhetorical ethics, and virtue in a polarized society under a far-right populist president, Welch delineates a historical materialist, Marxist approach to ethics and articulations of rights and social justice. She turns to Marx—and Leon Trotsky—to understand the “gut sense” that explains acts of solidarity but always within the context of “material conditions [that] also set the limits of what is possible to achieve” (60, 74). This section concludes with Deborah Mutnick’s theorization of “A Pedagogy for the Political Turn,” in which she proposes a Marxist pedagogy necessitated by the intensification of transnational capitalism, accelerating climate change, and the corporatization of higher education. Such a pedagogy, she argues, “links teachers to wider activist movements with the understanding that activism is always educative and that genuine education must embrace the history and aspirations of struggle for a more just, equal, humane world” (84). In Part II, “Variations on the Political Turn,” contributors reflect on how they have responded to the current moment as scholars, teachers, rhetoricians, and organizers. Refusing to draw strict boundaries separating us from the world beyond our institutions, these authors examine what a political turn might look like in our writing classrooms, programs, field(s), professional organizations, and an array of local and global communities. We begin with three pieces focused on interactions among protesters and the various responses (student, activist, and campus wide) to those protests. First, we feature an interview with Dana Cloud, a deeply politicized communication studies scholar and activist, who describes various strategies as an academic and activist dealing with threats—­including threats upon her life—based on her public demonstrations against white supremacists. We then move to Seth Kahn, “Audience Addressed? ­Audience Invoked? Audience Organized!” who describes activist organizing and developing trust among audiences, particularly by focusing on the rhetorical work of solidarity-building within labor unions. Then, we move to Vani Kannan’s “Taking a Lead from Student Movements in a ‘Political Turn’,” which opens up a discussion of policing and disciplinary mechanisms on college campuses connected to student protests. The remaining chapters of Part II take us from college campuses more broadly to the variations of the political turn that are shaped within the classroom through our roles as instructors and our negotiation as political actors ourselves and those effects on students. In “Nudging Ourselves Toward a Political Turn,” Paul Feigenbaum proposes the concept of “nudging” to focus on psychological barriers that students might have to political engagement or action. Staying within the realm

18  Shannon Carter et al. of classroom possibilities for the political turn, Geoffrey Clegg, in “Sustainable ­Audiences/Renewable Products: Penn State’s Student Farm, Business Writing, and Community Outreach,” offers an example of a business writing class that asks students to think about local community needs and challenge neoliberal models through a critical s­ ervice-learning course. Finally, Darin Jensen’s chapter “The Political Turn and the ­Two-Year College: Equity-Centered Partnerships and the Opportunities of Democratic Reform” compellingly reminds us that two-year colleges must be part of the political turn. Jensen argues for equity-centered partnerships, noting, “The political turn must be enacted in partnership with the teacher-scholar-activist movement in two-year colleges” (172). The inclusion of this chapter represents the potential blind spots embedded in the political turn. Moving forward, we agree with Jensen that “For the most part, community college professionals remain invisible in vital conversations at this moment. And this invisibility is normalized” (168). Even as we admit that we, too, have tended to omit two-year colleges as crucial to every aspect of higher education, we urge our readers—as we, too, resolve—to take up Jensen’s call for equity-centered partnerships. These variations in Part II offer concrete examples of scholars and activists who are practicing the political turn on their campuses and in their classrooms. As we see from these examples, though, there isn’t one version of the political turn; rather each example is shaped by the local campus contexts. Lastly, Part III, “Taking the Political Turn,” describes the pedagogies, embodied practices, and historical frameworks that can impact our political work. As we see from contributors, this involves curricular development, historical and archival work, and explicit reflection on material conditions that shape bureaucratic processes (such as visa ­applications) and rhetorical constructions of identity shaped by museums. We consider what the political turn means in relationship to Trump’s nationalist appeal to “Make America Great Again,” to the ongoing Islamophobia nationwide and beyond, and to continuing political movements such as Black Lives Matter. Further, we ask how such a turn can be made in a context not only of “fake news” and official disinformation campaigns but also, more importantly, the absence on the left—despite many positive signs of growth—of unified, strong leadership and a clear sense of strategic direction. In the process, we consider what we see as a ­21st-century tipping point—the constellation of environmental, geopolitical, economic, and humanitarian problems that seem “unsolvable”— and how to contribute to building integrated, collective resistance to push against the neoliberal capitalist policies that are generating these crises. This section explores not only composition and rhetoric’s own progressive history but also what political vision and already existing and possible movements are needed to actualize social and economic justice, equality, and freedom.

Introduction  19 We begin with Tamara Issak’s analysis of the 9/11 Museum in New York City, combined with personal reflections on Muslim identity in “How Does It Feel to be a Problem at the 9/11 Museum?” Issak analyzes artifacts from the 9/11 museum, including lesson plans and an audio tour, in order to illustrate the museum’s deeply problematic construction of Muslim identity as synonymous with a foreign enemy. This piece reminds us that the political turn takes place in our classrooms, on our campuses, but also among extracurricular sites of instruction. Next, we turn to Steven Alvarez’s chapter “Dismantling the Wall: Analyzing the Rhetorics of Shock and Writing Political Transformation.” Alvarez makes the case for developing a critical lens for analyzing neoliberal “shock” politics in our classrooms. Alvarez explores how storytelling can enable students to “dismantle the walls of individualism, greed, and free-market ideologies” and provides ideas for students to further engage the rhetorics of shock (194). In “Pass the Baton: Lessons from Historic Examples of the Political Turn, 1967–68,” Shannon Carter turns to John Carlos, a sprinter and lifelong activist for human rights best known for raising his fist in a Black Power salute at the Mexico City Olympics in 1968, for lessons about what she calls the “materiality of social justice” (228). Applying a Marxist framework, she investigates the embodied, material dimensions of this iconic demonstration and Carlos’s controversial effort to “pass the baton” the previous year when he was a student at her own conservative, then recently desegregated campus in Texas (1967). Significantly, Carlos’s lessons do not end with these historic examples. Soon after Carter “‘met’ … Carlos in the archives” (210), she began collaborating directly with him through a series of political turns that brought this Harlem native back nearly half a century later in 2012 to the campus whose racist policies and practices had contributed directly to his radicalization. Soon thereafter, in 2013, he arrived in Las Vegas, to deliver a keynote address at CCCC and join our WD Workshop in 2013. We end this section with Tamera Marko’s “The Visa Labyrinths: 310 Colombian and U.S. Artists and Scholars Write Their Way Through.” Marko describes the deeply powerful and difficult process of writing one’s self across borders, particularly the U.S. border. To this end, she details the visa application process and reflects on the mechanisms and infrastructures that have created unjust conditions for many applicants, ultimately foregrounding the material conditions that shape academic labor of some faculty, students, and administrators that is deeply connected to capitalist logics. In our conclusion, “Further Notes on the Political Turn,” we pull together the themes of the book that in various ways show how progressive academics in composition and rhetoric and across disciplines can contribute to creating conditions for genuine democratic dialogue and critical, historically, and scientifically grounded pursuit of just solutions to local and global problems. We argue that historical exigencies

20  Shannon Carter et al. call on us to enact a “political turn” that embraces yet goes beyond more celebrated cultural, public, and social turns to ask critical questions about our political economy and our field’s potential response(s) to them: How are social class and race interpolated in American—and global—­history? What is the future of education in this era of austerity, privatization, and corporatization? What sort of future is in store for the world’s children and their children? What are the underlying structures of U.S. and global capitalism? Whose interests does capitalism serve? Who benefits? Who suffers? What can be done about it? These are key questions we take with us in and beyond the Trump era.

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Introduction  21 Carter, Shannon, and James Conrad. “In Possession of Community: Towards a More Sustainable Local.” College Composition and Communication 64 (1): 81–121. Combahee River Collective Statement. 1979. Internet Archive. https://archive. org/details/Combahee1979. Condon, Frankie, and Vershawn Ashanti Young, eds. 2017. Performing Antiracist Pedagogy in Rhetoric, Writing, and Communication. Boulder: University of Colorado Press/WAC Clearinghouse. Cox, Laurence, and Alf Gunvald Nilsen. 2014. We Make Our Own History: Marxism and Social Movements in the Twilight of Neoliberalism. London: Pluto Press. Crowley, Sharon. 2006. Toward a Civil Discourse: Rhetoric and Fundamentalism. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Cushman, Ellen. 2013. The Cherokee Syllabary: Writing the People’s Perseverance. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Davis, Marianna White. 2014. History of the Black Caucus National Council of Teachers of English. Philadelphia, PA: Parlor Press/New City Community Press. Donoghue, Denis. 1989. “The Political Turn in Composition.” Salmagundi 81 (Winter): 104–122. Fanon, Franz. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press. Fish, Stanley. 2008. “French Theory in America.” New York Times, April 6, 2008. https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/french-theory-inamerica/. Folsom, Franklin. 1994. Days of Anger, Days of Hope: A Memoir of the League of American Writers 1937–1942. Boulder: University Press of Colorado. Foner, Eric. 2006. “Freedom: America’s Evolving and Enduring Idea.” OAH Magazine of History 20 (4): 9–11. Freire, Paulo. [1979] 2000. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Ganz, Marshall. 2010. Why David Sometimes Wins: Leadership, Organization, and Strategy in the California Farm Worker Movement. New York: Oxford University Press. Gries, Laurie. 2019. “Writing to Assemble Publics: Making Writing Activate, Making Writing Matter.” College Composition and Communication 70 (3): 327–355. Grobman, Laurie. 2015. “(Re)Writing Local Racial, Ethnic, and Cultural Histories: Negotiating Shared Meaning in Public Rhetoric Partnerships.” College English 77 (3): 236–258. ———. 2017. “‘Engaging Race’: Teaching Critical Race Inquiry and ­Community-Engaged Projects.” College English 80 (2): 105–132. Horner, Bruce, Samantha NeCamp, and Christiane Donahue. 2011. “Toward a Multilingual Composition Scholarship: From English Only to a Translingual Norm.” College Composition and Communication 63 (2): 269–300. Hunt, Jonathan. 2015. “Communists and the Classroom: Radicals in U.S. Education, 1930–1960.” Composition Studies 43 (2): 22–42. Jacobi, Tobi, and Ann Folwell Stanford, eds. 2014. Women, Writing, and Prison: Activists, Scholars, and Writers Speak Out. New York: Rowman & Littlefield.

22  Shannon Carter et al. Kelly, Ernece B. 1968. “Murder of the American Dream.” College Composition and Communication 19 (2): 106–108. Kirklighter, Cristina, Samantha Blackmon, and Steve Parks, eds. 2016. Listening to Our Elders: Working and Writing for Change. Anderson, SC: Parlor Press. Kuebrich, Ben. 2015. “‘White Guys Who Send My Uncle to Prison’: Going Public Within Asymmetrical Power.” College Composition and Communication 66 (4): 566–590. Kynard, Carmen. 2007. “‘I Want to Be African’: In Search of a Black Radical Tradition/African-American-Vernacularized Paradigm for ‘Students’ Right to Their Own Language,’ Critical Literacy, and ‘Class Politics.’” College English 69 (4): 360–390. Lorde, Audre. 2017. Your Silence Will Not Protect You. London: Silver Press. Lyotard, Jean-François. [1979] 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Marx, Karl. 1845. Theses on Feuerbach. Marxists Internet Archive, Marx Engels Archives. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm. ———. [1858] 1993. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, by Karl Marx & Martin Nicolaus. London: Penguin Classics, 1993. ———. 1894. Chapter 48, “The Trinity Formula.” Capital, Vol. III, Marxists Internet Archive, Marx Engels Archive. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/ works/1894-c3/ch48.htm. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. [1846] 1970. The German Ideology. New York: International. Matsuda, Aya, and Paul Kei Matsuda. 2010. “World Englishes and the Teaching of Writing.” TESOL Quarterly 44 (2): 369–374. Mutnick, Deborah. 2018. “Pathways to Freedom: From the Archives to the Street.” College Composition and Communication 69 (3): 372–399. ———. Forthcoming. “Threshold Concepts and the Phenomenal Forms.” In (re) Considering What We Know: Learning Thresholds in Writing, Composition, Rhetoric, and Literacy, edited by Linda Adler Kassner and Elizabeth Wardle. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press. Ohmann, Richard. 1987. Politics of Letters. Wesleyan, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Oxfam. 2016. An Economy for the 1%: How Privilege and Power Drive Extreme Inequality and How This Can Be Stopped. Oxfam, January 2016. www. oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/file_attachments/bp210-­economy-onepercent-tax-havens-180116-en_0.pdf. Parks, Steve. 2000. Class Politics: The Movement for the Students’ Right to Their Own Language. Refiguring English Studies. Urbana, IL. National Council of Teachers of English. ———. 2014. “Sinners Welcome: The Limits of Rhetorical Agency.” College English 76 (6): 506–524. Pauszek, Jessica, 2017. “‘Biscit’ Politics: Building Working-Class Educational Spaces From the Ground Up.” College Composition and Communication 68 (4): 655–683. Robinson, Cedric. 2000. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Roediger, David R. 2017. Class, Race, and Marxism. New York: Verso.

Introduction  23 Ruiz, Iris D., and Raúl Sánchez, eds. 2016. Decolonizing Rhetoric and Composition Studies: New Latinx Keywords for Theory and Pedagogy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan/Springer Nature. Sano-Franchini, Terese Guinsatao, and K. Hyoejin Yoon. 2017. Building a Community, Having a Home: History of the Conference on College Composition and Communication Asian/Asian American Caucus. Anderson, SC: Parlor Press. Schell, Eileen E. 1998. Gypsy Academics and Mother-Teachers: Gender, Contingent Labor, and Writing Instruction. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers. Schwartzman, David, and Quincy Saul. 2019. “The Path to Climate Justice Passes through Caracas.” Counterpunch, March 11, 2019. www.counterpunch.org/2019/03/11/the-path-to-climate-justice-passes-through-caracas/. Shor, Ira. 1992. Empowering Education: Critical Teaching for Social Change. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Smitherman, Geneva. 1999. “CCCC’s Role in the Struggle for Language Rights.” College Composition and Communication 50 (3): 349–376. Thatcher, Margaret. 1987. “Interview for Woman’s Own.” Interviewer Douglas Keay. Margaret Thatcher Foundation, September 23, 1987. www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid=106689. Trimbur, John, and Bruce Horner. 2002. “English Only and U.S. College Composition.” College Composition and Communication 53 (4): 594–630. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Welch, Nancy, and Tony Scott, eds. 2016. Composition in the Age of Austerity. Boulder: University Press of Colorado. Wiley, Mark, Gleason Barbara, and Louise Wetherbee Phelps, eds. 1996. Composition in Four Keys: Inquiring into the Field: Art, Nature, Science, Politics. Mountainview, CA: Mayfield Pub. Co. Wilkey, Chris. 2009. “Engaging Community Literacy through the Rhetorical Work of a Social Movement.” Reflections 9 (1): 1–35.

Part I

Mapping the Political Turn

2 Composition’s Left and the Struggle for Revolutionary Consciousness John Trimbur

Even before Trump was elected president, clouds of gloom were descending on U.S. college composition. As the Obama years drew to a close, there was a vague yet unmistakable feeling in radical sectors of composition that something was going wrong, that composition no longer was the “beacon of democracy” that once inspired its ranks with the vision of writing as a means of producing socially useful knowledge and new forms of solidarity in a more equitable and participatory social future. It was hard, for one thing, to ignore the class divisions in composition’s bifurcated political economy, with a few tenured and tenure-track (or other relatively permanent full-time) faculty in charge of the shortterm contract labor of year-by-year lecturers, per-course adjuncts, and graduate students. If anything, the socioeconomic inequality thematized by Occupy Wall Street and the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign appeared all too evident in composition. The felt sense of rising fortunes—of composition’s heightened academic legitimacy and professional standing— experienced by a tenured and tenure-track elite jostled in unsettling ways with the precarious state of part-time faculty, the mass of teachers in composition’s classrooms who are trying to make a living off five or six courses a semester, while the gentrifying sectors of composition’s knowledge economy get release time for research, teach upper division classes and graduate seminars in their areas of specialization, and administer the operation of U.S. college composition at their college or university. It was depressing to think that composition’s historically defining feature, the required first-year writing course, had ended up a prototype, in the publicly defunded world of higher education, for the efficient supervision of casual academic labor by a small cadre of expert faculty managers. These worries about the daily realities of U.S. college composition were compounded by misgivings on the left that the professional associations National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), and Writing Program Administrators (WPA) were adrift, that they had devolved into self-perpetuating bureaucracies whose main task was to reproduce themselves and their career-building distribution of symbolic capital through the annual round of electing officers, publishing a journal,

28  John Trimbur putting on a convention, and giving out life-time achievement awards. By the mid-2010s, radicalized graduate students and younger composition faculty were talking openly about the NCTE/CCCC/WPA axis as “the Establishment”; in 2018, following incidents of “mansplaining” and the dismissal of women’s anger on the WPA listserv, graduate students in rhetoric and writing studies set up the alternative nextGen as a means of communicating with each other outside official channels.1 A further sign of disaffection: in 2016, CCCC membership was dipping ominously enough for then Chair Joyce Locke Carter to bring the matter as a serious concern to the Cs’ Executive Committee. In some left-wing quarters, the impression that NCTE and CCCC and WPA had lost their bearings intensified in 2014, when none of these organizations joined major professional associations such as the American Association of University Professors, Modern Language Association, and Organization of American Historians to protest the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s (UIUC) last-minute cancellation of Steven Salaita’s appointment as a tenured associate professor in American Indian studies. Salaita is a scholar of settler colonialism and an outspoken critic of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. His impassioned tweets denouncing Israeli military operations in Gaza during the summer of 2014 prompted pro-Israel alumni, donors, and other influential figures to lobby the university to revoke his contract. In August 2014, right before he was scheduled to start teaching at UIUC, the university withdrew Salaita’s appointment on the grounds that the “tone” of his tweets against the civilian deaths and mass destruction in Gaza violated the norms of civility expected of UIUC faculty. For a small group of long-time members, NCTE and CCCC’s abstention in the Salaita case was the final straw. The refusal to support Salaita, in the group’s opinion, was based on a decision to protect NCTE/CCCC’s brand name—to sidestep the risks of expending capital on a particularly heated political controversy and thereby to ignore the suffering of Palestinians. Even when NCTE issued an official statement on academic freedom in November 2014, it did not (despite promises to the contrary) mention Salaita and avoided altogether the questions of political speech, public rhetoric, and social media raised by the case. All of which led a group of 11 composition faculty to not renew their memberships, in effect casting a vote of no confidence in composition’s two main professional associations for their unwillingness (1) to stand up against UIUC’s violations of academic freedom and well-established fair hiring practices; and (2) to clarify the issues of public rhetoric raised by ­ ro-Israel UIUC’s “civility” doctrine and by the efforts, more broadly, of p forces to stifle political speech by equating principled criticism of the Israeli state with anti-Semitism (see Trimbur 2018). I was one of the 11 non-renewers, and it’s fair to say that the immediate feeling within the group was one of disgust with NCTE/CCCC’s

Struggle for Revolutionary Consciousness  29 inaction, along with a desire to distance ourselves from NCTE/CCCC’s play-it-safe public stance. If anything, this feeling has been reinforced in the Trump era, as NCTE/CCCC, unlike other professional associations, has failed to issue public statements on issues that affect higher education, such as Trump’s anti-Muslim travel ban and the surveillance of left-wing and pro-Palestinian faculty and students by Professor Watch and Canary Mission. But there was also, I now think, another source of disenchantment that made us feel not just indignant and alienated but betrayed. That is, lurking just beneath the threshold of consciousness was the tacit belief that U.S. college composition was somehow based on a legacy of progressive ideals—and that therefore NCTE/CCCC’s failure to act in the Salaita case amounted to a betrayal of composition’s history and identity. We were caught, in other words, in the spell of an affective investment in the historic destiny of U.S. college composition to stand for such progressive principles as the educability of all people; the necessity for human freedom of dismantling the elitism, authoritarianism, myriad regressive masculinities, and white supremacy that remain powerful presences in higher education; and the emancipatory prospects of critical literacy and popular knowledge in a participatory democracy. Composition seemed to offer a professional calling that linked the field to radical moments of the past, from the Freedmen’s Bureau schools during Reconstruction, coeducation, and the public service ethos of the land grant universities to labor colleges of the 1930s, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s (SNCC) Freedom Summer schools, the free universities of the sixties, open admissions and basic writing, and Students’ Right to Their Own Language (SRTOL). The point is that the emotional attachment to a selectively imagined (and auto-persuasive) historical memory—the invention, as it were, of an authorizing radical tradition for c­ omposition— provided the warrant, without which feelings of betrayal could not have happened. The burden of this essay is to look more closely at the aura of composition’s ostensibly progressive tradition and the forces that now appear to be corrupting it. I want to recognize the limits of feeling betrayed. Making composition’s present a fallen version of its past risks mistaking the history of U.S. college composition as a whole for the episodic appearance of left formations within the field of composition. From this perspective, the question is not whether composition is or was progressive as a field. Better, I think, to examine those moments at which leftwing groupings arose, to understand how specific conjunctures enabled and constrained activity on the left and how the left influenced or failed to influence or was coopted by mainstream composition. My plan is first to consider recent critiques of neoliberalism’s deforming influence on composition and the growing suspicion that it is not just austerity and marketization that have undermined composition but that

30  John Trimbur weaknesses, compromises, and concessions within composition’s institutional history have left it defenseless in the face of higher education’s relentless corporatizing war of positions. Next, I briefly examine the history of the New Left and the development of revolutionary politics in postwar U.S. college composition. I use the left’s involvement in the 1974 SRTOL resolution and the 1988 National Language Policy (NLP) statement to illustrate the left’s struggle in composition for revolutionary consciousness. I close with lessons we might draw for what this volume is calling the “political turn” in U.S. college composition and more broadly in the popular mobilizations that have arisen on the American left during the Trump era.

Composition and Neoliberalism The political turn in U.S. college composition is rooted in a disenchantment with composition’s institutions and forms of consciousness, in the feelings of betrayal in the Salaita case and elsewhere. This disenchantment, which I describe anecdotally, has been theorized more fully on political grounds, most notably in Composition in the Age of Austerity, edited by Nancy Welch (one of the 11 non-renewers of their CCCC memberships) and Tony Scott (2016). The collection contains persuasive and sometimes searing accounts of what has gone wrong in composition. Above all, it provides the makings of a conceptual framework to grasp the corrupting influence of neoliberalism on U.S. college composition. There are differences among the contributors, of course, but what makes the collection so alert to the moment is a powerful understanding of the toll taken on composition by neoliberalism’s invasion of higher education. Neoliberalism’s forays into higher education are now well known: the pervasive infiltration of entrepreneurialism and market discourses of disruption, innovation, and risk-taking; the administrative bloat and endless hiring of expensive consultants; the heightened performance standards that speed up faculty and staff work; the inescapable demands of accountability schemes and productivity metrics; the outsourcing, downsizing, privatization, and constant imperative to do more with less. If most colleges and universities in the U.S. are officially “not for profit,” they are operating, for all practical purposes, according to market-driven principles. Upper administrators and an alarming number of faculty are now speaking unselfconsciously in neoliberalism’s market vernacular, about topics that range from maximizing brand recognition to treating faculty time as billable hours to monetizing the college degree in terms of prospective future earnings according to field of study. Composition in the Age of Austerity identifies a neoliberal educational regime that, in effect, is designed to de-socialize the individual, reducing students to atomized self-managed economic entities—or what you might call “responsibilized” accounting units—accumulating marketable credentials while bearing the expense privately as a decentralized

Struggle for Revolutionary Consciousness  31 cost center in a pay-as-you-go economy. 2 In an age of mounting student debt, when the funding of higher education has been sloughed off on individuals and their families, education gets recoded as an economic investment, a market event detached from earlier cultural and civic meanings (on this recoding of writing instruction, see Bolig 2015). The intellectual and moral development of the individual, which once provided a master narrative of liberal education, has given way to the precariousness of the market, the insecurity of flexible employment, and the incessant care of the self (the management of one’s own brand value), driven by the fear of being bypassed and made redundant. Neoliberalism, in other words, is twisting the formation of student subjectivity in new and contradictory ways. Witness, for example, the epidemic of anxiety among millennials and the demand for increased counseling and mental health services on college campuses. While reports on student anxiety in the mainstream press have typically linked it to such factors as social media and peer pressure (see, for example, Denizet-Lewis 2017), a recent study of college students in the U.S., U.K., and Canada born after 1989 makes a clear connection between anxiety and neoliberalism. Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill (2017) found that neoliberalism’s meritocratic logic—with its merciless linking of failure to feelings of inherent worthlessness—weighs heavily on millennials, causing an ­anxiety-inducing perfectionism. Students are holding themselves to impossible standards of performance, while being defensively judgmental about what other students do and paranoid about a social order that appears to be waiting for them to make mistakes, to fall, and to be replaced by someone worthier. Unlike earlier moments like the baby-boomer era of the sixties, with its massifying effects and strong generational ethos (“you can’t trust anyone over thirty”), the pressure today on students is atomizing, undercutting the felt sense of a common generational fate and the need or possibility for collective action. And yet, as though called up by the ­nerve-wracking tension of the individual’s neoliberal predicament, powerful, if uneven and only partially articulated desires have emerged to challenge the reconciliation of the individual to the economic performance of the ­system—desires to break with the “winner-take-all” triumphalism of the 1% and to overturn the austerity visited on what Wendy Brown (2016) calls the “sacrificial citizenship” of the 99%. There is the glimmering of a new sensibility afoot in the mass appeal to young people of the Bernie Sanders campaign, the startling revival of socialism as a popular idea, the tremendous growth of membership in Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and the nascent possibility, still seeking its own terms, of re-socializing the human personality based on principles of solidarity and mutual responsibility for a shared ­ merica could become more like Denmark social future. The idea that A or Norway (rather than “great again”) is suddenly not just thinkable but a compelling ­vision to young people of a democratic socialist way of life.

32  John Trimbur In the swirl of these complicated crosscurrents, the writers in Composition in the Age of Austerity don’t exactly accuse U.S. college composition of being brainwashed or selling out. The problem rather is that neoliberalism in higher education has so thoroughly occupied the attention of composition faculty with situations, policies, and paperwork that have to be dealt with, that loom as irresistible existential forces squeezing out other ways of being and thinking. Neoliberalism in education, that is, depends on a stealth infiltration of consciousness that makes its logic unavoidable at every turn, making people feel, in Margaret Thatcher’s infamous phrase, that “there is no alternative,” no outside to marketized consciousness, no measures of value aside from the performance metrics of managerial control. Along these lines, Chris W. Gallagher’s chapter in Composition in the Age of Austerity pictures neoliberalism’s intrusions as a Trojan horse that has smuggled the directives of instrumentalism and managerialism into composition through outcomes assessment. According to Gallagher (2016), participation in outcomes assessment amounts to “a tacit acknowledgement that results are all that really matter in education” (23), thereby opening the door, he warns, “to those who argue that where and how and under what circumstances one learns are irrelevant” (Scott and Welch 2016, 24). Deborah Mutnick’s (2016) chapter makes a related point when she says that “[o]utcomes assessment not only disciplines college teachers to participate in costly, system-wide assessment programs, burdening them with what often amounts to busy work and diverting them from more meaningful activities, but also embodies the shift from ‘inputs’ to ‘outputs’ in order to rationalize cutbacks” (38), as is evident in output-oriented delivery systems like MOOCs and self-paced online Competency-Based Education supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and touted by the Obama administration as “A Bargain for the Middle Class” (White House 2013). Both Gallagher and Mutnick think composition faculty have either kidded or outsmarted themselves in regard to outcomes assessment. As Gallagher puts it, When we turned to outcomes assessment, we failed to insist we were offering particular kinds of experiences that could not be attained elsewhere. We might have thought we were being good citizens. We might have thought outcomes were just a neutral tool. We might have thought we could have it all. If so, we were wrong. (24) Mutnick adds that although there was initially considerable resistance to outcomes assessment on the part of composition faculty, it was often taken up nonetheless because, as the familiar refrain goes, “If we don’t do it ourselves, they’ll do it for us.” She recounts her own involvement

Struggle for Revolutionary Consciousness  33 in outcomes assessment, motivated by the perfectly reasonable desires to keep her college solvent and accredited, to make sure the work didn’t fall unfairly on a colleague, and to guard against administrative or government interference. In the end, though, the truth of the matter, she confesses, is that “we had simply ‘done it’ for them” (38). As Gallagher and Mutnick make clear, neoliberalism entered composition behind the backs of the faculty, through varying combinations of ill-informed consent, failure of will, and just plain bad judgment. In the introduction to Composition in the Age of Austerity, Welch and Scott take this political naiveté and botched good will a further step, to argue that the field was intellectually unequipped to deal with the forces of marketization and austerity. We “now face the consequences,” they write, “of a field that has never established a scholarly habit of positioning composition scholarship in relation to the powerful political economic factors and trends that shape composition work” (6). The key move Welch and Scott make here is to break with both self-congratulatory accounts of composition’s progressive legacy (the structure of feeling that I’ve tried to problematize) and the professional orthodoxy in composition histories of the tragic fall of rhetoric from its central place in the classical curriculum to its lowly marginalized status in first-year composition. If the first motive is to write composition’s history based on political aspirations, the second motive comes from status anxiety, to find who’s to blame for composition’s shaky professional reputation. Though both motives are undeniable parts of composition’s history, neither, it turns out, is particularly helpful in understanding how composition has been involved in or shaped by the political economies of higher education. Another genealogy is required, a worldly one that registers composition’s role in the political economic settlements that have negotiated the exchange value of writing instruction in the modern academy. From this angle, composition emerges by way of what Ryan Skinnell (2016) calls “concessions” to institutional exigencies. In its most stripped-down version, the paradigmatic case occurred when Harvard needed to admit students who couldn’t pass the entrance exam in writing it had established in 1874, which endangered both its immediate enrollment numbers and its historic task of preparing young men from the best families to take on leading positions in society. First-year composition provided the solution, to “condition” acceptance by way of a required course, put into place on a temporary basis until the secondary schools improved student writing. As Skinnell notes, employing composition institutionally as a concession (in the double sense of a yielding and a business enterprise) may or may not actually improve writing instruction or student writing abilities. Instead, he emphasizes how composition is bartered in the influence markets of higher education, where it serves as a flexible signifier

34  John Trimbur to indexicalize complicated and sometimes contradictory institutional aims. Looked at this way, composition at Harvard served as an enrollment management tool that assuaged the anxieties of the Old Guard Eastern elites about the “mongrelizing” influences on English of immigrants, popular culture, and the philistine tastes of the new middle classes, as captured in the Harvard Reports of the 1890s (see Brereton 1996), while at the same time institutionalizing the shift from the oratorical culture of the 19th-century college to the print culture of the modern research university and the expanding, newly accredited white collar labor of Harvard’s professional schools (on composition as an enrollment management strategy, see Soliday 2002). The point Skinnell enables us to see is that composition is not so much marginalized, as in the tragic fall histories, as it is mobilized to bolster such institutional work as enrollment, professionalization, accreditation, and the pursuit of federal funding. Among all the curricular real estate in higher education, as the nearly universal requirement, composition is uniquely available to be coded and recoded according to institutional motives. Skinnell traces, for example, how composition was invoked in the institutional transformations from normal school to teachers college to state college to what today is the R1 institution Arizona State University—and provides suggestive glimpses of similar “concessions” of composition at North Texas State and University of California, Berkeley. In turn, U.S. college composition and its professional associations have taken on the role and consciousness of concessionaires, as the ­franchise-managers who seek to make writing instruction available to meet institutional and national needs. Pre-neoliberal marketing of the composition concession may be seen, for example, during the Cold War years, in NCTE’s lobbying efforts to identify the study of English with the national interest and to include the language arts for funding under the National Defense Education Act (see Harris 1997). Along similar lines, with the literacy crisis and back-to-basics backlash that accompanied the end of the postwar economic boom in the mid-1970s, WPAs became adept at citing national studies and employer surveys to gain resources by pitching to administrators, government officials, and foundations composition’s value in developing nimble, ­critical-thinking, self-starting, and team-playing employees for the rapidly changing post-Fordist workplace (see Trimbur 1991; Scott 2016). More recently, composition has figured in the neoliberal cosmopolitanism of ­A merican higher education under the sign of multiculturalism and linguistic diversity by mediating anxieties, based on monolingual ideologies of a lost linguistic homogeneity, about the displacement of the native English speaker by the figure of the “postmodern global citizen,” equipped with cultural sensitivity and intercultural communicative competence, as the measure of linguistic value.

Struggle for Revolutionary Consciousness  35 This brief sketch, which may take Skinnell’s work in directions he shouldn’t be held responsible for, is meant to show that composition is and probably always has been not so much on a special mission (of building a literate democracy, restoring rhetoric to its rightful place in the academy, fighting for progressive language policies) as a normal bureaucratic unit in higher education, with assets that can be leveraged for institutional aims. The impact of neoliberalism has, in effect, disabused composition of its cherished past, stripping away the aura and revealing instead the bottom line settlements and concessions that form the actual work of composition. As Composition in the Age of Austerity demonstrates, in a thoroughly marketized world, disenchantment is an unavoidable starting point for radicals to come to terms with the political economy of U.S. college composition—and, this time, without its familiar self-descriptions. None of this means, of course, that there have never been radical tendencies in composition. If we can no longer assume unproblematically a progressive legacy that belongs to composition, we all know there have been—and continue to be—radical interventions from the left in composition, in politics, theory, and pedagogy. The point is that these moments are not expressions of composition’s inherent identity but the result of left activity.

Composition and the New Left The quick answer … is that in the beginning was the sixties. —Richard Ohmann (2003, 239) In the politics of postwar U.S. college composition, everything turned in the sixties with the widespread radicalization of students and faculty. The decade witnessed a political movement that can be dated, at least symbolically, to February 1, 1960, when four black students from North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University sat in at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro. Other black students quickly joined them, and white students from colleges in the North drove to Greensboro to set up a picket line in front of Woolworth’s in support of the sit-in. The idea of direct action to protest segregation spread to other black students, inspiring a wave of sit-ins and the founding later in 1960 of SNCC, which went on to organize the Freedom Rides in 1961 and the Mississippi Freedom Summer voter registration drive and Freedom Schools in 1963. Before SNCC broke with white allies following an attempted t­ akeover by liberal Democrats in 1964, students from the North brought their experience with SNCC’s direct action and its nearly mystical sense of participatory democracy back to campus, where they played leadership roles in the 1964 Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, the draft resistance

36  John Trimbur movement that was emerging nationwide by 1965, the ­1965–1970 ­Delano Grape Strike, led by Cesar Chavez and Larry Itliong, and many local community organizing projects. Support work for SNCC on campuses in the north overlapped with the early years of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), whose1962 Port Huron statement set forth a generational politics opposed to corporate America and cold war liberalism, the welfare state’s perpetuation of poverty and racism, and the stifling conformity of the Eisenhower years. This intersection of student movements was the political matrix from which the New Left arose. The radicalizing process that moved SNCC in 1966 toward Black Power and revolutionary politics also took a left turn in the predominantly white student movement toward anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist politics. Increasingly, black and white activists saw themselves as part of a revolutionary insurgency worldwide that ranged from Third World liberation movements to the French worker-student alliance that nearly overthrew Gaullism in May 1968 to the Black Panther Party. The emergence of the New Left illustrates how quickly political consciousness can change. Consider, for example, how it was impossible, as fall semester of 1964 opened, to imagine that the well-behaved liberal ­students who voted for Lyndon B. Johnson against ­arch-conservative Barry Goldwater that November would by 1967 be calling for the ­military defeat of the U.S. in Vietnam and fighting in the streets to shut down draft centers. Nor was there any way to predict that in the spring of 1970, after Nixon extended the war into Cambodia and student protesters were shot and killed at Kent State and Jackson State, over four million students would go on strike.3 Or that just a few years later, nearly all traces of ­anti-war activism and its burgeoning revolutionary internationalism seem to have disappeared from college campuses as the war wound down and the worldwide crisis of capitalism deepened in the mid-1970s. The fact is political consciousness moves in ebbs and flows, not in a straight line; it is subject to fits and starts, intense struggles alternating with hiatuses, defeats, distraction, quietude, and periods of repression and reaction. What this means, to put a positive spin on it, is that even at the bleakest moments—think of the rise in the mid-1970s of the culture wars and back-to-the-basics attacks on sixties’ “permissiveness,” followed by Reagan’s post-Vietnam revanchism, Thatcher’s TINA, and the end-of-history triumphalism after the fall of Stalinized communism in the late 1980s and early 1990s—reactionary forces cannot permanently cancel the prospects of the left. Instead, the potentialities of left activity are built into class society, guaranteed by the unrelenting friction inevitably produced by contradictions in the system. The history of the left may look cyclical, like the changing seasons of capitalism’s eternal present. But we must see the motion of history not as an interminable repetition but as episodes in the struggle for revolutionary consciousness—in our case moments that seek to radicalize the theory and practice of U.S.

Struggle for Revolutionary Consciousness  37 college composition, that occur at various conjunctures in the historic fate of the left. To put it another way, left activity in composition is related dialectically to the discourses, practices, and institutions that dominate higher education by the hope of negating the system’s logic in order to reimagine subjectivities now deformed by market consciousness, to identify where the emancipatory potential to overcome scarcity and provide for everyone is being blocked, and to point to the common sense of a different social future. The appearance in composition of the New Left in the late 1960s and early 1970s was inextricably tied to one of composition’s defining moments, the struggle for open admissions and the beginnings of basic writing at the City University of New York (CUNY). It is important to see that the social forces behind open admissions, like those behind the sit-ins of 1960, came from a mobilization of black student power. Influenced by Black Power, the anti-Vietnam war movement, and Third World politics, the Black and Puerto Rican Student Community (BPRSC) at City College of New York (CCNY) led the campaign to end selective admissions and democratize the predominantly white four-year colleges in the CUNY system. For New Left faculty in composition, open admissions, basic writing, and Mina Shaughnessy’s call for a “literate democracy” figured as mandates for racial and class justice, popular power, and participatory democracy, making the work of composition appear to grow directly out of the fight for a new politics in American society rather than from disciplinary frameworks. There was a strong sense, inspired by SNCC and the Black Panther Party, of “serving the people” rather than pursuing careers. As Richard Ohmann (2017) puts it, “We thought of ourselves as the academic wing of international popular movements” (n.p.). For young leftist faculty, this feeling of being in the midst of history provided a key motive for the switch many had made, necessitated by the academic job market, from the belletrism of literary studies to the grassroots of composition.4 The New Left in composition has taken a variety of forms. We should note, at the outset, the persistent presence of radical intellectual traditions in U.S. college composition, starting with Richard Ohmann’s ([1976] 1996) English in America. The theoretical scope includes localized American versions of Freirean conscientization, New Left neo-marxism, socialist feminism, radical sociology of education (like Henry Giroux and Bowles and Gintis’ Schooling in Capitalist America), working-class pedagogies, and the transformative influence of open admissions and basic writing on Ira Shor, Patricia Bizzell, Mike Rose, Tom Fox, Bruce Horner, Min Zhan Lu, and many others in composition. This nondoctrinaire leftist structure of feeling, grounded in the radicalizations of the sixties, has influenced curriculum development, study groups, conference panels, special issues of journals, community writing projects, and other assorted aspects of mainstream composition’s professional practices.

38  John Trimbur The dilemmas in the struggle for political consciousness are evident, for example, in the New Left-inspired loosely affiliated intellectual grouping that coalesced in the late 1980s and early 1990s around James Berlin, with his turn to Marxism and the arrival of British cultural studies in U.S. college composition. For Berlin, Lester Faigley, and others, the task was to delineate a viable left position and pedagogy in the 1990s world of postmodern theory, and to deal with attacks both from reactionaries, as in the case of the first-year writing course E306 “Writing About Difference,” designed by Linda Brodkey at the University of Texas, Austin, which was canceled under pressure from the far right, and from liberals, such as Maxine Hairston, whose red-baiting polemic against radical pedagogy “Diversity, Ideology, and Teaching Writing” came out in 1992.5 Berlin’s influence is due in part to how he absorbed the a­ ntifoundationalism of Stanley Fish and Richard Rorty that rattled composition’s epistemologies in the 1980s, while fending off the renegade postmarxisms of Lyotard and Baudrillard without sounding corny or old-fashioned. For Berlin, Stuart Hall’s notion of “Marxism without guarantees” provided the grounds to resist the untenable certainties and mechanical determinisms of earlier Marxist orthodoxies, but at the same time to maintain the reality of class struggle as it is complexly refracted through the prism of late capitalism—to articulate a democratic socialist vision of the education of citizen-workers.6 Berlin’s circle of co-thinkers was transient and ephemeral; its only structure was the fluidity of conversation and the episodic publication of books and articles. This loose, mainly textual network of likeminded radicals contrasts in telling ways with other left initiatives seeking to establish more organized presences in U.S. college composition, such as the radical caucuses and special interest groups in CCCC; ongoing publishing projects such as Radical Teacher, New City Community Press founded by Steve Parks in Philadelphia, and Forum: Newsletter for Issues about Part-Time and Contingent Faculty; the independent left organization Writing Democracy, which, following the crash of 2008, called for an updated Federal Writers’ Project in Obama’s stimulus package and has since performed exemplary work as a left forum at CCCC and other conferences by providing resources for radical teachers and posing the political question “what is to be done?” in the Trump era;7 or single-issue activism, such as the 1986 Wyoming Resolution, which called on composition’s professional associations to establish standards for salaries and working conditions of contingent faculty, a national grievance process, and a procedure to censure postsecondary institutions for noncompliance. What all these manifestations of the left in composition have in common is that their radical politics come from a place outside the official consciousness of U.S. college composition, making their presence an

Struggle for Revolutionary Consciousness  39 intervention into business as usual. Each has faced, in different ways, the political question of how to work, as Ohmann says, from the contradictory position of being both within and against mainstream institutions, as leftists’ workplaces and professional lives are shaped by the corporatization of American higher education, the self-interests of composition’s tenured and tenure-track elite, and the bureaucratic conservatism of NCTE/CCCC. This inside/outside position also means that one of the difficulties of being on the left in composition is that it’s correctly coded as an oppositional stance. As CCCC made quite clear when it defanged the Wyoming Resolution by dropping the grievance process and censure procedures as “unrealistic” and formulating an embarrassingly watered-down set of professional standards, the work of mainstream composition is to manage the concession.8 The liberals and moderates in composition’s pragmatic, results-oriented mainstream try to contain the left by picturing it as overly idealistic, impractical, and/or unruly—anything from the conscience of the field to the purveyors of an unattainable fantasy to a tolerated presence to a clear and present danger. By contrast, the task of the left is to resist these normalizing pressures of the status quo through the revolutionary negation of the present state of affairs. This is what it means to be unreconciled to the unfairness, suffering, and waste of the current system: the aim of revolutionary consciousness is to unlock from the old order new and more humanly adequate forms of social life. To see in greater detail what this struggle for revolutionary consciousness looks like in practice—how it tries to find, you might say, in any given situation, the available means of subversion—we turn in the next section to radical interventions on the part of composition’s left into the language politics of CCCC during events that led to the 1974 SRTOL resolution and the 1988 NLP statement. In each case, a left formation— the New University Conference (NUC) or the Progressive Composition Caucus (PCC)—was involved in pushing the political urgency of language ideology and language policy in composition.

Composition’s Left and Language Politics According to Fred L. Pincus and Howard J. Ehrlich (1988), the NUC was the “first politically left organization on American campuses with the explicit membership policy of including faculty and graduate students” (145). It was an attempt, in other words, to have a national faculty counterpart to the New Left politics of the student movement. NUC activists introduced the idea of radical education to many colleges and universities, linking campus movements to wider struggles against war, imperialism, and the oppression of women and minorities. NUC fought for campus day-care centers, organized graduate student unions, held teach-ins in solidarity with the Black Power movement and

40  John Trimbur anti-colonial struggles, called for an end to military research, ROTC, and ­complicity with the draft, defended political prisoners, and established ­radical caucuses in professional associations. From its founding in 1968, NUC had an organized presence in CCCC, holding workshops, pushing for anti-war resolutions, and promoting the legitimacy of black and ­working-class dialects. As Stephen Parks (2000) shows in Class Politics: The Movement for the Students’ Right to Their Own Language, NUC raised working-class and minority dialects as political issues as early as 1969, two years before the CCCC Executive Committee established in 1971 the committee which wrote SRTOL. Following the 1969 CCCC convention, NUC sent a memo to the Executive Committee, calling on CCCC and NCTE to “work actively to make nonstandard dialects acceptable in all schools,” kindergarten through postsecondary, and to “concentrate not on trying to teach everyone to speak and write upper middle-class white dialect but rather on changing the attitude of society that discriminates against other dialects” (Parks 139). Geneva Smitherman (1999), on the other hand, dates the inception of SRTOL to the year before, in 1968, when the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. coincided with the CCCC convention in Minneapolis. Smitherman is unquestionably right that King’s murder was a “symbolic turning point” in composition, marked by Ernece B. Kelly’s speech at the 1968 convention “Murder of the ‘American Dream,’” which rebukes CCCC, in Smitherman’s words, for “the lack of Black representation on the program,” “the exclusion of Black intellectual and literary products in anthologies,” and the “way it deals with Black Language” (355–357). Kelly’s talk appeared in the May 1968 issue of CCC, and she subsequently edited the December 1968 special issue of CCC featuring four black writers on black language and culture, which was a first for the journal. This black insurgency, as Smitherman recounts it, raised the consciousness of racial oppression and language politics in CCCC in a way that had not happened before, in effect preparing the political climate for SRTOL. Keith Gilyard (2002) argues that Parks’ account of SRTOL downplays the role of African American scholars like Kelly and misinterprets Smitherman’s political motives; at the same time, he also notes that Smitherman’s account ignores NUC’s presence, portraying SRTOL instead as the logical outcome of CCCC discussions of language variation that went back to the 1950s. Gilyard is certainly correct that the two versions are not mutually exclusive. It is also true that the mutual omissions pose a historiographical problem to sort out—to understand more fully the pressures and limits in the confluence of black and white activism that was characteristic of revolutionary politics in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and how these currents played out in CCCC and the making of SRTOL.

Struggle for Revolutionary Consciousness  41 Carmen Kynard (2007) has taken an important step in this direction in her investigation of SRTOL, the New Left, and Black Power. For one thing, Kynard points out the absence of Angela Davis in Parks’ Class Politics and its consequences for understanding the Black Liberation Movement. By highlighting Davis instead of the more predictable Stokely Carmichael as the iconic spokesperson for the politics of Black Power, Kynard foregrounds the “project of looking at ­A frican-Americans who fold out racial oppression in terms of class struggle under the terms of Marxism and socialism” (379). For Kynard, an anti-capitalist black radical tradition, exemplified by Davis and charted in Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism and Robin D.G. Kelley’s Race Rebels, among other places, offers an understanding of the politics of black vernacular expression and the relations between Black Power and the New Left that sidesteps wasted postmodern arguments “about what is essentialist and what isn’t” (380) and instead challenges “racialized class exploitation” by pushing “black working-class audiences to new levels of social awareness, solidarity, and political activism” (Kynard 2007, 362).9 At this point, however, for our purposes, it is enough to reconstruct how, as Smitherman (1999) says, the fight for SRTOL provided a “critical mechanism for CCCC to address its own internal contradictions” (355). Smitherman (1995) casts African American militants—“marching, fist-raising, loud-talking protesters”—as the vanguard of a mass social movement that “unleash[ed] Brown Power, Woman Power, Poor People’s Power, Gay Power, and other human energy sources that fundamentally altered American power relations in our time” (21). Importantly, Smitherman evokes this popular upsurge not just to contextualize the fight for SRTOL in the radical politics of the sixties but also to identify the actual political pressures of the moment as they impinged on the consciousness of CCCC’s members, the tensions between protecting the organization’s mainstream credibility as a source of professional expertise on the English language, on the one hand, and aligning U.S. college composition, on the other, in a more active political relation to the Black Liberation Movement. In this regard, we know from Parks’ (2000) account that NUC wanted to valorize African American English and other working-class dialects, but not just for the purpose of forwarding knowledge in linguistics to enlighten teachers, policymakers, and the public about dialects. NUC was also intent on undermining the ruling class authority that had denigrated dialects in the first place. The 1969 NUC newsletter article “Who(m) Does Standard English Serve? Who(m) Does Standard English Hurt?” argued that “if no one dialect were given more prestige than another, one of the ideological props for the myth of upper-class intellectual superiority would be removed” (quoted in Parks, 87). As Parks notes, the authors of the NUC newsletter, Mary Tyler Knowles, Betty Resnikoff, and Jacqueline Ross, emphasize how language and culture

42  John Trimbur create differences between groups, enabling the ruling class to keep workers divided and block the formation of a unified multiracial and multilingual working-class movement (87). From this angle, intervening in language ideology by equalizing the linguistic status of dialects was to clear the ground for cross-racial, cross-ethnolinguistic alliances. What happened, however, is that the reformist wing of CCCC dominated the final formulation of SRTOL, short-circuiting NUC’s New Leftist understanding of the interpenetration of race and class in capitalist social relations and the political necessity of building interracial working-class united fronts. NUC was aligned ideologically with the Black Panther Party and the revolutionary wing of the Black Liberation Movement that saw the racial predicament of African Americans in terms of a worldwide class struggle. Black English, therefore, could not be reduced to the symbol of “a nation proud of its diverse heritage,” as it became in the liberal reformist politics of SRTOL a signifier of multiculturalism’s national consciousness. Instead, in the revolutionary consciousness left as NUC’s legacy, Black English figures as the linguistic negation of such a harmonized cultural pluralism, a sign of resistance to the racial and class oppression that links African Americans’ fate to revolutionary politics. If, however, SRTOL was stripped of its revolutionary potentialities by the dominant liberal reformism in CCCC, this does not mean that ­SRTOL was a failure or a sell-out. On the contrary, it was a historic though partial victory, secured through compromise between radicals and moderates that upheld the validity of non-prestige English varieties against linguistic elitism and its underlying racialized and class-based premises, even if the resolution did not employ such politically loaded terms. At the same time, it is important that the left not pretend SRTOL was more than a qualified tactical gain in the language wars. The NUC, as it turned out, was a mercurial left formation. In ­1970–1971, at its peak, NUC had 2,000 members on 66 campuses. By 1972, it was facing bankruptcy, with only 300 members left. Though NUC may have disappeared organizationally, ten years later, in 1982, the PCC materialized, not exactly picking up where NUC left off but in its own moment, with its own sense of necessity about keeping ­socialist-feminist politics and radical teaching alive during the dark Reagan years. PCC published a newsletter, which was a crucial forum for radical pedagogy; picketed with striking Service Employees International Union (SEIU) hotel workers in New Orleans at the 1986 CCCC convention; and presented a sense-of-the-house motion in solidarity with the S­ andinistas, then under attack by the U.S.-backed Contras in Nicaragua (see Dougherty and Lewis 2011). Like NUC before it, PCC was involved in language politics, though the terms of linguistic struggle had changed in some important ways by the 1980s, in particular with the rise of an English Only movement based on

Struggle for Revolutionary Consciousness  43 ­ ecome anti-immigrant sentiment and a revitalized nativism that have b all too familiar fixtures in American politics. In 1986, ­California became the first state to make English the official language. In response, at the 1987 CCCC convention, PCC submitted a sense-of-the-house motion with a dual purpose: first, to support the statement NCTE had already made opposing English Only legislation; and, second, to appoint a CCCC task force to address the renewed urgency of language politics (see CCCC minutes, March 21, 1987, p. 5). In an unusual move for a motion from the floor, PCC specified that Geneva Smitherman be appointed chair of the task force, an expression of the PCC’s skepticism about the reliability of the CCCC Executive Committee’s political judgment. Compared to SRTOL, which, as Smitherman (1999) notes, had ­endured “agonizing argumentation, contestation, debate—and denial” (369), the NLP statement rested on an overriding consensus in favor of an English Plus policy that (1) reinforced access to English as the language of wider communication; (2) legitimized the use of mother tongue languages and dialects, such as African American English; and (3) promoted the acquisition of Spanish and other “foreign” languages. NLP’s English Plus orientation was seen widely and favorably in CCCC and beyond as a logical extension of SRTOL, as another pluralistic affirmation of “respect both for English, the common language, and the many other languages that have contributed to our rich cultural and linguistic heritage” (quoted in Smitherman 1999, 368). Smitherman (1995) argued that the NLP was based on a “new paradigm shift,” from the “provincial, more narrowly conceived focus” of SRTOL “to a broader internationalist perspective” (26). It has taken some time and the blunt force of neoliberal globalization to see that indeed the NLP is the vehicle of an “internationalist perspective” but one that is cosmopolitan rather than revolutionary in outlook, that combines an affirmation of linguistic diversity with the mobility of the “postmodern global citizen”—the portfolio men and women of a deterritorialized late capitalism—in order to promote the communicative competence across linguistic and cultural borders needed to “participate more effectively in worldwide activities” and “unify diverse U.S. communities,” as the updated 2015 version of NLP put it. The problem, from a left perspective, is that NLP does not link its emphasis on linguistic tolerance and communicative competence to a critical consciousness of language based on anti-racism, anti-capitalism, and anti-imperialism. The additive multilingualism of the NLP’s tripartite approach amounts to a pluricentrism that is based on what Mary Louise Pratt (1987) calls the “linguistics of community” (and “subcommunity”), in which language “is seen as a nexus of social identity, but not as a site of social struggle or a producer of social relations” (56). By contrast, what is required, Pratt says, is a “linguistics of contact” that sees how language operates “across” the “lines of social differentiation”

44  John Trimbur that produce linguistic stratification, differential access to resources of representation, and the asymmetrical workings of transcultural linguistic exchange (59). The alternative to the NLP’s cosmopolitan outlook is the struggle for revolutionary consciousness, to activate the radical potentialities of the NLP’s tripartite approach by formulating pedagogies and public policies in which the learning of multiple languages, including African American English, Spanglish, and other working-class vernaculars, by all students and residents of the U.S., would serve to weaken ethnolinguistic divisions and to release the languages spoken and written in the U.S. as linguistic resources to form new translingual alliances based on the solidarity of working and oppressed people. Such an approach has been anticipated in the revolutionary outlook of the late Neville Alexander and other language activists in South Africa.10 Alexander’s call for a national language policy in South Africa was based on a tripartite approach similar to the NLP, with (1) all students learning English as the language of wider communication; (2) legitimizing the home languages—whether an African language, Afrikaans, or the ­hybrid mixes of township vernaculars—of the majority non-native English speakers as intellectual, rhetorical, and poetic linguistic resources; and (3) all students learning a third regionally significant language, which would be either Afrikaans or another African language, depending on the local language ecology. For Alexander, this national language policy goes beyond recognizing the linguistic right of South Africans to use their own languages as they see fit, which it resolutely defends. The goal rather is a double negation of the prevailing linguistic order: 1 To decenter English as the unevenly distributed prestige medium of teaching and learning, the media, commerce, and government; to reverse its current role as a source of linguistic inequality and restricted access to elite knowledge economies; and to refigure its relation to other South African languages in education, culture, and public forums. 2 To loosen the identification of language with the racialized ethnolinguistic groups created by colonialism and apartheid; to “intellectualize” African languages as vehicles of knowledge production; and to put multiple languages into circulation as linguistic resources in the articulation of new social solidarities. The point, for Alexander, was not just to represent the languages that are present in the new South Africa but to re-represent them translingually as democratic channels of reciprocal exchange in the formation of a new body politic. The radical impulse of everyone speaking each other’s language was meant to go beyond preserving the nation’s linguistic heritage to undermine the linguistic hierarchy

Struggle for Revolutionary Consciousness  45 that resulted from South Africa’s “elite transition” to democracy in 1994, when English was recoded from the language of liberation—the “People’s English”11 of the anti-apartheid struggle—to the cosmopolitan vernacular of globalization that now divides corporate interests and a new black middle class from poor and working-class African and Afrikaans language speakers.12 There are significant differences, of course, between the two settler colonies in the United States and South Africa, but the lesson in language politics that Alexander makes available to U.S. college composition’s left is how rejecting locked-in language and identity equations from the past can combine with the dismantling of linguistic hierarchies in the present to open the radical possibility of new identifications across ethnolinguistic lines of working and oppressed people.

One Ending When I was saying, “White people go to hell,” I never had trouble finding a publisher. But when I say, “Black and white unite and fight, destroy capitalism,” then you suddenly become unreasonable. —Amiri Baraka As Keith Gilyard notes, Steve Parks’ history of SRTOL breaks with earlier intellectual histories of U.S. college composition by Berlin, Sharon Crowley, Robert J. Connors, and others to focus instead on political organization and forging interracial working-class alliances. To this end, in the early 2000s, Parks, Eileen Schell, Matthew Abraham, Damián Baca, and others sought to bring together caucuses of CCCC—Black, Latinx, American Indian, Asian/Asian American, Labor, Queer—in the Progressive SIG and Caucus Coalition (PSSC), with the aim of creating what Parks called an “intersectional space” of mutual aid to confront the conservatism of CCCC, invite guest speakers, promote common agendas of social justice, clarify political differences, and provide support for individual caucus resolutions at the business meetings. For almost a decade, PSSC organized activities at CCCC annual meetings, held independent meetings outside the mainstream professional associations, and sponsored the Rachel Corrie Courage in the Teaching of Writing Award, named for the American activist killed by the Israel Defense Force when she was trying to prevent the demolition of Palestinian homes in Gaza during the Second Intifada in 2003.13 The fact that PSSC disbanded by 2010 should not deter us from acknowledging its radical potentialities and what it may forecast about the prospects of building new political formations. The most hopeful left news of the Trump era are the political campaigns of socialist women of color such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Jovanka Beckles, and Julia Salazar; the emergence of a new generation of black

46  John Trimbur socialist intellectuals such as Keeanga-Yamhatta Taylor, Briahna Gray, Touré F. Reed, and R.L. Stephens; and Reverend William Barber’s revival of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s radical Poor Peoples campaign. These new political developments point once again to both the confluence of black and white activism that gave rise to the New Left and the vexing political challenge of unifying the disparate leftist forces that have emerged fitfully over the past 20 years—from the anti-globalization uprising at the Battle of Seattle in 1999 to Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and the #MeToo movement to the revival of American socialism signaled by the rapid growth of the DSA. As we just saw, language activists such as Neville Alexander rejected the idea of linguistic unification as the basis of a national popular consciousness in the new South African polity, abandoning the idea of a unifying “People’s English” for a radical reconfiguration of the prevailing linguistic hierarchy that delinks language and identity equations of the past in order to form new solidarities in the present. I think something similar may be needed today on the American left in the way we think of political unity. Max Erlbaum makes a telling comparison between the New Communist Movement (NCM) of the 1970s, with its ­Marxist-Leninist-Maoist emphasis on revolutionary orthodoxy and the struggle against Soviet revisionism, and to the current DSA, which is ideologically heterogeneous but “united on a political program, socialism” (quoted in Uetricht 2018, n.p.).14 The question to be tested, Erlbaum seems to suggest, is whether unity on a program of democratic socialism is enough to build a lasting political movement. The time seems propitious for a politics of unity that sidesteps the doctrinal purity and sectarian divisions that go back to the Bolshevik Revolution and the split in international communism between Stalinists and Trotskyists. At the same time, a united front that includes diverse ideological strands and vigorous political debate must be more than a conglomeration of anti-Trump forces from the contradictory pluricentric world of identity politics, where the struggle of the oppressed for self-defense and self-definition rubs uneasily against the class interests of established and aspiring professional managerial sectors. What a program of democratic socialism makes it possible to imagine is the reconfiguration of identities based on solidarity rather than ideological correctness or interest group politics, a united front against the bosses that joins the struggle against racism and patriarchy to the struggle against capitalism. The exigence is certainly there. At a moment unsettled by the emboldened politics of white nationalism and the free rein Trump has given to an earth-destroying deregulatory capitalism, the interracial, interethnic, translingual bonds of workers, oppressed people, radicalized intellectuals, professionals, and artists pose the revolutionary negation capable of summoning an emancipatory and sustainable social future.

Struggle for Revolutionary Consciousness  47

Notes 1 I owe this point to Laura Tetreault, who explained the growing alienation of graduate students and beginning-stage composition faculty. See the rhetoric and composition graduate student listserv nextGen, https://crdm. news.chass.ncsu.edu/2018/04/09/introducing-nextgen-listserv-for-writingrhetoric-grad-students/. 2 On the individual as a “responsibilized” accounting unit, see Brown (2016). 3 For details on the 1970 student strike, see “May 1970 Student Anti-War Strikes” at Mapping American Social Movements, University of W ­ ashington, accessed March 14, 2019. http://depts.washington.edu/moves/antiwar_ may1970.shtml. 4 See Lisa Ede (2004) on this connection between the job market and the career shifts of a generation of literature Ph.D.’s, including such prominent composition figures as David Bartholomae, James Berlin, and Patricia Bizzell. 5 A similar exchange about critical pedagogy took place in College Composition and Communication in 2006 between William Thelin and Russel Durst, revealing once again the persistent tensions between radicals and the mainstream liberalism of U.S. college composition. 6 I was associated with this tendency, and there was, briefly, in the five years or so before Berlin’s death in 1994, a common project to work out a radical neo-Marxist framework for the study and teaching of writing. In retrospect, I think the connections between ideology and rhetoric, the notion of the student as a citizen-worker, and the collapsing hierarchy of popular and high culture were gains in footing for the left in U.S. college composition. There was the key recognition that theoretical clarification of the first-year writing curriculum was an important site of struggle. But there were also limits, such as the heroic narrative of breaking with ­c urrent-traditional rhetoric, as conceived by Berlin and Sharon Crowley, and the propensity to reduce the scope of politics to a struggle for the intellectual acknowledgment of composition as a legitimate field of inquiry and the revival of rhetoric, in a leftist version inspired by Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton. My feeling is that, given the security of being “tenured radicals,” we were often not as conscious as we might have been of the material conditions of our own intellectual production, how the workings of our consciousness were subject to both the necessity and the illusions of what Gayatri Spivack calls “striking great blows against capital in the realm of theory.” 7 On Writing Democracy, see the website https://writingdemocracy.­wordpress. com/ and the 2012 special issue of Community Literacy Journal 7 (1), edited by Shannon Carter and Deborah Mutnick. 8 For a helpful overview of the fate of the Wyoming Resolution, see McDonald and Schell (2011). Given the refusal of NCTE/CCCC to address the need for radical change in academic labor, the initiative falls, as always, outside mainstream institutions, in this case to the Labor Caucus, which since 2014 has been developing the Indianapolis Resolution to move CCCC’s position on contingent faculty to the left. See Cox et al. (2016). 9 Interestingly, much in Kynard’s critique of Parks’ interpretation of NUC hinges on what she sees as the uncritical acceptance by both Park and NUC of William Labov’s work on Black English as a foundation of radical language politics. I think she is right about this. She draws on Robin Kelley (1998), for a critique of Labov. See also Mary Louise Pratt’s critique of Labov in “Linguistic Utopias.”

48  John Trimbur 10 Neville Alexander (1936–2012) was a veteran activist to the left of the ­A frican National Congress whose writings on politics and language policy have never been published in the U.S. but have been made available by decision of his family and literary executor as an open source at the Marxist Archive www.marxists.org/archive/alexander/ index.htm. See especially the book Language Policy and National Unity in South Africa (1989); the pamphlet English Unassailable but Unattainable: The Dilemma of Language Policy in South African Education (1999); and the essay “The African Renaissance and the Use of African Languages in Tertiary Education” (2003). 11 See Bronwyn Norton Pierce (1989). 12 What made English appear to be emancipatory is that it was neither (a) ­A frikaans, the language of the apartheid regime; nor (b) an African language, which was associated with the tribal homelands or bantustans set up by apartheid’s “separate development.” Alexander turned from ­English-language projects to multilingualism in the 1990s when it became clear to him ­English was “unassailable” in prestige but “unobtainable” for many, especially for the poor and rural, and that a different approach—not so much adding ­English as reconfiguring the relations among languages—was needed. For more on English in the post-apartheid era, see Trimbur (2010). 13 I want to thank Steve Parks and Eileen Schell for providing me with information and materials from the PSSC archive. 14 The NCM refers to Marxist/Leninist/Maoist groups that considered the Communist Party USA to be hopelessly revisionist and sought to build a more orthodox revolutionary vanguard, looking to the Chinese, Cuban, and Vietnamese revolutions and Third World national liberation movements for inspiration and leadership. The NCM regrouped New Left activists and recruited a significant number of revolutionary people of color at the time the student movement was fading. It lasted into the late 1970s, in a few instances into the 1980s. Quotes here are taken from Michah Uetricht, “Learning from the New Communist Movement: An Interview with Max Elbaum” (2018). See also Elbaum’s history of the NCM, Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che, Verso, 2018.

References Bolig, Chase. 2015. “‘Is Writing Worth It?’: Arguing for Composition’s Value with the Citizen-Worker.” College Composition and Communication 67 (2): 150–172. Brereton, John. 1996. The Origins of Composition Studies in the American College, 1875–1925. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Brown, Wendy. 2016. “Sacrificial Citizenship: Neoliberalism, Human Capital, and Austerity Politics.” Constellations 23 (1): 3–14. CCCC Guideline on the National Language Policy, Conference on College Composition and Communication, 1988, updated 1992, revised 2015, https:// cccc.ncte.org/cccc/resources/positions/nationallangpolicy. Cox, Anicca, Timothy R. Dougherty, Seth Kahn, Michelle LaFrance, and Amy Lynch-Biniek. 2016. “The Indianapolis Resolution: Responding to ­Twenty-First Century Exigencies/Political Economies of Composition L ­ abor.” College Composition and Communication 68 (1): 38–67. Curran, Thomas, and Andrew Hill. 2017. “Perfectionism Is Increasing over Time: A Meta-Analysis of Birth Cohort Differences from 1989 to 2016.” Psychological Bulletin, December 28, 2017. DOI:10.1037/bul0000138.

Struggle for Revolutionary Consciousness  49 Denizet-Lewis, Benoit. 2017. “The Kids Who Can’t: Why Are More Teenagers Than Ever Suffering from Severe Anxiety?” New York Times Magazine, ­October 11, 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/10/11/magazine/why-are-more-american-­ teenagers-than-ever-suffering-from-severe-anxiety.html. Dougherty, Timothy R., and Justin Lewis. 2011. “Progressive Caucus: Combating Institutional Neutrality.” In Listening to Our Elders: Working and Writing for Change, edited by Samantha Blackmon, Cynthia Kirklighter, and Stephen Parks, 145–154. Boulder: University of Colorado Press. Durst, Russel. 2006. “Can We Be Critical of Critical Pedagogy?” College ­C omposition and Communication 58 (1): 110–114. Ede, Lisa. 2004. Situating Composition: Composition and the Politics of Location. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Gallagher, Chris. 2016. “Our Trojan Horse: Outcomes Assessment and the Resurrection of Competency-Based Education.” In Composition in the Age of Austerity, edited by Nancy Welch and Tony Scott, 21–34. Logan: Utah State University Press. Gilyard, Keith. 2002. “Holdin It Down: Students’ Right and the Struggle over Linguistic Diversity.” In Rhetoric and Composition as Intellectual Work, edited by Gary A. Olson, 115–127. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Hairston, Maxine. 1992. “Diversity, Ideology, and Teaching Writing.” College Composition and Communication 43 (2): 179–193. Harris, Joseph. 1997. A Teaching Subject: Composition since 1966. Upper Saddle River: Prentice-Hall. Kelley, Robin D.G. 1998. Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America. Boston: Beacon Press. Kynard, Carmen. 2007. “‘I Want to Be African’: In Search of a Radical Black Tradition/African-American-Vernacular Paradigm for ‘Students’ Right to Their Own Language,’ Critical Literacy, and ‘Class Politics.’” College English 69 (4): 360–390. McDonald, James C., and Eileen Schell. 2011. “The Spirit and Influence of the Wyoming Resolution: Looking Back to Look Forward.” College English 73 (4): 360–378. Mutnick, Deborah. 2016. “Confessions of an Assessment Fellow.” In Composition in the Age of Austerity, edited by Nancy Welch and Tony Scott, 35–50. Logan: Utah State University Press. Ohmann, Richard. [1976] 1996. English in America: A Radical View of the Profession. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. ———. 2003. Politics of Knowledge: The Commercialization of the University, the Professions, & Print Culture. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. ———. 2017. “A ‘60s Radical Reflects.’” Inside Higher Education, November 13, 2017. www.insidehighered.com/views/2017/11/13/two-views-past-50-yearscampuses-and-essay. Parks, Stephen. 2000. Class Politics: The Movement for the Students’ Right to Their Own Language. Urbana: NCTE. Pierce, Bronwyn Norton. 1989. “Toward a Pedagogy of Possibility in Teaching English Internationally: People’s English in South Africa.” TESOL Quarterly 23 (3): 401–420. Pincus, Fred L., and Howard J. Ehrlich. 1988. “The New University Conference: A Study of Its Former Members.” Critical Sociology 15 (2): 145–147.

50  John Trimbur Pratt, Mary Louise. 1987. “Linguistic Utopias.” In The Linguistics of Writing: Arguments between Language and Literature, edited by Nigel Fabb, et al., 48–66. New York: Methuen. Scott, Tony. 2016. “Subverting Crisis in the Political Economy of Composition.” College Composition and Communication 68 (1): 10–37. Scott, Tony, and Nancy Welch. 2016. “Introduction: Composition in the Age of Austerity.” In Composition in the Age of Austerity, edited by Nancy Welch and Tony Scott, 3–17 Logan: Utah State University Press. Skinnell, Ryan. 2016. Conceding Composition: A Crooked History of Composition’s Institutional Fortunes. Logan: Utah State University Press. Smitherman, Geneva. 1995. “‘Students’ Right to Their Own Language’: A ­Retrospective.” English Journal 84 (1): 21–27. ———. 1999. “CCCC’s Role in the Struggle for Language Rights.” College Composition and Communication 50 (3): 349–376. Soliday, Mary. 2002. Politics of Remediation: Institutional and Student Needs in Higher Education. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Thelin, William H. 2006. “William H. Thelin’s Response to Russel Durst.” College Composition and Communication 58 (1): 114–118. Trimbur, John. 1991. “Literacy and the Discourse of Crisis.” In Politics of ­Writing Instruction: Postsecondary, edited by Richard Bullock, Charles I. Schuster, and John Trimbur, 277–295. Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook. ———. 2010. “English in a Splintered Metropolis: South Africa after ­Apartheid.” JAC 29 (1–2):107–137. ———. 2018. “The Steven Salaita Case: Public Rhetoric and the Political Imagination in U.S. College Composition and Its Professional Associations.” In Unruly Rhetorics: Protest, Persuasion, and Publics, edited by Jonathan ­A lexander, Susan Jarratt, and Nancy Welch, 183–205. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Uetricht, Michael. 2018. “Learning from the New Communist Movement: An Interview with Max Elbaum.” Jacobin, September 30, 2018. www.­jacobinmag. com/2018/09/max-elbaum-new-communist-movement-­socialism-organizing, accessed October 1, 2018. The White House Office of the Press Secretary. 2013. “Fact Sheet on the President’s Plan to Make College More Affordable: A Better Bargain for the Middle Class.” 22 August 2013. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/ the-press-office/2013/08/22/fact-sheet-president-s-plan-make-college-moreaffordable-better-bargain-.

3 “Organize as If It Were Possible to Create a Movement That Will Change the World” An Interview with Angela Davis LaToya Lydia Sawyer and Ben Kuebrich What follows is an interview we conducted with Angela Davis in the spring of 2014 in the Writing Democracy workshop at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC). To get into the discussion, a reader should recall the moment: Occupy Wall Street was over and activists and organizers were thinking about what lessons to take from it. George Zimmerman had been acquitted of all charges after he fatally shot Trayvon Martin. The founders of Black Lives Matter were using the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter as a tool for organizing a movement that would not be nationally visible until the summer of 2014 after the tragic deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown.1 In this historical space, just as one important movement had faded and another began to rise in response to social urgencies, Davis reminds us to learn and teach the promise of moments past and to see the “interconnectedness of all our social justice movements.” She calls on us as writing teachers to help create a radical collective political imagination. It is with this radical collective political imagination in mind that we hope readers of Writing Democracy will take up these discussions in the writing classroom and beyond. These insights hold particular weight in this present moment given Davis’ background and long-standing commitment to organizing and working for justice. From an early age, growing up in Birmingham, Alabama, in the midst of racial segregation, Angela Davis saw injustice and its violent impact on communities first hand. Davis has demonstrated her passion for justice and improving the lives of people all throughout her life, whether in school study groups as a teen, alongside other women while incarcerated, working in the Communist Party, or with the Black Liberation Movement. A world-renowned speaker, author, and teacher, Angela Davis continues to inspire generations to critically examine structural, social inequalities and to work ward transformative solutions. She is a Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies

52  LaToya Lydia Sawyer and Ben Kuebrich department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She’s also the founder of Critical Resistance, a national organization that seeks to build an international movement to end the prison industrial complex by, as the mission statement describes, “challenging the belief that caging and controlling people makes us safe.” The organization argues, instead, that “basic necessities, such as food, shelter, and freedom are what really make our communities secure.” This interview builds on discussions we began with Davis in 2010 when we took her Woman of Color Feminisms seminar at Syracuse University. It has been our pleasure to speak with her and to share her humility, grace, and her depth of wisdom and conviction on matters concerning a freer and more just world. BEN KUEBRICH:  So

I wanted to start by asking you about the theme of this workshop: “Writing Democracy.” We’ve been working under that banner in this ongoing workshop and in our recent scholarship and community-partnership work, so we obviously think of democracy as a guiding concept. But we also see it as a deeply contested, often totally compromised term, and so I’m curious how you see the concept of democracy at play in your own work and in social movements generally, or what other concepts create a sense of purpose and possibility in the work that you do. ANGELA DAVIS:  Okay. Well good afternoon everyone, and first of all I’m really happy to be here. It’s great to see LaToya and Ben again, and it feels really good being a part of this collaborative effort to figure out how we can move forward. Okay, the question, democracy, the meaning of democracy. I suppose I would answer that question by saying that first of all, it’s important to adopt a critical perspective and ask how democracy is normally defined within the context of prevailing ideologies, and then we discover, I think, that there’s a kind of conflation between democracy and capitalism. And I think it’s extremely important to acknowledge the way in which capitalism has kind of colonized the whole field in order for us to come up with some approaches toward a democracy that are not necessarily the formalistic, legalistic ideas of democracy that are connected with capitalism and the notion of the market. So, this would mean that we would have to go much further, we would have to think about substantive rights. There are those who argue that we have to go beyond rights discourse, but if we stay within the context of rights instead of democracy, meaning simply formal rights, we would have to talk about substantive rights, such as the right to a job, the right to health care, the right to education. And that would mean that we would be on an entirely different footing with respect to democracy.

An Interview with Angela Davis  53 But I do believe that we have to hold on to that term. We cannot allow that notion to be taken away by those who assume that democracy is always a democracy of the elite. And of course in the history of this country, democracy has always been a democracy of the minority, and a democracy of the property owners, and a democracy of the racially dominant. And I think that sometimes it’s important to do some historical revision, and you know we think about the U.S., 1776, and France, 1789, as the first contemporary democracies, but why does Haiti 2 get left out? And, as a matter of fact, Haiti was really the first non-racial democracy in the world. So those are just some ideas for ways in which we might pursue redefinitions of the term democracy. LATOYA:  So, along the lines of Writing Democracy, it’s becoming more and more popular to circulate stories and communicate about social justice issues through social media. I’m primarily thinking about Twitter bringing certain issues to the fore where the major news organizations are not carrying them and people seeing this as a way of being social activists. And I’m curious to know what role or function do you see social media playing in activism? You know, re-tweeting different posts about an issue or these petitions that circulate through social media? What role do they have and what other steps should we be taking to make these efforts more efficient? ANGELA DAVIS:  Well, I think social media are great because we do get to communicate with each other in ways that were inconceivable in the past. I often bring up the example of trying to organize a national student strike in the Spring of 1970 with the invasion of Cambodia. We had to organize this national student strike not only without the assistance of the social media we now take for granted, but we could not even make long-distance calls because long-distance telephone calls were so expensive. So, organizing something like that by snail mail, which of course didn’t prevent us from doing the work. And it actually was quite successful. But, you know, I sort of joke around now and say if we had had Facebook or Twitter we could’ve made a revolution. (Laughter) But in answering that question I would caution us not to assume that these new social media can actually do the work—can actually do the work of organizing. I think that’s the mistake to basically subordinate ourselves to the means of communication and assume that that is about organizing a radical, progressive community of struggle, community of resistance. And we often—perhaps because of the impact of Twitter and Facebook—we often assume that mobilization is the same as organization. And so that, if we can bring 100,000 or a million people out on the streets simultaneously, then that’s the answer. But of course, demonstrations are always about demonstrating the existence of a movement, and a movement consists of far more

54  LaToya Lydia Sawyer and Ben Kuebrich than the capacity to be mobilized. So I would suggest that we don’t write off Twitter and Facebook, but that we recognize that organizing radical movements require a bit more than simply the process of mobilization. It requires not only a kind of political consciousness, but a sense of connectedness that we often don’t get from the media that allow us to come together. I mean, yes, we come together, but is there a sense of being politically and emotionally connected across all kinds of putative barriers? So, that work has to be taken up in the organizing of movements, and then we can use the social media to assist us in that process. If that’s clear. BEN:  Talking about some of the movements that have been happening over the last five years or so, we’ve had Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and these were all important, exciting moments, but I’m also wondering if you think that there may be an absence in leadership on the left? Is there a sense of increasing vulnerability when it comes to income inequality, containment strategies like mass incarceration, the effects of climate change, especially on poor communities. We’re still met with all of these problems, even though there were a couple of moments that were really energizing and seemed like anything was possible in terms of social change. So I’m curious about it at this moment, what movements you see as promising? ANGELA DAVIS:  Okay, that’s a really complicated question, so let me see if I can break it down. And part one of my answer would make the point that it is really important for us to preserve moments of promise and, of course, for teachers of writing, this would be really important. Simply because the historical moment has passed does not mean that we have to let the promise go. And so because the Arab Spring and Occupy happened at a particular moment, and we no longer see the mobilizations and the encampments, that does not mean that we cannot preserve the promise of that moment. And I think especially within the U.S., it is important to remember that the Occupy Movement, whatever problems there may have been, created the conditions for us to speak publicly and critically about capitalism in a way that perhaps had not been possible since the 1930s. So we have to hold on to that and, of course, something like Occupy could not have lasted indefinitely. It was destined to be a particular moment, but what are the lessons that we learned from that moment? How to make that remain alive in the hearts of people who really want to bring about change? Okay, that would be part one. Part two would address the question of leadership. And you know I don’t know if leadership is as important as we think it is because we often deflect our own potential power onto leaders. And of, course, if we look at what happened in the aftermath of the election of Barack Obama, we can see the extent to which people—even

An Interview with Angela Davis  55 radicals—placed all of this hope in one single individual, which would have never worked under any circumstances. And especially not in terms of someone who was being elected to the Presidency of the racist, imperialist, patriarchal United States of America. (Laughter) And I think that what is perhaps needed more than leaders is an awareness of the importance of organizing. Of course, the organizers are those who rarely receive credit for the work that they do. It is the leaders who receive credit for the work that the organizers do, you know, just as Dr. King receives credit for a huge Civil Rights Movement, and that kind of erases contributions of the people who really did the on-the-ground work. It erases the contributions of women who were the ones who did the overwhelming majority of that organizing work. My sense is that we always have to organize as if it were possible to create a movement that will change the world. Sometimes it may not happen, but we have to act as if it were possible. If we don’t act as if it were possible, when those conditions arise, we won’t be ready. And I think that if one looks at, you know, how certain movements in this country emerged, one can see that there was organizing happening long before the movements emerged. And the movements would not have emerged as they did if that everyday organizing wasn’t taking place, and so what we call the Civil Rights Movement would not have been possible without work that was done prior to the era we call the Civil Rights Movement. My sense is that today there is a much more complicated consciousness of what needs to be done in this country and in the world—and that actually, while there are those who argue that young people aren’t doing the work that they should be doing, there are so many more interesting developments among young people and activism and scholar-activist work than we could have pointed to say forty years ago prior to the emergence of the movements that we think of as characterizing the radical era of this country. And then the third part of the question: what are some of the movements that have radical potential? Well, I do think it’s important to continue to work toward prison abolition. It has taken a long time to even do the work that has permitted this notion to enter into a kind of public consciousness. Fifteen years ago people would’ve thought that those of us who were talking about prison abolition are absolutely insane in the same way that people fifteen years before the Civil War thought that John Brown was absolutely crazy for thinking about the possibility of the self-emancipation of slaves. What’s important, though: it’s not so much what movements, but the awareness of the interconnectedness of all of the movements that we’re involved in. So, if people ask me “what’s the most important

56  LaToya Lydia Sawyer and Ben Kuebrich movement today?”—I wouldn’t have a single answer. I might say that, okay, I think that food sovereignty, food justice movements, are really going to capture the imagination of people all over the world. I might say that immigrant rights movements are really important because every country in the world is confronted with the implications of immigration from the Global South to the Global North, whether you’re talking about Europe and the U.S. or Australia, or whether you’re talking about the people—the countries from which people come in Africa and Asia and Latin America. I might say all of those things, but at the same time I would say that what is perhaps most important is the recognition of the interconnectedness of all of these movements. That we cannot effectively participate in any of these movements unless we recognize what in feminist terms has been called the “intersectionality” of these struggles. And beyond race, class, gender, sexuality, ability to all of the issues—the intersectionality of movements or the connectedness of movements. Because otherwise people give up and they say, “well I can’t do all of these things simultaneously.” So my answer is always, get involved in the movement that calls you. Follow your own passion and at the same time recognize the backdrop against which that movement is unfolding, which requires us to recognize the intersections and interconnections. LATOYA:  To continue along the lines of prison abolition, I know back at Syracuse [University] when you talked about this, there were still questions and continue to be questions about how this actually manifests in a world where there are crimes committed and people are really hurt by things. So recently in the last couple of years, the trials of George Zimmerman and Michael Dunn, and Marissa Alexander in Florida have focused a lot of attention on the inequalities of the justice system and the lack of value placed on Black life in American society. So convictions and prison sentences have been the rally cries of people who want to see justice for these people who have perpetrated these crimes and what we would consider murders of innocent people, while at the same time folks are fighting for Marissa Alexander to be acquitted based on her plea of self-defense. So, do you think that with all of these recent cases, the meaning of justice has been obscured in some kind of way in the midst of wanting to see prosecution and “guilty” convictions here? And what does justice look like in these scenarios under or with the prison abolition framework? ANGELA DAVIS:  Again, that’s a really complicated question. But it’s so important because we often fall back on what our impulses, conditioned as they are by ideologies, make us feel. And, there’s a way in which these notions of justice have become inscribed on our very emotions so that even those of us who say we are in favor of prison

An Interview with Angela Davis  57 abolition, if we feel that we or our friends, our sisters, brothers, colleagues have been the target of harm, the default response is, “I want harm done to this person.” And it seems to me that if we are really serious about abolition, we also have to think about the cases of people like George Zimmerman and Michael Dunn, the one who killed Jordan Davis, in those terms as well. I know that when George Zimmerman was acquitted, people were very, very angry, and I would like to ask that we think about what might have been the response had he not been acquitted. Had he been convicted, had he been, say, sentenced to several years in prison, people might have said, “oh that’s not enough years.” But the focus would be on the individual and how easily we get drawn into this neoliberal process of individualizing the issues. The reason why there was such a vast movement around the death of Trayvon Martin wasn’t only because of the killing of Trayvon Martin the individual; it was because of the whole history of racist violence; it was because of the fact that this stretches back, all the way back to the days of slavery and slave patrols and Ku Klux Klan. And so how could the incarceration of one individual solve that problem? And in a sense, although, of course, people who commit such acts have to be rendered accountable, and George Zimmerman should be made accountable, it wasn’t entirely a bad thing that he wasn’t sent to prison because that continued the discussion. It continued the dialog. We’re still talking about it today. Because imprisonment, it enacts closure. It enacts closure on problems that we should attempt to solve in other ways and, therefore, I would suggest that even as we think about our emotional impulses that call upon us to commit harm on the person who has done harm, we first of all ask ourselves how is it that we are doing the work of the state through our own emotions. And second of all, how can we imagine a very different kind of justice system? A justice system in which there would be true accountability, in which we would address not simply that individual instance but one that would allow us to think about how to root out, for example, racist violence—the long process that would be required. And so I think there are ways of thinking about these issues in abolitionist’s terms that requires us to think in feminist terms of the relationships between the state and intimate violence, institutions of intimate violence, public and private, personal and political. BEN:  Thank you so much. And with that I think we’re going to open it up to any questions that you all have for Professor Davis. Would you say your name and just also the question kind of loud? JEFF CLAY:  Since you were talking about moving away from that specific individual, you know like the MLK, how would you try to cultivate the next generation of Bayard Rustin who aren’t totally forgotten

58  LaToya Lydia Sawyer and Ben Kuebrich from history but who worked and planned and spent a whole life within that but don’t have the same type of recognition? How would you cultivate students like that? How would you cultivate people like that? ANGELA DAVIS:  Well, exactly. I think that it is important to encourage students to recognize the complexity of building movements and, of course, everybody knows the name of Dr. Martin Luther King— kids, everybody, probably most people in the world, and that’s good. That’s not bad. But at the same time to encourage students to think about all of the other people who were required and, of course, the Bayard Rustin, and the Ella Baker, and the Fannie Lou Hamers, and all of those people whose names we are able to know. But then there is the question of how to encourage people to pay tribute to those whose names we do not know and will never know. I think that’s more difficult than simply creating a kind of historical accounting of people whose names we can provide. It’s important to know those names, but even those names can have the effect of creating the impression that the only way you can make a difference is to be an extraordinary individual. And for people who don’t see themselves as extraordinary individuals, it’s kind of a message that you don’t really matter, and how can we create situations so that people recognize that everybody matters, everybody can help bring about change. DEBORAH MUTNICK:  I’m thinking historically about the mass movements both internationally and in this country, you know, going back to the ’20s and the ’30s and following the Russian Revolution, and the role of the Communist Party. And also the strength of the labor movement during that period and the decimation of it, not total, but the real impact that McCarthyism and later Cointelpro had on all of those movements. It’s still a question to me of where we go from here in terms of what I think is really about defeating capitalism worldwide and, you know, the questions that raises just in this country, in particular, ideologically because there’s still so much anti-communism. Do you see us, collectively as human beings, moving toward socialism? That is certainly what revolutionaries saw throughout the twentieth century, and it’s not as clear in many ways now, I think, as it was a generation ago or three generations ago.3 So, I guess the question is how do you see the critique of capitalism playing out for us as educators, particularly since that’s who we are in the room? How do we talk about what capitalism is, to really study capitalism, and then how do we think with our students, with our communities, with each other about what the next step is for humankind? I’m thinking of examples like climate change, where it just seems in so many ways we’re facing a really, really desperate moment. And, so then having these different movements seems

An Interview with Angela Davis  59 insufficient to me. And so where do we go? I know you can’t totally answer that question. (Laughter) ANGELA DAVIS:  Well, I think in many ways you’ve answered the question yourself—that there may be no formulas, and often times I think we look for formulas and we look for evidence that when we do A that we’re going to arrive at B. And of course that is not possible. What is needed, I think, is a greater reliance on creativity, a greater reliance on the imagination and, of course, writing teachers have to really emphasize the power of the imagination. And again harkening back to what I said before: it’s important not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Let’s retain the promise. You know there was a great promise that existed with those former socialist countries. And that promise may not have been realized, but we can look back and we can say that compared to the kind of commodified educational system we have in this country, in the socialist countries, people were able to get a free education. And, of course, in places like Cuba, education is still free, so it’s interesting that often times people may be afraid of communism or socialism, but you talk about free education, free health care and all of that, and then they get excited! So let’s not assume that we cannot raise these issues, and let’s not assume that the anti-communism, which is certainly still very much in evidence, that it’s not possible to defeat it, and often times we censure ourselves. You know who would’ve thought that the Occupy movement—that it was possible to talk about Wall Street like that, to talk about the 1% and then that became a part of the dominant discourse. Who would’ve imagined that? So, I say use the imagination. Rely on the imagination! A collective political imagination.

Notes 1 See Black Lives Matter’s “Herstory” for more information on the history and development of the Black Lives Matter movement. https://blacklivesmatter.com/about/herstory/. 2 Haiti’s revolution from 1791 to 1804 led to its independence in 1804 making it the second democracy in the Western hemisphere and the first Black republic in the world (see Shen, Kona. 2018. “History of Haiti 1492–1805.” Brown University Library, October 27, 2015. https://library.brown.edu/haitihistory/11.html). 3 Today, of course, socialism is far more visible than we could have imagined in 2014. That workshop in 2014 took place in what now feels like a different time, before the explosion of membership in socialist organizations. We had yet to experience a presidential race in which an outspoken socialist like Bernie Sanders would not only be taken seriously but enthusiastically embraced by masses of people in the United States, to be followed by a band of courageous young women elected to Congress in 2018 and boldly speaking out for Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, and racial and economic justice.

4 Marxist Ethics for Uncertain Times Nancy Welch

What Makes You So Certain? When I first sat down to draft this essay, the 2018 West Virginia teachers’ strike had entered its ninth day, and my faculty union’s usually dormant listserv buzzed with enthusiasm. One colleague after another urged our executive council to send solidarity greetings and a strikefund donation. No one voiced the usual qualms: Aren’t they hurting students? Shouldn’t they have accepted the latest offer? Let’s focus on our own concerns instead of worrying about other people somewhere else. Even our union’s staff representative—typically quick to quash any work action that might be read as “illegal”—was jubilant about this wildcat strike in a right-to-work state, the obituary for West Virginia’s insurrectionary labor spirit prematurely written. I was thrilled so many colleagues shared my gut sense that these teachers had shut down their schools in the interests of a greater good. In the months that have followed, I’ve also grappled with how to understand this “gut sense.” What made us willing to be constituted by the teachers’ hail of We Are Worthy! rather than hesitate or abstain? Why did even the most dedicated skeptics among us embrace this cause rather than warn that we risked being swept away by the same kind of populist discourse that has constituted reactionary social forces around Make America Great Again? Why did even our staff representative rally at this rare display of working-class self-activity rather than opine that the teachers should instead throw their support behind Democratic Party candidates in the next election? I need to address these questions not only for those heady times when thousands are answering the same social justice hail but also for those times when my own gut sense isn’t instantly intelligible to others or even to myself. “What makes you so certain?” a rhetoric colleague asked about my support for the 2012 Chicago teachers’ strike, his tone communicating suspicion about strikes and certainty both. “Should I even be doing this?” I asked myself when, in August 2017, one week after Charlottesville, I joined a march to the Boston Commons to confront a white supremacist rally.

Marxist Ethics for Uncertain Times  61 To explore the basis of “gut sense” solidarity and a possible foundation for rhetorical commitment, I turn to Marxist ethics. Marxist ­ethics doesn’t prescribe certainties, reverting to positivist universals. It also does not give into postmodern denials of any foundation for judging the justice of one claim over another. What Marxist ethics provides instead is both clarity of perspective and a compass for navigating the twisting, sometimes treacherous terrain of daily social and political life. By extending such ethical questions as In what world shall we live? and How do we get there? with according to whom? and in whose interests?, the Marxist ethical compass provides at any given moment a place to stand, a place from which to gain one’s bearing. I’m not alone in seeking in this moment more articulation of the ethical grounds for rhetorical commitments and actions. The past decade has brought more than 50 articles and books into the field of composition featuring the word “ethic,” “ethics,” or “ethical” in their titles: the ethics of assessment, writing program administration, first-year composition, writing center pedagogies, archival research, and more. Unclear though it may be whether composition will deliberately take a “political turn” to ally our classrooms, scholarship, and community-based projects with resistance to virulent nationalisms, support for stirring liberatory formations, and alternatives to the austerity regimes decimating our universities, the field’s uptake of ethics, although near exclusively focused on writing studies settings and concerns, has occurred alongside the stunning ethical breaches of the past decade. Those ethical breaches include the rapacious greed that precipitated and followed the 2008 financial crisis, the epidemic of police murders of people of color, the withdrawal of the United States from any attempt to slow the course of climate change, and White House promotion of white supremacy, sexual predation, and settler-colonial pillage of indigenous lands. My turn to Marx is toward engaging more directly with that “alongsideness” and seeking in the standpoints of the exploited and oppressed what Marxist rhetorician Dana Cloud (2018) argues are “the conditions of possibility for alternative realities and rhetorics based upon them” (6). Admittedly, Marxism hasn’t had much presence in composition’s “ethical turn.” This omission can be attributed in large part to the brutal legacy of Stalinism, leading disillusioned Old and New Left activists to conclude that Marxism deploys ruthless means for undemocratic ends, as well as to the legacy of economism that would limit Marxist aims to acquiring for workers a greater share of the wealth produced—all other material and moral concerns regarding colonialism, militarism, and planetary health be damned. Economism furthermore ignores race, gender, and sexuality as key working-class signifiers that intersect with and also exceed wage exploitation. Focusing strictly on “productive” workers, this blinkered distortion of Marxism overlooks exploitation at the points of social reproduction (including education, childcare, eldercare, and nursing) on which

62  Nancy Welch the realization of profit and the reproduction of capitalist relations rely. Further discouraging a Marxist or historical materialist approach to ethics is a widespread misconception that Marxism assigns language, and thus the rhetorical, to the realm of idealist ­mystification (McComiskey 2018, 33–34), even though Marx (1859) spotlighted ideology as the very realm in which people “become conscious” of the conflicts of material life “and fight them out.” The first generation of socialist thinkers, writes Michael J. Thompson (2014) in his introduction to Constructing Marxist Ethics, also embraced this “reified conception” of Marxism as a science, purporting that “all moralizing … cant” would evaporate “in the face of social forces internal to capitalist society” (1–2). As I hope to show, none of these ­characteristics—­anti-democratic, economistic, and deterministic—­ describe the spirit of Marx himself and of the social justice-minded intellectuals worldwide who have further developed a rich Marxist tradition, including in the realms of rhetoric and ethics.

Marx’s Standpoint Morality Marx and Engels (2014) did indeed have abundant contempt for “moralizing … cant”: so much “bourgeois clap-trap,” for example, “about the hallowed co-relation of parents and child” even as industrial capitalism denied England’s emerging working class “all family ties” and turned children “into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labor” (27). Marx’s project was to reveal the hypocrisies papered over by the “pompous catalogue of the ‘inalienable rights of man’” (Marx 1992, 416) through his painstaking analyses and harrowing examples of the true relations of production: the interdependency of child labor in British cotton mills with enslaved Black labor in the United States that brought capital “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, in blood and dirt”; and the “hidden abode of production” into which the capitalist leads his purchased labor who, having no choice but to bring “his own hide to the market,” can now expect “a tanning” (Marx 1992, 279–280). Under Marx’s scrutiny, the capitalist system, its ideological pieties notwithstanding, is exposed as driven by an unrelenting logic of valorization, accumulation, and expansion. The system is shown to produce, despite all attempts to temper and tame, shattering economic crises, yawning poverty amidst vast wealth, global colonial plunder, and unresolvable inter-imperialist rivalries that place humanity under the constant threat and actuality of war. Hence, the meaningful tension in contemporary feminist artist Jenny Holzer’s bright neon sign proclaiming If you had behaved nicely the communists wouldn’t exist. Capitalism has no way of “behaving nicely”; it is a system without conscience. But even as Marx detailed capitalism’s amoral operations, he (and his collaborator Friedrich Engels (2010) in such chronicles as The Condition of the Working Class in England) also catalogued its human toll in a

Marxist Ethics for Uncertain Times  63 language steeped with moral judgment. In fact, what makes Capital’s first volume such an affecting piece of literature is how Marx joins what Ernest Bloch (1995) calls “the cold stream” of political economic analysis with the “warm stream” of so many flesh-and-blood examples of thwarted human potential and widespread human suffering (11). Contrary to “productivist” caricatures of Marxism, Marx’s (1992) empathy was at the same time deeply ecological, concerned with the combined devastation of productive relations on nature and human nature. Industrial agricultural practices, he argued, are “a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil …,” “laying waste” to and “debilitating” both (638). Electrified and instructed by the 1857 revolt of Indian workers against their British colonizers (Jani 2002), Marx also became increasingly “harsh and unremitting” in his “condemnation” of colonialism (Anderson 2002, 242). With C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, Patrice Lumumba, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, and many others further developing Marx’s insights for 20th-century conditions and beyond, a “Marxist presence” in anti-colonial struggle has been, argues Benita Parry (2002), “ubiquitous and longstanding” (134). This isn’t to suggest that Marx, like the utopian socialists who preceded him, longed to turn back the clock to pre-capitalist relations. He did not condemn capitalism for devising new practices for production per se. He condemned it instead for its limitless appetite for unfettered accumulation and brutalizing conquest, for necessitating “too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce” with those at the helm of “such gigantic means of production and of exchange” like a “sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells” (Marx and Engels 2014, 14–15). Not content with diagnostics alone, Marx envisioned the potential for social transformation: a radically democratic society that valued—not in moral strictures against excessive consumption but in equitable and sustainable practices of production and distribution—being over having, need-meeting use over profiteering exchange, and “the free development of each” as “the condition for the free development of all” (Marx and Engels 2014, 31). Marx located the agency for such transformation in the working class on grounds that are at once moral and material: if able to act collectively and across such divide-and-conquer lines as race and national chauvinism, this class alone has the means for and an interest in abolishing class rule, eliminating the capitalist mode of production, and thereby eliminating relations of privation and inequality class society structures and requires. This emphasis on the working class’ emancipatory potential is itself historical and materialist rather than idealist. Marx’s (1992) understanding of human problems under capitalism and human potential beyond were, for instance, informed by his practical involvement in the movements of a new working class—including the brief and astonishing establishment of

64  Nancy Welch a workers’ society with the 1871 Paris Commune—and his evolving grasp as a New York Daily Tribune journalist of anti-colonial revolt and its role in freeing all from capitalism’s “undisguised looting, enslavement, and murder” (918). As Marx and Engels (2004) explained, “[T]he theoretical conclusions of the communists are not in any way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer” but instead “express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle going on under our very eyes” (23). The wellspring of Marx’s materialism was thus his own lived and eye-witnessing experience. “Life,” as he and Engels (2004) wrote in The German Ideology, “is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life” (47). In this first principle for Marx’s historical materialism, we can surmise, too, the foundation for a Marxist ethics: one in which life sets the conditions and horizons of possibility for ethical consciousness. Because bedrock to historical materialism is that lived experience sets consciousness’ conditions and horizons, Marx did not imagine a working class automatically constituted by its system-challenging potential and unfettered by reactionary ideas. As he and Engels (2004) emphasize in The German Ideology, the ruling ideas in any historical moment are the ideas that best serve the ruling class—the class that has at its disposal the major means to direct “mental” as well as “material production” and to give ruling-class ideas “the form of universality” (64–66). Yet, the lived experiences of working-class and oppressed groups, as Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge (1993), E. P. Thompson (1978), and Georg Lukács (1971) have variously pointed out, also come into frequent friction with ruling claims about what is necessary, just, and true. The experience of the “massive layer of working class and poor Americans,” writes Cloud (2018), “… contradicts the orthodoxy rationalizing austerity, war, and environmental catastrophe” (12). A watershed moment like the revelations about Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh exposes that while sexist ideas circulate at all levels of society, institutionalized misogyny and sexual predation serve specifically to groom white male elites for power, including over women’s bodies and lives. In such moments of contradiction, friction, and exposure are found a basis for altering and expanding the horizons of consciousness. This potential for alternative consciousness depends, too, however, upon discourse, upon rhetoric—the articulation of a set of counter ideas enabling the exploited and oppressed to move from existing as “a class of itself” to acting as “a class for itself” (Marx 2016, 125). The Marxist and feminist traditions of standpoint theory thus privilege the strategic vantage points of the exploited and oppressed for understanding society as it is and envisioning society as it could be. The “adoption of a standpoint,” explains feminist philosopher Nancy Hartsock (1985), “exposes the real relations among human beings” and, by pointing “beyond the present,” can carry “a historically liberatory role” (232).

Marxist Ethics for Uncertain Times  65 Undeniably, the experience of life under neoliberal assault has also created a widely held belief that a working class with any liberatory potential has been wiped from history. But as Labor Notes founder Kim Moody meticulously documents, the empirical facts reveal that as neoliberalism has suppressed wages and eliminated social supports, it has also increased capitalism’s supply-chain vulnerability to collective workplace action. In vast logistics centers which dot the U.S. continent and on which global production and trade depend, Moody (2017) points out, a multiracial workforce labors in interlocking manufacturing, transportation, warehousing, and service jobs (Chapter 5 passim; see also, www. clustermapping.us_cluster_ transportation_and_logistics). The emancipatory potential of a contemporary working class becoming aware of itself is not diminished but intensified. This potential—of p ­ eople articulating the conflicts and fighting them out—is also what neoliberal reign has fortified itself against through precarious employment, anti-union legislation, and deportation threats as well as through the ­solidarity-shredding discourses of white supremacy, misogyny, nativism, and bellicose nationalism. Notably, the “Red for Ed” movement, launched by and now spreading well beyond the 2018 West Virginia teachers’ strike, did not arise out of the major population and logistics centers Moody describes. Here, as teacher strike leaders have detailed (Comer et al. 2018), social media provided necessary means for overcoming geographic distance, forging solidarity, and creating concentrated power for the strike wave in Spring 2018 that swept from West Virginia to Arizona, Kentucky, and ­Oklahoma. These are the states, long written off by the mainstream press as “red” for Tea Party conservatism alone, that have marked the leading edge of public disinvestment, leaving in the wreckage abundant fuel for discontent: teachers supplementing their meager paychecks by moonlighting for Uber, students resorting to flashlights during power cutoffs. Through social media tools to both organize and broadcast their mass embodied strikes, these teachers amplified to the larger public the enormous toll taken by decades of austerity laying waste to vital social supports. By securing varying degrees of victory not only for themselves but also for other public workers and the broader communities they serve, school workers also reacquainted (or acquainted for the first time) the larger public with the relevance of workers’ power for the political struggles and uprisings that, in the United States and globally, have ­followed from the 2008 financial crisis. What else was necessary to spark and sustain this strike wave is beyond my scope in this essay. Instead, I want to return now to its ­consciousness-raising effects and to how a Marxist standpoint approach to the ethics of contentious movements can ground and expand the ­horizons of composition’s own uptake of the ethical intertwined with, not only alongside, the political.

66  Nancy Welch

Class Acts Ethics, as John Duffy (2017) stresses, has always been central to the rhetorical enterprise because every time we write … we propose a relationship with others, our readers. In proposing such relationships, we raise those questions moral philosophers attach to the ethical: What kind of person do I want to be? How should I live my life? What does it mean to be a good person? (229–230) Although Duffy gestures toward contemporary “political discussions” that are “characterized by rancor, duplicity, and spectacle” and that have failed to “address productively issues of inequality, racism, the environment, and other compelling concerns,” his focus is more particularly on the “better world” that might be cultivated through ethical rhetorical practices “in our classes,” “at our conferences,” and “in our professional literature” (242, 246). For these contexts, Duffy advocates teaching the practice of “virtue ethics” where all sides “acknowledge differences, defend commitments, accept criticisms, however withering, and yet remain willing to engage one another” with the aim of cultivating “conditions of rhetorical friendship” (242). In the context of scholarly examination and exchange, Cloud (2018) likewise stresses a commitment to extended and attentive engagement. “In the political arena,” she writes, “patience and generosity are not always the appropriate moves, but in scholarship and criticism we can and should take the risk of engagement” (73). Yet as Cloud suggests, a shift in terrain and purpose (in her example, a shift from scholarly examination of anti-abortion campaigns’ disturbing but compelling persuasive strategies to the question of the means needed to mobilize people and arguments to defend reproductive rights) returns us under new conditions to the question of what are the ­appropriate— rhetorically effective, ethically attuned—moves. Duffy (2017), too, acknowledges that in situations where “reasoned argument” is “not productive or even possible, the relevant questions become ‘How does a good writer resist such conditions?’ ‘How might my words and actions promote justice?’” (245). These are the situations with which I began this essay: teachers’ appeals unheeded by a legislature intent on cancelling pensions and hiking health-care premiums; neo-fascists seeking a public stage from which to intimidate and recruit. In these situations, we do not find individuals and small groups meeting on a two-way street with “open-mindedness,” ready to extend “intellectual generosity,” and willing to “inhabit … the perspective of The Other” (238). In place of individual moral actors, we find instead social groups whose locations

Marxist Ethics for Uncertain Times  67 and circumstances condition both unequal rhetorical means and sharply conflicting visions—certainties—about what is right, just, and true. In West Virginia, for instance, person-to-person negotiations between teachers and legislators could not pull the brake on the engines of ­neoliberalism—that is, the acceleration of capital accumulation through defunding public institutions and services, eliminating social provisions, and shifting responsibility for social reproductive or care-taking labor from the state to the individual or private charity. Person-to-person negotiations could not serve as an ethical brake or mediator because, no matter any given legislator’s individual tugs of conscience, the teachers were not contending with individuals acting on their own behalf. They contended instead with a distinct and consolidated class. Of course, a poll of individual legislators may find varying degrees of sympathy with or antipathy toward the public good of funding schools, state services, and livable wages. But as a whole, state legislatures have consistently acted to advance a neoliberal agenda—an agenda that the ruling ideology also explains and naturalizes through a distinct moral framework, including the good of individual freedom, private enterprise, personal responsibility, family values, and law and order. West Virginia’s teachers likewise responded not as individuals but as a class. Through the sign-waving, singing, and frequently rancorous spectacle of an extra-legal statewide strike, the teachers also accomplished more in nine days—a 5% raise for all state public-sector workers plus a commitment to fix the state’s health-care fund—than decades of unproductive electioneering and lobbying. While commentary following the 2016 presidential election cast West Virginians and other rust-belt Americans as a “dangerous class,” their reactionary politics sealed by votes for Donald Trump, in this strike teachers acted, in Marx’s terms, as “a class for itself” (Marx 2016, 125). In such popular chants as Fix it or we’ll shut it down! they advanced a distinct oppositional vision to the neoliberal truths of free markets and limited government. In signs like Students, Because You’re Mine, I Walk the Line, they advanced an oppositional moral vision too. “Between equal rights, force decides,” Marx (1992) argued about the relations of production that pit the rights of capital against the rights of workers (34). Between contending moral frameworks, we can say as well, force decides. This appeal to force is not a warrant for violent confrontation. Consider, for example, the anti-fascist march to the Boston Commons mentioned near the start of this chapter. When local police surrounded and attempted to prevent some marchers from moving forward, no one made the adventurous and perilous attempt to push back with their own lone body. Instead, pressing tightly together and chanting in unison Back off, back off! We want freedom, freedom!, each group under siege created a single social force—visible, audible, and undaunted—that did indeed persuade half a dozen cops to “back off,” a victory in this instance of people

68  Nancy Welch power over fire power. Nor is the appeal to force—the collective force of workers withholding their labor, of anti-racist activists overwhelming with their numbers a rally for white supremacy—meant to throw out the good, and the necessity, of interpersonal relationship-building. A wildcat strike—self-governing, without the direction of officials—­ requires person-to-person communication and a commitment to direct democratic decision making. “[E]very time we decided to do something, everybody would have to vote,” explained West Virginia high school teacher Katie Endicott (Blanchard 2018). Building a coalition for sustained anti-racist struggle further requires the difficult work of determining common goals, sharing leadership roles, and keeping faith with one another across racial, gendered, and other differences. Here we find important local applications of the virtue ethics Duffy describes, including resistance to unproductive in-group rancor and a refusal of any sort of duplicity that would spell death to movement democracy. But in these local applications, we also find a fundamental shift from I to we, from the individual to the collective, and from an exclusive focus on writing to consideration of all available rhetorical means. In social movements to redress social problems and injustices, suggests Marxist ethicist Lawrence Wilde (2014), virtue ethics’ question What should I be? and duty ethics’ question What should I do? become the social questions What should we be? and What shall we do? (31–32). For example, anticipating the material impact (and potential moral censure) of closing schools for the many students who rely on breakfast and lunch programs, West Virginia teachers responded to a social—and gendered—problem with a social solution. They and other school workers prepared a week’s worth of food to send home in students’ backpacks; they also networked with area churches, food banks, and other organizations to make sure hot meals were served (Goodman and Moynihan 2018; Johnson 2018). Through this social solution to a difficult condition that might have diminished their ethos, the teachers created a means to strengthen their bonds with community—their communities reciprocating by providing teachers with the support they also needed to sustain a long strike. This local solution also became a form of mass argument, revealing the enormous weight of human need that austerity had shifted onto teachers’ shoulders. As Barbara Ehrenreich (2018) summed it up on Twitter, “This is our dystopian welfare state: severely underpaid teachers trying to keep poverty-stricken kids alive.” In this example, openness, generosity, and the forging of connections across geographic and occupational borders aren’t ends in themselves. Such local and interpersonal practices are instead among the means necessary to consolidate a social force (a class for itself) that grasps a central conflictual relationship (in West Virginia, tax cuts enriching a handful of extraction industry executives while driving pay, pension, and social service cuts for the majority) and answers the conflict with an alternative

Marxist Ethics for Uncertain Times  69 vision (Fund Education, We Are Worthy) expressed through the most effective means at hand to enter the political arena (a statewide strike and mobilization of thousands at the state capitol). When my colleagues and I were stirred to support that alternative vision and to embrace rather than shrink from its necessarily rowdy and spectacular means of expression, our gut-sense solidarity was, more accurately, a nascent class sense. From our location in an increasingly proletarianized profession—a profession “stripped of its halo” as more faculty work under the terms and conditions of “paid wage-laborers” (Marx and Engels 2014, 11), we were responding in what E. P. ­Thompson (1978) called “class ways” (145). Here class is not a fixed sociological or individual identity category but instead “a relation, a position, a point of view vis a vis other classes and the social totality” (Cloud and Feyh 2015, 45). Momentarily at least, the strike enabled us to view public education as a site of struggle between labor and capital and to take the teachers’ viewpoint as our own. What Marxist ethics provides are class ways to approach the ethical questions posed by mass struggle between one vision and another as a social “us” faces off against a social “them.” Whereas virtue ethics promotes a universal spirit of Aristotelian compromise—seeking, Duffy (2017) explains, “the mean, the middle path, between the extremes of excess and deficiency” (234)—Marxism is attuned to the irreconcilability of class interests and to capitalism’s insuppressible profit-seeking appetite that subjugates capitalist players themselves to cut-throat competition in the race to cheapen costs, increase profit margins, and head off encroachments to market share. In this race-to-the-bottom context, Marxist ethics is attuned to the failure of universal strictures regarding individual conduct to account for how, as Wilde (2014) points out, “most human beings are systematically denied the possibility of living their lives in conditions ‘most worthy and appropriate for their human nature’” (31; quoting Marx, 1981, 959). “What can I do? What are my options?” That’s how Arizona teacher Tomorrah Howard emphatically put it when a reporter asked what moral justification teachers could give for closing schools in their “Red for Ed” walk-out (Cano et al. 2018, AZCentral 2018).

Materializing Ethics Marxism doesn’t rule out, writes Sean Sayers (2014), the possibility of “an ethic” with a “genuinely universal character”—that is, a society that has finally freed itself from exploitation and oppression so that “for the first time the notion of human universality … will have a genuine social and historical basis” (163). Marxist ethics arises, however, from the understanding that, very far from conditions for such universality, existing society is characterized by what Wadood Hamad (2014) calls

70  Nancy Welch “rhetoric/reality” discrepancy between “the rhetoric of universal interests” and “the reality of particular class interests” (130). In West Virginia, legislators claim to serve all residents of the state; they in fact enact legislation that transfers resources state residents need into the pockets of a ruling minority. A schooling in rhetoric/reality discrepancy is what striking Arizona teacher Tomorrah Howard gave to the TV news reporter when she pointed out that, as she was nearing age 40, “I had to move back into my parents’ to help pay for [my daughter’s] college. This is my reality. But here it is we’re giving millionaires tax cuts” (Cano et al. 2018, emphasis added; AZCentral 2018). With her rejoinder, she counters the What about the children? moral frame through an opposing tax cuts for millionaires frame, redirecting censure toward the people responsible for this reality. Striking Oklahoma teachers also drew on the rhetorical resource of “frame-checking” (Cloud 2018, 9) when, in response to their governor comparing them to “a teenage kid that wants a new car” (Balingit 2018), they carried signs declaring, “Damn those rich teachers and their ’99 Camrys.” Here, Oklahoma teachers also provide a prime example of Kenneth Burke’s “comic frame” (Burke 1984, ­166–167). Through the incongruous pairing of wealth with teachers driving 20-year-old Camrys, they evoke a laughter that mobilizes support for their alternative vision. As these examples illustrate, the exposure of rhetoric/reality discrepancies need not fall prey to the kind of elitism that remains untouched by actual engagement with people’s responses to the contradictions of daily life. Nor must a commitment to rhetoric/reality exposures result in the inadequacies of the “debunker” who, aloof to the needs of living audiences, engages in a “purely quantitative form of propaganda” (Burke 1974, 171). To the contrary, the striking teachers’ unmaskings occur within mobilizations. Through those mobilizations, we find that “moment of politics” when, writes Cloud (2018), “the experience of suffering” is named by and thus becomes “understandable” to those who are suffering and who are realizing too their collective potential to fight back (6). Marxist ethics also provides orientation and guidance for audiences to a movement’s hails and to social conflicts and debates. More specifically, it provides a needed alternative to composition and rhetoric’s dematerialized theories for ethical communication by attending to who constructs and benefits from a rhetoric/reality discrepancy, how it is justified and perpetuated, and what justifies fightback against it. Who, for instance, tells and benefits from the story of public schools and social services as an economic drain? How do frames of “do it for the children” sacrifice, of greedy teachers, and of failing schools all serve the transfer of wealth into private coffers? Through these questions, Marxist ethics does more than denaturalize universal moralities. It makes it possible for

Marxist Ethics for Uncertain Times  71 us to “radically contextualize moral acts” (Cloud 2003, 531). ­Radical contextualization includes close attention to language—to how it is deployed to “legitimate either struggle to preserve the existing order …,” writes Hamad (2014), “or … struggle to overcome the existing order” (130). Because language doesn’t circulate of its own accord and for its own purposes, radical contextualization further asks that we attach claims and appeals to social groups and interests: the community we are being hailed to join, the interests served, the interests denied. And because our investigations aren’t merely “disinterested,” radical contextualization also requires evaluating claims for what Cloud (2018) calls their “fidelity” not to “some simple empirical fact or presumed universal truth” but to “the collective interests of the people being asked to accept that claim—to their standpoint” (33). The critical importance of fidelity becomes most apparent in its breach: when major labor unions ally their workers’ interests with the capitalist class in pipeline and other extraction projects or when leaders of the Navajo Nation court alliance with weapons-manufacturer Lockheed Martin (see Lister 2018) or when one segment of the academic labor force safeguards its own privileges at the expense of others. The particular interests that these alliances and agreements purport to advance break faith with the wider exploited and oppressed population’s rights and needs. Such sectionalism, a version of Let’s focus on our own concerns instead of worrying about other people somewhere else, is a breach of Marx’s moral vision of an inextricable relationship between the “free development” of “each” and of “all,” a vision also expressed in the radical labor slogan “An injury to one is an injury to all.” Fracturing solidarity, these alliances and agreements reinforce rather than point the way toward overcoming a destructive order. In contrast with such breaches, consider these instances of ethical fidelity maintained. When West Virginia’s state and union officials prematurely announced that a strike-ending deal had been reached, teachers rejected the deal on the grounds that it would deny an equal raise for other school and state employees. By not limiting their standpoint assessment to one narrow category—“teachers”—they kept faith with the bus drivers, cafeteria workers, school custodians, and state workers in whose names they also struck. Several months later when strike leader Emily Comer joined more than a dozen other women to occupy the campaign office of Senator Joe Manchin III (D-WVa) and demand that he vote against Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination, Comer spotlighted the resonance of the #MeToo movement for working-class and poor women: “When powerful elites like Kavanaugh cut the social safety net by eroding our healthcare benefits, we are made even more vulnerable to abusive men in our personal lives” (International Women’s Strike 2018). Rather than focus on vulnerability alone, she also asserted the unique power working-class women hold: “My story is also the story

72  Nancy Welch ­ ercent of a woman who stood side by side with over 20,000 teachers, 74 p of them women, this past spring to fight against rising austerity….” And rather than relinquish that power in the interests of reelecting a Democratic Party candidate, she called for putting it in service to the cause of emancipating all women: “We want to bring that same power to bear on Senator Manchin today” (emphasis added). The application of Marxist ethics and the test of fidelity are thus not limited to the category of class. In the longer Marxist tradition, V. I. ­L enin (2015) argued that genuinely revolutionary movements must be led by and stay true to interests of the “vanguard of the oppressed” (126). “Working-class consciousness,” he argued, “cannot be genuine political consciousness unless the workers are trained to respond to all cases of tyranny, oppression, violence, and abuse, no matter what class is affected” (Lenin 1969, 69). Such working-class political consciousness and reciprocal fidelity were inspiringly evident when McDonald’s predominantly African American and Latinx women workers walked out across the United States in Fall 2018, proclaiming, “I Am Not on the Menu” and chanting, “Hold your burgers, hold your fries. Keep your hands off my thighs” (Abrams 2018). Through their strike, they materialized both the intersecting aspirations of the Me Too, Black Lives Matter, and Fight for Fifteen (minimum wage-raising) movements plus the working class’s Fix it or we’ll shut it down means against otherwise seemingly intractable injustices.

Faithful Feeling and Horizons of Hope In his acknowledgment of virtue ethics’ limits in redressing entrenched social injustices, Duffy (2017) suggests turning “to genres and mediums that transcend rational argument” (246). To his list of possible genres and mediums—“narrative, poetry, music, painting, dance” (246)—we can add march, strike, and occupation and the uses of story, song, image, and bodies within them. Yet in the social justice actions sketched above, embodied expression and mass spectacle strive to register in public consciousness and change social realities. That is, they heighten, rather than transcend, the need for logical intelligibility. Because these are rhetorical acts that would also enlist their audience’s hearts and bodies, heightened too are the time-bound exigencies of ethical assessment. The Marxist ethical compass as I’ve described it so far provides orienting guidance so that we can, as Cloud (2003) argues, “align ourselves with political projects and actions” on the basis of “historically specific criteria” (531). Yet the urgency of a moment does not always afford time for exhaustive critical investigation, for detailing and evaluating reasons for feelings. After all, my colleagues and I did not respond to the West Virginia teachers’ strike with “We’ll get back to you on the question of our support tomorrow, next week, or next month.”

Marxist Ethics for Uncertain Times  73 Still to be accounted for, then, is the question of the kind of certainty that is felt in the moment of such hails. And since social justice appeals solicit not only an audience’s approbation but also its practical involvement, needed too is more reflection on ethical means. Is there any basis, for instance, on which could I claim in advance to have known that joining a march into the same park where white supremacists were rallying was the right thing to do—particularly since although the marchers were committed in this moment to nonviolence, we could not say the same of those we would confront? On the ground I’ve laid thus far, I can tackle more directly these two questions: the first which I’ll approach as a question about ends (that felt sense of rightness in a given action’s or movement’s moral vision) and the second which I’ll approach as one about means (including the contradictory and constraining social conditions that trouble certainty when we ask “What should we do?” and attempt, or are compelled, to answer). For the first question, Dana Cloud and Kathleen Feyh’s (2015) term “affective fidelity” provides an additional point on a Marxist ethical compass, one that doesn’t treat emotion as “rationality’s ‘Other’” (3). Affective fidelity, that gut sense of certainty in an appeal’s social justice promise, is forged, Cloud and Fehy write, when “the emotional constructs of a constitutive discourse align with the class standpoint of its addressees” (313), creating “an emergent fit between a rhetorical hailing and the experience of those hailed” (301). In other words, if embracing the striking teachers’ cause felt instinctual to me and my colleagues, one reason is that our own bodies have felt the strain of staff cuts, productivity speed-ups, benefit reductions, and the many other forms of public education’s degradation to which the strike gave voice. And if our “Yes!” to this instance of education worker revolt was emotional, it was emotion borne of good reason. At the time of the strike, our university was two years into a budget model that pits the university’s colleges and schools in Hunger Games competition against one another. We felt the fit of the teachers’ fight with our lived experience and with our yearning for another reality. That sense of emergent fit doesn’t make moot the need for critical introspection, for asking Whose hail … Whose community … Whose interests …? Plenty of mass circulating emotional appeals fail the fidelity test: the appeal, for example, to Make America Great Again harnessing displaced rural workers to a political project that will deepen immiseration, including their own. Through a grasp of affective fidelity, however, we can distinguish between one emotional appeal and another without misidentifying the presence of pathos itself as the danger. The danger in my university’s faculty allying with the teachers’ strike wasn’t that emotion might overcome reason. Rather the danger is that we might overcome our learned distrust of rowdy and embodied spectacle and that we might through such means join in revolt, including against our own university’s game makers.

74  Nancy Welch But while the possibility of such revolt is what the teachers’ strike wave put on the horizon, reigning ideas about appropriate and ethical means can’t be wished away. We should let the facts speak for themselves has been the dominant refrain whenever my faculty union has pondered What should we do? about the transfer of campus resources from academics to administration and amenities. Given the contemporary political climate’s debasement of facts, the idea of letting facts speak for themselves has considerable ethical appeal. We shouldn’t give white supremacists the attention they seek also carries a combined appeal of wisdom and common sense. But although widely circulating ­common-sensical ideas can’t be wished away, they can be contextualized, reexamined through historically specific criteria, and contested from the standpoint interests of working-class and oppressed groups, so that another kind of critical consciousness can emerge: even if facts could speak without rhetorical mediation, we control none of the major means to circulate them; it’s in the vacated terrain left from the suppression and disintegration of vibrant Civil Rights, Black Power, and Chicano Power movements that Far Right forces have emerged. What also cannot be wished away is the social context in which we would choose and exercise rhetorical means: an unequal society whose inequities are backed not only by ideas but also by force or its threat. The expression and mobilization of violence to defend and deepen an unjust system are found when neo-Nazis march and chant “Blood and Soil” and when Yale fraternity brothers march and chant “No means yes! Yes means anal!” They are found in the harassing, disenfranchising, and lethal policing of Black and Brown communities and in militarized response to mass protest and to asylum seekers along the U.S. southern border. Although a society founded on inequality cannot endure, as Leon Trotsky (1969) argues, “through force alone” and thus requires “the cement of morality” (23), the inverse is also true: force used or threatened wherever necessary to safeguard the existing order. Here Trotsky’s writing on a working-class revolutionary morality contributes further to a Marxist ethics while reminding us that material conditions also set the limits of what is possible to achieve. In Their Morals and Ours, first published in 1938 by The New International as a debate with John Dewey, Trotsky (1969) argues for the ethical good of supporting armed resistance to fascism in the Spanish Civil War. Against liberal intellectualism’s decontextualized insistence on a “free and unprejudiced search for the means by which” human liberation “can be attained” (Dewey 1969, 78), he sought to make the moral case that the ends of a “victory over Franco” necessitated the means of “civil war, with its wake of horrors and crimes” (28). Doing so, Trotsky doesn’t set aside questions about what means within a civil war are permissible. Rather, arguing that the question of means is deeply contextual—there is no “ready answer to the question of what is and is not permissible in

Marxist Ethics for Uncertain Times  75 each separate case” (37)—he counsels against championing “moral precepts obligatory upon all” (17) and for attention instead to “the living experience of [a] movement under the clarification of theory” (37). With that phrase “the clarification of theory,” Trotsky (1969) returns us to the Marxist ethical compass, calibrated toward those means that can advance “the abolition of the power of one person over another” (37). If liberation is the desired end, Trotsky emphasizes, it follows then that “not all means are permissible” (37). Ruled out, for instance, are those sectionalist and solidarity-denying means that would “set one part of the working class against other parts” and those means that position a few to act undemocratically on behalf of a group “without their participation” (37). Such means that promote elitism, chauvinism, competition, and passivity don’t advance the goal of liberation but reinforce and deepen capitalism’s reign. Against such means Trotsky champions as not only “permissible” but “obligatory” those means that instead “unite” workers and cultivate full “consciousness” of the significance of shared struggle across the sectional divides of nation, race, gender, sexuality, and more (37). “Seeds of wheat,” he argues, “must be sown in order to yield an ear of wheat” (38). The analogy isn’t an echo of utopian socialist prefiguration—as in, if we each live nonviolently, we can become the nonviolent society we long to be. Rather, it implies a needed two-fold commitment to the ends of undoing a system organized for the domination of people and planet—in the context of Their Morals and Ours, a commitment to stop Franco—and to means that cultivate the unity, full consciousness, and full participation of those seeking freedom, even if in the context of a civil war, arms are required. In the metaphor of wheat seeds and ears is that “reciprocity of means and ends” that Kristie Fleckenstein (2010) underscores in explaining why she excludes ecoterrorism and abortion clinic harassment from her definition of social action: because the means destroy rather than create the possibility for “compassionate living” (6). But essential here, too, because Trotsky wasn’t a pacifist and his argument was for side-taking in a violent struggle, is how his metaphor directs our attention to the soil: to the hostile conditions of existing society in which social justice seeds must struggle to take root, to the circumstances in which people seek effective means to both overcome a violent order and yield a fully democratic future. The Russian Revolution, with its mass participatory quest for a “profound economic democracy” and a “society of the free and the equal” (LeBlanc 2017, 343), serves as a stirring and sobering illustration. The seeds sown by the 1917 revolution for radical democracy were many, but notable for today’s fights for public, democratizing education were those that advanced mass radical education: the establishment of nurseries and preschools to free women from the home; free and universal access to schools and universities; inclusion of students with disabilities; native language textbooks and instructions for national minorities; and a

76  Nancy Welch teacher-led pedagogical emphasis on “developing independence, creative initiative, and social feeling” (Kirschenbaum 2001, 73; see also Behrent 2016, Wilson 1928). Yet at the very same time, the fledgling and economically isolated Russian state was besieged by a civil war and multiple foreign invasions seeking to restore tsarism or install military dictatorship. With Russia’s working class further diminished by famine and unable to advance self-rule, all hope rested with the victories of workers’ uprisings taking place across Europe—uprisings that one by one went down to defeat as the ruling classes of Germany, Italy, and Spain embraced fascism to suppress revolt. The test of fidelity between articulated goals and chosen means does indeed need to be applied to this history, resisting, as Marxist historian Paul LeBlanc (2017) writes, “the temptation of exonerating Lenin, Trotsky, and like-minded comrades from any responsibility for bad-to-horrific developments following the 1917 revolution” (19). But it needs to be applied with recognition that the means to realize a radical democratic vision were not at hand. Historic conditions doomed the project. This and other stirring but defeated revolutionary uprisings—from Chile, Portugal, and Iran to the Arab Spring—“weigh,” as Marx (1994) writes, “like a nightmare on the brain of the living” (15). But when we examine them with historical specificity and through the vantage points of those struggling for relief and liberation, we can draw needed lessons. Chief among the lessons is that while the contradictions and conflicts of class society will inevitably produce struggle for a different society, that different and longed-for society may be—in the moment—out of reach. To be sure, today’s contradictions and conflicts do not arise from the same soil of early 20th-century Europe. But sharp inequality, racism, ­anti-immigrant scapegoating, rising Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, and the revival of fascist and white nationalist ideas all mark our political moment. In counter-demonstrations against white nationalists, street and highway blockades to protest police murder, and strikes against austerity, today’s conditions have brought restive response. ­Violent repression remains a risk because there is, Trotsky (1969) writes, “no impervious demarcation between ‘peaceful’ class struggle and revolution. Every strike embodies in an unexpanded form all the elements of civil war” (38–39). When 30 Elwood, Illinois, warehouse workers refused to move goods to stock Walmart’s Black Friday shelves, two dozen riot police responded in full military gear, including a sonic weapon-equipped Humvee, to break the strike (Uetricht 2012). When students of color at my university occupied the administration building to protest a­ dministrative inaction against racist threats on campus, they were ­simultaneously surrounded by armed police and scolded by the Board of Trustees chairperson for failing to uphold the university’s “Common Ground” principles (moral precepts obligatory to all, apparently, except administrators). Visible and not so latent in this peaceful struggle—as administrators called in police and retreated behind locked

Marxist Ethics for Uncertain Times  77 doors and as students chanted “Show respect for Black and Brown/Meet us on the Common Ground”—were all the elements of civil war. There was nothing easy or certain about answering the questions What kind of university can we be? and How do we get there? To such uncertain conditions, in a society so hardwired for violence, Trotsky (1969) contributes the necessity—visible in both the deeds and breaches of the past century’s social justice movements and uprisings from the Russian Revolution to the Arab Spring—that means be ­chosen not only for their potential to achieve a near-term goal but for their ­fidelity to an ultimate goal of uniting people in “irreconcilable ­hostility to ­ nderstanding oppression” (50). This imperative is also grounded in the u that means for such a project cannot be prescribed in isolation from the ­conditions at hand. When tens of thousands marched into the Boston Commons where white nationalists intended to celebrate their murderous violence in Charlottesville, the means of mass mobilization did indeed reduce danger; it even persuaded the racists to abandon the Common minutes before the first marchers arrived. Still, it would be a mistake to abstract from this instance a universal principle like People power always wins over fire power. The march’s We are many size cannot be separated from the horrors in Virginia the week before and the resulting widespread recognition—that in Charlottesville we had been too few— necessary to overcome common wisdom that if we just stay home, the Far Right will go away. I don’t think either that there was a person in this march who took a single step unaccompanied by terrified uncertainty. Anyone outside the West Virginia strike zone can likewise only imagine the uncertainty weighing on rank-and-file teachers when they decided to continue their strike until a raise for all state workers was also secured. A Marxist compass helps me articulate why—even if in holding out for the good of all, the teachers had lost everything—I cheered their decision. It tells me why I joined the march and resisted with thousands of others attempts by police and other city officials to hold us in ­Roxbury, miles from the Commons. But no compass guarantees safe arrival. To the contrary, Trotsky (1969) observes, even if an “immediate end” is reached, it necessarily becomes “a means for further end,” until a material basis is actually won for that most ethical of ethical visions: “from each according to their ability and to each according to their need” (38). In West Virginia, as I write in late 2018, the teachers’ battle has continued against the legislature’s plans to pay for the strike’s gains not by taxing wealth but through a $20 million cut to Medicaid and other social services on which students, teachers, and their communities depend (Levensen and Jorgensen 2018). On my campus, the faculty union listserv recently buzzed to life once more, this time with a clamor to register our public opposition to the Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination. The conditions in which We should let the facts speak for themselves had such arresting appeal had changed.

78  Nancy Welch Heightened too, I think, is consciousness of the dire need for a unified global struggle against capitalism’s ravages because—as the UN’s scientific panel on climate change warns (Davenport 2018)—the world’s economy must be transformed within just the next few years if we are to have a livable planet at all. Witnessing the horrors of World War I and German social democracy’s lurch to the right, Rosa Luxemburg posed the choice for the future as one between socialism or barbarism. Today, she might say socialism or extinction. The ethical questions of what we will do in this moment thus come to us with all the urgency of Trotsky’s debate of what would be necessary to stop fascism. I have no certainty about how we’ll answer these questions though I am certain the scientific panel has it right—global economic transformation is imperative. I am also certain that the will and the means for such transformation must come from the global working classes; it will not come from global elites. But whether such transformation is possible depends, too, on how the fundamental contradiction created by neoliberal capital is exposed and resolved: this potentially catastrophic hour coming when global capital has both intensified the potential power of workers and, through systematically destroying structures and discourses for solidarity, has effectively divided and disarmed—materially and ideologically—them. In exposing and resolving this contradiction, composition and rhetoric has a role to play. Rather than teach “moral precepts obligatory to all” and reinforce the shackles of neoliberal morality, we can seek the standpoints of exploited and oppressed people in struggle and learn from the further contributions to a liberatory ethics their struggles will make.

Acknowledgment I am indebted to my many conversations with Tony Scott on the question of an historical materialist approach to rhetorical ethics and to our work together on “Between Equal Rights: Rhetorical Discernment in an Era of Climate Conflict” (Works & Days 70/71.36, 285–308), providing the foundation for this chapter.

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5 A Pedagogy for the Political Turn Deborah Mutnick

[P]roletarian revolutions … constantly interrupt themselves in their own course, return to the apparently accomplished, in order to begin anew; they deride with cruel thoroughness the half-measures, weaknesses, and paltriness of their first attempts, seem to throw down their opponents only so the latter may draw new strength from the earth and rise before them again more gigantic than ever … until a situation is created which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves call out: Hic Rhodus, hic salta! (Marx 1852)

In the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx ([1852] 1963) analyzes the revolutionary events in France from 1848 to 1851. He compares the “dramatic” but “short-lived” effects of bourgeois revolutions of the 18th century to the proletarian revolutions of the 19th century that recoil constantly from the indefinite prodigiousness of their own aims … until a situation has been created that makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves cry out: Hic Rhodus, hic salta [Here is Rhodes, here is where you jump]! (8) The aphorism is adapted from Hegel who in turn took it from Aesop’s fable about an athlete who boasts of an enormous jump at Rhodes only to be asked to prove his claim by jumping again. Marx (1859) makes a similar point about the dialectic of revolutionary change in the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since close examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation! If today is our Rhodes, as Grant Banfield (2015) suggests, then our challenge is to find solutions to multiple crises of our time in the material

A Pedagogy for the Political Turn  83 conditions already present, including the exigency, like no other humanity has faced, of climate change. This chapter is an attempt to forge a pedagogy of the political turn to support that historic task. Six months into his presidency, Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of the 2015 Paris Agreement. On November 21, 2018, he tweeted, ­“Brutal and Extended Cold Blast could shatter ALL RECORDS—Whatever ­happened to Global Warming?” (@realDonaldTrump). According to ­Lipton et al. (2018), Trump “has unleashed a regulatory rollback, lobbied for and cheered on by industry, with little parallel in the past ­half-century.” Brazil’s new far right president Jair Bolsanaro threatens likewise to withdraw from the climate agreement and deregulate the protected Amazon rainforest. Meanwhile, reports by the U ­ .N.-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and 13 U.S. federal agencies in late 2018 warn that we have about a decade to limit fossil fuel emissions before already disastrous effects on the climate become catastrophic. More hopefully, the issue of fossil fuel emissions has been taken up by a bipartisan alliance of 17 governors in the U.S. together with the governments of Canada and Mexico, and global demands for a habitable planet persisted at the 24th international Conference of the Parties (COP) conference in Poland in 2018, powerfully expressed by 15-year-old Swedish climate change leader Greta Thunberg: “We have come here to let you know that change is coming, whether you like it or not. The real power belongs to the people” (Connect4Climate). But the non-binding rules agreed on at COP24 are only a step toward achieving the goal of preventing global temperatures from rising 1.5°C above preindustrial levels. Even as the group was meeting in Poland, the difficulty of solving environmental problems in isolation became clear when protests led by the Mouvement des Gilets Jaunes, or Yellow Vest movement, erupted in France against a gasoline tax that unfairly burdens rural and working-class people. The Yellow Vest demands for economic equality expose the contradiction faced by neoliberal capitalist governments like that of President Emmanuel Macron’s that support efforts to reduce greenhouse emissions but face popular protest against austerity policies for the poor and tax cuts for the rich. These interrelated environmental, economic, and social problems make clear the need to connect the environmental crisis to unfinished struggles for racial, gender, and wealth equality, in essence, demanding a socialist alternative to capitalism. As Naomi Klein (2014) puts it, … the climate movement offers an overarching narrative in which everything from the fight for good jobs to justice for migrants to reparations for historical wrongs like slavery and colonialism can all become part of the grand project of building a nontoxic, shockproof economy before it’s too late. (134)

84  Deborah Mutnick It is these immense challenges and the related spread of neoliberal educational policies worldwide that inspired this volume’s call for a political turn (a response to other theoretical turns—linguistic, cultural, social, public—which elide the fundamental structural question of the role of capital in perpetuating inequality and injustice). Here I argue for a corresponding pedagogical praxis, a project that can be framed as follows: •

•

First, given the particularly grim threat of climate change and its connection to other forms of exploitation, education has a decisive role to play in informing and mobilizing a multi-issue mass movement to stop fossil fuel emissions and protect the planet (in composition studies, see, e.g., Owens (2001), Weisser and Dobrin (2001), Lynch (2012)). Second, these twin tasks of mass education and mobilization must be understood in the context of neoliberal policies of austerity imposed on teachers and students worldwide; widening disparities in educational access and quality; and intensifying pressures of transnational capital to relegate masses of people to low-wage jobs, joblessness, poverty, prison, and other forms of precarity (see, e.g., Bousquet et al. 2004; Slaughter and Rhodes 2009; Schrecker 2010; Fabricant and Brier 2016).

This chapter thus argues for a Marxist pedagogy of the political turn necessitated by spiraling global crises, including climate change and the corporatization of higher education. It builds on decades of composition and rhetoric scholarship influenced by Marxist thought (see, e.g., Berlin 1987; Shor 1992; Horner 2000; Trimbur 2000; Ohmann 2003; Kynard 2007; Welch 2008; Scott 2009). It further argues that a Marxist social analysis is needed to empower the majority to act against the interests of the few. With respect to the exigency of climate change and a kernel of teachable insight, a subject to which I return, Marx’s theory of “metabolic rift” explains the widening chasm in the metabolism between humanity and nature and postulates an end to the exploitation of labor as well as nature. This pedagogy adopts a historical materialist theoretical framework based on principles of Marxist education derived from Marx, Lenin, Vygotsky, and their interpreters. Situated in what Laurence Cox and Alf Gunvald Nilsen (2014) call “social movements from below” (2), it links teachers to wider activist movements with the understanding that activism is always educative and that genuine education must embrace the history and aspirations of struggle for a more just, equal, humane world.

The Case for a Marxist Pedagogy The history of public and popular education, including Marxist theories and influences, has new meaning in this period of anthropogenic crisis,

A Pedagogy for the Political Turn  85 transnational capital, and neoliberal corporatization, privatization, and marketization of schools. A pedagogy of the political turn asserts the need at this eleventh hour to demystify the social structures that organize capitalist society, not in a dogmatic or mechanical way but by using the materialist, dialectical theories of Marxism to grasp their inner patterns and contradictions. For Marx (1845), this investigation of reality is never merely academic: as he famously said, “Philosophers have hitherto interpreted the world but the point is to change it.” Nor is it ever static, for Marxist theory extends beyond the realm of political economy to embrace a scientific,1 interdisciplinary, sensuous method of inquiry applicable across disciplines in a dialectic between historical material conditions and the history-making capacity of human beings who are “not just products” of their circumstances but also “active, ­self-producers of it” (Banfield 2015, 180). Before more fully describing a pedagogy grounded in historical materialism, it will be useful to review some reasons why many contemporary radical educators and activists have retreated from Marxism. Several aspects of social class have been taken up in composition studies, including the analysis of class identities, biases against working-class students, the rhetoric of labor struggles, and the proletarianization of faculty, especially the adjunctification of teachers of writing, and some composition scholars, as already noted, assume a distinctly Marxist perspective. Yet it is increasingly common for scholars across disciplines, including composition, to discount the centrality of “class” or to see it as parallel to other categories of oppression either because the “working class” as Marx understood it is no longer believed to be powerful enough to serve as a basis for radical social transformation or in deference to intersectionality and decolonial perspectives. For example, in “Freshman English as a Precariat Enterprise,” James Rushing Daniel (2017) criticizes the impact of neoliberal policies in Freshman English and calls on teachers to resist them, concluding that “Insofar as we are threatened by economic precarity and increasingly discriminatory politics, faculty and students must collaboratively seek out ways to face these conditions without demurring” (82). However, it is unclear what it would mean to “face” such conditions given his assertion that the concept of precarity “promotes nuanced thinking of economic fracture beyond the purview of class stratification … and offers compositionists ways to think beyond categorical notions of class” (68 emphasis added). Likewise, the theory of intersectionality, a term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989), describes interlocking systems of class, racial, gender, and other social identities with the intent of accounting for the effects of multiple oppressions, but offers no analysis of underlying causes of inequality. Vital to debates about intersectionality is the relation of class to racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression, typically pitting Old Left arguments about the centrality of class against black feminist and

86  Deborah Mutnick decolonial arguments that a focus on class silences women, people of color, and other oppressed groups and reifies white male (and female) privilege. However, from a Marxist perspective, rather than a type of identity commensurable with race and gender, class represents the fundamental division between those who control the relations and forces of production and those whose labor is exploited by it in the form of surplus value. As Barbara Foley (2018) puts it, “Although intersectionality can usefully describe the effects of multiple oppressions, I propose, it does not offer an adequate explanatory framework for addressing the root causes of social inequality in the capitalist socioeconomic system.” Other reasons for a retreat from Marxist theory are the continuing chill of Cold War politics and attacks on academic freedom; the almost subliminal impact of postmodern suspicion of grand narratives, metanarratives, and truth and reason, particularly on humanities and social science research and scholarship; and the rise of identity politics, an understandable but problematic response to the failure of capitalist nations to live up to the promises of democracy. Without an identifiable source of exploitation to organize a radical restructuring of society, even when that end is not clearly in sight, activists, teachers, and theorists risk becoming enmeshed in polarizing debates and pseudo-democratic practices that fracture rather than unite left forces. Thus, we see tendencies toward a resigned acceptance of capitalist hegemony, schismatic factionalism, and a commitment to pluralistic, horizontal forms of organization like the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and, more recently, the Me Too movement, which signal the potential for mass radicalization but have yet to build significant oppositional forces. They do, however, denote a rise of interest in socialism evident in strong support for Bernie Sanders’ 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns, affirmative surveys of youth, the rapid growth of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and victories of self-proclaimed democratic socialist candidates like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib in the 2018 midterm elections. However, as much as these stirrings show that the idea of socialism is no longer unspeakable and has gained traction in U.S. politics, what they concretely mean is less clear. Marxist theory situates “liberating praxis” neither in reform efforts nor in education in itself (though he advocates participation in both realms as part of a revolutionary process) but in participation in class struggle in all its various forms—the “teacher” that best prepares all of us for the battles ahead. Lest the idea of class struggle conjure up stereotypical images of white, male workers in hardhats, it is worth recalling that class is determined by the social relations of production, which in capitalist societies pits the proletariat, wage workers who sell their labor for a salary, against the bourgeoisie, the owners of the means of production who extract that labor as surplus value. The working class has always been male and female and, depending on geography, racially

A Pedagogy for the Political Turn  87 and ethnically diverse, if also stratified and divided along these same lines. Occupy Wall Street’s brilliant slogan “We are the 99%” was so effective because it named the experience of masses of people in the U.S. (and elsewhere) in a shrinking, increasingly fragile middle class and a distressed working class hit hard by the Great Recession, reeling from intensely felt effects of wealth inequality, wage stagnation, growing indebtedness, rising rents and prices, vanishing pensions, and downward mobility, particularly among black male youth. According to Oxfam International, the wealthiest 42 individuals in the world in 2017 owned $1.4 trillion, or as much as the 3.7 billion poorest people (Alejo Vázquez Pimentel et al. 2018, 10). This process of unbridled accumulation, coupled with stagnant wages, slow growth, and downwardly mobile portions of the middle class, including the academic precariat, was presciently observed by Marx and Engels (1848) in The Communist Manifesto: “[E]ntire sections of the ruling class are, by the advance of industry, precipitated into the proletariat, or are at least threatened in their conditions of existence. These also supply the proletariat with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress” (Chapter 1). In addition to worsening prospects for students, faculty, and working people generally in the U.S., 2 climate change severely threatens a large swath of the world’s population in “their conditions of existence.” Class struggle, then, despite the revisionist tendencies of social democrats and bourgeois intellectuals, must be seen more broadly in terms of the deepening contradictions of transnational capitalist economies at the same time it must actively embrace anti-racist, anti-sexist, democratic methods and goals. Marxist pedagogy examines these dynamics of capitalism, which make it incompatible in the long term with democracy, and exposes the contradiction between labor and capital that Marx believed would inevitably lead to socialism or communism.3 As Marx and Engels (1848) put it, “What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are inevitable.” To sum up the case for a Marxist pedagogy, rooted in historical materialist theory, these intensifying dynamics can be seen in the crisis of climate change; the near total marketization of public and private life according to a “neoliberal rationality” that “does not always take a monetary form” but rather economizes “fields, persons, and practices  … in ways that vastly exceed literal wealth generation” (Brown 2015, 37); and increasingly undemocratic, corporatized education at all levels, stratified by racial, class, and wealth inequalities. While these inequalities have persisted and, in some respects, deepened, it is also true that struggles for reform within capitalism have resulted periodically in improved conditions across class, racial, and gender lines (e.g., social security benefits, victories of the Civil Rights Movement, Roe. v. Wade). But unlike periods in which state and national governments were responsive to labor and radical demands, if only to subdue and control

88  Deborah Mutnick dissent, a transnational capitalist class untethered from national constraints has reduced virtually all aspects of life to metrics and market values by means of “a governing rationality” that “construes the human itself exclusively as homo oeconomicus” (Brown 2017, 176).

Higher Education as a “Key Space of Conflict” This thinning and flattening of social and natural environments in our epoch flits in and out of consciousness, impinging as it were on perceptions of everyday life in contradictory and troubling recognitions of loss: of human contact, promises of democracy, upward mobility, hopefulness about the future, temperate weather, fresh water, flowing rivers, entire species. In higher education, the impact of neoliberal capitalist policies can be seen in the abandonment of commitments to the “public good,” preparing an educated populace for participatory democracy, and offering a broad liberal arts curriculum to undergird the classical “good life,” historically reserved for the elite but to which masses of people gained access through centuries of hard-won victories, lending credence to what Wendy Brown (2017) describes as “a utopian vision in which freedom from toil is generalized and political rule is widely shared” (189). These commitments, along with all the other promises of democracy, were never wholly and in some cases barely fulfilled, existing more in name than reality, but they resonated with the ethics and goals of educators and scholars and stood for a widely shared set of societal values. To restate this point, the contradiction between the promise and reality of democracy and, by extension, education forms the crucible that is now one critical site of contestation and struggle. Left critiques of education in the 1970s and 1980s mapped out the reproduction of the social relations of production in the “hidden curriculum” through which different schools and educational tracks prepare youth for blue-collar, white-collar, or civil servant jobs, middle-class artistic, intellectual, and professional lives, or top executive positions in government and private corporations (Bowles and Gintes 1977; Anyon 1980). In addition to the means by which the educational system sponsors specific forms of literacy to meet the economic demands of capitalism, it sorts students into racially segregated schools, academic and vocational tracks, and the school-to-prison pipeline. As Deborah Brandt (1998; see also Horner et al. 2017) reminds us, Literacy looms as one of the great engines of profit and competitive advantage … A lubricant for consumer desire; a means for integrating corporate markets; a foundation for the deployment of weapons and other technology; a raw material in the production of information. (166)

A Pedagogy for the Political Turn  89 Nevertheless, however insufficient, social movements, mass protests, and legal challenges have resulted in structural reforms and historic victories, including school desegregation and open admissions; improved methods of instruction widely influenced by progressive educators like John Dewey and Lev Vygotsky; and in higher education, even as Bill Readings (1997) was demarcating the university in ruins, a prevailing culture on most campuses that was still defined by a “utopian vision” of democracy that valued the liberal arts and sciences and abided by ­long-established rules of governance in which faculty held purview over curricular and academic matters. By the 2000s, that vision had further dissipated, leaving in its stead the haunted labyrinths of Readings’ ruins: huge budget cuts, rising student debt, and a vocationalism epitomized by the University of Akron’s announcement in 2018 that it was slashing 80 academic programs and opening a new esports videogaming facility (Pettit 2018). The “managed university,” stripped of intellectual commitments to scholarship, teaching, and the public good, represents the wholesale adoption of a business model in which academic labor must be disciplined and students vested as customers and consumers of vocationally driven, accelerated academic programs. A vicious circle of federal and state disinvestment, rising tuition, crushing student debt, and restructuring through contraction in order to guarantee “return on investment” has produced a mainstream narrative of higher education as a questionable but necessary choice with few alternatives other than minimum or low wage, lowskilled employment. This managed university works to shape the consciousness of faculty and students alike who, fearful of losing or never attaining job security, submit to anti-union, pro-business regimes more concerned with profitability than with educational quality. Increasingly, administrators and trustees control academic program development, hire and fire at will, abide by the rules of shared governance in name only, hold faculty hostage to threats of job and program loss, and persuade students that career-driven educational goals are in their best interests. In describing the kind of educational system promoted by the transnational capitalist elite, William I. Robinson (2016) conjures up a scary but all too real scenario of the masses of “precariatized” humanity thrown into the ranks of surplus labor … [whose] tier in the educational system would be quite restricted in its pedagogical content (if not its provision) serving the dual function of supplying the numeracy, literacy, and technical knowledge necessary to produce servile workers while suppressing the development of critical thinking that could mount a challenge to global capitalism and its punitive social control. (2)

90  Deborah Mutnick These conditions play out differently across and within public and private, elite and nonelite institutions in the contradictions of 21st-century capitalism, defined not only by ever-tightening corporate controls and interests but also inevitably by contestation and struggle. As George Caffentzis and Silvia Federici (2009) observe: As was the factory, so now is the university. Where once the factory was a paradigmatic site of struggle between workers and capitalists, so now the university is a key space of conflict, where the ownership of knowledge, the reproduction of the labor force, and the creation of social and cultural stratifications are all at stake. This is to say the university is not just another institution subject to sovereign and governmental controls, but a crucial site in which wider social struggles are won and lost. (125) The pedagogy of the political turn takes up this idea of the intensifying role of the university as factory for the production of knowledge, particularly as it circulates on the Internet, and for a labor force to meet the shifting needs of capital as a “crucial site in which wider social struggles are won and lost” in what Cox and Nilsen (2014) call “the twilight of neoliberalism.” Since we can neither exist outside the relations of production that define social reality nor survive without salaried work, it is important to defend public and nonprofit private education despite its embeddedness in capitalist structures and increasingly transparent, slavish obedience to the market. Moreover, even in these worsening conditions of neoliberal austerity and marketization, the sharpening contradictions of late capitalism create opportunities for critique and resistance in everyday instructional practices, curricular matters, and labor struggles. As of this writing, three years into Trump’s presidency, we have entered a new phase of crisis marked by deepening racial, class, and gender inequities, white resentment periodically erupting into fascistic terror, attacks on fundamental rights, including voting laws, reproduction, and immigration, and the increasingly grim, dystopian consequences of climate change. Even if educational systems were well funded and relatively autonomous from state and corporate interventions, we would still need to figure out how to address these exigencies as educators. But ­mainstream education is ruined beyond the destruction that Readings imagined. These increasingly untenable conditions for teaching, learning, and work in all facets of institutional operations, especially at those institutions that have historically served working-class students, require a three-pronged strategy of defending the university, resisting its further corporatization, and rethinking critical pedagogy on multiple fronts beyond its walls.

A Pedagogy for the Political Turn  91 In short, this historical conjuncture calls for a politically conscious, Marxist pedagogy in and out of the classroom in which progressive educators work with labor, social justice activists, and local publics to develop and/or join existing projects for freedom and democracy writ large, including the expansion of educational access to underserved communities through schools, neighborhoods, unions, and movements. Together with students, working people, and community members, we need to sharpen our understanding of the process by which we have arrived at this perilous crossroad and understand the limits and possibilities of education in actually existing relations of production. In the next section, I suggest a framework for these activities drawn from Marxist theories of dialectical and historical materialism; I then turn to Lenin’s (1902) theories of education suggested in “What Is To Be Done”; third, I show how Vygotsky’s theories of cognitive development fit into a Marxist approach to education; and finally, I argue for a visible Marxist pedagogy. My intent is to provide a theoretical justification for a historically situated pedagogical praxis based on Marxist theory in response to the crisis of late capitalism and the exigencies of education on an ever hotter, drier, more turbulent planet.

“The Revolutionary Educator”: A Theoretical Framework for a Marxist Pedagogy4 In the crisis of climate change, we are confronting what John Bellamy Foster (2013) describes as “the emerging Great Rift in the earth system, and the resulting necessity of an epochal transformation in the existing nature-society metabolism.” Foster delves into Marx’s “ecological materialism” to explain “the labor process as the metabolic relation between humanity and nature. For human beings this metabolism necessarily took a socially mediated form, encompassing the organic conditions common to all life, but also taking a distinctly human-historical character through production.”5 In other words, Marx theorized a rupture in human beings’ metabolic interaction with the rest of nature as they labored to satisfy their needs. To arrive at this insight, he drew on Justus von Liebig’s expanded use of the term “metabolism” to refer to biochemical processes not only in the body but also in natural systems. Created by the extraction and depletion of natural resources in the labor process, the metabolic rift between nature and humanity now threatens to engulf the planet in sweltering heat, drought, floods, fires, and storms, an existential reality like no other humanity has faced. For educational purposes, the explanatory power of the dialectic Marx perceived between the labor process and nature exemplifies the pedagogical value of a Marxist theoretical framework in meeting the historic challenge of global warming.

92  Deborah Mutnick As suggested by Foster’s discussion of metabolic rift, the case I am making for a Marxist pedagogy begins with the major precepts of Marx’s theory of historical materialism. Accordingly, to grasp the dialectic between the deepening crises of capitalism and the potential they create for revolutionary transformation requires a materialist conception of history starting with the fact that people organize themselves in order to obtain the basic necessities of survival as “a fundamental condition of all history” (Marx and Engels 1845). This definition provides a materialist understanding of reality that breaks with the Hegelian idealists whom Marx and Engels ridiculed for having “to fight only against the illusions of consciousness,” mere “phrases,” rather than the “real existing world.”6 Marx (1859) further notes in the preface to “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy”: It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or—this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms—with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. However, this “real existing world” does not completely determine the course of history. Beyond subsistence, Marx (1844) argued, humans are distinguished from animals by their “conscious life activity” and ability to transform their environment through the process of their own labor. He writes: “Man makes his life activity the object of his will and of his consciousness” (“Estranged Labor”). Distinct social classes arise from economic modes of production at every historical stage, and are shaped, in turn, by those relations as they satisfy basic needs and further develop human capacities and technologies. In capitalist societies, under the spell of bourgeois ideology, two dominant classes emerge: the capitalist class, which owns the means of production and extracts and appropriates profit from the surplus value created after labor costs, and the working class, which sells its labor power as a commodity for a wage. Each epoch, Marx and Engels (1848) argue in The Communist ­M anifesto, produces the seeds of its own demise by advancing society as a whole to the point that the fetters of the old system are an impediment to further development, a turning point that we have clearly reached today as we approach the pivotal third decade of the 21st century. Just as feudal society gave way to capitalism in a period when mercantilism transformed the economic social base so completely that the incipient middle classes revolted against the aristocracy, the system of capitalism calls into existence an expanding, increasingly concentrated proletariat class that will ultimately destroy it. Meanwhile, capitalism endures

A Pedagogy for the Political Turn  93 periodic crises in a cycle of financial booms and busts in what Marx and Engels called an “epidemic of overproduction” that threatens to catapult society back into “a state of momentary barbarism”—a state that has intermittently characterized the last four centuries and presently menaces humanity’s future. On the one hand, Marx and Engels explain that “the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself”; on the other, “it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons—the modern working class—the proletarians.” In other words, Marx objected to mechanistic explanations of the material basis of economic development that defined the individual “as the passive product of external circumstances, the recipient of external stimuli which formed his knowledge and character” (Simon 1977, 202). Rather, he presented the dialectic between material existence and consciousness as the very basis for revolutionary change, emphasizing the role of human agency in his famous contention that “men make their own history even if they do not always make it of their own choosing” (Marx 1852). This dialectical method of analysis is rooted in a materialist view of reality as a process of change, in flux, driven by contradiction, inevitably transforming from one state or phase to another, even when appearances suggest otherwise. The impetus for a Marxist pedagogy at this time is the increasingly urgent need for educational programs, together with mass political organizing, that foster critical inquiry in the face of deepening worldwide crises—rising levels of precarity, inequality, and global warming—and the deliberate suppression of critical thinking. Such an appeal to scholars, researchers, students, and working people might seem absurd given the relatively weak state of the left, or overreaching in any other context, but arguably the threat of species extinction will serve as our “Hic Rhodus, hic salta.” In this brief overview of a Marxist analysis of history, political economy, and the dialectic between material existence and human potential, Marx can be seen as a “revolutionary educator” (Banfield 2015, 8). As Robin Small (2014) puts it, Marx is an educator for us. He challenges us to develop our capacity to think critically about our own society and, in particular, to look beneath the surface of schooling and find out what is really happening in this area of social life. (2) In refuting the mechanistic materialism of the Young Hegelians and underscoring his strong belief in humans’ capacity to change the course of their own history, Marx (1845) writes in the Theses on Feuerbach: The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that therefore, changed men are products of

94  Deborah Mutnick other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men that change circumstances and that the educator must himself be educated. (emphasis added) It is this dialectical understanding that enables Marxists to attribute agency to oppressed classes, recognizing their power to change their own circumstances, and to reject the idealistic view that education in and of itself can liberate us. Although Marx made relatively few explicit statements on the subject of schooling, he eloquently supported the provision of a robust education for workers as necessary for them to develop their full “species-being” potential and to build the revolutionary capacities of their class. He also supported reform efforts in response to the conditions and exigencies of his own time. He stood with trade unionists for the ten-hour and then the eight-hour work day, for child labor laws that restricted the hours that children could be made to work according to their age, and for compulsory education. Although he unequivocally saw education as an institution in service to capitalism, controlled by the ruling class, he understood its role in the struggle for emancipation. Marx, Engels, and Lenin, among other socialist thinkers, fought strenuously in their day for educational access to the full sociological range of knowledge that had been the exclusive preserve of the affluent classes. For them, the source of oppression was not culture or language but a socioeconomic system whose existence required the exploitation and suppression of the working class, which was deprived of the right to learn. Marx addressed more practical questions concerning schools at the first International Workingmen’s Association in Geneva in 1867, where he laid out basic principles for how education should be provided to children. Impressed by Robert Owen’s ideas about education, if critical of his utopianism, Marx supported the creation of polytechnic schools that combined intellectual and physical development (gymnastics, sports, and the military) with varying degrees of labor depending on a child’s age. This view of child labor as educational reflects 19th-century realities of child labor and the chief working-class demand for a shorter work day, especially for children, but it also stems from Marx’s theory of labor as the driving force in human history, satisfying basic needs of food, shelter, and clothing and continually transforming material reality to produce “definite forms of social consciousness” through the “social production of their existence” (Marx 1859). In other words, he believed children should be engaged in age appropriate labor as part of a rounded education, a practical application of the theoretical view that it is the production of material social existence rather than ideas that determines consciousness. He argued further that the state should guarantee the means of education but that neither the state nor the church should provide its content, which should be independently determined by educators.

A Pedagogy for the Political Turn  95 Similarly, in keeping with the “remarkably literate” Chartist movement7 and other revolutionary thinkers who followed him like Lenin and Trotsky, Marx argued that the working class should have access to all of what human history and culture offered rather than be limited to narrow vocational or professional training or to proletarian ­culture— that the working class “must take for ourselves the sum total of human knowledge” (quoted in Simon 1977, 201). In his Marx ­Memorial Lecture delivered in 1977, British education historian Brian Simon noted that Marx viewed mass education as an essential component of class struggle and the state as the necessary means by which to enforce schooling in the context of 19th-century capitalism. At the first meeting of the International Workingmen’s Association in 1867, Marx stated: “The more enlightened part of the working class fully understands that the future of its class, and, therefore, mankind, altogether depends on the formation of the rising working generation.” He further maintained that the working class “do not fortify government power” but “[o]n the contrary, they transform that power, now used against them, into their own agency” (quoted in Simon, 197). Simon’s central argument is that even though Marx’s emphasis was never on education per se, he understood its critical importance to revolutionary movements as a struggle that must be fought on multiple fronts, ranging from the defense of secular, public education to the educational imperatives of union-building, extending workers’ comprehension of their oppression beyond trade union issues to the larger system of capitalism, and bolstering the intellectual capacities of a revolutionary vanguard and the working class as a whole. However, even as Marx actively supported reform efforts, especially with respect to shortening the work day, limiting child labor, and demanding state-supported public education, he had no illusions that education could be the basis for resolving class inequalities or achieving social democracy. This distinction between reforms in support of what Gramsci (1971) described as a “war of position” in counterhegemonic struggles and utopian belief in the capacity of education to achieve social democracy without changing the economic base—the capitalist mode of production—­continues to unfold in debates over the role and capacity of education today. Meanwhile, the extensive and intensive expansion of transnational capitalism has sharpened the contradiction between classical and vocational education in a process of corporatization and commodification that has reduced teacher autonomy, quantified learning, and further stratified schooling and curricula, reserving elaborated, rigorous study for the relatively elite few and consigning masses of people to schools, colleges, and universities increasingly defined by a stripped-down, jobs-oriented curriculum in a mercurial, unpredictable marketplace. Thus, we can see the relevance of Marxist theory and methods to a 21st-century pedagogy of the political turn in Marx’s analysis of capital, his support

96  Deborah Mutnick for educational reform that widened access to classical education, and his understanding of the crucial but subordinate role of education in achieving social transformation. To further delineate the shape and content of a Marxist pedagogy, it will be helpful to look more closely at two instances of Marx’s impact, first on educational aspects of revolutionary praxis, and second on sociological perspectives on developmental psychology and education. Lenin and Vygotsky: Using Summation and Generalization to Understand and Change the World Echoing Marx and Engels, Vladimir Lenin emphasized the importance of mass education. Contrary to critiques of Lenin’s approach to worker education as a “derailment of democratic political pedagogy” (Welton 2014, 652), Wayne Au (2007) argues that Lenin’s (1902) pamphlet “What Is To Be Done” clearly expresses the view that workers are capable of developing critical political consciousness. 8 Lenin (1902) lays out the character and content of a revolutionary movement, its organizational tasks, and its plans for building a “militant, all-Russia organization.” Responding to a tendency toward economism among a faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, which would culminate a year later in a split between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks, Lenin argued that workers can achieve trade union consciousness on their own but need political education to grasp the broader systemic issues that explain their exploitation and thus persuade them to engage in militant political struggle. It was only ideological or conscious criticism of those elements, he insisted, that could “point out the road ahead.” This debate, like the ones Marx and Engels had participated in a few decades earlier over the character of mass education, pivoted on a firm belief in workers’ intellectual capacities, a view that would be further developed by Gramsci ([1971] 1989) in The Prison Notebooks. Lenin (1902) had faith that the working class could grasp not only trade union goals but also the broader revolutionary objective of abolishing “the social system that compels the propertyless to sell themselves to the rich.” The famous pamphlet is Lenin’s response to Rabocheye Dyelo, the Russian Social Democratic political newspaper, as to the most effective way to draw the working class into political struggle—through trade union agitation alone or “a thousand other similar manifestations of tyranny” that oppressed the masses. The key distinction Lenin makes is between purely economic oppression requiring better terms for selling the “commodity” of labor and the wide range of oppressive social conditions Russian workers faced from “the flogging of the peasants” to “the police treatment of the ‘common people’ in the cities” to “the suppression of the popular striving towards enlightenment and knowledge” (emphasis added).

A Pedagogy for the Political Turn  97 Particularly relevant to the development of a pedagogy of the political turn is the parallel Au (2007) draws between Vygotsky’s and Lenin’s respective approaches to individual and social development in which he connects Vygotsky’s theory of cognitive development as the movement of the individual learner from spontaneous to scientific concepts about reality to Lenin’s approach to how to raise the political consciousness of workers in prerevolutionary Russia. Like other scholars who have sought to reestablish Marx’s influence on Vygotskian cognitive and developmental theory, Au traces the editions of Vygotsky’s Thought and Language, first translated into English in 1962 with all the references to Marx, Engels, and Lenin omitted to their eventual restoration with its republication as Thinking and Language in 1986. In this important reassessment of Vygotsky’s Marxist-Leninist perspective, Au goes on to compare Lenin’s approach to educating Russian workers about the systemic causes of their oppressive conditions to Vygotsky’s theory of advancing the learner from her actual level of development to a higher level of comprehension within her zone of proximal development (ZPD). Just as Vygotsky assigned the teacher or more advanced peer the role of enabling the learner to grasp increasingly more difficult concepts, Lenin saw students and more politically conscious workers as the most effective “teachers” in raising the political consciousness of workers. In both cases, spontaneous concepts based on experience and empirical observation are subjected to critical examination that can uncover the concealed “rational kernel within the mystical shell” (Marx 1873). In other words, the point of a critical education is to dislodge spontaneous or commonsense concepts—not wrong but inadequate—based on the perception of surface manifestations of reality with analytical tools capable of grasping their inner patterns. Thus, “[I]n Vygotskian terms, it could be said that Lenin saw a zone of proximal development in the spontaneous consciousness of the workers” (Au 2007, 284). In addition to emphasizing the significance of later editions of ­Vygotsky’s work that make clear his commitment to a Marxist-Leninist approach to psychology, Au extrapolates from Lenin’s writing the implicit pedagogical content embedded in it, demonstrating how Lenin’s description of the need for workers to become conscious of systemic exploitation that contradicted their own interests, to apply materialist analysis to their situation, and then to “summarize and generalize all of the diverse signs of ferment and struggle,” resonates with the goals of general and specialized education. Au summarizes Lenin’s conception of consciousness and his methodology as the willful application of a systematic and materialist analysis of social conditions and relations, making use of summation and generalization as forms of abstraction for understanding what is happening in the world in preparation for purposeful, volitional action to change that world. (278)

98  Deborah Mutnick Not only does this language resonate with activity theory but also with general education, academic writing, and rhetorical theory, in particular, Lloyd Bitzer’s (1968) idea of “situated rhetoric” responsive to exigencies that call for rhetorical interventions as a “mode of altering reality, not by the direct application of energy to objects, but by the creation of a discourse which changes reality through the mediation of thought and action” (4). Vygotsky’s “Theoretical Blind Spot”: Marx’s Theory of the Phenomenal Forms In a reassessment of Vygotsky’s educational theories, Luis Villacañas de Castro (2015) proposes what he calls the “pedagogy of the Erscheinungsformen” (German for “phenomenal forms”) (110). Like Au, Villacañas de Castro notes Vygotsky’s underacknowledged but clear debt to Marxist theory in shaping his internationally influential social theory of cognitive development. At the same time, Villacañas de Castro argues that Vygotsky’s theory of mind fails to account for the impact of Marx’s concept of the phenomenal forms—the appearance of reality—on learning at the microgenetic level, that is, “the purely synchronic progress that children may undergo at a given educational site” (100). As Villacañas de Castro explains, Marx’s theory of the phenomenal forms offers a materialist analysis of the epistemological and ontological obstacles to learning. In the context of formal or informal instruction, this pedagogy of the phenomenal forms resonates with Au’s discussion of the movement from spontaneous to scientific concepts of inner, hidden patterns of reality that often appear as the inverse of observable phenomena. The theory of the phenomenal forms helps explain learners’ resistance to acquiring new, troublesome knowledge as a potentially traumatic loss of certainty and egocentric insularity in a process that entails “the general epistemological difficulty of having to understand a given reality at the same time as one forms part of it” (Villacañas de Castro 2015, 96). This experience threatens learners’ ontological well-being as they revise their sense of cosmic scale and their own place in the universe. Further explicating the issue, Villacañas de Castro writes: … any attempt to understand scientifically9 a given social milieu must occur from within, and the trouble lies in that this epistemological dynamic creates a complex dialectic between the subject and the object of inquiry—between the observer and the subject matter in which the former, however, is also induced—which obviously complicates the attainment of the intended goal. (106–107) The dialectic between subject and object of inquiry applies equally to scientific and sociological knowledge as can be seen from evolutionary

A Pedagogy for the Political Turn  99 biology that relegates human existence from godlike status to the process of natural history, to the sociology of class division that requires an individual to move beyond the viewpoint of a specific class in order to grasp the structural dynamics explaining his or her own class position. A sociological example of this difficulty can be seen in the poignant figure of the colonized subject described by Frantz Fanon as having internalized his own racialized, subjugated identity in what Paulo Freire (2000) describes as the “mirages and phantoms that take hold of oppressed peoples” (107–108). But Villacañas de Castro makes clear that any field of study from genetics to cosmology involves the (re)discovery of scientific and conceptual knowledge—the inner, often abstract forms of reality outwardly expressed as their inverse, for example, the theory of relativity or money as the manifestation of the value of labor-time immanent in commodities (Marx 1887, Capital, Vol. 1, Section 1, Chapter 3). In order to help students overcome the epistemological and ontological obstacles to learning, Villacañas de Castro (2015) urges teachers to engage in the sort of egalitarian dialogue fostered by Paulo Freire’s (2000) “project of conscientização” (108), explaining that the reason why democratic dialog had to be retained by this pedagogy was that the profound cognitive transition Freire devised would only occur if teachers were able to engage the cognitive backgrounds of the students whose viewpoints and identities they had to expand as much as transform. (109) This dialogic approach to teaching and learning addresses the ontological trauma of learning by enabling movement from the actual level of development to the learner’s full potential through collaborative interactions along the ZPD between the learner and a teacher or more advanced peer. Freire’s pedagogical methods, according to Villacañas de Castro, thus mitigate the existential and sociological barriers to learning that may persist beyond but are meanwhile intensified in class-riven societies. *    *    * As I have been arguing throughout this chapter, the relevance of Marxist pedagogy to this historical moment can be seen nowhere more clearly than in the failure of world governments to reduce carbon emissions. At the same time, the crisis of climate change is inseparable from that of late capitalism in all its forms of racial, gender, and wealth inequality, growing precarity, the rise of fascism, the degradation of nature, and the neoliberal assault on education and other cultural institutions and public sectors through austerity, corporatization, and the deliberate suppression of critical thinking for the majority of the world’s people. Just as the

100  Deborah Mutnick problem of climate change is complicated by localized environmental destruction, much of which cannot be immediately seen and occurs on a scale that is hard to fathom, the impact of a similar epochal shift in capitalism is difficult to grasp not only in its causes but also in its diffuse, contradictory, extraordinarily complex effects. The unofficially named epoch of the Anthropocene—or Capitalocene (Moore)—begins to clarify the dialectic relationship between these natural and social forms of devastation. Reformist responses to climate change ranging from technological solutions to a Green New Deal should be pursued wherever possible, but such responses fail to address the fundamental problem of relentless capitalist extraction of wealth from labor and nature in order to maximize profits; at best, they buy more time. Both climate change denial and faith in capitalism to solve these crises offer paradigmatic examples of how the phenomenal forms conceal inner processes and patterns that are complex, diffuse, uneven, hidden except in their most violent manifestations, and therefore hard to grasp in their total end-ofthe-world-as-we-know-it global consequences.

Conclusion: Educating the Educator, Answering the Call of History There is a long history of radical education in support of social movements from below, in and out of state-sponsored schools, including the vision of universal education set forth in the radical phase of the French Revolution, the Chartists’ call for “Public Halls for Schools for the People” in England that would expand general education and increase the number of circulating libraries, communist schools from the 1920s to the 1950s in the U.S., 1960s freedom schools inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, literacy campaigns in Russia, Cuba, Nicaragua, and other revolutionary societies, struggles to desegregate public education in the U.S., student-led demands for open admissions, more recent manifestations like public lectures and popup libraries sponsored by Occupy Wall Street, and socialist schools, including the Marxist Education Project (formerly the New York Marxist School, then Brecht Forum) in Brooklyn, New York, the Solidarity Day School in Dallas, Texas, and the Toronto Socialism School. In composition and rhetoric and across the disciplines, teachers and researchers have contributed to the history, theory, and pedagogies of these educational projects, engaged in activist struggles within educational institutions and in the streets and halls of radical movements and parties, and promoted community literacy, writing, and research in support of educational access, bottom-up history, and the cultural literacies of diverse groups ranging from Mexican immigrants (Guerra 1998) to homeless writers (Mathieu 2005) to residents in an impoverished neighborhood negotiating asymmetrical power relations with police (Kuebrich 2015).

A Pedagogy for the Political Turn  101 These repositories of archival, historical, and collective knowledge, born of the school of radical political struggle, inform the Marxist pedagogy of the political turn I am proposing here: a commitment to strive for praxis, that is, critical reflection and action based on historical materialist analysis of social and natural realities that aims to comprehend the inner, often hidden, abstract inverse of “the mode of expression, the phenomenal form, of something contained in it, yet distinguishable from it” (Marx [1867] 1887, Chapter 1); that presumes the desire and capacity of all human beings to learn; and that is committed to building a truly humane, just world. Practically, such a pedagogy must straddle state-sponsored and mass, community-based sites of education from unions to alternative freedom schools to literacy programs to Marxist education projects. Though beyond the scope of this chapter, further study of such projects is needed to determine how best to “educate the educators” as well as consider more fully the goals, methods, and content of Marxist pedagogy. In his reflections on the political pedagogy of Marx and Lenin, Michael R. Welton (2014) argues that the role of the socialist intellectual in raising emancipatory consciousness is not to impose the “correct praxis” (643) on the proletariat but rather to act as facilitator of learning in “a process of enlightenment in which there are only participants” (655). Welton contends that Lenin’s implicit ideas about education were overly directive, instrumental, and authoritarian, reinscribing class hierarchies of proletariat pupils and revolutionary intellectuals. Although I remain persuaded by Au’s (2007) account of Lenin’s commitment to “Marxbased Social Democracy (Lih 2008, 43)” and his confidence, like that of Marx and Engels, in the intellectual capacity of the proletariat to go beyond trade union consciousness to a deeper understanding of the structural exploitation of a class-riven society, Welton’s cautionary note serves as a reminder that “educating the educator” requires “intellectuals who set out to educate particular audiences to reflect on their own class location and how this might be shaping (and misshaping) perceptions of enlightenment, empowerment and collective emancipatory action” (655). We might add to that caveat the need for educators to reflect on their own race and gender locations. As I have sought to make clear throughout this chapter, it is the apocalyptic threat of climate change that clarified my sense of the necessity of a Marxist approach both to education and to building the revolutionary forces to turn back global warming. As a “red diaper baby,” I was raised to believe in socialism and accustomed to conversations about Marx at the dinner table. While I practiced Freirean pedagogy and talked with my students about “education as the practice of freedom,” I was careful neither to abuse my authority in the classroom nor to engage in indoctrination nor to cross the line between my life as an activist and my work as a teacher. I was daunted in equal parts by the residue of Cold

102  Deborah Mutnick War McCarthyism in higher education, a string of left-wing defeats here and abroad, critiques of critical pedagogy (both left and the right) that warned of the dangers of politicizing the classroom, and my own sense of the remoteness, if not impossibility, of a socialist revolution in the U.S. That is no longer the case as ardently expressed by Naomi Klein (2014) in her title This Changes Everything: Capitalism Versus the Climate. Both this changing zeitgeist and exigency of climate change have convinced me that the time to fight for a socialist world is very possibly now or never. The pedagogy of the political turn I advocate here would simultaneously mobilize the energies of teachers in response to demands for fair working conditions and students’ right to learn and to the historical call to build social movements from below that are “sufficiently far-reaching, broad-based, and strategically oriented to win” (Cox and Nilsen 2014, xi). I have drawn on Marxist theory as the basis for a democratic, dialogic pedagogy capable of contributing to structural change and envisioning socialism as an alternative to the intensifying degradation of nature and humanity. Such a project requires critical ­analysis—and the capacity to teach others to engage in such analysis—of a fundamental contradiction in late capitalism: a globalized, transnational economy barreling undeterred toward a terrifying dystopian future in a nation-based system of political authority Robinson (2018). Through a collective process of “educating the educator” teachers can facilitate critical education across the disciplines in relation to grasping the inner essential patterns of appearances, including the causes of climate change, unprecedented degrees of inequality, worldwide precarity, and the rise of fascism. To do so means straddling the worlds of the classroom and other social locations and strategically supporting reform efforts without losing the political vision and clarity needed to build a revolutionary socialist movement. Further, it ­requires us as teachers to understand that a new round of restructuring in world capitalism has weakened our position in the university even as it opens possibilities of radical resistance and transformation—a situation in which the conditions themselves called out: Hic Rhodus, hic salta!

Notes 1 Marx and Engels’ (1845) conception of the word “scientific” is best explained in their own words in The German Ideology in which they write: We know only a single science, the study of history. One can look at history from two sides and divide it into the history of nature and the history of men. The two sides are, however, inseparable; the history of nature and the history of men are dependent on each other so long as men exist. 2 See Eleanor Krause and Isabel V. Sawhill (2018) “Seven Reasons to Worry about the American Middle Class.” 3 Early on, Marx and Engels referred to “communism” instead of “socialism” to distinguish their theories from utopian socialists like Robert Owen who believed radical change could come about according to their visions of a free

A Pedagogy for the Political Turn  103 society. But by the 1860s, given the widespread acceptance of the term “socialism,” Marx and Engels used it interchangeably. Nevertheless, the ideological splits between democratic socialists and Marxists continue to be the source of debate and division. 4 In forging a pedagogy of the political turn, I am indebted to existing literature and a renewed focus on Marxist educational thought with respect to climate change as well as general education and literacy, offering a rich historical and theoretical array of resources (see, e.g., Simon 1977; Au 2007; Lambirth 2011; Small 2014; Banfield 2015; Villacañas de Castro 2015). 5 The theory of “metabolic rift” has been the subject of debate among M ­ arxist scholars who disagree on the attribution of the concept to Marx and its consistency with historical materialism. Jason Moore’s critique of Foster’s extensive use of the idea is that it is grounded in a “Cartesian binary” as opposed to a monistic theory of “nature-in-society” and “society-in-nature.” Foster and others argue, in turn, that Moore is engaging in a postmodern language game that elides the theoretical work on the concept done not only by Marx and Engels but also by many Marxist sociologists and scientists, including the biologist Richard Lewontin. See Moore’s Capitalism in the Web of Life and “Toward a Singular Metabolism: Epistemic Rifts and ­Environment-Making in the Capitalist World-Ecology”; see also Foster, “Marx and the Rift in the Universal Metabolism of Nature.” 6 Arguably, we face similar questions today about the materialist basis of capitalism with a new wave of enthusiasm for socialism in the wake of Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. Along with the revived idea of socialism, particularly among youth, the largest number of democratic socialists since the Cold War was elected in 2018. Yet, for example, DSA members Joseph Schwartz and Jason Schulman (2012) argue: “If global social democratic capitalism proves impossible, there will be no chance for an international movement towards the full socialization of the world economy.” Such views either belie their actual understanding of class warfare and the “real existing world” that must be confronted, serving rather as appeals for broad support, or else reveal their idealist tendencies to “fight only against the illusions of consciousness” (Marx and Engels 1845). On the one hand, any renewed interest in socialism is heartening; on the other, a democratic socialist agenda based on utopian idealism is as unlikely to prevail now as it was in Marx’s time, again pointing to the critical role of education and self-education. 7 See Ian Haywood’s The Literature of Struggle for an in-depth study of the literary and educational aspirations and achievements of the Chartist Movement. 8 Michael R. Welton’s sobering assessment of Marx’s and Lenin’s implicit theories of education is that Marx remained “silent on the contradiction” between “the revolutionary intellectual and the oppressed proletariat” and that Lenin believed “the subordination of worker to intellectual is scientifically validated” (648). Welton goes on to describe Lenin’s approach as “bluntly instrumental and directive” (648). He then turns to Jurgen Habermas’ psychoanalytic critique of the process of enlightenment in which he asserts that “Decisions for the political struggle … cannot at the outset be justified theoretically and then be carried out organizationally” (quoted in Welton 653). Although I am not persuaded by Welton’s critique of Marx and Lenin, I value his conclusion that “In the process of enlightenment, there are only participants” (655). 9 See Endnote 1 for clarification of what Marxist discourse typically means by “scientific.”

104  Deborah Mutnick

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Part II

Variations on the Political Turn

6 “I’d Like to Overthrow Capitalism, But Meanwhile, I Would Like the Nazis to be Completely Demoralized” An Interview with Dana L. Cloud Stephen Parks Dana Cloud is an independent scholar-activist and former professor of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University and the University of Texas. Her scholarship engages the connections among Marxism, Feminism, and Public Sphere theory, with a continual focus on how truth is established in the context of collective activism and social movements. Her most recent publication, Reality Bites: Rhetoric and the Circulation of Truth Claims in U.S. Political Culture, argues that the strategy to combat fake news requires not simply “fact-­checking” but also developing alternative public paradigms through which “facts” are generated. She names this strategy “rhetorical realism” and asks us to develop paradigms which are deeply related to the needs of an intersectional working-class experience. Cloud’s scholarly commitments have also led to public activism. Most recently, Cloud was the object of a campaign by the conservative and alt-right for her participation in protest against anti-Muslim activists. Part of the campaign involved death threats by neo-Nazi organizations, as well as consistent online harassment. Cloud discusses these events in this interview in the context of what it means to ask our students and our colleagues to engage in political work.1 STEPHEN PARKS:  Over

the past five years or more, but with increased intensity post-Trump’s election, Composition/Rhetoric has experienced a call for a “political turn,” a call for researchers, teachers, and program administrators to take on an overtly political framework to their work. Such a call is seen as an expansion (or rejection) of the previous call for a “social turn” which came to be seen as linked to service-learning, community-engagement projects that intersected with neoliberal calls for a volunteer society. I’m wondering how do you understand the exigencies of this political moment? What do you think it would mean for professors of all rank and labor conditions to take a political turn?

112  Stephen Parks DANA CLOUD: The

need for a political turn is obviously older than Trump. I think what you’re calling the “social turn” might correspond to what is (and had been) going on in Rhetorical and Cultural studies in terms of the “cultural turn,” which starts with Raymond Williams. It was a way of thinking about politics as intervening in cultural debates, imagining a war of position (culture work rather than mass protest) as the only war that can be fought. This led to rethinking the role of critics and scholars as cultural warriors. I’m not denigrating this move because I think there’s important work to be done there, but I’ve often argued with my colleagues about the limits of that political vision given its absence of class politics. For instance, in the 1980s, Eurocommunism, the “New Times” framework in cultural studies, and a number of poststructuralist and postmodernist tendencies, including queer theory, became widespread across the humanities. One undergirding thematic is that after Reagan and Thatcher, revolutionary socialist politics, or even labor struggle, would be minimal and irrelevant against a capitalism that seemed permanently triumphant. Marxists like me continued to try to hold the door open on understanding how identity movements and struggles intersect with economic power and economic justice, and how cultural work and critique in the academy could not replace movement organizing. It is true that during that time period things seemed bleak for Marxism and labor. But we are seeing an insurgency in both movements, with the Democratic Socialists of America growing to the tens of thousands, and my own organization, the International Socialist Organization, 2 seeing growth in numbers and political clarity. And labor, especially among teachers and hotel and restaurant workers, is rising again. Those struggles are truly intersectional, explicitly connecting justice for immigrants and people of color to demands about wages and work conditions. We definitely need to realize that the labor movement is not and has not been a predominantly white movement throughout US history. But labor and radicals need to theorize and organize intersectionally— connecting oppression and the fights against it to resistance to exploitation and economic precarity. I also don’t think that rhetorical studies, in the speech side, has taken up service learning in the same way as Composition/­R hetoric because there’s not as natural an entrée into writing with and about people. So, we don’t have a deep service-learning tradition in speech, which is a little strange because teaching people to speak and advocate certainly something that we should be doing. My friend Nina Reich at Loyola Marymount is moving her university’s ­service-learning program that is about expanding the work into the political. She takes groups of students abroad, which is normally a fairly depoliticized venture, but she links them with activists. She

An Interview with Dana L. Cloud  113 recently took a group to Morocco where they worked with women’s rights activists to organize. That took service-learning in kind of a new direction. It’s sort of paternalistic to think about helping, but to actually become sort of embedded in struggle in those projects is a really cool thing. Finally, it’s much easier to make a political turn if you are involved in political organizing yourself. To have an organization that is a constant connection with communities on and off campus provides opportunities to organize and get students involved in political work. The goal is to be thinking politically and engaging in political work all the time. For instance, when I leave here I’m going to do two interviews about the individuals who were arrested during the ICE protest recently in Syracuse. At this protest, there were ten people who committed civil disobedience at the ICE office on Salina Street. They were arrested. Even though they were charged only with a simple trespass violation, not even a misdemeanor, they were booked, arraigned, kept in jail all day. They were then brought before a judge in chains. At the time of this writing, they still have not gone to trial, suffering one meaningless hearing after another. One of the people who got arrested is a very young trans man who was on the receiving end of incredible humiliating transphobia. I can’t believe that he is okay. They called him a lady man. They asked him if he had a penis. They said all the people who were born male should go this way. I mean it was just horrific, horrific. I can’t believe that he is okay. So, I’m going to talk to them then bring that into publication in the Socialist Worker newspaper.3 I’m hoping that these interviews do greater work and get circulated elsewhere as well. We’ll see. But this work, this circulation of their stories, is only possible because of my link to an organization, to organizing efforts, to the networks in which they exist. STEPHEN PARKS:  The idea of needing to be in an organization, to be consistently part of institutions that support organizing has its own history in the university. In the past, there have been efforts like the New University Conference or Scholars and Artists Working for Social Justice, or perhaps the current Network of Concerned Academics, which form and aim to be a consistent resource for ­activists—both outside and inside the university. As you imagine the political work of academics, you seem to be saying there is a need for consistent outside organizations to leverage our public work, but I’m assuming you also think that internal reform/resistance within the university is also important? DANA CLOUD:  I think it is incredibly important work. I think it should happen, but I’m not optimistic about it happening because of the political economy of the institutions. I mean I think if we started

114  Stephen Parks our own institutions that that would be different. I had this dream (and I told all my graduate students that I had this dream) where we started an institute for new critical theory. We would build it from the ground up. It would start in my house and we would have seminars. They would teach them. I would teach them. Other people would teach them. Kind of like the Birmingham Centre or the Open University. That would be extremely exciting if one had the resources. I feel like a university, like Syracuse or a public university like Texas, where I came from, even though their mission is nonprofit, they have deep relations with industry, the military, and corporate life. I’ve never been in a place like Syracuse University where there was such imbrication of the university with the military as here. It’s like we are an offshoot. I mean when the Syracuse University Chancellor stated in a recent Senate meeting that he was on the Academic Advisory Board for Homeland Security, I’m just like, what? I’m looking around thinking is anybody else outraged about this because this seems like a complete conflict of interest. Then there is Koch money that are funding lots of the business school people and making inroads in other places. The overwhelming dependence of the university, especially on military money, also makes them seem committed to veterans, but I don’t think the university is really interested in actually helping veterans. They are going to get a lot of money. I read about the veterans’ resource center. It doesn’t look like there’s mental health services or anything there. I have a different sense, I guess, of what it means to really support veterans. Finally, I think that there’s an investment by the university in trying to win students whose families can pay the tuition/housing costs of over $70,000 per year here at Syracuse University. It’s so ludicrous. It’s totally inaccessible. I know that there have been scholarship programs and so on, but now this whole beautification and student experience initiative that they’re undertaking shows the true priorities. They are putting new roof on the football stadium dome. They spent millions of dollars closing a local road and turning it into a student “promenade,” which is heated, to connect the campus. We can now walk part of the way to the library on a not slippery sidewalk. So, when you look at all the things that are going on campus and it’s clearly an investment of money in things that are not about the academic mission. STEPHEN PARKS:  What would a political turn look like if you thought about it as on campus work? DANA CLOUD:  My friend Brian McCann who’s at LSU gave a great ­conference about how he sees his main political work as being on campus. He made a compelling case that first of all, campus is real life. There are people who are oppressed here. There are people who labor

An Interview with Dana L. Cloud  115 here. There are people who are exploited here, especially contingent and precarious faculty and staff as well as untenured young professors. Especially with contingent faculty, I think, there are people whose labor is exploited. He argues we should get involved in policy making and organizing on campus that would help their labor conditions. There would be related organizing tasks, so I don’t mean to completely shunt those to the side. I’ve been part of the reboot of the AAUP. I’m on the Senate. I’d like to think that we do good work on academic freedom, professional responsibility, and ethics, but political organizing for labor equity would be a different type of activity. Still, it’s frustrating as a faculty member to be really experienced in what works instrumentally in organizing and then being with a bunch of really great and well-meaning intellectuals who are basically like, “Shouldn’t we appeal to the administration first?” “What if we wrote a letter to the trustees?” Or when we do this AAUP organizing, “We don’t want it to be a union.” I’m like, “No, I think we could really want it to be a union.” We want to be antagonistic. In my activist life off campus and in socialist organizing, antagonism is sort of a taken for granted. So, coming onto campus and trying to work with colleagues, I have to do to a kind of mental shift to not be what I would call ultra-left and ask them to do things that are way over here, but basically taking or having a discussion about “Yes, we could do this and then maybe we could think about moving this a little bit farther along.” I have to say not all faculty are resistant. I mean I’m not saying that, I’m not trying to be hitting my colleagues on the head. It’s just that the culture is so invested in civility. STEPHEN PARKS:  I’m just wondering if you could talk about what do you see as the purpose and effect of claims about the need for civility to do politics on campus and off campus? DANA CLOUD:  I was harassed and threatened online in summer 2017 by bona fide Nazis and white supremacists after calling for reinforcements on Twitter during a protest. Those threats were very serious. At other Universities, targeted faculty were suspended, lost their jobs—and even had to go into hiding—in response to such attacks. This trend of harassing critical and activist scholars has continued, but the American Association of University Professors and other scholarly associations, including my home professional organization, the National Communication Association, have developed toolkits and model responses. At Syracuse, Chancellor Syverud actually came out in support of my academic freedom and such freedom on campus generally. That support has not stopped calls for “civility” in political debates on and off campus, and many universities’ administrations are putting into place civility rules, which some faculty are resisting. I have argued that the demand for civility is a form of social control and a threat to academic freedom.

116  Stephen Parks It’s really clear, especially in the wake of my experience last year for the Nazi trolling and the calls for me to be fired. There was a double edge. They were the uncivil ones, as the Chancellor said. They were antagonistic. They were calling for violence and for confrontation. But that good Dana Cloud wasn’t, even though off campus, I so was. Obviously, I was. That’s what started the whole thing. I was confronting Nazis in the street and will be doing that again this weekend. But that doesn’t translate very well to on-campus professional civility. As this was happening, the Provost called me into her office and basically gave me a lecture about civility. She argued that don’t we want to embrace all points of view, invite everyone to campus. I’m like “No. We don’t invite people who lynch people to the campus. We just don’t do that. And we don’t give them a forum as if they’re like morally equal.” So, the discourse of civility is all about moral equivalency and how all points of view are regarded as potentially valid. I disagree with such equivalencies. But there’s that double edge. If the administration were to block those speakers on campus, they’re likely to block the left on campus as well because of its “incivility and antagonism,” which clearly is not the same morally as right-wing antagonism. I just feel like we have to acknowledge that. So basically, my position is that we don’t let the administration block people. It would be nice if they just didn’t invite them in the first place, but I believe that we should we allow social movements to speak, then meet speech with more speech by us, which often involves physical bodies in proximity to one another, which has always been the case in terms of public expression. And during all this, the provost continues lecturing me about civility. I swear to god, like every week for a while, she kept sending me articles about civility. She’s like, “I thought you might find this interesting.” It was definitely an attempt to moderate me back and not in a gentle way. It was very passive-aggressive thing for her to be doing. But after the Chancellor came out with his statement, she couldn’t say that. She couldn’t say, “bad professor.” STEPHEN PARKS:  Why do you think the Chancellor came out in support of you? DANA CLOUD:  This is the thing about having access to organized resources when being an academic under fire. I think being an organized activist and being able to call on national and international networks of activists and scholars was key to the outcome in my situation. One thing I did was to write an article in Inside Higher Education (Cloud 2018b). There are actually two articles (Cloud 2018a), but the first one is directly what to do, like here’s what you do, when faced with being attacked. It is about how white supremacy and neoliberalism dovetail in our political moment. In that article,

An Interview with Dana L. Cloud  117 I said, the first thing to do is to attempt to change the narrative. But basically, you need to write a statement that says “These people are Nazis, literally, not metaphorically.” It’s not like when you call your boss a fascist and laugh that off. No, it’s like actual white supremacists. They commit violence. They persecute left-wing intellectuals. We have a history of basically turning the narrative around so that the faculty members, not the provocateurs, become the uncivil and dangerous voices. (See Bibliography for article information.) And in responding to this moment, flipping the narrative, it was helpful to document all the messages that I received and all the symbology that accompanied the messages. Again, here’s where being organized helps a lot. I’m in the International Socialists Organization, so we divided the work up. I had other people doing that research because I was facing messages that were the “I’m going to find you and rape you in the street” kind of a thing. I’m kind of weathered about that, but I had people collecting and archiving the bullshit. That is, I had people doing security, researching, as well as people writing and circulating a petition. It was like I didn’t have to do all that labor under siege. The uptake was instant on the part of the organization, which is fantastic. So, backing up to gaining Chancellor support. We gathered all this information about symbology in the messages. You know how the Right uses Pepe the Frog as a symbol. They also had all these Nazi symbols, some of them were not obscure, like the double lightning bolt for SS, and some that might not be well known, like the Celtic Cross. If you looked at the emoticons of the text messages and on Twitter, you could see they were all signaling to each other that they were white supremacists, that they attempting to collectively discipline me. It was really super clear that in addition to the hateful content of the messages, that there was an organized thing going on. In fact, what we have learned from Steven Salaita forward, through Johnny Eric Williams, George Ciccariello-Maher, and Keeanga-­ Yamahtta Taylor and me, is that there was a subsequent list of ­people. That this was an organized political phenomenon. And so, to turn that message around, I took a statement and all that evidence to my chair. I was lucky to have such a supportive chair. He said we have to go to the Dean and make sure the Dean has your back also. So, I took all this material to the Dean and, I think he was very moved and appalled. It totally shifted the perspective from “I have this outspoken faculty member who’s threatening my funding sources” to “Oh my god, there are Nazis again.” I don’t know if he influenced the Chancellor at that point, but he might have, because things started moving fast. I mean, the first set of responses were in terms of my physical safety. They occurred within 24 hours, maybe less because the International Socialist

118  Stephen Parks Organization had been seeing these things pop up. Keeanga was getting death threats, lynching threats. I mean she had to take her family into hiding because if you’re a scholar of color or a Muslim or untenured, which she was at Princeton, you are much more vulnerable to this crap. It was also less than a week when the petition was written and started to circulate. There was one among the faculty and then there was one that circulated nationally and internationally. So, there was a massive outpouring of support on the part of the faculty. Actually, I don’t think anyone on the faculty contacted me and said, “Shame on you, that was a really ugly thing that you did.” Then the petition that other people had written, graduate students actually, started circulating and I think there were like 2,000 signatures on that thing like within days. I mean, hundreds of people then were signing on to these statements, which would never have happened at Texas. I had a chance through all these other networks to get to know people and they knew me. They knew that I was a reliable ally on the University Senate. They knew that I wasn’t a hateful person. So not being anonymous is good. STEPHEN PARKS:  That’s kind of been your point, you’re saying because you had an identity across different parts of the university, being active in the organizations on campus, they could be activated when your identity was threatened, in tandem with your networks of organizations off campus. DANA CLOUD:  And this also began to intersect with pressure on the Chancellor. I don’t know how they find out people’s cell phones, but I think he was getting lots of mail and calls. So, the positive support from the faculty and the sort of massive public awareness I think allowed, the Chancellor to do the right thing. STEPHEN PARKS:  If you would have known this was going to happen, were there things you would have done to consciously prepare before going and protesting fascists? Would you have warned your chair you were doing this? Would you have done any pre-work now that you know that there’s a campaign against people doing this? DANA CLOUD:  I talked to Rochelle Gutierrez. She’s a math teacher, but she does like critical history of math. She was under attack for developing a module for faculty to access to a kind of know-how to handle themselves. As I said before, more and more organizations are developing those resources. I also made a list of eight things in my article that targeted faculty should do immediately—such as reversing the narrative, ensuring your physical safety, organizing on campus, organizing off campus (See bibliography for article reference). If that doesn’t work, then you have to involve students explicitly and see if your colleagues would mobilize a student campaign

An Interview with Dana L. Cloud  119 in your defense. I think that would be huge at a place like Syracuse. It didn’t have to go there, but I think that would be huge if a student campaign came out in favor of a faculty member. STEPHEN PARKS:  Given the skills you learned in political organizing (or had to learn in the face of political attacks) do you think graduate students as part of the education should learn some of these organizing skills? If we’re serious about a political turn and it being more than just an article about the political turn? DANA CLOUD:  For sure. I think graduate students especially. In my department, we have a public engagement mission which often translates into graduate students being involved in organizing on campus. We have several students who are involved in the union drive for graduate students. As a materialist, as a Marxist, I work to make sure people’s material conditions are addressed and their material interests to be forwarded. So being involved in the union drive, I think, is really crucial. Every time I’m at an activist event, all my graduate students are there. So, you build a community or culture where that’s okay, where that’s actually welcome. It is unusual, I’ll admit. I mean people are like am I going to get in trouble if I do this? I’m like, I don’t think so. Not here. Elsewhere, yes. STEPHEN PARKS:  Of course, the danger in a “political turn” as faculty activism or part of a student’s education is self-evident. I’m sure you can imagine (and have seen) a bunch of academics and students running off and telling communities what they need. In your work, you talk about fidelity to the interests of sort of the marginalized, oppressed community/class. I’m wondering if you could talk about how folks can learn to have that fidelity to the community- how we can actually learn to do the work, not to just offer our “advice.” DANA CLOUD:  Fidelity. I do actually teach students, graduate students especially, but people who are entering a career and who are interested in activism to not ever go into an activist setting and think you know what it is. I recommend a solidarity approach because as I say in my book about the labor movement, We are the Union: Democratic Unionism and Dissent at Boeing, learned so much freaking more from ordinary people engaged in activism than I could ever presume to teach them. I actually feel kind of bad because they’re giving me a huge education in class politics essentially because I’ve spent 10 years basically hanging around these democratic union activists. I followed them around because they were doing the negotiation of their class interests and institutions in a way that I found incredibly inspiring and useful from a rhetorical and communications studies standpoint. So, I basically used that to tell my students, we should go learn from people. Then we should try to be responsive on the basis of their experience. You should tell them that you’re in

120  Stephen Parks solidarity with what they’re doing and they should slap you around if you are being an asshole. STEPHEN PARKS:  Begin with some humility walking in. DANA CLOUD:  Humility. Maria Lugones, in her article about world traveling, she talks about loving perception and arrogant perception. I talk about in terms of solidaristic perception as opposed to arrogant perception. There’s a whole division in my field about educators teaching activists. It just drives me crazy. Like maybe, you could, if you’re in a movement for a really long time, could come back and say from my experience—not as somebody who has verified ­knowledgethat I can tell you this, that and the other thing, and why don’t we talk about that. So, there’s knowledge that is garnered through research in solidarity with ordinary people but it’s not only research because I walked the picket lines with those guys, I just did. I had to establish that I was with them. So, I feel like that is very important when you’re talking about service. I just think service, actually, service is such a patronizing term, what I mean activist learning, engaged learning, is dependent on learning from those who have done the work, have the skills. Align with what they determine as the needs of their community. STEPHEN PARKS:  Actually, I was interested in your navigating the role of fact and to what extent alignments with community self-defined needs is related to their understanding of the facts as they perceive them which I think is the key sort of thing. DANA CLOUD:  Trotsky said that there’s morality, but there’s their morality and ours; there are their facts and ours. There’s no such thing as true news and fake news so much as there is their news and our news. We have an obligation to produce information based on our experience which is not to say that we don’t have some obligation to the empirical world but that—and this is all Lukács all over—there’s no encounter with that natural world without mediation. Somebody has to do the mediating besides the ruling class and ideally, it’s about ordinary people’s self-mediation. It’s like in the consciousness raising movement in feminism where you generate shared knowledge based on your collective experience and then you theorize from that and you produce your knowledge. STEPHEN PARKS:  So, in that world, the academics are required to be civil, which equalizes unfair knowledges and unfair networks of power of knowledge, you end up being a very ineffective advocate unless you work within the mediated facts/knowledge of those with whom you are doing activist organizing work. DANA CLOUD:  Right. STEPHEN PARKS:  I want to end with a trite, but not unimportant question: What do you think academics who think of themselves as in the political turn should do?

An Interview with Dana L. Cloud  121 DANA CLOUD:  This

is about the class position: So we’re actually in the petit-bourgeoisie as defined by Marx. We can identify up or we can identify down. And there’s going to come a moment when that is going to really matter. We’ll never be organic intellectuals, so the obligation is to engage movements. I would say especially working-class movements with both humility and a desire to win. You want to win. You don’t want to just be civil and have a conversation. You want to win. I mean I’d like to overthrow capitalism, but meanwhile, I would like the Nazis to be completely demoralized. Meanwhile I would like unions to flourish. So I can work on those two things. And as long as you are willing to learn over a period of time from ordinary people, not be arrogant and think you have everything to tell people, there will be eventually a dialectical moment where ordinary people, where people in movements, will take the theory they’ve generated, think through and access what they’re doing next. That dialogical moment is something that we can be involved in and we can be helpful mediators but only if we identify down. And we learn that in organizing. That’s why I’m saying coming back to the original point about being an organized person as an intellectual on campus, off campus, being part of organizations on and off campus working for justice, being systematically organized for the long haul, is key. I think generating ideas, testing them through action, and assessing them with your allies, that method is so crucial. You have to be doing that all the time, assessing yourself, and being humble about it. That is what making a political turn should mean. As I said, I am a socialist, so I will advocate that others join a principled socialist organization (and there are a lot of small groups and the growing Democratic Socialists of America, but some are not so great—Stalinist, for example—so do your research). It is crucial in this period since the 2008 economic crisis—and the weak recovery that has left so many ordinary people in situations of economic precarity—that academics understand that many if not most issues of oppression and injustice are working-class issues. We have to fight not only to recognize and honor trans persons, for example, but to demand protections against job discrimination and the right to identification that enables folks to travel and hold jobs. We have to confront sexual assault and harassment while recognizing that workplace harassment is at the center of the feminist agenda right now. The scapegoating and persecution of immigrants is about labor rights and the right to migrate for a better life; the immigration justice movement is a working-class movement. If we’re going to be good for something, then being part of struggles that demand material and institutional change in addition to recognition of identities and oppressions is what we need to do.

122  Stephen Parks This approach cuts against a wave of theory and critique in the academic domain that we started with, which is demoralized and dismissive of explicit working-class emancipatory projects, but it is becoming clearer and clearer that those theories are no longer accurately describing the world, and worse, they are prescriptions for elitism and passivity. So, in addition to scholarship and teaching, where we can incorporate social justice politics, engaging social movements that are using numbers and economic influence to change the situations of ordinary people and to challenge the system that produces exploitation and oppression.

Notes 1 Much has been written about these events, as well as Cloud’s response to them (see Daniels 2017; Cloud 2018a; Cloud 2018b; Cloud 2018c). 2 As a result of a necessary and progressive reckoning with its leadership and organizational habits around racial inclusion and sexual abuse, the ISO is on hiatus pending reorganization on a new basis. This reckoning does not negate the influential revolutionary training, leadership, and activism conducted by members over the period of decades. 3 Also on hiatus.

References American Association of University Professors. Resources on Academic Freedom. n.d. www.aaup.org/our-programs/academic-freedom/resources-academicfreedom. Cloud, Dana. 2015. “‘Civility’ as a Threat to Academic Freedom.” First Amendment Studies 49 (1): 13–17. DOI: 10.1080/21689725.2015.1016359. ———. 2018a. “From Austerity to Attacks on Professors.” Inside Higher Education, May 3, 2018. www.insidehighered.com/views/2018/05/03/neoliberalacademy-age-trump. ———. 2018b. “Responding to Right Wing Attacks.” Inside Higher Education. www.insidehighered.com/advice/2017/11/07/tips-help-academics-respondright-wing-attacks-essay. ———. 2018c. Reality Bites: Rhetoric and the Circulation of Truth in the U.S. Political Culture. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Daniels, Brandon. 2017. “Why Has This Professor Been Targeted?” Socialist Worker, June 21, 2017. https://socialistworker.org/2017/06/21/why-has-thisprofessor-been-targeted. National Communication Association. 2018. National Communication Association Statement on Protection and Defense of Academic Freedom and Freedom of Expression for Communication Scholar. www.natcom.org/ press-room/national-communication-association-statement-protection-and-­ defense-academic-freedom-and.

7 Audience Addressed? Audience Invoked? Audience Organized! Seth Kahn

With Apologies to Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede (1984) When the Association of Pennsylvania State College and University ­Faculty (APSCUF, my union) went on strike in October 2016, the three days we spent on the line culminating in a successful contract settlement were the product of nearly two years of organizing.1 The details about our organizing process and challenges are interesting inasmuch as they offer some insight into unionism and processes most workers don’t experience. For the purposes of this book on the “political turn,” the value of that experience is in the lessons it offers about solidarity-building as rhetorical practices and as literacy practices. As activists, reframing our audiences as people we’re organizing with instead of people we’re persuading to agree with us creates sustainable and ethical relationships that conventional theories of persuasion make it easy to ignore or erase. My argument, as I’ll lay out below, sits at the intersection of two theoretical claims. First, as Lee Artz (2010) argues in “Speaking Truth to Power: Observations from Experience,” our political moment is one in which truth and reason don’t win just by being true and reasonable; instead activists need to understand rhetoric as speaking power. Second, as sociologists Adam Reich and Peter Bierman (2018) argue in their book Working for Respect: Community and Conflict at Walmart, at the heart of any successful organizing is building networks of solidarity among members. If this seems like a complex set of ideas to juggle in such a short piece, the best way to simplify it all is to establish the god-term [a la ­Kenneth Burke (1969)] of the whole argument: trust. Everything I’m talking about in this piece is about building, earning, and sustaining trust among participants in democratic work. Trust, of course, is an enigmatic term; in case it’s not clear, I’m using it as a verb, to signal the actions, the practices, of being in solidarity. I’m hardly the only person to argue that humanizing relations among participants in a system ­matters, ­obviously, but the specific context of our strike offers some illuminating lessons about understanding specific audiences as people rather than as abstractions.

124  Seth Kahn A story from near the tail end of our preparations will, I hope, make clear what I mean by treating audiences as people. Some context: our contract expired in June 2015. If you’re not on a union campus you may not have been through negotiations, but they often follow a predictable pattern of preparation, and the discourse around those preparations follows suit. By the time Spring 2016 semester started, at which point we’d been about seven months without a contract, both the insider discourse about strike preparations and the grapevine discourse among students and their families/friends were heating up. Along about midterm, students in my classes started to ask me if it was true that we were going to strike at the end of April, which would lead to a cancelation of the whole semester’s worth of credit (a rumor that always circulates). Because of my position in the union (co-chair of our campus Mobilization Committee, the committee primarily responsibile for strike preparations), I was able to tell them in no uncertain terms that the rumors were silly. I also told them that when we came back in the fall, I’d appreciate their running increasingly shrill and frequent rumors by me before spreading them (they did). Fast-forward to September 2016. Negotiations weren’t going well, and the rumor mill was, as expected, at a fever pitch. Fueling the speculations were a series of oblique messages that the Office of the Chancellor, who oversees the entire 14-campus Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education (PASSHE), sent to students claiming that they (the students) would be hearing lots of rumors (they didn’t accuse us directly of lying, but it was close) from faculty, and that in the event of a strike, the status of the semester was uncertain.2 Union leadership worked with faculty through a series of meetings, blog posts, emails, and conversations to help faculty push back. Our advice focused on a couple of simple tactical moves. First, when students asked questions of the sort “What happens if ____” (a la, what happens if you’re on strike through Final Exam week, or what happens to my student-teaching assignment if my supervising faculty member goes out?), don’t try to answer them directly. Instead, we coached, send the students to their deans and to the university president, on the grounds that it’s literally their job to know the answers to those questions. And (in case that felt or sounded too snarky), to explain that because faculty don’t have the authority to decide the answers to those questions, the students need to ask the people who do. In the process of training faculty to get comfortable doing this, we had to remind them any number of times not to sound like they were saying, “Don’t ask me. Ask your dean!” as if we couldn’t be bothered with the question; we had to remind faculty to be audience-savvy, remembering that we needed students to trust that we were on their side and didn’t know any more about those kinds of questions than they did. Our ability to be consistent across not just our campus but much of our system with this position paid off in two ways. First, we were able to listen to and absorb many of the students’ very real anxieties without the pressure of having to solve them, that is, to build a humane, trusting

Audience Addressed? Invoked? Organized!  125 relationship with the audience we needed most to be with us. Students needed to know where the power to help and to thwart them was and what kinds of power they had (e.g., making demands to the right people). Second, we were able to be clear about the issues we did have the authority to assert ourselves on. While we were careful not to talk much about the substance of the negotiations, we had learned a valuable lesson from the successful teacher strike in Chicago in 2011, and the successful end of the faculty lockout at LIU-Brooklyn just a month in advance of our strike: focus on issues of educational quality and working conditions instead of compensation, and don’t let anyone distract from that. An especially powerful example happened during an Open Forum that local union leadership hosted for students in early October, about two-and-a-half weeks before the strike date. We decided to ask students what they were hearing in the grapevine as the discussion starters. The first three or four students, taken together, told us that we were being greedy by asking for giant raises and other perks, and that we obviously “don’t care about the students.” That last part hit a nerve in me; I jumped up and said: Who do you think cares more about what you want and need? The people who work with you every day, who know your names and aspirations and stories, or ... people who wouldn’t recognize you if they walked by you on the sidewalk because they work in an office halfway across the state? And yet they talk about you as if they’re the ones who understand what you want and need even though they’ve never even bothered to ask you? In retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have been as audibly angry as I was, essentially accusing our system management of using the students as cover while negotiating in bad faith. On the spot, though, I could see many among the 150 or so students who were there who got it: not that we agreed substantively on policy and compensation demands, but that we (students and faculty) are the people who do the work of the university, not them (managers who don’t ever interact with either). It was a moment of genuine connection with students, at least some of them—and I know that because during the actual strike, more than a few students I didn’t recognize by name or face told me they were on our picket lines because they’d heard me say it. That particular event helps to clarify the distinction at the heart of my argument. This meeting was a moment of trust-building between members of communities with a strong mutual interest and interconnection. That said, simply articulating the mutual interest in protecting educational equality from decision makers willing to sacrifice it for fiscal [the word for “taking the easy way out of something”] reasons wasn’t enough; we needed to be face to face, in a room full of us, not just

126  Seth Kahn agreeing on the facts but also bonding as human beings. Yes, they were an audience, but more important they were people. Maybe a clearer way to make the point is: what we’re after isn’t support. It’s trusting relationships with supporters. Agreeing with ideas has little discernible material consequence by itself; unfortunately, in activist circles and in the larger culture, there’s still a long-held assumption that consciousness-raising (or awareness-building) will lead to action, but anyone who understands praxis (a la Freire) as the synthesis of action and reflection recognizes that simply winning the argument doesn’t do anything. Along similar lines, although Malcolm Gladwell (2010) was roundly— and rightly—critiqued as a curmudgeon for his essay “Small Change” in which he argued that internet-based activism isn’t really activism b ­ ecause it’s too easy, he’s partly right. Retweeting inflammatory preaching-tothe-choir messages, and liking other people’s posts that subsequently drown in the flood of our feeds, doesn’t actually accomplish much of anything even if the messages are “true.” And an analogous version of the problem: even if the agreement is substantive and based on “facts” or “truth,” Lee Artz (2010) points out in “Speaking Truth to Power” that if those facts or truth were going to convince powerful people based solely on the merits, they already would have. Reason would matter more if we lived in an more rational world (48). While I seriously doubt Gladwell and Artz would agree with each other’s analysis of exigency, their responses are remarkably similar. For Gladwell, the answer is activism that builds “strong ties” (drawing on the work of sociologist Doug McAdam) based on authentic relationships among participants; he insists that those can only happen over long periods of time and in physical space, which I don’t think is true, but the emphasis on shared history and personal interaction is important (Gladwell 2010). In our case, while the face-to-face meeting I described earlier was important as a trust-building moment, our union worked hard statewide across multiple social media platforms to do similar work. The statewide union was active on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, not just sending out information and talking points but also fielding comments and questions, engaging students and their families and friends, and building relationships of trust steadily for months. APSCUF members by the hundreds were active on our own social media accounts making points about negotiations (and about the state system’s negotiators!) that our own leaders couldn’t make publicly; answering questions from students and community members about what they were hearing and reading in the press; and other slow, daily, person-to-person network-building. Because I had strong-tie relationships (to use McAdam’s term) with some people in those networks, it’s hard to know how much those ties influenced the strength of connections that stretched from them, but I have definitely developed regular and powerful activist

Audience Addressed? Invoked? Organized!  127 relationships with people I met during that time and have never spoken to in person. The bigger point, though, is that sustained contact that moves in more than direction and connects people across multiple nodes of a network is much more powerful than one-shot clicks on social ­media posts. Artz (2010) wouldn’t disagree with that point particularly; I suspect he’d find it both obvious and beside the point. For Artz, what matters is activism that “speaks power to truth,” i.e., expressions of solidarity that conspicuously disrupt the ordinary machinations of power. In both cases, it’s not until supporters do something that activates their support that the support means anything concrete. Those same social media accounts built connections with other unions, especially the large teacher unions in Pennsylvania (mostly affiliated with the ­National ­E ducation Association), and garnered expressions of support and solidarity that appeared in plain sight of everyone who followed any of those accounts. It was huge for our morale, for example, when the president of the Communication Workers of America (whose pickets we had joined in the spring of 2016) posted a solidarity video on YouTube 3 that we were able to cross-post on our union’s blog and social media accounts, from which it spread to other unions around the country who then made similar statements, and so on. Same when the president of the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO spoke at a statewide union meeting and promised us that his entire organization was with us (to the extent feasible under the law4). The work we did building relationships with students made the disruption of the strike itself work as well. For two months before we walked, state- and campus-level management across the entire system were promising students that even if we went out, business (their word) would continue as usual; some were sent messages instructing them to report to class, while others were promised that online instruction would still occur. Finally, similar to my earlier point about training faculty not to answer “What happens if” questions, we encouraged faculty to announce that if we told students we weren’t going to be there, they didn’t need to be, and if somebody handed us attendance sheets from those days, we’d ignore (I usually said “burn” or “shred”) them. Talk about audience-aware: the message got through that business would not continue as usual, and there was no point in students pretending that things were normal in order to try to break the strike. By all accounts, all 14 campuses were ghost towns (the only people reporting to work were non-union employees and members of other bargaining units required to cross our line by law). Many of those students, furthermore, chose to participate in strike activities—walking lines with us (which is perfectly legal as long as it’s voluntary); doing all kinds of support work (bringing us food and coffee and water; making signs for themselves and for us; helping to repair signs as they started to break; showing up to play

128  Seth Kahn music; hanging banners from their houses up and down all the streets in town); and more. Some of the student support was self-generated, i.e., people showing up and helping out because they felt like it, but some of it was orchestrated in a systematic way across the state under the guidance of a group called the PA Student Power Network—a relationship which has continued to develop as their group and our union continue to organize together around a variety of issues. Did every one of the 100,000+ students in our system support the faculty during the run-up and through the actual strike? Of course not. Some are politically opposed to unions. Some were concerned that the disruption would harm them. There are lots of understandable reasons that individual students wouldn’t support the action itself. Put another way, once we understood that students (as actual human beings) are audiences but the students (abstraction composed of assumptions and generalizations) are not, our ability to build trust with them got a lot stronger. As a result, there’s no way to overstate the contribution our students’ presence and activity during the strike made to the successful outcome. Their contributions to our picket lines made the lives of the campus strike planners/organizers significantly easier by preventing lots of problems from ever becoming problems. Students’ support was instrumental in elevating faculty morale high enough from the beginning of the strike that we could push as hard as we did for three days and get a quick resolution as a result. During the event itself, the visible/audible enthusiastic presence of thousands of students on television for three days clearly put immense pressure on the state system to settle fairly and quickly. Their presence in social media did too, both in ­conjunction with our accounts and within their own networks. As a tale of how networks of solidarity (to borrow Reich and Bierman’s (2018) language) get built, I hope the examples here show concretely how various kinds of communicative acts, posed not as persuasive but as humane and trust-building, helped APSCUF build solidarity with students. The story that Reich and Bierman tell, which is about the Our Walmart campaign, is worth reading for its extensive richness of detail (216–266). Our project was much less complex, so our networks were simpler to build and maintain—which leads to one final point. One of the most valuable lessons we learned from this experience is who not to worry about trying to include in our networks of solidarity. As rhetoricians, we know from decades of scholarship that the “general public” doesn’t exist as an actual audience, but it’s easy to forget that in the midst of worrying about the kind of public relations necessary for a ­nearly-6,000-member union to organize, especially as employees of a public university system in a state the politics of which are fraught with conflicts over organized labor. It was, therefore, crucial for us to realize that we simply couldn’t, and didn’t need to, respond to e­ very negative newspaper article or letter to the editor in every newspaper around the

Audience Addressed? Invoked? Organized!  129 state. Not only were the readerships of most of those papers relatively small (and already decidedly for or against unions or higher education) and thus not especially persuadable; more importantly, they had almost no power either to help us or stop us from disrupting business as usual. Instead, by focusing our rhetorical work on building solidarity with constituencies that have such power, especially students in this case, thus amplifying everyone’s power, we were giving less time and energy to fruitless work (trying to convince people who would never agree with us to agree, and even if they did, the agreement didn’t mean anything concrete), and more time and energy to useful work (building networks of solidarity among people whose interest was of a piece with our collective interests in public education and organized labor).

Notes 1 For a more detailed account of the organizing process, see “From Solidarity Invoked to Solidarity Built,” an essay I wrote for a special issue of Works and Days that focused on the strike. 2 I’d quote from these, but the web page that archives most of these communications doesn’t have them anymore. 3 www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEgK2Grwbjw. 4 In Pennsylvania, it’s illegal for unions to honor each other’s picket lines. Unions have developed ways of recognizing each other’s lines, however, that are disruptive without breaking that law. For example, some Teamsters are willing to let their trucks “break down” just before they reach picket sites. Others are willing to tell supervisors that they won’t cross the line without being directed and then to push that up their chains of command so that at least it takes hours before somebody can punish them for not doing it.

References Artz, Lee. 2010. “Speaking Truth to Power: Observations from Experience.” In Activism and Rhetoric: Theories and Contexts for Political Engagement, edited by Seth Kahn and Jong-Hwa Lee, 47–55. New York: Routledge. Burke, Kenneth. 1969. A Grammar of Motives. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ede, Lisa, and Andrea Lunsford. 1984. “Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy College Composition and Communication.” College Composition and Communication 35 (2): 155–171. Gladwell, Malcolm. 2010. “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not be Tweeted.” October 4, 2010 issue. www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/ small-change-malcolm-gladwell. Kahn, Seth. 2017. “From Solidarity Invoked to Solidarity Built.” Works and Days 69 (35): 251–262. Reich, Adam, and Peter Bierman. 2018. Working for Respect: Community and Conflict at Walmart, 216–266. New York: Columbia University Press.

8 Taking a Lead from Student Movements in a “Political Turn” Vani Kannan

When I returned to school to pursue an MA in Rhetoric and Composition at Colorado State University (CSU), the professor who would become my thesis adviser gave me “the talk” about academic labor. I was so happy to have secured a funded MA and the chance to teach that her words caught me off guard. “Don’t get confused. You are cheap labor for this university.” As an MA student, I was teaching 2:2 and making around $12,000 a year, along with a $1,000+ health insurance fee. The unquantifiable part of my wage—the one that Eileen Schell (1998) describes as “psychic income”—was the fact that I loved my work. The professor explained to me that this “labor of love” fallacy enables the exploitation of teachers and others in feminized jobs, in part to discourage us from identifying as workers with exploitable labor. The problem with not identifying as a worker isn’t just that we are discouraged from pushing for better working conditions and higher wages for ourselves. We are also discouraged from acting in solidarity with other student and worker-led campus struggles. The professor who gave me “the talk” and I worked together with other students, TAs, and adjuncts to write and perform a play about academic labor at CSU. In the play, she stood front and center, delivered a monologue that indicted the complicity of tenure-track faculty in inequitable labor conditions, and called on the audience to recognize their own complicity. She was up for tenure the same semester we performed the play; this precarious moment did not preclude her from, in that moment, seeing herself as a worker struggling alongside others. This public performance/embodiment of her politics and research on labor stand in stark contrast to a tendency that Carmen Kynard (2015) describes as endemic to higher education, in which critical/radical theories “can become merely the stage for an academic performance, not a way of engaging the world and oppression in it” (12). There is immense institutional pressure on those who pursue justice-oriented teaching and scholarship not to “engage the world and oppression in it”—to study movements rather than participate in them. Time constraints and a desire for stable employment (and all the talks we receive behind closed

Taking a Lead from Student Movements  131 doors about how you “cannot be both an academic and an organizer”) attempt to dissuade us from embodying the principles of the struggles and theories that may form the very foundation of our scholarship. For example, I recently gave my first talk on campus as a new tenure-­ track faculty member. The talk coincided with a faculty union “work-in” in the college’s administration building. Some of my colleagues informed me ahead of time that they would be leaving my talk early to attend the work-in, and at the talk, I encouraged others to do the same. I thought about the situation from a birds’-eye view, with me giving a lecture on activist histories in the Women’s Studies Program office, and other campus workers gathering in the administration building to make their labor visible and fight for a fair contract. I don’t tell this story as an act of public self-flagellation; the work-ins are an ongoing tactic, and the following week, students and I attended together. But for me, a bird’s-eye view of the simultaneous talk and work-in revealed the tension between professionalizing around radical political histories and physically participating in ongoing political organizing. In the face of this tension, I have reflected on some of the lessons I’ve learned from student movements that help me redefine “accountability” as a tenure-track faculty member. In this piece, I focus on centering student movement analyses, and acting in solidarity with student-led movements on our campuses, as part of a broader project of building coalitions among different struggles on- and off-campus. When I arrived in Syracuse to start the PhD program, it was July, ­almost two months before the school year would begin. A group of undergraduate and graduate students were meeting to discuss the recent closure of the campus sexual assault advocacy center. Students were deeply upset, and rightfully so. That summer, there were not services in place for students who were sexually assaulted beyond the already-overloaded Counseling Center, despite the fact that an estimated one in four women and one in six men will be sexually assaulted in college (National Sexual Violence Resource Center 2018). After several rallies and months of organizing, students formed a broad coalition of over 50 student groups called THE General Body and held an 18-day sit-in at the university’s administration building. Having exhausted the institutional channels for change, students sat in as a last resort to draw attention to corporatization, racism and homophobia on campus, issues of access, a lack of mental health care services, and the administration’s unilateral decision to shut down the advocacy center and break contracts with scholarship programs. During the sit-in, I found myself on the media team, working with other students to produce daily blog posts, press releases, and live-tweets to push against an institutional narrative that rendered the student movement unreasonable and uncivil (THE General Body 2015). In their introduction to The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent, Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira (2014)

132  Vani Kannan remark that in moments when we are actively policed by universities, we are making visible the disciplining mechanisms that are always there; we are unmasking what has been normalized (13). One night, Department of Public Safety officers demanded that we hand over our student IDs; they swiped them to catalog who was part of the sit-in. The next night, an administrator entered the space and, without explanation, dropped a stack of individually addressed envelopes containing highlighted copies of the campus disruption policies and code of student conduct, with highlighted portions emphasizing that while we had the right to freedom of expression, it was infringing on the rights of others on campus.1 Steven Salaita breaks down this institutional rhetoric when he notes that free speech, like any resource in a capitalist system, it not equally distributed (This Rhetorical Life 2014). Even though the space of the sit-in became an active space of learning and meeting where professors brought their students, we were framed as “infring[ing] on the rights” of others. 2 Faculty support went a long way in countering these claims. Across campus, faculty pasted posters over their windows, facing outward, proclaiming “Faculty Support THE General Body.” Over 100 faculty signed a letter of support for the sit-in and spoke at rallies in support, particularly after a professor of law offering legal counsel to those sitting in was denied entry to the sit-in (Mattingly 2015). A group of faculty created a listserv dedicated to supporting the students, and several brought forward a resolution of support for the sit-in at faculty senate. This support did not only come from tenured faculty; adjuncts and untenured faculty were among the strongest supporters. This support felt particularly urgent given that 7–10 armed “public safety” officers patrolled the sit-in at all times. My engagement with the media team during the sit-in at SU inspired me to go digging through the archives of activist organizations to see how they had produced their own media, cultural performances, and political education programs. When I first visited the Sophia Smith archives to begin my dissertation research, the sit-in had ended with some wins (such as a Teaching Assistant [TA] stipend raise and a commitment to hire an Americans with Disabilities Act [ADA] coordinator) and some losses (the Advocacy Center remained closed). We were in the midst of thinking through how to archive our documents, student-produced media, and solidarity statements. I had begun to research and write about the Third World Women’s Alliance—a radical women-of-color-led political organization that maintained active chapters in New York City (NYC) and the Bay Area during the 1970s. I chatted with an archivist who mentioned that the Alliance’s archives were some of the Sophia Smith Collection’s most-used holdings; professors across disciplines used them to teach students about political organizing. Writing a historical dissertation was never something I thought I could do. I had always received poor grades in History class, and for years thought I just had no aptitude for it. Then, during my second year of

Taking a Lead from Student Movements  133 college, I took a course to fulfill my history requirement titled “Modern American Social Movements.” The class highlighted multiple movements and community organizing strategies, and did so through engagement with primary-source documents. I vividly remember reading speeches from the Berkeley Free Speech Movement; papers from Students for a Democratic Society and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; and position statements from the civil rights and Black Power movements. History came alive for me through primary-source documents from social movements. I remember poring over microfiche in the university library, confused at why history had never been taught this way before. As I went through the archives for my dissertation research, I was ­excited to find concrete connections between the Alliance’s organizing work and institutions of higher education. One of the founding members had been active with the movement for Open Admissions at City ­University of New York (CUNY). The Bay Area chapter used space/resources at U.C. Berkeley, and several of the members had been active in the 1968 Third World Liberation Front, which fought for Ethnic Studies and other area studies majors. For me, these histories deconstructed the false binary of “campus” and “community,” and demonstrated how movements led by young people crossed these contexts. The organization’s FBI file reminded me that state surveillance crosses these contexts too. Student activist histories, and the policing of dissent on campuses, were on my mind when I started at Lehman, and attended a New ­Faculty Orientation event that included a presentation by an officer with ­Lehman Public Safety. He told us the story of how Public Safety at CUNY initially formed. In 1969–1970, in a “cauldron of grassroots ­protest,” CUNY adopted an Open Admissions policy that guaranteed a free college education to any student with a high school diploma (Steinberg 2018; CUNY 2019). This move significantly increased the number of students at CUNY, particularly Black and Puerto Rican students. However, the 1975 fiscal crisis prompted tightened admissions and reinstated tuition, which led to a decline in enrollment; during Rudolph Giuliani’s time as mayor, in 1998, remedial courses were phased out and Open Admissions was officially discontinued (Steinberg 2018). When the Open Admissions policy ended, a new wave of student protests and campus takeovers erupted—one that the Lehman public safety officer had participated in. As he told the story, the Chancellor of CUNY at the time, Ann Reynolds, missed having access to a campus police force and decided that CUNY needed its own police force to handle the protests. She had come to CUNY after resigning from her position as Chancellor at the California State University system over a controversy over pay raises for herself and other top administrators and was “expected to clamp down on student protests in ways that [former] Chancellor Murphy had resisted” (Gordon 1990; Gunderson 2014, 19). The formation of police at CUNY, in other words, was in direct response to

134  Vani Kannan student activism on behalf of educational access. As an example, during the 1991 CUNY Student Strike, 300 police raided an occupied building at Lehman and arrested students (Gunderson 2014). We know from other student movements that as local police forces become more heavily militarized, so do campus police. Even though the Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that over the past decade, violent crime on campuses has declined by 27%, the number of campuses with armed private security guards has skyrocketed. More and more campus police have acquired surplus military equipment (from armored vehicles to grenade launchers), and some schools have created SWAT teams; this has been paired with a rise in shootings of unarmed students by campus officers, and an increased deployment of police in communities of color (Moraff 2015; Hassonjee 2018). Under the 1,033 Federal Excess Property Program, “excess Department of Defense property” can be transferred to state and local law enforcement agencies (Division of Criminal Justice Services n.d.); many of these weapons have ended up on college campuses. At the University of Maryland, for example, students protested the University police’s acquisition of “16 shotguns, two M14 rifles and 50 M16 rifles,” along with an armored vehicle and two high-mobility multipurpose wheeled vehicles, through this program (Sykes 2014). Campus police argued that such equipment was needed in the case of a school shooting; students drew attention to the fact that such equipment was often used against students, protesters, and communities of color, not mass shooters. Students have been on the front lines of cutting through such pro-­ police rhetoric on campuses. Shortly after the sit-in at Syracuse, a group of students at Binghamton University called the Frances Beal Society, named after the Black feminist writer and organizer, held a 15-day sit-in protesting the university’s spending millions of dollars on so-called community “safety” initiatives. Students demanded that “the university reverse its plan to devote [1 million dollars] to the expansion of street cameras and ‘blue light’ call boxes, like those found on campus, to the city of Binghamton,” argued that “adding ‘blue light’ cameras and call boxes to the downtown bar district would only aid Binghamton’s police department,” and pointed out that the surveillance technologies would be concentrated in an area of the city where the mayor owned ¼ of the property (Maloney 2017). These funds were earmarked for “programs that support community advancement,” but did not tackle the city’s most pressing issues of “poverty, education, the opioid epidemic or mental health issues” (Maloney 2017). Student activists managed to halt the spending and to push for people living in the city to have primary say over how that money is spent. Such student activism necessarily takes on corporate influence in education. When I started teaching at Lehman, Amazon had just announced that it would build a new headquarters in Long Island City, Queens, prompting the CUNY chancellor and Board of Trustees to publish an

Taking a Lead from Student Movements  135 op-ed titled in support of Amazon’s announcement (Thompson and Rabinowitz 2018). Partnerships with the city’s public universities were part of the plan, according to NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio (2019), so it isn’t surprising that CUNY leadership vied for the 25,000 new jobs that Amazon promised to create in NYC. The narrative of corporate job-creation can be difficult to overturn. However, student organizers reframed the Amazon debate in light of its negative impact on many CUNY students and their communities. For example, a petition titled “Keep CUNY Out of Amazon” cited worker exploitation at Amazon; the fact that the facility would gentrify and displace residents of Queens; and Amazon’s collusion with ICE, police, and law enforcement (CRAASH Hunter 2018). Students forged connections with worker-led struggles in the CUNY system, as they juxtaposed the three billion dollars that the city would invest in Amazon with tuition increases, low adjunct wages, and campus infrastructure problems. CUNY students (many of whom lived in Queens and would be directly impacted by Amazon’s presence there) were part of a large coalition of grassroots community organizations and unions that eventually triumphed: Amazon will not be coming to Queens. Student activists, in other words, continue to be a force to take a lead from, with analyses that seamlessly connect the campus, community, and city contexts through which they move. As I finish this chapter, Trump has declared a State of Emergency to build the border wall, and my social media feeds are flooded with thinkpieces on what this means, which roadblocks he could face, and what precedent this sets up for future administrations. However, there are several other recurring threads in my social media feeds that I’m trying to train my eye to focus on, which include the Denver teachers’ strike victory. I am moved in particular by students’ solidarity with striking teachers. Videos show students dancing in the hallways in class, holding solidarity protests and walkouts, and marching with teachers on picket lines in freezing temperatures (Blanc 2019). As faculty, we should show this level of solidarity in student-led struggles too. Student and faculty struggles are reciprocal, and of a piece. For example, Steven Salaita (2019) just released the piece “An Honest Living,” a searing documentation of his excommunication from academia as a result of his political views. He chronicles his departure from American University of Beirut after “US Senators and AUB’s reactionary donor class pressured the university’s president to cancel the appointment.” Students on campus protested, and Salaita was asked by the provost to “quash the rebellion.” He did not, the students received no faculty support, and Salaita left the country. What could have happened if these students had the support of other faculty? My own experience as a student and teacher continue to remind me of the centrality of student movements and student activists’ analyses

136  Vani Kannan to our “political turn” in this era. Students are often on the front lines. It is up to us to figure out how to take their lead, offering the histories, frameworks, analyses, and experiences we can. In the context of these experiences, and this edited collection, I find myself asking: What kinds of “political” work will become legible in a “political turn”—and what risks being dismissed as disruptive, unpragmatic, or too oppositional— as with student movements? What about when we are asked to call our own political or institutional stances into question? I hope we will take a lead from the bodies that bear the burden of the policies and ideologies that we seek to resist—bodies that are often our students’.

Notes 1 The following sections were highlighted: Prohibited Conduct Syracuse University is committed to the principle that freedom of discussion is essential to the search for truth and, consequently, welcomes and encourages the expression of dissent. Freedom of expression, however, ceases at the point when its exercise infringes on the rights of either participants or nonparticipants. To preserve freedom of discussion and to protect the rights of all, the following conduct is ­prohibited:  —­Obstruction or disruption of teaching, research, administration, disciplinary proceedings, pedestrian or vehicular traffic, or other University activities, including public service functions and other authorized activities on University-owned, operated, or controlled property. — Entry on or use of University facilities or property without authorization, or violation of regulations governing the use of University facilities or property. —Failure to comply with the lawful directives of University officials or law enforcement officers acting in the performance of their duties. 2 This is only one example of how the discourse of “free speech” gets inverted to support those who are already in power. For example, after Trump was elected, the Syracuse University student newspaper published an article ­titled “Feeling Unwelcome, Trump Supporters at Syracuse University Want Civility,” demonstrating how those whose ideologies are aligned with dominant power structures invert the rhetoric of civility and free speech to claim “marginality” in relation to the struggles of marginalized people.

References Blanc, Eric. 2019. “Denver Students Take the Lead as Teachers Strike.” The Nation. www.thenation.com/article/denver-teachers-strike-students/. Chatterjee, Piya, and Sunaina Maira, eds. 2014. The Imperial University: ­Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. CRAASH Hunter. 2018. “Keep CUNY Out of Amazon.” The Petition Site. www.thepetitionsite.com/671/091/519/keep-cuny-out-of-amazon/. CUNY. 2019. “When Tuition At CUNY Was Free, Sort Of.” CUNY. www1. cuny.edu/mu/forum/2011/10/12/when-tuition-at-cuny-was-free-sort- of/. de Blasio, Bill. 2019. “The Path Amazon Rejected.” The New York Times. www. nytimes.com/2019/02/16/opinion/amazon-new-york-bill-de-blasio.html.

Taking a Lead from Student Movements  137 Division of Criminal Justice Services. n.d. “1033 Federal Excess Property Program.” New York State. www.criminaljustice.ny.gov/ops/1033excessproperty.htm. Gordon, Larry. 1990. “Cal State Chief Resigns Under Fire Over Raises.” L.A. Times. http://articles.latimes.com/1990–04-21/news/mn-1391_1_cal-state. Gunderson, Christopher. 2014. “The Struggle for CUNY: A History of the CUNY Student Movement, 1969–1999.” CUNY. https://eportfolios.macaulay. cuny.edu/hainline2014/files/2014/02/Gunderson_The-Struggle-forCUNY.pdf; https://eportfolios.Macaulay.cuny.edu/hainline2014/files/2014/02/Gunderson_ The-Struggle-for-CUNY.pdf. Hassonjee, Arva. 2018. “Militarization of Police Fails to Enhance Safety, May Harm Police Reputation.” Princeton University. www.princeton.edu/ news/2018/08/21/militarization-police-fails-enhance-safety-may-harmpolice-reputation. Kynard, Carmen. 2015. “Teaching While Black: Witnessing and Countering Disciplinary Whiteness, Racial Violence, and University Race-Management.” Literacy in Composition Studies 3 (1): 1–20. Maloney, Sean. 2017. “Protesting Blue-Light Surveillance.” Socialist Worker. https://socialistworker.org/2017/05/08/protesting-blue-light-surveillance. Mattingly, Justin. 2015. “Faculty Discuss Continued Support of THE General Body 1 Year After Sit-In Began.” The Daily Orange. http://dailyorange. com/2015/11/faculty-discuss-continued-support-of-the-general-body-1-yearafter-sit-in-began/. Moraff, Christopher. 2015. “Campus Cops are Shadowy, Militarized and More Powerful than Ever.” The Washington Post. www.washingtonpost.com/ news/the-watch/wp/2015/07/09/campus-cops-are-shadowy-militarized-andmore-powerful-than ever/?noredirect =on&utm_term=. c0a61d925cc5. National Sexual Violence Resource Center. 2018. “Sexual Assault in the United States.” www.nsvrc.org/statistics. Schell, Eileen. 1998. Gypsy Academics and Mother-Teachers: Gender, Contingent Labor, and Writing Instruction. Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook. Steinberg, Stephen. 2018. “Revisiting Open Admissions at CUNY.” Clarion. www.psc-cuny.org/clarion/february-2018/revisiting-open-admissions-cuny. Sykes, Michael. 2014. “Maryland Students Protest Police Militarization.” The Sentinel. https://pgs.thesentinel.com/2014/11/25/maryland-students-protestpolice-militarization/. THE General Body. 2015. “Press.” https://thegeneralbody.org/press/. This Rhetorical Life. 2014. “Conversations about Academic Labor, Aca­ demic Freedom, and Palestine.” http://thisrhetoricallife.syr.edu/episode-26­conversations-about-academic-labor-academic-freedom-and-palestine/. Thompson, William C. and Vita C. Rabinowitz. 2018. “Amazon Fits Beautifully with CUNY: The City’s Public Universities are Training People to Fill the Jobs the Tech Giant is Creating.” New York Daily News. www.nydailynews.com/ opinion/ny-oped-amazon-fits-beautifully-with-cuny-20181121-story.html.

9 Nudging Ourselves Toward a Political Turn Paul Feigenbaum

In thinking about how to support a political turn in our field, I want to focus less on winning the hearts and minds of students, faculty, and administrators who do not already identify as progressives and focus more on actualizing passive progressives, by which I mean people who hold progressive political beliefs and values—and may be very critical of the neoliberal state—but do not see themselves as political actors. As I have written elsewhere (2012), this political quietism is conditioned by lifelong immersion in ideologies of individual advancement, hyper-­competition, and civic disengagement. Hence, it is possible to recognize, and even denounce, neoliberalism’s individualist ethos of personal r­ esponsibility and still live according to this ethos. In fact, part of my evolution as a justice-oriented educator has required learning to appreciate how deeply human beings can embody such contradictions. I myself was politicized in graduate school, guided by teachers who examined historical and contemporary oppression primarily through the lenses of race, class, and gender. However, I saw few of these professors working to effect change beyond teaching and publishing in narrow academic circles, and within the classes themselves, I do not recall ever having discussions about other ways we as academics might productively intervene against injustice. Once, during a faculty panel addressing the role of higher education in promoting social change, I expressed my frustrations about the limited impact of these efforts. A panelist responded something to the effect that universities are places for people to think really hard about big questions; this disjuncture between theory and practice did not seem to trouble her. That was in the early 2000s, but has much changed? In Summer 2018, a mentor from SUNY Buffalo, my undergraduate alma mater, told me about the challenges he faced convincing his (often tenured) colleagues to sign a petition supporting a Living Stipend campaign among graduate students. Then, at a 2019 CCCC roundtable organized by students and faculty leaders of this campaign, I learned that SUNY Buffalo’s Faculty Senate had just voted down a resolution to support the Living Stipend (Mazzolini et al. 2019). Clearly, effecting a widespread and civically impactful political turn means (among other things) assuming and sharing risks, and the fact that even tenured university

Nudging Ourselves Toward a Political Turn  139 professors often decide they cannot afford to take fairly minimal professional risks is deeply disheartening. But while faculty are very much implicated by passive progressivism, I want to concentrate here on students, and more specifically, on confronting the psychological factors that impede students’ pathways toward collective action. After all, if we want to help students unlearn their enculturated political quietism, we are surely in the realm of psychology at least as much as rhetoric. For instance, as Guy Standing (2017) explains in his book The Precariat, part of the neoliberal agenda is to commodify and marketize all aspects of contemporary society, thus making competition the primary means by which people relate to one another. But because competition is the enemy of empathy, living in a neoliberal ecosystem makes it psychologically difficult for people to feel solidarity with others who face similar economic struggles and professional uncertainties (26). Furthermore, chronic insecurity narrows people’s mental bandwidth to short-term issues such as, in the case of students, the next exam, paper, or work shift, rather than the long-term planning and organizing necessary to bring about substantive institutional and systemic change. Indeed, sociologist Jonathan Smucker (2017) perceives the very terms activism and activist, which imply a “voluntary and self-­selecting enterprise, an extracurricular activity, a realm of subculture, and a generic differentiating label,” as psychological impediments for many people, because these labels establish sharp distinctions between the “active social change participant” and the broader society (32). As a result, participation in social change is not regarded as the collective work of all members of society, but the niche endeavors of small, fairly exclusionary groups. In the public imagination, then, activists have been fashioned into an Other from which the majority of people disassociate themselves, even many who are otherwise sympathetic to a particular cause or ideology. For Smucker, the “activist strawman repels many people, cognitively blocking their entry into collective action” (34, emphasis in original).

Choice Architecture and the Libertarian Paternalist Roots of Nudging Reflecting on these challenges, Smucker argues that building a political movement requires an “understanding of social action that spans all the way from the macro level of economic and political structures to the micro level of group and individual psychology” (197). In this piece, I focus on the latter. More specifically, I draw on insights from behavioral psychology in order to pursue the following pedagogical thought experiment: by attending closely to students’ preexisting ­dispositions ­toward (or against) political engagement, and by helping students ­become more conscious of these dispositions, can writing teachers help activate the political energies of passively progressive students? This thought

140  Paul Feigenbaum experiment was partially inspired by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s (2009) book Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness, which examines how seemingly insignificant factors influence people’s behavior and decision making. Operating from the premise that “everything matters,” Thaler and Sunstein note that oftentimes “the power of … small details comes from focusing the attention of users in a particular direction” (3), such as determining which foods to place at eye level in cafeteria displays or supermarket aisles. The authors emphasize the role of choice architects, or people who have “the responsibility for organizing the context in which people make decisions” (3), along with a number of strategies via which choice architects can “nudge” people toward one decision or another.1 Nudge brought to greater public ­attention decades of research in behavioral psychology, particularly the work of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, about the extent to which human decision-making results from fallible cognitive heuristics. These heuristics are vital for managing moment-to-moment exigencies in a quick and efficient manner, but they also produce systemic irrationalities such as the availability bias, or what Kahneman (2011) calls “the process of judging frequency by ‘the ease with which instances come to mind’” (129). Among other insights, the availability bias demonstrates the power of the media on people’s thinking, because our capacity to retrieve a social issue from memory “is largely determined by the e­ xtent of coverage in the media” (8). Sensationalism, then, helps explain people’s tendency to inflate the dangers of events like terrorist attacks and earthquakes way out of proportion to their actual frequency, and by extension, to underestimate the dangers of less vividly covered issues like heart attacks. Thaler and Sunstein (2009) note that the availability bias has public policy implications, because “governments are likely to allocate their resources in a way that fits with people’s fears rather than in response to the most likely danger” (26). Nudge also ­inspired the respective establishment of a Behavioural Insights Team and a Social and Behavioral Sciences Team—aka “Nudge Units”—by the government of the United Kingdom and the Obama Administration, in order to ­improve the outcomes of public policy initiatives. Many of these measures employ social norming, or the subtle use of peer pressure, such as encouraging people to pay taxes by informing them that most other people are already doing so. The concept of nudging clearly has real-world applications, and thus it seems worthwhile to consider its progressive potential. In light of the goals addressed above, this potential would not involve changing the political dispositions of conservatives but rather encouraging progressively inclined students to act more consistently on their preexisting political beliefs. At the same time, from a progressive standpoint, there are significant problems with how Thaler and Sunstein frame the concept of nudging, which they describe as libertarian paternalism. The authors

Nudging Ourselves Toward a Political Turn  141 explain that “the libertarian aspect of our strategies lies in the straightforward insistence that, in general, people should be free to do what they like—and to opt out of undesirable arrangements if they want to do so,” whereas the “paternalistic aspect lies in the claim that it is legitimate for choice architects to try to influence people’s behavior in order to make their lives longer, healthier, and better” (5). They add, “In our understanding, a policy is ‘paternalistic’ if it tries to influence choices in a way that will make choosers better off, as judged by themselves” (5, emphasis in original). While conceding that some people will find the term distasteful, and while agreeing that people should ultimately determine what their own best interests are, these two middle-aged white men do nothing to address the obvious patriarchal overtones of the term they have coined. Moreover, while Thaler and Sunstein’s vision of libertarian paternalism supports some goals that are consistent with progressive values, such as reducing carbon emissions and encouraging people to recycle, they also advocate conservative values such as school choice, and while the authors do not explicitly claim support for the privatization of social security, they discuss strategies for helping people make the wisest investment decisions should privatization come to pass. Furthermore, the fact that Thaler and Sunstein situate these issues of public policy and individual choice in primarily economic terms might be troublesome for progressives who resist the neoliberal economization of all human relations. 2 As a progressive, I understand and share these concerns. Turning the insights of behavioral psychology to the concept of libertarian paternalism itself, I suggest that the term reflects Thaler and Sunstein’s own cognitive blindspots, which in turn reflect the authors’ cultural and demographic backgrounds and their ideological predispositions. Beyond libertarian paternalism, Guy Standing (2017) finds the term “choice architecture” itself problematic, likening it to utilitarianism founder ­Jeremy Bentham’s “architecture of choice” and the much more ominous metaphor of the “panopticon society” (155–156). Standing argues that choice architecture associated with the panopticon creates the illusion of choice but actually leads people—prisoners, hospital patients, students, factory workers, etc.—toward making the right choice as determined by institutional overseers. Standing thus situates nudging as part of a broader neoliberal effort to curtail both individual and group autonomy and to expand governmental and corporate systems of mass surveillance. However, while making a compelling argument that nudging can be used as a form of neoliberal social engineering, Standing overlooks the existential fact that choice architecture is a necessary, pervasive, and inescapable aspect of contemporary society, influencing all kinds of decisions we make as we negotiate our daily lives. Governments and corporations are clearly interested in the power of choice architecture, and they are unlikely to stop nudging people in ways favorable to their own ends.

142  Paul Feigenbaum Therefore, I propose following the lead of the left-wing podcast Current Affairs (Davis 2018), specifically their recurring segment “When the Right Ain’t Entirely Wrong,” during which panelists consider how progressives might adapt various strategies and tactics that conservatives have used to achieve concrete political goals;3 though in this case, I am operating from a slightly different premise: “What can the Left learn from Libertarian Paternalists?” Like the Current Affairs podcasters, I don’t think it makes pragmatic sense for progressives—in particular progressive educators—to reject all ideas that emerge from outside our political home base. Rather, I advocate severing the concept of nudging from libertarian paternalism and reorienting it toward progressive ends, for choice architecture deeply and inevitably influences the work of teaching and learning as well; the institutions teachers represent are sites of choice architecture, and teachers are themselves choice architects.4 Crucially, in comparing choice architects to more traditional architects, Thaler and Sunstein (2009) themselves note that “there is no such thing as a ‘neutral’ design … As good architects know, seemingly arbitrary decisions, such as where to locate the bathrooms, will have subtle influences on how the people who use the building interact” (3). In other words, how teachers set up the various choices that students have to make—in all kinds of ways that include where to sit, how much to speak in class, how to interact with peers, how hard to work on assignments, etc.—influences students’ decision making about these choices, even if teachers do not intend such influence and remain unconscious of how one decision is linked to another. So, as choice architects, is it better that pedagogical nudging operate without our conscious awareness, or should we assume greater agency in its operation?

Toward Conscientious Nudges: Transcending Libertarian Paternalism If we choose the former option, we resign ourselves to what I call ­serendipitous nudging, which can support political engagement, but which leaves an awful lot to chance. Returning to my own case of ­political awakening, it is safe to say that upon entering graduate school, I was a passive progressive, and my fitful pathway toward enhanced political conscientiousness could easily have petered out absent serendipity. For instance, by the time I finished college, I understood—in a fairly ­abstract, diffident manner—the existence of intersectional oppression and marginalization around race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and so on. However, I had not spent significant time reflecting on these injustices, let alone comprehending my responsibility to participate as an ally in redressing them; as a beneficiary of white male heterosexual ­privilege, I had made it that far in life without these issues being particularly ­salient to me. But when I got to graduate school, I encountered a

Nudging Ourselves Toward a Political Turn  143 number of professors who, in centralizing social injustice in their classes, did make these issues salient. In other words, the choice architecture ­established by these teachers nudged me toward a justice orientation. But as mentioned earlier, the courses and the professors themselves offered few opportunities to supplement my growing political interest with action. Kairos intervened here through two peers who were actively ­involved in our graduate student union. Like a typical passive progressive, I had, until then, vaguely supported the union, but I had not actualized this solidarity beyond paying monthly dues. Fortunately, seeing my peers’ example at the right time inspired me to begin attending meetings myself, which gradually led to more active roles, including serving on the bargaining committee as the union negotiated its next contract with university administration. In turn, another graduate student introduced me to Buzz Alexander, the all-too-rare professor who had actualized his beliefs by founding the Prison Creative Arts Project—the evolution of which is detailed in his monograph Is William Martinez Not Our Brother? (2010)—and by inspiring hundreds of students both to support artistic expression on the inside and to challenge the prison-industrial complex on the outside. In terms of confronting my own passive progressivism, my circumstances now shifted from being at the mercy of serendipitous nudging to having a mentor who not only modeled action but who thoughtfully guided my development as a politically oriented scholar and teacher. Still, I periodically wonder, if not for the kairotic opportunity provided by my peer role models, would I have taken those initial steps toward becoming an active union member? I also wonder at the opportunities missed, especially the fact that I wasn’t consistently nudged toward political conscientiousness until graduate school. How much more politically engaged might I be now if my status quo bias, a concept I address below, hadn’t been so firmly established and hard to overcome? For instance, union work required learning to speak up for my ideas in sometimes contentious meetings with graduate peers who were both quite eager to express their convictions and often intimidatingly better-informed than me on the issues. Being an introvert, I struggled to develop this skill, but had I begun this process earlier in my educational career, I might have struggled less in future roles I took on with various community organizations. Therefore, considering the inherent limitations of serendipitous nudging, I propose that progressive teachers practice a more conscientious nudging of passively progressive students. While developing a comprehensive, inclusive, and culturally responsive pedagogy of conscientious nudging will require a lot of collective brainstorming and a healthy spirit of situated experimentation, I do have some initial ideas. A big component of this process, of course, involves modeling political engagement, thus demonstrating to students that we are trying to actualize our own

144  Paul Feigenbaum beliefs. Storytelling is called for here, inviting students to identify with our experiences without requiring or coercing parallel actions on their part. Social norming might also be effective, such as encouraging students to vote or to attend rallies by showing that many of their peers are already doing so. However, in the space remaining, I want to explore conscientious nudging from a more metacognitive perspective—i.e., helping students themselves understand how nudging works, which I suspect might be more effective in the long run. Here my thinking reflects the power of another cognitive heuristic known as the status quo bias. According to Thaler and Sunstein (2009), “For lots of reasons, people have a more general tendency to stick with their current situation” (34), no matter how arbitrarily that situation emerged. 5 If we consider passive progressivism through the lens of the status quo bias, it might help us understand why students struggle to become politically engaged. It has, for instance, reframed my own thinking about the gap between students’ actual levels of civic participation and their aspirations for civic participation. This gap has consistently shown up in a survey I give that asks students to place themselves on a spectrum of political engagement; the spectrum extends from unengaged to personally responsible to participatory to justice-oriented (2012). On average, students place their current civic levels toward the unengaged and personally responsible side, but they place their aspirations toward the participatory and justice-oriented side. So, it seems plausible that for many students, political quietism represents the default option—i.e., the current situation to which they cling not necessarily because they want to, but because the status quo bias represents a very powerful nudge.

Examples of Conscientious Nudges To help make the status quo bias visible to students, I propose an activity inspired by Buzz Alexander; while conceived long before the concept existed, this language-oriented praxis represents to me a wonderful example of conscientious nudging. In this lesson, called the “language of consent,” Buzz would read aloud a long list of phrases commonly used to “consent” to injustices faced by other people. Quite typical examples include: “I am not a racist,” “I have my own challenges,” and “I don’t know where to begin.” In vocalizing these phrases, a process that would go on for several minutes, Buzz effectively demonstrated both their lame redundancy and their cultural pervasiveness, as everyone would probably recognize more than a few phrases they themselves had used. In fact, whenever he heard a new phrase during class discussions, Buzz would add it to his list for use in future semesters. Part of his pedagogical goal was to help students realize that the power of these phrases comes not only from their familiarity but also from being partially true. That is, students for the most part do not harbor conscious racist beliefs. They

Nudging Ourselves Toward a Political Turn  145 also are genuinely busy people, and they (like the rest of us) do not have all the answers to systemic problems. Nevertheless, these “true” phrases neither prevent, nor exonerate, one from acting against injustice, and Buzz’s point is that the actual reason people use these phrases is to avoid revealing a much more uncomfortable response: “I don’t care.” Or, to put it in the language of behavioral psychology, “I’m okay with the status quo.” For Buzz, the key figure is not so much the person uttering the phrase but the person hearing it. In most cases, the listener does not challenge the speaker by pointing out that, for example, busy people can split the work when they join like-minded allies, or that one need not devise solutions to injustice to become involved with a cause. So, the audience is generally as committed to the status quo as the speaker. As I have written elsewhere (2012), I have developed a slightly m ­ odified version of this activity, calling it the “language of adaptation” and, instead of reading the phrases myself, asking students to take turns calling out phrases they themselves have heard or used to justify adaptation to unjust circumstances. I write the students’ phrases on the board, which fills up quickly—I like having the visual image of these endless phrases sitting before us—and then we discuss their deceptive truth-value in ways similar to how Buzz did with his students. I also supplement the activity by later asking students to offer phrases that encourage action against injustice, language that tends to come far less readily. As a form of conscientious nudging, this activity will not resolve the status quo bias on its own, but it can at least help students become more conscious of how language subtly reinforces our predispositions toward or against political action. Making this language visible also becomes a recurring theme, something students and I can point out when we hear each other using it later in the term. Conscientious nudging can also raise awareness about two other related, if somewhat paradoxical, aspects of the status quo bias as it relates to political engagement. The first is what Jonathan Smucker (2017) calls activist inoculation. Namely, due to negative public stereotypes, “many Americans have been effectively ‘inoculated’ against the very means available to them to effect social and political change” (194). For instance, when conservative pundits circulate caricatures of activists as “joint-smoking, window-smashing, flag-burning, Kumbaya-singing dirty hippie protestor[s],” they are introducing a “metaphorical weak strand” of the activism virus into the public consciousness, which in turn builds a “cultural ‘immune system’” against collective action (194). In associating activism only with mobilization events such as “loudly and expressively marching in the streets,” this caricature also directs attention away from less visible but equally important organizing work (196). Being aware of this built-in resistance to certain symbols of collective ­action, progressive educators can seek alternative symbols, including narratives and memes to which students might more readily identify.

146  Paul Feigenbaum Asking students to describe and reflect on the feelings they associate with various activities such as attending rallies, knocking on doors, and organizing petition campaigns, as well as labels such as “activist,” “feminist,” and “abolitionist,” might help students reassess their affective relationship to political behaviors they have avoided in the past. On the flip side of activist inoculation is what I have elsewhere called the progressive perfect standard (2015), whereby famous historical activists are transformed from real people into paragons of moral integrity and righteousness, so much so that they become un-relatable to the masses. Engaging the stories of these activists, not from the moment they became iconic figures, but at earlier points in their lives, as when taking their uncertain, erratic, and not preordained first steps toward collective action, might replace these perfect standards with down-to-earth, realistic-­ seeming people whom students could envision themselves emulating.6 Essentially, these interventions against activist inoculation and the progressive perfect standard are meant to help students see that the prospect of overcoming their default status as passive progressives is less daunting than they might have imagined. More broadly speaking, my hope is that bringing students’ attention to the political status quo bias might inspire them to reevaluate earlier decisions made without conscious thought, intent, or analysis. In fact, there is evidence that making people aware of their biases can lead them to act in less biased ways. For example, Nasie et al. (2014) discuss their efforts to promote conflict resolution among Israelis and Palestinians. The researchers’ strategy was to teach study participants about naïve realism, the “conviction that one’s own views are objective and unbiased, whereas the other’s views are biased by ideology, self-interest, and irrationality.” Naïve realism closes people off to other people’s viewpoints and contributes to “misunderstandings, disagreements, and antagonism between individuals and groups” (1544). The study’s results suggest that making people aware of naïve realism in turn makes them more attuned to, and more willing to overcome, their own biases—a process the authors refer to as “bias correction” (1545); this process also increases people’s openness to adversarial perspectives. These results are preliminary, and they do not guarantee that teaching students about the status quo bias would necessarily lead them to be more politically engaged. However, even if students do not practice bias correction, becoming aware of their own biases might—as a peek behind their own cognitive and affective curtains—at least help them navigate an increasingly complex and often bewildering world. Such an outcome would be an important pedagogical achievement even if it does not directly support the political turn. Granted, rhetoric and composition teachers are not psychologists. But psychology and rhetoric, which in their own ways seek to understand how and why people’s minds and behavior change (or do not change), are natural disciplinary cousins. For better and for worse, our field has

Nudging Ourselves Toward a Political Turn  147 frequently overlapped with psychology, particularly through the cognitivist strain of process pedagogy and earlier efforts to promote behaviorism (Gallagher 2016), not to mention the now widespread interest in meta­ pportunities cognition and teaching for transfer. So we might explore o to craft anti-status quo pedagogies in partnership with justice-minded colleagues in psychology. In any case, if you believe that s­ ociety is headed in a deeply dark direction (and if you are reading a book whose subtitle is The ­Political Turn in and Beyond the Trump Era, I imagine you might), can you afford not to explore every trick in the pedagogical book? ­Writing teachers who want to bring about a political turn need to be as upfront with each other as possible about the ­abiding challenges of doing so. Many students want to be more politically ­engaged, but the inertial force of the status quo bias represents (among others) a significant ­hindrance to this outcome. I thus contend that, whether or not progressive compositionists embrace our roles as conscientious nudgers, we should at the very least enhance our understanding of how nudges—these powerful and nearly ubiquitous forms of subtle persuasion—­operate. Nudge or be nudged; that is the choice before us.

Notes 1 To be clear, Thaler and Sunstein’s (2009) book did not invent choice architecture, which has long existed all around us. When driving a car from one location to another, for instance, we encounter choice architecture through the dynamic array of streets, intersections, and signals, not to mention the continuously recalibrated GPS feedback regarding traffic patterns and alternative routes, which guide our driving decisions as we proceed toward our destination. Rather, the idea of nudging is that choice architects can draw on behavioral science as they organize the contexts in which people make decisions, thus being more aware of, and intentional about, how the process of choice architecture operates in practice. 2 Outside psychology, the discipline that has most substantially employed behavioral science research is economics. Indeed, this hybridization of psychology and economics formed the basis of behavioral economics, for which Richard Thaler won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2017. But then again, a key contribution of behavioral economics has been to show the many practical absurdities of classical economic theory, driven as it is by the mythical Homo Economicus. Behavioral economists want to build humanity—with all of our cognitive irrationalities, idiosyncracies, and contradictions—back into economics. 3 In one episode (Davis 2018), for example, a panelist noted how effective the Right has been at targeting local and state elections, which enabled significant gerrymandering in many states. Another panelist addressed the long-term commitment that conservative pundits and politicians have made toward shifting the Overton Window, which is basically the range of issues generally deemed acceptable to discuss in public forums, in directions that favor broad receptivity to conservative values. 4 Nudge techniques have already been used in educational contexts, including efforts to reduce the impact of “summer melt,” the troublingly widespread phenomenon of (primarily) low-income students enrolling in college after

148  Paul Feigenbaum high school but, for various (often financial) reasons, failing to matriculate in the fall. Maya Shankar, who ran the Nudge Unit under Obama, notes that the fairly simple nudge of sending students “eight personalized text messages over the summer” increased matriculation rates by several percentage points (Stillman 2017). Nudges have been used to promote college access and persistence in other ways as well, such as helping low-income students follow through with FAFSA’s highly complicated paperwork (­Castleman et  al. 2015) and offering structured choice architecture for community college students as they navigate their way through their course sequences (Scott-Clayton 2015). 5 As one simple but characteristic example, consider how often students, after making a fairly arbitrary choice of where to sit on the first day of class, continue sitting in the same seats all semester. Teachers can choose to d ­ isrupt this largely unconscious process by pointing it out and, perhaps, asking students to consider what a less automatic, and more deliberative, way to choose seats might look like. 6 While focusing more often on celebrities than activists, the fairly new podcast Imagined Life (2018) takes just such an approach, narrating the stories of people before they became famous and using the “you” personal pronoun to create the subtle impression that the listener is the subject of the story.

Works Cited Alexander, Buzz. 2010. Is William Martinez Not Our Brother?: Twenty Years of the Prison Creative Arts Project. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Castleman, Benjamin L., Sandy Baum, and Saul Schwartz. 2015. “Behavioral Economics and Postsecondary Access: A Primer.” In Decision Making for Student Success: Behavioral Insights to Improve College Access and Persistence, edited by Benjamin L. Castleman, Saul Schwartz, and Sandy Baum, 1–19. New York: Routledge. Davis, Pete. 2018. “#16: 2020 Visions.” Current Affairs: The Podcast, December 5. https://currentaffairs.simplecast.fm/d51f8c46. Feigenbaum, Paul. 2015. Collaborative Imagination: Earning Activism through Literacy Education. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Gallagher, Chris. 2016. “What Writers Do: Behaviors, Behaviorism, and Writing Studies.” CCC 68 (2): 238–265. Imagined Life. 2018. Produced by Wondery. Accessed December 28, 2018. https://wondery.com/shows/imagined-life/. Kahneman, Daniel. 2011. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Mazzolini, Elizabeth, Barbara Bono, Ana Grujic, Nicole Lowman, Joseph Moore, and James Rizzi. 2019. “The Performance-Rhetoric of Campus Activism.” Roundtable presented at the Conference on College Compoisition and Communication, Pittsburgh, March 14–17, 2019. Nasie, Meytal, Daniel Bar-Tal, Ruthie Pliskin, Eman Nahhas, and Eran Halperin. 2014. “Overcoming the Barrier of Narrative Adherence in Conflicts Through Awareness of the Psychological Bias of Naïve Realism.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 40 (11): 1543–1556. DOI: 10.1177/0146167214551153. Scott-Clayton, Judith. 2015. “The Shapeless River: Does a Lack of Structure Inhibit Students’ Progress at Community Colleges?” In Decision Making for

Nudging Ourselves Toward a Political Turn  149 Student Success: Behavioral Insights to Improve College Access and Persistence, edited by Benjamin L. Castleman, Saul Schwartz, and Sandy Baum, 102–123. New York: Routledge. Smucker, Jonathan Matthew. 2017. Hegemony How-To: A Roadmap for Radicals. Chico, CA: AK Press. Standing, Guy. 2017. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Stillman, Sarah. 2017. “Can Behavioral Science Help in Flint?” The New Yorker, January 23. www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/23/ can-behavioral-science-help-in-flint. Thaler, Richard H., and Cass R. Sunstein. 2009. Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness. New York: Penguin Books.

10 Sustainable Audiences/ Renewable Products Penn State’s Student Farm, Business Writing, and Community Outreach Geoffrey Clegg Henry Giroux, writing in Neoliberalism’s War on Education (2014), contends that one of the outcomes of the neoliberal political focus on education—with neoliberalism in this case cast as economic Darwinism (12)—is that “[p]edagogies that unsettle common sense, make power accountable, and connect classroom knowledge to larger civic issues have become dangerous to all level of schooling” (20). Gone are the connection between lessons and civic duty, charity without a return in capital, or the benefit of inquiry to spur some sort of joy in our lives. In return, we have witnessed the growth of corporate universities, students as customers, and the consistent monetization of every possible person including the homeless. The classic notion of civic action, inspired by some sort of political action in benefit of the people, becomes lost in the mire of outside funding, grants, and centers funded by plutocrats in the hopes of giving their economic beliefs legitimacy. Giroux places such shifts in the context of a pedagogy of market-driven illiteracy whereby “the desire to consume and invest exclusively in relationships that serve only one’s individual interests” becomes paramount to the interests of both the university and the student (21). In effect, teaching has become a sort of quid pro quo bent solely on the return of investment one can receive, hopefully with an added monetary bonus. Giroux is not wrong to see hope in leadership that resists dystopian cynicism and combines the personal with the political in pedagogy (114); hope lies in creating leadership that resists neoliberal imperatives within higher education that began before and extend through the age of Trump. Specifically, we must resist the constant pressures to monetize the classroom and our students by making sure that our teaching does not ask students to consistently think about capital returns they may get in return for their efforts or analysis. This may seem like an unexpected statement from an untenured assistant professor of business writing. Surely, my stance here goes against the ethos of many of my students, as their whole focus sometimes seems to concentrate on acquiescing to power and investing, both literally and metaphorically, in relationships through networking and internships. Likewise, they prefer to engage in a form of neoliberal thought Aihwa Ong calls “mobile

Sustainable Audiences/Renewable Products  151 technology” whereby neoliberalism acts as “a logic of governing that migrates and is selectively taken up in diverse political contexts” so that it adapts to the needs or demands of the moment (2007, 3). No matter where I have taught business writing, students tend to think of solutions that focus on immediate profit over concentrating on local needs. It is not that these are unethical or greedy young pre-professionals; instead, they are following the case studies, advice, and models presented to them within business curriculum or looking at what mainstream Western media hypes as the newest ideals of profit-oriented decision making. Such quick solutions are themselves a product of neoliberal politics and of higher education’s acceptance of capitalist norms that lends prestige to market solutions for every conceivable problem. While neoliberalism predates the Trump presidency, one long-term effect of its rise can be identified in the movement away from civic duty as a primary motivated factor found in Giroux’s response to concerted civic action as a response. Civic action has not disappeared completely, however, as one form of resistance against neoliberal ideals can be found within the university structure itself through the various service and experiential learning curriculums throughout departments. Perhaps, one of the strongest calls for civic action I’ve most identified with has come from Rural Literacies wherein Kim Donehower et al. (2007) collectively state, “we envision the work of composition teachers and scholars as having a public dimension beyond the classroom” (158). I have long considered work outside my classroom to be a vital part of my maturation as a professional and person. Whether working on downtown redevelopment research or working with a campus farm, such pursuits have helped me to understand how to navigate local communities and their interaction with the universities they surround. Teaming up with the Penn State University Student Farm on the University Park campus was no different as it provided me with just such an opportunity to combine efforts inside and outside the classroom by engaging multiple publics in nonprofit work. By doing so, my hope was to unveil the complex, hidden political factors—classism, knowledge of the region’s economy, and misplaced trust in technological development—shaping my students’ experiences as well as working to better expose them to work that was not bent on pure capitalistic or neoliberal technological profit. In the fall of 2015, instructors were asked by the Penn State English Department’s Program on Writing and Rhetoric (PWR) if they wanted to facilitate active learning with campus partners in our professional writing courses, technical (202 C) and business (202 D). Of those partners, a technical writing instructor and I chose to partner with the Student Farm at Penn State—then known as the Penn State One Acre Student Farm before its expansion—on providing different deliverables (marketing materials, a code of ethics, and potential business plans) for farm use that our students would create. The hope of this project was

152  Geoffrey Clegg twofold: to inspire and educate students on the sustainability initiatives currently underway on campus and to allow students to work on projects that extended beyond the university into the State College, PA community itself. Beginning in the Spring 2016 semester, students would work together with a faculty member from the Agriculture department, Leslie Pillen, on crafting a variety of documents, which I hoped would combine business writing genres with community-based service-learning practices in order to better strengthen my students’ understanding of the complex political and economic conditions that shape the borders between the university and surrounding communities. Our hope was that students would create flyers (using visual and written rhetorics), outreach models via prospectus reports, and a solid code of conduct that would delineate ethical expectations for volunteers and students using the farm. An important component of this venture is the farm itself, which is part of the university’s interdisciplinary Sustainable Food Systems Program (SFSP). As it describes itself on its university webpage: “[The farm] link[s] classroom education with experiential learning, student-led research and community outreach” (“Welcome” 2017). Every year, the SFSP hosts on-campus events encouraging students and locals to learn, engage in broad conversations about agriculture, and further engages as advocates for social issues such as “food security, food waste, and other pressing issues of our time” (“Welcome” 2017). In itself, the farm is part of a larger initiative to challenge and educate all comers in a collaborative environment by developing new skills and enhancing the lives of the larger Centre County community. How might toying with business communication conventions aid l­ocal agriculture, and how might it provide a powerful venue for students to take part in politically oriented rhetoric? These were two questions that I sought to answer as I prepared students in my two sections of business writing to work with the Student Farm at The Pennsylvania State ­University—University Park. Throughout the Spring 2016 semester, both my students and I sought to discover the intersections between multiple literacy concepts within business and agriculture as well as how to engage rhetorics of place, space, and politics that permeated the divide between the town and gown, State College, PA, and the surrounding counties. Specifically, my hope was that students would take economic foundations (price theory, supply and demand, logistics, and innovation) they learned in their major coursework and apply them to issues within agriculture (sustainability, use of land resources, and nonprofit work). My explicit focus required that my Smeal College of Business students not think in terms of capitalistic competition for resources or buyers; instead, we deconstructed the different ways in which motivations for profit affected stakeholders through three assignments bent on challenging neoliberal business ideology. Moreover, I wanted them to understand

Sustainable Audiences/Renewable Products  153 that writing even the most basic memorandum is a political act tied by many diverse ideologies requiring their business reports and messaging to consumers to avoid assumptions of wealth, simple branding techniques, or using vague promises. My students needed to understand that their audience was potentially made up of savvy and experienced farmers within the region, buyers from within the university who weren’t going to purchase goods due to the Penn State name, and others who could see past marketing appeals to quality when they were not sure such a thing existed. I must caution that this course does not fit into the traditional ­service-learning model of college students working directly in tandem with the community. Instead, we fit more into the critical service-learning environment advocated by Veronica House (2014). House’s definition of critical service-learning asks that instructors think “not about providing charity work” but on “shifting the focus to intellectual rigor, problem solving, critical thinking, and higher-order reasoning, all of which lead to enhanced writing” (7). She further states that such “courses immerse students in complex rhetorical debates and community conversations to teach them how to use writing, genre knowledge, and rhetorical strategies to make something happen” (7). In this specific case, the business writing classroom offers an ideal space for critical service-learning ­because of the wealth of genres it employs (memorandums, letters, reports, and presentations), diverse sets of audiences (labor/­manager, ­college ­educated/ high school graduate/no formal education, urban/­rural) with a varying assortment of literacies attached to cultural and economic realities, and interdisciplinary potential. Within this space, there is far more potential for students to learn through c­ ommunity literacy practices focused on “social change” and “problem solving tak[ing] precedence” (Peck et al. 1995, 205) rather than the rote memorization and testing of management theory. A similar directive of the service-learning ethos comes from the participatory nature of working with clients for social justice-oriented ends (Knight 2017, 1). While James Dubinsky reminds us that service-learning within the business writing classroom may act as “[the] bridge between practical, ‘market-driven’ focus and a humanistic, service-­oriented one” (qtd. in Pope-Roark et al. 2014, 132), we must also consider how the use of social change allows students to feel more invested in the content and trajectory of the course. My approach was to meld to critical service-learning with community literacy practices in an attempt to have students examine social and hierarchical pressures (the place of the university within the regional economy, and its economic power to change or alter buying habits) within the central Pennsylvania region and question how these related to the competing pressures of capitalism and ­humanism. Under the auspices of this combined effort, I hoped that we could open discussion from stakeholders throughout the community

154  Geoffrey Clegg as students surveyed their peers, local growers, and State College residents in order to open opinions on how agricultural needs were or were not met. I also hoped that such conversations would help students understand that microeconomic environments require careful examinations of the stakeholders involved in the agro-politics of sustainability. Ultimately, my objective concerned challenging students to open themselves to engaging and listening to varied discourse communities’ actors whose work and lives are often not covered in traditional business courses at larger premier public universities. While my motivations were to open up discussion about the political and economic complexity of agricultural capitalistic life, I often wondered what my students’ motivation was to remain in the course. I made it clear in my two sections from the first day that we would be working with the Student Farm on projects throughout the semester and allowed them to switch out of my sections if they so desired. All of them agreed to continue on after an explanation of what we would be doing and why. To provide an ethos for the overall spirit of the class, we first read Rebecca Pope-­ Ruark, Paige Ransbury, Mia Brady, and Rachel Fishman’s 2014 BPCQ article reflecting on the ability to create change, emerge passions, and give back to the community. Paige Ransbury’s rumination that students have different sets of motivations which “are determined by a variety of factors: course format, past experiences, personal dispositions, interactions with peers and partners, and general communication with others” stuck with students as it helped to position the course as one that required them to rethink their own motivations during class projects (137). Building upon the motivations described by Ransbury, students felt that there was a practical rather than hypothetical use to our class as it meant that we could explore these issues in real time with real people rather than through the standard use of business simulations or case studies. A secondary effect of the course involved presenting student motivation as part of a political process. Rather than consider every action apolitically, we would spend time exploring the realities and structures of how each group of students came to their conclusions to each different partnership requirements. Such conversations did not function as just good/bad or Democrat/Republican binary configurations; instead, they drew upon issues of the then furious debates happening in the 2016 Presidential primaries occurring throughout the semester. Questions concerning the impact of Penn State’s subsidized small farms on local farmers permeated every class session. Likewise, thinking forward to the then unlikely chance that Donald Trump would ascend to the presidency, I would ask how an immigration plan would affect our position as a producer in relationship to those farms around us. While the installation of inhumane immigration measures has become a reality, at the time they merely haunted the national conversation at Republican primaries. Still, such specters were important points to consider as

Sustainable Audiences/Renewable Products  155 immigration reform affected all farms, even our small university one. Since we are a quasi-public institution using student and volunteer labor, there was a distinct possibility that we could alter labor practices throughout the region. More specifically, I asked students to consider how any agricultural region would be reshaped by racist immigration reform. Using Alabama’s HB 56 (2011) as a model, I presented students with the possibility of a larger expansion of the criminalization of undocumented immigrants, as mentioned during the Republican debates, affecting our position as a producer, albeit a small one. How would we benefit due to a volunteer workforce versus our peers who may employ undocumented workers? Would such laws, if passed, alter the ability of regional farmers in ways that could affect the One Acre Farm? While these discussions about politics and motivation helped foster a collaborative, engaged ethos in the class, the actual makeup of the students involved in both sections proved to be an ideal group for this curriculum. With the exception of two students—one whose previous internship was on a sheep farm and another whose parents owned a farm, both grew up in a rural farming communities in Western Pennsylvania—most of the students who took part in this project were from urban Eastern Seaboard communities (New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland) or international environs (Seoul, Taipei); thus, their knowledge of agricultural politics, practices, and realities was not as developed as that of their coursework in finance and logistics. In theory, students would cross between the borders of their known world (production, finance, knowledge of economies of scale) and that which they would not have extensive exposure with (local economies, agricultural production, nonprofit interaction, and knowledge of working-class audiences). This interplay of differing literacies (agricultural, financial) produced a perfect fit for thinking about meeting human needs by drawing upon a variety of student knowledge bases and experiences. Doing so offers students a way to become multi-literate in ways that not only allow them access to new information and media-based technologies, but also enable them to be border crossers capable of engaging, learning from, understanding, and being tolerant of and responsible to matters of difference and otherness. (Guilherme 2004, n.p.) (Guilherme n.p.) Similarly, by having students conceive of projects without focusing on monetary profit and, instead, discuss strategies for partnership helped them develop interpersonal skills that generally are not part of the larger capitalistic pedagogical system within their major. Despite these deficiencies, we were able to quickly work with the director of the Student Farm at Penn State on planning, strategizing, and communicating messages to the regional farmers, university employees, and students.

156  Geoffrey Clegg

Student Projects Before the Spring 2016 semester began, I met Leslie Pillen, my Agricultural department contact, to discuss different possible projects for my students. We both agreed that students must understand the delicate nature of this partnership, which would require them to refocus their efforts from competing with Centre County farmers and seeking technological “solutions” as a possible business plan—i.e., students could not suggest an app or website that sold products, which often just amounted to an Uberification of services through delivery rather than a tangible way of interacting and providing services to people—to instead providing some form of assistance to vulnerable or underrepresented populations in the university. What and which assignments I gave were up to me and I would collect samples for her at the end of the semester. I chose to use three of my standard six assignments as part of our Student Farm work while augmenting and crafting a new assignment from my previous discussions with Pillen. The traditional format of a 202 D course asks students to remix a previous essay from their previous first-year writing course to create a memo, write a topic proposal to solve a campus issue, create a job application package to ready them for career fairs, a simple communication packet addressing good and bad news, a long formal report based on their earlier proposal, and finish with a final presentation on that report. I decided to keep the proposal, job application, and report/presentation assignments with the proposal and report/presentation being modified to fit the needs of the collaboration with the farm. In turn, I replaced the memo assignment with the job application packet, used the proposal as an oral pitch assignment for a future business plan, created a new assignment asking students to create a code of conduct for different aspects of the farm (logistics, marketing, grant work, relationship with the larger community), reworked the communication packet to become a set of marketing messages, and changed my formal report to become a business plan that provided possible pathways for expansion into the university and Centre County area. Their presentation remained a persuasive presentation of the business plan they created for the farm. Students were to complete each assignment by teaming with students in groups with the explicit instruction to keep in mind that they were working with a nonprofit, engaging with the local farmers, and offering potential plans that used farm products without attempting to provide competition. The guiding principle I used to craft these projects came from the best practices advocated by Sheryl Breen (2010) in her essay “The Mixed Political Blessing of Campus Sustainability.” Specifically, Breen asks that faculty, “encourage students, faculty, and administrators to examine the connections between our goals and the community’s needs, between ideal and the local knowledge that can help make them work,” and

Sustainable Audiences/Renewable Products  157 “celebrate the ingenuity and critical analysis of local thinkers” (689). Each project reinforced these practices as we sought to situate the community, whether student or local, first within the framework of drafting deliverables. Likewise, our collective goal as a class was set to provide services that would benefit varieties of local communities within and outside the university-State College structure. Students were asked to locate and talk to people outside the university structure when possible. This meant that they would have to engage with vendors at one of the two area farmers’ markets, one of which was hosted directly across the university’s campus in downtown State College, and seek to understand community members’ feelings about potential projects like the business plan, how projects might have a short- and long-term impact on them, or if they were willing to engage in collaborative work with the university farm. This required them to step out of the familiarity of campus and cross borders into the lives and realities of local produce merchants as well as ensuring that they understood that their ideas weren’t bound just to the classroom because they had potential real effects. Ultimately, my aim in each new or reformed project was to expose students to the community stakeholders, their peers across the university, and student and faculty members of the Student Farm itself. While working on each assignment, they were to consult not just with me but also those they would have the most impact upon depending on what they pitched. For example, one group wanted to use farm resources to add freshness to campus services. In order to provide the best possible route to find this out, they were to consult with the food services managers in charge of campus cafeterias to understand from whom they bought produce, if there were any potential conflicts with local growers, and what needs the farm could provide. In turn, they would then be required to meet with the campus farm leaders to see what viable crop options could be explored. If all three sides (student-food services-campus farm) could come up with a viable solution they could then begin work on extending their plans. A second group of students wished to create a partnership between the two local area farmers’ markets and our farm to work with a downtown State College program for low-income families and the homeless to provide unsold or surplus food throughout the year. Such a plan required more delicate communication and planning for students as it required them to work with the university’s farm leadership on whether their plan could: (a) be viable due to restrictions put forth by the university, (b) effectively bring together local farmers’ market vendors in a reasonable time period, and (c) work across nonprofit borders with an area charity organization. This plan proved unwieldy and was shot down after consultation with Student Farm stakeholders because it required more time to gather potential community members. While most of the groups explored local borders, one group used both their proposal and subsequent formal report to explore how the

158  Geoffrey Clegg Student Farm could provide undergraduate and graduate international students and their family members with low-cost produce that was not normally sold by local markets or grocers. The impetus of their idea came from one of the group mates who often struggled finding fresh produce native to her home country. Her solution was simple: Why not poll the international student population to see if they had any common items such as spices, herbs, or tubers that could be grown to fill that need? This idea would require survey work of internationals gathered from face-to-face as well as online anonymous Survey Monkey surveys, collection and analysis of data, and consulting with farm leadership, in order to fill a need of an often-underserved population. For the rest of the group, three American students, the project meant communicating with a population they rarely engaged with in their daily lives. The group was able to communicate with different student organizations as well as informal networks to find out what would be the best possible plants that could be grown and donated to students who wished to participate. Their resulting final report and presentation captured how diverse our international student population was in terms of background, country, economic class, and need for assistance beyond the farm’s needs. Business Plans As mentioned above, a majority of my students were familiar with sustainability initiatives and practices through previous business courses and campus wide programs. To further the goal of sustainability, the projects created by students were nonprofit-driven ideas for the farm to use once it was capable of more expansive production. Most groups chose to work with the university as the main client by using the farm to provide fresher options within its cafeteria system. The frequent argument from each group was that by using the produce they could reduce potential costs to the students while providing fresher and higher quality produce. Students also felt that setting up a reciprocal agreement within the university itself would convince the local farmers that their own produce would not be affected by price slashing or direct competition at local farmers’ markets within the region. One group’s plan even incorporated a larger scale herb option that would utilize the campus greenhouses to provide the cafeteria system with fresh herbs year-round at a lower cost than prepackaged dried shipments. Code of Conduct Students were asked to produce a code of conduct that emphasized using the farm’s green operations as a potential on-campus supplier of produce. Based on a reading of Jagadeesh Rajashekharaiah’s “CSR, Clean

Sustainable Audiences/Renewable Products  159 and Green Operations—Suppliers’ Code of Conduct” (2012), we sought to employ the best supply chain practices Rajashekharajah mentions, type[s] of labor that can be employed, age and working hours, wage laws, safety and welfare of the workers, non-discriminatory practices among the employees, and willingness on the part of the companies to allow for scrutiny and audit of their practices in order to provide a better understanding of the ethical goals (32). We also read and discussed similar code statements drawn up by Alphabet, Hershey’s, and UNESCO’s “Universal Declaration of Bioethics and Human Rights.” Our ultimate goal was to have a standard deliverable for use by the farm as it expanded services within and throughout the university. The secondary goal was to provide students with a foundation in ethical practices that hold an organization accountable to itself, its mission, and guidelines for how its internal function worked in for rather than against its workers’ interests. By critically considering codes of conduct, students crafted a document grounded in resisting negligent practices rife within community-university partnerships and preventing the reinforcement of “an unjust economic system on the backs of unpaid labor [student and community volunteers] delivering services that support the economic system to communities most exploited by that economic system” (Brown 2006, 183). The end result of both of these projects meant that the farm had readyto-use documents that emphasized open communication with the local population as well as environmentally sound practices. At the end of the semester, the farm was presented with five sets of codes of conduct, each with their own twist for how to best communicate their critical practices to the university leadership, students, community stakeholders, and area farmers. By introducing noncompetitive practices emphasizing conversation, students were better able to concentrate on what they needed to know from area farmers rather than on how to gain advantage in the marketplace. Even more, they were able to uncover invisible relations to power that control local farming practices. For example, students were now able to identify how a university support, grant funding, and research often acted at odds to the needs of small-scale farming operations. Even more, the examination of the precarious nature of agricultural labor practices—whether done by local or immigrant ­workforces—became a known quality to many students rather than just a part of an Excel column.

Teaching Resistance in the Age of Trump While my class predates the election of Donald Trump by a few months, it nevertheless acted as a site for resistance on different levels. The first

160  Geoffrey Clegg level asked students to resist personal motivations to follow profit trails or the Uberification of the Student Farm through economizing it through cellphone apps. The next level required that students position themselves within the political landscape of the moment as they had to figure in the effects of Trump’s various potential trade pronunciations and plans for tariffs that would impact all levels of agricultural work, even a small university farm. Lastly, students had to reposition themselves outside of the university itself and cross over into the community itself by discussing ideas, potential business plans, current practices, and other significant impacts with local farmers and Centre County agricultural stakeholders. Each of these placed a burden to reconceive the work of the classroom, as it was reoriented from the simple hypothetical project to deliverable model into a real-time, real-world application of their ideas beyond the scope of the classroom. The political turn within writing and rhetoric asks both instructors and students to resist neoliberal policies of capitalist assent by reconceiving the classroom as a site of passive learning into an active space for collaboration and direct action. While the traditionally conservative environment of business writing, and by extension business students, might seem to be an unlikely place to motivate students to challenge the norms by which they are taught, asking business students to think local, act in tandem with local needs, and think beyond profit offers a form of resistance to what we see within the cronyism of the Trump administration and push for closure from the wider world. We might better position our future with an eye toward fairness and impact students’ ability to be ethical decision makers whose goal is to not fleece and poison the areas in which they do business; instead, these are fruitful sites of exchange with local investors, workers, and community members that can be built upon past graduation. That alone was worth attempting, even if the results are not seen for another decade or more.

References Breen, Sheryl D. 2010. “The Mixed Political Blessing of Campus Sustainability.” Political Science & Politics 43 (4): 685–690. Brown, Danika M. 2006. “Serving Academic Capitalism: The Cultural Function of Community-Based Partnerships.” In Rhetorical Agendas: Political, Ethical, Spiritual, edited by Patricia Bizzell, 179–184. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Donehower, Kim, Charlotte Hogg, and Eileen Schell. 2007. Rural Literacies. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Giroux, Henry. 2014. Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books. Guilherme, Manuela. 2004. “Is There a Role for Critical Pedagogy in Language/ Culture Studies? An Interview with Henry A. Giroux.” Language and Intercultural Communication Journal 6 (2). Retrieved from www.henryagiroux. com/RoleOfCritPedagogy.htm.

Sustainable Audiences/Renewable Products  161 House, Veronica. 2014. “Re-Framing the Argument: Critical Service-­L earning and Community-Centered Food Literacy.” Community Literacy Journal 8 (2): 1–16. Knight, Melinda. 2017. “Social Justice in the Business and Professional Communication Curriculum.” Business and Professional Communication Quarterly 80 (1): 3–5. Ong, Aihwa. 2007. “Neoliberalism as a Mobile Technology.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 32: 3–8. Peck, Wayne, Linda Flower, and Lorraine Higgins. 1995. “Community Literacy.” College Composition and Communication 46 (2): 199–222. Pope-Ruark, Rebecca, Paige Ransbury, Mia Brady, and Rachel Fishman. 2014. “­Student and Faculty Perspectives on Motivation to Collaborate in a ServiceLearning Course.” Business and Professional Communication Quarterly 77 (2): 129–149. Rajashekharaiah, Jagadeesh. 2012. “CSR, Clean and Green Operations: Suppliers’ Code of Conduct Revisited.” Journal of Supply Chain Management Systems 1 (4): 30–36. “Welcome!” 2017. Student Farm at Penn State. studentfarm.psu.edu.

11 The Political Turn and the Two-Year College Equity-Centered Partnerships and the Opportunities of Democratic Reform Darin L. Jensen Introduction When we teach our students to write, we emphasize audience awareness. It is only fair I do the same here. I imagine the audience for this book as graduate students and writing studies professionals interested in the democratic and political nature of our work. I imagine, too, that the average audience member for this book knows little about two-year college writing studies or why such a discussion should be carried in this text. Simply, two-year college writing studies is a distinct and significant profession with its own knowledge making (Reynolds 2005), epistemic authority (Larson 2018), and professional autonomy (Griffiths 2017). These tenets are true even as they are contested. The issues of the two-year college are historically embedded in a political instantiation of education envisioned as both democratic and capitalist. These competing missions have always carried tension (Jensen 2017). And in these times of austerity and precarity, this tension has often been destructive and minimizing of the democratic ideal (Sullivan 2017). Therefore, when rhetoric and composition and writing studies think of the political turn as a concept, they must include two-year colleges in their foundational thinking. This volume’s call for a political turn in rhetoric and composition and writing studies is powerful and needed. The editors “focused […] attention on the public and pedagogical role of teachers, specifically those in composition and rhetoric” and have drawn insight and strength from historical struggles for social and economic justice in labor, civil rights, black power, women’s, and national liberation struggles, and emergent movements, such as the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, climate justice, and Me Too. (Carter et al. 2019) This statement is powerful and is the focus of writing studies for a growing number of writing faculty in the two-year college teacher-scholar-activist

The Political Turn and the Two-Year College  163 movement. Further, I see this work growing out of the social turn and Bizzell’s (2009) framing of our disciplinary and professional work as labor that can bring substantive changes in our society. Bizzell wrote that at the beginning of the social turn, she and other teacher-scholars were trying to meet students where they were—not to merely flunk them out for entering postsecondary study without the necessary language, dialects, and discourses already learned. These teachers weren’t “bent on saving the world,” but teaching writing to all students meant learning to address their needs (175). Bizzell’s historical contextualization of the social turn allows us to see the foundations in our own field for the political turn for which the editors are calling. However, there is a disconnection between the two- and four-year college. Steeped in exclusivity, graduate programs are often intent on replicating graduate students for research-intensive institutions rather than the teaching-intensive work of the two-year college (MLA 2011). This long-standing orientation means that two-year college work is invisible. Presently, beyond a few outlier courses and programs, graduate programs do not prepare graduate students to teach in community colleges (Calhoon-Dillahunt et al. 2017; Jensen 2017; Jensen and Toth 2017; Toth et al. 2017). Graduate programs do not teach students about the history and institutional missions, the student populations, or how to teach first-generation students and/or racially diverse students (Jensen 2017; Jensen and Toth 2017). There is little instruction available for navigating teaching writing and applying it to both the transfer and student missions. The same is true in basic writing and developmental education. Barbara Gleason (2006) found less than 25 courses in the entire country that teach basic writing theory and practice. There are four graduate programs (three PhDs and one Education Specialist) in developmental education (Emily Suh, personal communication March 15, 2019). What’s more, poorly prepared and marginally qualified instructors are often hired as adjuncts, sometimes at the last minute, to teach students who have more instructional needs than traditionally prepared and often middle-class students at four-year colleges and universities. All of this is true as community colleges and developmental education have withstood withering criticism from the Education Industrial Complex (EIC) and state legislatures (Adler-Kassner 2017; Suh and Jensen 2017). Essentially, we have not prepared our profession to undertake the intellectual and instructional tasks needed. These are political and ethical issues. They speak to our failure as a profession and as a discipline. The two-year college as an institutional type rapidly expanded in the 1960s and 1970s. Part of the reason for this was an enormous public investment in education. The ideological foundation for this rapid expansion can be found in the Truman Commission’s six volume report Higher Education for American Democracy published in 1947 (Zook 1947). The commission members helped to rhetorically position the

164  Darin L. Jensen historic mission of the community college to aim at democracy, equity, and the public good. The introduction to this collection begins with asking the question: What does democracy mean? This question is particularly important to the 1,103 two-year colleges in the United States; it is, in fact, one of our origin stories (AACC 2019; Jensen 2017). The Truman Commission articulated that democracy meant access to equitable education for all citizens as a public good, as a way to preserve and strengthen democracy and as a means of building a strong economy. The commission wrote: “[…] higher education must inspire its graduates with high social aims as well as endow them with specialized information and technical skill. Teaching and learning must be invested with public purpose” (Zook 1947, 11). They go on: “It becomes, then, an urgent task for our scholars and our teachers to restate and revivify the ideals of democracy” (13). The report is filled with language defining a democratic society as an educated society invested in public good. And the word revivify is important. The authors of the report did not see democracy as constant. The etymology of “vivify” from the Latin has connotations of making alive and restoring to life. It requires tending and attention. The community college is positioned as the institution that does this work. The language, sadly, seems almost quaint in the second decade of the 21st century when our language surrounding education is usually reduced to mere job preparation. The conservative restoration and implementation of neoliberal ideologies and manufactured austerity have created a democratic crisis and an identity crisis for community colleges (Shor 1992; Sullivan 2017).

The Political Turn in the Two-Year College I have news for my four-year colleagues: two-year college teacher-­scholaractivists have been working on their own version of a political turn for some time. John Lovas’ (2002) oft-cited Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) address, “All Good Writing ­Develops at the Edge of Risk,” called on four-year colleges to recognize the inequities of scholarship and resources in our field. Jeff Andelora (2013) coined the term teacher-scholar-activist as a way of articulating the public activism needed to serve our students and profession. Patrick Sullivan (2015) articulated that identity more fully in his article “The Two-Year College Teacher-Scholar-Activist.” That same year, the Two-Year College English Association (TYCA) published its third set of guidelines for teacher preparation taking an activist stance calling on graduate programs to take up their ethical responsibilities in preparing future two-year college teachers (Calhoon-Dillahunt et al. 2017). In ­January of 2017 as Trump was inaugurated, Christie Toth, Patrick Sullivan, and I founded the Teacher-Scholar-Activist blog, which has often promoted the work of two-year college professionals (Jensen

The Political Turn and the Two-Year College  165 et. al 2017). In fact, Joanne Baird-Giordano’s introduction to the opening session of the very first TYCA national conference on March 13, 2019, was titled “Starting the Conversation: Teacher-Scholar Activism and Access to Higher Education” (Baird-Giordano 2019). In short, there is a teacher-scholar-activist turn in two-year college writing studies and as this volume considers and calls for the political turn in our discipline and profession, I invite readers and my four-year sisters and brothers to join us and learn from us. After all, we are the teaching majority (Hassel and Baird-Giordano 2013).

Why Two-Year Colleges Matter Two-year colleges are the site of roughly half of all first-year writing instruction. Even though we are a minority in publishing and scholarship, are seen by some as lesser institutions, suffer from uneven and incomplete professionalization and a lack of resources, we teach the most courses. There are more than 27,000 of us laboring who teach writing, reading, developmental writing, literature, study skills, and more (BLS 2016). A huge number of us are contingent faculty, gigging from school to school attempting to string enough classes together to make rent (AAUP 2009). Sadly, we employ more contingent faculty than fulltime faculty (CCSSE 2014; Baird-Giordano 2019). Those of us blessed enough to be full time usually teach a five-class per semester load. Ten classes per year. But it is not merely our numbers or the quantity of courses we teach. It is who we teach that is so important to the political turn and to democracy. There are more than 7 million students enrolled in the community college, representing 41% of all postsecondary students (AACC 2018). Two-year colleges enroll 56% of Native American students, 52% of Hispanic students, 43% of black students, and 40% of Asian Pacific ­Islander Students (AACC 2018). Further, community colleges enroll 36% of first-generation students and significant numbers of veteran ­students and students with disabilities (AACC 2019). Toth et al. (2019) assert “Given the students these institutions enroll, the underrepresentation of two-year colleges is not just an abstract disciplinary concern—it is a matter of social justice.” Indeed, serving these students is a matter of social justice; it can be the work of anti-racism, class consciousness, and democracy. In addition, the majority of developmental education classes, including basic writing courses are taught at two-year colleges. Community colleges are often in urban and rural locations where four-year colleges and universities cannot easily reach, making the two-year college the only point of access for postsecondary education for some students (Baird-­ Giordano 2019). Our students face significant barriers to their degree, whether it be location, work, life circumstances, or under-preparation

166  Darin L. Jensen (Baird-Giordano 2019). Any political turn which fails to make visible the two-year college also fails to bring democratic equitable opportunity to all students, especially those who are vulnerable to continuing structural violence, inequity, classism, and racism. What then can four-year colleges and universities, especially graduate programs, do so that the most vulnerable are not taught be the least prepared?

Equity-Centered Partnerships One answer is equity-centered partnerships. I define these as reciprocal local agreements and programs wherein two-year college English departments and four-year colleges and universities, especially graduate programs, collaborate in creating meaningful, sustainable reforms that aid in the political turn and teacher-scholar-activist movement (Jensen 2017). Obviously, this work will not be done out of altruism. I frame this work as democratic, drawing from Harbour and Dewey. Clifford Harbour (2014) in John Dewey and the Future of Community College Education embraces John Dewey because the educational philosopher was trying to “explain the kind of education needed to advance American Democracy in a period distinguished by rapid technological change” and by the astonishing income inequality in the period before and during the Great Depression (7). The author points to Dewey’s critique of school systems “failing to prepare students to think critically about the very difficult problems their society was facing—unemployment, poverty, and the inequitable distribution of wealth and income” (143). Harbour argues for an adoption of Dewey’s normative vision of democratically centered education to counteract the economic vision being predicated by outside forces. The work of equity-centered partnerships will help achieve ­Harbour’s normative democratic vision of the community (­Harbour 2014). These programs should include preparation of graduate students for the two-year college classroom and the distinct challenges of that institution type, creating transfer programs and curricular intersections to help vulnerable students succeed in our classes and share in the production of and contribute to knowledge. These partnerships need to be reflected in our national professional and disciplinary work, too. Chris Gallagher (2002) in Radical Departures arrives at important conclusions in examining P-12 partnerships with universities. He notes university professors have “much to learn from our colleagues in the public schools—about teaching, about learning, about writing and (maybe especially, at this political moment) about developing institutional literacy to combat reductive understandings of our work” (178). He goes on to note how the story of composition is usually the story of university composition, citing Irvin Peckham’s work on the history of composition as being a history of the “upper classes” (179). Gallagher sees this “class-based academic economy” as part of a long history of

The Political Turn and the Two-Year College  167 composition and rhetoric’s “vexed place/space within English studies and the academy in general” (179). What’s more, Gallagher sees as his “most important conclusion” that “even where there is a strong English education presence, teacher preparation is rarely a significant or visible part of English curricula” (181). We must, I think, extrapolate these very same notions about the fraught relationship between P-12 instructors and university professionals to the relationship between community college writing professionals and university graduate programs. Much of the last 40 years has been spent by two-year college English instructors articulating the distinct profession of teaching English in the two-year college (Reynolds 2005; TYCA 2006; Andelora 2005, 2007, 2008). TYCA fleshed out the profession and its needs through three sets of guidelines detailing preparation over that time, and scholars have written on the subject. Moreover, scholars have pointed out the inequity and invisibility faced by two-year college English studies professionals— that half of the work is performed at the community college, but that extraordinarily little by comparison is written about it (TYCA 2006; Calhoon-Dillahunt et. al 2015; Grubb and Norton 2002; Lovas 2002). And practitioner-scholars like Hassel and Giordano have called for a recentering of Writing Studies to reflect the teaching majority—that is, to reflect the actual material circumstances of the profession which have been ignored by the “upper classes” of university professors (Hassel and Baird-Giordano 2013). Because we teach some of the same courses and are trained in the same departments, the connection between the two-year college professional and the university professional should be strong and clear. In Gallagher’s work, he sees the “omissions (inadvertent or not) as symptomatic of the invisibility of public-school teachers” to the field of composition (179). As I’ve noted, this same sort of invisibility or failure to acknowledge the community college teacher is well covered by research. As ­Gallagher argues, the political moment makes this even more pressing—and that was nearly 15 years ago. Meanwhile, austerity and ­neoliberal logics instantiated through the completion agenda have become even more ­omnipresent in community colleges. Reductive understandings of education, which have contributed to an attack on developmental education and the broader educational mission of the community college, have national momentum (Gardner 2019, Kahlenberg 2015, 2018). Yet recent important books in the field, for example, Composition in the Age of Austerity edited by Welch and Scott (2016), or Very Like a Whale by White et al. (2015), make no mention of community colleges. This fact is important because issues of austerity and assessment are paramount at community colleges. Leaving them out silences half of English faculty—tellingly, the half who serve the most vulnerable students. Labor issues and adjunctification are severe problems in the community college. Yet the Indianapolis Resolution and the CCC

168  Darin L. Jensen article discussing it make no mention of community colleges (Cox et al. 2016). To be fair, Contingency, Exploitation, and Solidarity: ­L abor and Action in English Composition (Kahn et al. 2017) contains two chapters authored by community college faculty. But sometimes, collections, committees, and initiatives have only one representative from two-year colleges. This fact can feel like tokenism rather than a seat at the table. For the most part, community college professionals remain invisible in vital conversations at this moment. And this invisibility is normalized. While equity-centered partnerships are not a panacea for all these ills, sustained, local, program-to-program collaboration of community college and university English programs would be a significant means to begin the necessary reconceptualization of a hierarchy that serves neither set of professionals. Most importantly in terms of this book’s call to action, the maintenance of the status quo of hierarchy undermines the normative democratic vision of education that is under sustained pressure at all levels (Harbour 2014; Sullivan 2017). It should be clear that this work is a necessary part of a political turn already underway within the two-year college teacher-scholar-activist movement. Below I detail some specific examples of these partnerships. It is my hope that they can be studied, extended, interrogated, and replicated. Scholarship Scholarship is the production and dissemination of knowledge. It is one of the major markers of promotion and tenure in the university system. Few two-year colleges, though, have scholarship requirements as part of a tenure or continued employment scheme. These facts create an imbalance in the prioritization of scholarship. Nonetheless, two-year college writing studies professionals have created a significant and growing body of knowledge. These material realities create tension in the creation of equitable scholarly partnerships. First, and most important, community colleges are not sites of study. They are sites of partnership. Write with us, not about us. Research-­ intensive universities have resources community colleges do not, e.g., research funds, larger libraries, technology for research, etc. Community college writing professionals have deep experience in the classroom and with managing high teaching loads. Second, writing with two-year college writing studies professionals helps to raise the visibility and reputation of our institutions and work. I know that co-authorship does not count in the game of promotion and tenure in the same way as single authorship, but pushing on that outdated system is part of the political turn. When four-year writing studies professionals are willing to put that system to the test and call for a more ethical accounting for research, progress is made. Third, give credence to shorter pieces of writing. We frequently teach 5/5 loads. Privileging the book-length monograph

The Political Turn and the Two-Year College  169 ignores our material realities. Part of the political turn toward fostering democratic education must be a reimagining of the structure of recognition and reward designed to favor four-year colleges and universities. Partnerships Partnerships are key to equity. One kind of partnership that will help is centered on preparing graduate students to teach in two-year college contexts. There are a number of these programs, but I will comment on two recent examples. Jensen and Ely (2017) describe an externship model of preparing graduate students at Metropolitan Community College. This partnership between the University of Nebraska-Omaha and the college allowed graduate students to co-teach in a basic writing classroom with an experienced two-year college instructor. Karen Uehling at Boise State has just begun a similar partnership with the College of Western Idaho (Uehling, personal communication, March 5, 2019). A key place to grow this kind of work is to bring two-year college professors into graduate programs. We can teach basic writing, two-year college writing studies, and more, in collaboration with professors. Recognizing our epistemic authority is a political act (Larson 2018). The externship, by sending graduate students to the site of basic writing instruction at the two-year college and by centering mentoring between the graduate student and the two-year college faculty member recognizes the epistemic authority of the two-year college faculty. Another kind of equity-centered partnership I see as an exemplar is the transfer agreement and curricular partnership between Salt Lake Community College and the University of Utah. Toth et al. (2019) discuss this program in detail in “Two-Year College Teacher-Scholar-Activism: Reconstructing the Disciplinary Matrix of Writing Studies.” In 2015, the two institutions worked to create a partnership centered on transfer and have formed an articulation agreement. This work has been part of the process of SLCC creating a writing studies associate degree, the first in the nation. The authors note that the “transfer degree articulates directly in the WRS major and includes several lower-division courses co-­developed across […] institutions” (Toth et al. n.p.). On top of that, the university has worked “with a team of transfer student collaborators” to create “two new upper-division ‘bridge’ courses offered by the University of Utah on SLCC’s campus that students can take prior to transfer” (Toth et al. n.p.). This initiative is innovative and serves both institutions and their students. Even more impressive is that the two institutions have crafted a vision statement with seven principles to preserve equity (Toth et al. n.p.). The principles are as follows: Recognize Inequities, Be Colleagues, Value Difference, Center Students, Address Material Conditions, Education for Social Justice, and Engage with Communities (Toth et al. n.p.). Partnerships such as this are exactly the kind of equity-centered models that need

170  Darin L. Jensen to be disseminated nationally. And most importantly for the context of this collection, this partnership demonstrates the political turn in a way that addresses inequity, provides students with opportunities, and serves a democratic notion of education. Epistemic Authority, Professional Autonomy, Equity, and Respect These equity-centered partnerships rely on what Griffiths (2017) calls professional autonomy and what Larson (2018) calls epistemic authority. These two scholars examine what two-year college writing professionals offer to the political turn, namely, our professional competency and experience in teaching students—all students in our open admissions and democratic foundation—while managing the competing demands and ideologies of fast capitalism. Griffiths (2017) asserts that the “activation of our identities as teachers and scholars […] can help us regain legitimacy of the profession of two-year college writing instructors” (46). While I might quibble with the word “regain” here as I would argue that our legitimacy has always been contested, I agree with Griffiths’ insistence that the “visibility of this knowledge is the precise requirement faculty need to better position themselves and their departments within their institutions and in the context of a reductive national conversation on public education” (46). Here is a vital point. The visibility of our knowledge is important, and it is especially needed if this political turn is to challenge reductive notions of education and economics that have become common currency in fast capitalism. Griffiths emphasizes the point, noting that when instructors “engage [in] scholarship within their institutions and articulate their specialized set of knowledge as activists for the field, they better position themselves to advocate for departmentaland institutional-level change that improves student learning and reinforces their own professional status as writing instructors” (62). It is our specialized knowledge which is so valuable in authentic collaborative partnership with our four-year comrades. To build on Griffiths’ work, Holly Larson (2018) uses standpoint theory through a feminist theoretical framework to “understand how two-year English faculty have historically been overlooked as generators of critical knowledge” (113). She argues that two-year writing faculty provide an “inverse” way of knowing to that of our university ­counterparts—a way of knowing that doesn’t have the historical pedigree and baggage of universities. She goes on to explain that this historicized way of knowing typical of university faculty reifies itself leaving the work of the two-year college unacknowledged and invisible. Larson concludes from her analysis using feminist standpoint theory that “two-year English faculty’s social materiality resists and challenges the dominant standpoint theory ‘handed down’ by university compositionists exposing

The Political Turn and the Two-Year College  171 the limitations and […] social and cultural arrogance of deeming basic and struggling students’ writing unworthy of theory and research” (Larson 2018, 114). Like Griffiths, she then positions her argument as a call to action, asking two-year college writing professionals to take up the work of knowledge construction. She points out that as long as the “dominant standpoint theory of composition remains squarely focused on the material reality of university educational life and not on the fragile academic existence of community college students, […]the next generation of composition professors […] may end up perpetuating” the same hierarchical and reductive discourses in which we’ve been locked for decades (114). The point these scholars make is that two-year college writing instructors must embrace a professional identity and disrupt the tradition of centering knowledge in the university. We have professional and epistemic authority. Our experience and scholarship are worth taking up and collaborating with now and in the future. Two-year college teacher-scholar-activists are taking up that identity along with the labor and responsibility that goes with it. Fouryear university and college professionals have an opportunity to make professional equity and respect part of the political turn. Doing so will be beneficial for all of us in the classroom and institutions—students, faculty, and graduate students. This vision of equity is worth pursuing.

Future Thinking This chapter probably won’t convince every reader to look down the hill and get out of the tower to go and find the two-year college in their community. Nevertheless, I hope it has made clear that the community college has a long history of ideological engagement with democracy and equity. That history is not well known in composition and rhetoric/ writing studies. Both two-year and four-year institutions are poorer for this continued ignorance. Moreover, the democratic possibilities of the two-year college have been assailed by the conservative restoration and the rising implementation of neoliberal ideologies acted out in various schemes. This violence to the democratic ideal of the community college endangers the dream of open access and education; it reifies inequalities; it is speeding up the instrumentalization of education for all of us at every level of instruction. All told, just as the idea of the public good has been under sustained national pressure, so has the notion of democratic education, especially for students at two-year colleges. Two-year college teacher-scholar-activists have been making a sustained effort to mobilize through equitable partnerships, work professional organizations, writing in journals, and more to respond to these pressures. While not all two-year college professionals take on this identity (likely not even a majority), the work being done here is a nascent step toward a unified intellectual and ethical response to the EIC. We

172  Darin L. Jensen have some excellent allies in four-year institutions and in organizations like CCCC who are helping us to do this work. But it is not enough. We are still not visible, and we are certainly not equitable. For the political turn to be a serious movement, it must reckon with how it engages with two-year colleges in this labor. I suggest a model of solidarity in equity-centered partnerships. It is imperative to understand the political turn as necessarily inclusive of two-year colleges, where labor conditions are abysmal, where the EIC has already made much progress toward instrumentalizing education through pathways and other wrong-headed reforms, where shared governance is under attack and ofttimes absent, and where the faculty are unevenly and incompletely professionalized. The political turn must be enacted in partnership with the teacher-scholar-activist movement in two-year colleges. Equity-centered pedagogical and institutional partnerships can provide capital, social, and material, as well as leverage for reestablishing the democratic equitable ideal of the Truman Commission’s Higher Education for American Democracy. By partnering with us, four-year colleagues will have the advantage of our epistemic authority and our deep teaching experience with the most vulnerable students. And pragmatically, our students can be future writing studies majors— who come from first-generation, working-class, linguistic, and racial diversity. Students will be well served by equity-centered partnerships. For more than 100 years, a hierarchical relationship has been rhetorically positioned between the university and the two-year college. The political turn must reimagine and challenge that hierarchy and must integrate and partner with the two-year teacher-scholar-activist movement to be successful. Anything less is a failure of our democratic ideals.

References American Association of Community Colleges. “Fast Facts 2018.” Accessed March 10, 2019. www.aacc.nche.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/2018-FastFacts.pdf American Association of University Professors. 2009. “Who are the Part-time Faculty.” Accessed March 15, 2019. www.aaup.org/article/who-are-parttime-faculty#.XQeIXtNKjfY Andelora, Jeffrey. 2005. “The Teacher/Scholar: Reconstructing Our Professional Identity in Two-Year Colleges.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College 32 (3): 307–322. ———. 2007. “The Professionalization of Two-Year College English Faculty: 1950–1990.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College 35 (1): 6–19. ———. 2008. “Forging a National Identity: TYCA and the Two-Year College Teacher-Scholar.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College 35 (4): 350–362. ———. 2013. “Teacher/Scholar/Activist: A Response to Keith Kroll’s ‘The End of the Community College English Profession.’” Teaching English in the TwoYear College 40 (3): 302–307.

The Political Turn and the Two-Year College  173 Baird-Giordano, Joanne. 13 March 2019. Opening Address for 1st Annual Two Year College Association Conference. Bizzell, Patricia. 2009. “Composition Studies Saves the World!.” Profession 1: 94–98. Bureau of Labor Statistics. 2016. Occupational Employment Statistics: English Language and Literature Teachers, Postsecondary. Bureau of Labor Statistics. www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes251123.htm. Calhoon-Dillahunt, Carolyn, Darin L. Jensen, Sarah Z. Johnson, Howard Tinberg, and Christie Toth. 2017. “TYCA Guidelines for Preparing Teachers of English in the Two-Year College.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College 45 (1): 8–19. Center for Community College Student Engagement. 2014. “Contingent Commitments: Bringing Part- Time Faculty into Focus.” https://pullias.usc.edu/ download/contingent-commitments-bringing-part-time-faculty-focus/ Cox, Anicca, Timothy R. Dougherty, Seth Kahn, Michelle LaFrance, and Amy Lynch-Biniek. 2016. “The Indianapolis Resolution: Responding to TwentyFirst-Century Exigencies/Political Economies of Composition ­Labor.” College Composition and Communication 68 (1): 38–67. Gallagher, Chris W. 2002. Radical Departures: Composition and Progressive Pedagogy. Refiguring English Studies. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English. Gardner, Lee. 2019. “Most Americans Think Government Support for Public Colleges Is Rising or Flat. They’re Wrong.” Chronicle of Higher Education 65 (24): 1. Gleason, Barbara. 2006. “Reasoning the Need: Graduate Education and Basic Writing.” Journal of Basic Writing 25 (2): 49–75. Griffiths, Brett. 2017. “Professional Autonomy and Teacher-Scholar-Activists in Two-Year Colleges: Preparing New Faculty to Think Institutionally.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College 45 (1): 47–68. Grubb, W. Norton, ed. 2002. Honored but Invisible: An Inside Look at Teaching in Community Colleges. New York: Routledge. Harbour, Clifford P. 2014. John Dewey and the Future of Community College Education. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing USA. Hassel, Holly, and Joanne Baird Giordano. 2013. “Occupy Writing Studies: Rethinking College Composition for the Needs of the Teaching Majority.” College Composition and Communication 61 (1): 117–139. Jensen, Darin L. 2017. “Tilting at Windmills: Refiguring Graduate Education in English to Prepare Future Two-Year College Professionals.” PhD diss. Digital Commons @ University of Nebraska – Lincoln. Jensen, Darin L., and Susan Ely. 2017. “A Partnership Teaching Externship ­Program: A Model That Makes Do.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College 44 (3): 247–263. Jensen, Darin L., and Christie Toth. 2017. “Unknown Knowns: The Past, Present, and Future of Graduate Preparation for Two-Year College English Faculty.” College English 79 (6): 561–592. Jensen, Darin L., Christie Toth, and Patrick Sullivan. 2017. Teacher-­S cholarActivist. Teacher-scholar-activist.com. Kahlenberg, Richard D. 2015. “How Higher Education Funding Shortchanges Community Colleges.” https://tcf.org/content/report/how-higher-educationfunding-shortchanges-community-colleges/?session=1.

174  Darin L. Jensen Kahlenberg, Richard D., Robert Shireman, Kimberly Quick, and Tariq Habash. 2018. “Policy Strategies for Pursuing Adequate Funding of Community Colleges.” https://tcf.org/content/report/policy-strategies-pursuing-adequatefunding-community-colleges/. Larson, Holly. 2018. “Epistemic Authority in Composition Studies: Tenuous Relationship between Two-Year English Faculty and Knowledge Production.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College 46 (2): 109–136. Modern Language Association. 2011. “Rethinking the Master’s Degree in English for a New Century”. www.mla.org/Resources/Career/Career-Resources/ Rethinking-the-Master-s-Degree-in-English-for-a-New-Century. Reynolds, Mark. 2005. “Two-Year College Teachers as Knowledge Makers.” In The Profession of English in the Two-Year College, edited by Mark Reynolds and Sylvia Holladay-Hicks, 1–15. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann Educational Books. Reynolds, Mark, and Sylvia A. Holladay, eds. 2005. The Profession of English in the Two-Year College. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann Educational Books. Shor, Ira. 1992. Culture Wars: School and Society in the Conservative Restoration. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Suh, Emily, and Darin L. Jensen. 2017. “Building Professional Autonomy: A Way Forward in Hard Times.” Journal of Developmental Education 41 (6): 28–29. Sullivan, Patrick. 2015. “The Two-Year College Teacher-Scholar-Activist.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College 42 (4): 327. ———. 2017. Economic Inequality, Neoliberalism, and the American Community College. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan/Springer Nature. Toth, Christie M., Patrick Sullivan, and Carolyn Calhoon-Dillahunt. Forthcoming 2019. “Two-Year College Teacher-Scholar-Activism: Reconstructing the Disciplinary Matrix of Writing Studies.” College Composition and Communication. Two-Year College English Association (TYCA). 2006. “Guidelines for the Academic Preparation of English Faculty at Two-Year Colleges.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College 34 (1): 7–19. ———. 2016. “TYCA Guidelines for Preparing Teachers of English in the ­Two-Year College.” National Council of Teachers of English. www.ncte.org/ library/NCTEFiles/Groups/TYCA/GuidelinesPrep2YCEngFac_REVISED. pdf. Uehling, Karen. 2019. Personal Communication with Darin Jensen. 25 ­February 2019. Welch, Nancy, and Tony Scott, eds. 2016. Composition in the Age of Austerity. Boulder, CO: Utah State University Press/University Press of Colorado. White, Edward M., Norbert Elliot, and Irvin Peckham. 2015. Very Like A Whale: The Assessment of Writing Programs. Boulder: Utah State University Press/University Press of Colorado. Zook, George Frederick. 1947. Higher Education for American Democracy: A Report, Vol. 1. Washington: US Government Printing Office.

Part III

Taking the Political Turn

12 How Does It Feel to be a Problem at the 9/11 Museum? Tamara Issak

I placed my hand on the ledge of the memorial and traced the names of the victims of the September 11th attacks etched into stone. I peered downward at water descending into a deep pool—a memorial constructed in the same place where the Twin Towers stood. Recalling September 11, 2001, and the days and weeks that followed, I felt an overwhelming sense of grief. I was in high school in New Jersey, about 20 miles from New York City, when the terrorist attacks happened, and I immediately witnessed the repercussions for Muslims. Like my classmates, I was terrified by what I witnessed in the news. At school, class discussions focused on the necessity of punishing those who committed these atrocities. I remember one of my peers said, “We need to kill all Muslims. Wipe them out.” I looked around, and my classmates were either silent or nodding in agreement. I was the only Muslim in the room. In our New Jersey community, mosques were on high alert after threats were sent and homes were vandalized. While standing in line to purchase tickets and enter the 9/11 ­Museum, my brother asked me, “Why are people looking at us?” Going to the 9/11 Memorial & Museum and reliving that day is painful for anyone. Being visibly Muslim and wearing a hijab at Ground Zero adds another layer to the experience. That day, I felt I understood Du Bois’s (1994) definition of double consciousness—the “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others” (2). I was hyper-aware of my surroundings and how my movements and expressions could be interpreted. I wondered if these museumgoers grouped my brother and me with the perpetrators as followers of Islam. Officially opened to the public in May 2014, the 9/11 Memorial & Museum is built where the Twin Towers stood—the site of the Ground Zero attacks. In the 13 years after the attacks, politicians and the public engaged in disputes about what should be built in that place. Some called for a memorial park. Others wanted to rebuild the Twin Towers. Despite the variety of proposals, plans eventually moved in the direction of constructing a memorial and a museum. In those days, months, and years following the 9/11 attacks, intense uncertainty, fear, and anxiety spread across the United States. The

178  Tamara Issak U.S. government commenced the War on Terror and passed the Patriot Act, forever changing the U.S. political and social environment. The ­A merican Muslim community experienced severe backlash. Immediately following 9/11, American Muslims and Arabs were scapegoated and targeted as many Americans viewed them as enemies within. Now, almost 20 years later, President Trump is repeating stereotypes about Muslims through tweets and carefully crafted soundbites, referring to Muslims and Islam as violent. On his path to the presidency, he used ­Islamophobia to rile up his supporters; in one speech, he drew thunderous applause by “calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” (Stokols and Strauss 2015). After his first weeks in office, he issued a travel ban on people from seven Muslim majority countries: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen (Shear 2017). By targeting particular countries, Trump’s rhetoric grouped entire nations of people as enemies. Whether or not this ban is ever fully enacted, the effects of Trump’s words remain. A clear message is sent to Americans that Muslims are a threat and should not be in the country. In other speeches and interviews, Trump recycled debunked stories about Muslims cheering in Jersey City and Paterson after the 9/11 attacks. During one speech, he said, “Hey, I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down. And I watched in Jersey City, N.J., where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering” (Dwyer 2015). Experts and reporters did not find any evidence of Muslims celebrating and have concluded that these were false rumors (Dwyer 2015). Trump’s damaging and dangerous rhetoric remains in people’s memories, however, and serves to unite his voting base against Muslims. In 2015, anti-Muslim hate became much louder, more widespread, and more violent. According to a study at California State University, San Bernardino, there was a 78% increase in hate crimes against ­A merican Muslims in 2015 (Lichtblau 2016)—the highest recorded level of hate crimes against American Muslims since 2001. Researchers attribute this increase not only to terrorist attacks but also to Trump’s Islamophobic rhetoric. According to Brian Levin, the director for the Study of Hate and Extremism at the California State University, San Bernardino, “the frequency of anti-Muslim violence appeared to have increased immediately after some of Mr. Trump’s most incendiary comments” (Lichtblau 2016). As we approach the 2020 elections, many politicians are sure to use Islamophobic rhetoric to garner more attention and votes. According to a 2018 report by the New America Foundation, election cycles are tied to increased anti-Muslim activity (Hussain and Saleh 2018). ­Often, the expectation is that anti-Muslim activity spikes after terrorist attacks, but the data shows that there is more of a correlation between anti-­Muslim rhetoric and anti-Muslim incidents than there is between terrorist attacks and anti-Muslim incidents (Hussain and Saleh 2018).

How Does It Feel to be a Problem at the 9/11 Museum?  179 There have been many cases of anti-Muslim violence in recent years. In February 2015, three Muslim students in Chapel Hill, North ­Carolina, were shot dead by their neighbor. The Chapel Hill police declared the killings were “motivated by an ongoing neighbor dispute over parking” even though the neighbor expressed his anti-religious views on social media (Talbot 2015). More recently, in June 2017, another Muslim student in a hijab was beaten to death and dumped in a pond in Fairfax, Virginia. The Fairfax County police described it as a road rage incident even though the targeted student was walking on the side of the road and not driving (Elliot 2017). It can be difficult to classify violence as a hate crime, but taken together with numerous other attacks, these cases demonstrate a pattern of anti-Muslim violence that is hard to dismiss as coincidental. It is not only Muslims who are targeted; it is also people who are believed to be Muslim or are defending Muslims. In February 2017, two Indian men were shot dead in a bar by a man who thought they were Iranian. He reportedly used racial slurs and shouted, “Get out of my country” (Schmidt 2018). In May 2017, two men in Portland were killed while intervening to protect two young women, one in a hijab, from a man yelling anti-Muslim slurs (Haag and Fortin 2017). There are many more reported incidents, and, undoubtedly, there are incidents that go unreported. Islamophobia is a problem, and politicians rely on Islamophobic rhetoric to stir voters’ emotions and garner more support. Given the rise of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab racism, it is crucial for composition and rhetoric scholars to examine Islamophobic rhetoric. 9/11 is often used to ­bolster Islamophobic rhetoric. While scholarship has attended to the Park51 debate and Ground Zero (Ivanova 2013; Pierce 2014; Earle 2015) and scholars in related fields have focused on the 9/11 ­Memorial & ­Museum (Sturken 2015, 2016; Senie 2016; Sodaro 2018), this work has not focused on representations of Islam and Muslims in the 9/11 ­Memorial & Museum. In this essay, I argue that the 9/11 M ­ emorial & Museum oversimplifies history, conflates Muslim identity with terrorism, and presents an “us” versus “them” narrative. As a result, the 9/11 Memorial & Museum intensifies Islamophobic rhetoric that feeds into our current political moment.

9/11 Memorial & Museum As it stands now, the repository in the 9/11 Memorial & Museum contains approximately 14,000 still-unidentified or unclaimed remains. In addition to its function as a memorial and cemetery, it also serves as an educational space. According to the 9/11 Memorial & Museum website, “The 9/11 Memorial Museum serves as the country’s principal institution concerned with exploring the implications of the events of 9/11, documenting the impact of those events and exploring 9/11’s continuing

180  Tamara Issak significance” (“Museum”). This multifunctioning space causes tension for curators and visitors because a memorial serves a different purpose than a historical museum/educational space. The week that the 9/11 Memorial & Museum opened to family members of victims and rescue workers, New York Times reporter Alan Feuer (2014) described New Yorkers’ ambivalence about the museum not only as “a mixture of survivors’ pride (‘Don’t tell me what I saw’) and emotional fatigue (‘I don’t want to see it anymore’)” but also as an effect of “the museum’s own complicated mission.” A firefighter whose son died on September 11th expressed a similar perspective in an interview: “Look, it’s not the Natural History Museum … I know plenty of guys who won’t go down there because they were there for months when it was Dante’s inferno. The memories are just too much. They simply won’t go back” (Feuer 2014). A New York Times survey asked readers: “Will you visit the National September 11 Memorial Museum?” Of the 150 or so answers, a majority were negative: “I don’t think so,” “not likely,” “no way,” “not a chance” (Feuer 2014). If survivors or victims do not want to revisit the space and the painful memories, who is the audience for the museum? The museum is built with the families of the victims in mind as there are special places inside reserved only for family. But to this question of who the museum is for, the chief executive of the memorial and museum foundation said, That’s why we built this museum, at the end of the day. It is to make sure that our children’s children’s children know what this country went through on 9/11, and equally as important, know how we came together to help one another with absolutely limitless compassion. (Farrell 2014) It seems, then, that the focus of the museum is on historicizing 9/11 for posterity. In his review of the museum, Holland Cotter (2014), New York Times art critic, writes: Was it going to be primarily a historical document, a monument to the dead or a theme-park-style tourist attraction? How many historical museums are built around an active repository of human remains, still being added to? How many cemeteries have a $24 entrance fee and sell souvenir T-shirts? How many theme parks bring you, repeatedly, to tears? These are difficult questions that help us to understand the complex and contentious space of the 9/11 Memorial & Museum. In her analysis of the enterprise, American Studies scholar Marita Sturken (2015) raises similar questions about the complications that arise from having a museum that “construct[s] a political narrative of the meanings of 9/11”

How Does It Feel to be a Problem at the 9/11 Museum?  181 with all the elements one would expect to see at a museum—an entrance fee, a café, a souvenir shop—alongside a memorial space which houses human remains (474). These different purposes of the museum make the space difficult to read and understand.

Constituting an “Other” The 9/11 Memorial & Museum is a place where American identity is defined and consolidated—what Gregory Clark (2004) refers to as a rhetorical landscape (13). A rhetorical landscape is an iconic place where visitors can have a tangible shared experience of national identity. Clark explains that “the rhetorical power of a national culture is wielded not only by public discourse, but also by public experiences” (4). Visiting the 9/11 Memorial & Museum is a powerful public experience in which visitors grieve collectively and feel a sense of “communion and community” in Kenneth Burke’s terms (Clark 2004, 14). Although rhetorical landmarks have a unifying power, they also separate people. In the case of the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, an American “us” is presented in contrast to an un-American/Muslim “them.” An us versus them approach to 9/11 is evident in the educational materials offered by the 9/11 Memorial & Museum. Lesson plans on the website are included for teachers who want to talk to their students about September 11th. In a unit on community and conflict, a semester-long lesson plan is titled, “Exploring Afghani Culture Through Literature” (“­Exploring”). In this unit, students read The Kite Runner and A ­Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini; they are asked to consider “how literature written by an Afghani author offers insights into Afghani culture leading up to 9/11.” Students are asked to respond to questions such as “What are specific characteristics of Afghani culture?” and “How is it similar to and different from the role of women in American culture?” The use of fiction in this lesson plan—which is not even representative of Afghan culture—furthers the idea of Muslims as foreign, particularly with its focus on the status of women. Carrillo Rowe (2004) explains that “[a]n integral part of defining free Americans is by contrast to those who are non-American and unfree,” and so by having American students look at Afghan culture and contrasting the role of women in ­A fghan culture to the role of women in American culture, the definition of being American is defined as not Afghan (124). This lesson plan entails the pursuit of “understanding others” for the purpose of reestablishing the hierarchy of American culture above other cultures including Afghan culture. This approach not only defines an “us” that is different from an exotic “them,” it obscures people’s understanding of this area of the world and reproduces the political argument for the United States’ involvement in Afghanistan, namely the mission to free Afghan women and to save and civilize the people.

182  Tamara Issak

Islamic Extremism vs. Violent Extremism Even though violent extremism is a national and global problem, at the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, violent extremism is presented as a Muslim problem. There is a conflation in the museum of violent extremists with Muslims. The historical exhibition section of the museum features The Rise of Al Qaeda, a documentary film which has drawn criticism. An interfaith advisory panel of clergy who had viewed the museum “overwhelmingly took strong exception to the film, believing some of the terminology in it casts aspersions on all Muslims, and requested changes. But the museum declined to make any changes” (Otterman 2014). To express his disapproval of the film, Shaikh Mostafa Elazabawy, the imam on the interfaith panel reviewing the film, resigned in March 2014. According to Elazabawy, “Unsophisticated visitors who do not understand the difference between Al Qaeda and Muslims may come away with a prejudiced view of Islam, leading to antagonism and even confrontation toward Muslim believers near the site” (Otterman 2014). The 11 members of the panel wrote a formal letter to Clifford Chanin, the education director, outlining some of their concerns about the film. These included that the video may very well leave viewers with the impression that all ­Muslims bear some collective guilt or responsibility for the actions of al-Qaeda, or even misinterpret its content to justify bigotry or even violence toward Muslims or those perceived to be Muslim. (“Letter” 2014) The panel also objected to the fact that “all American sources, news quotations and narrative are recorded in ‘Media English,’ whereas translations from Middle Eastern sources were recorded in English or broken English with a heavy Middle Eastern accent” (“Letter” 2014). The choice to distinguish between American sources and Middle Eastern sources with contrasting language plays on preconceived ideas about Arabs and Arabic and paints people who speak Arabic as foreign. In response to the panel’s letter, Chanin inadvertently included the interfaith panel in an email to the museum’s senior directors: “I don’t see this as difficult to respond to, if any response is even needed” (Otterman 2014). Chanin’s indifference to constructive critique illustrates the lack of openness of the museum to changing their narrative. It is important to consider who the leaders of the museum are and how their respective views influence the 9/11 Memorial & Museum’s narrative. Upon further investigation, I discovered that one of the board members at the museum, Debra Burlingame, is a self-professed I­ slamophobe who has drawn criticism and calls for her resignation (Otterman 2014).

How Does It Feel to be a Problem at the 9/11 Museum?  183 Burlingame, the sister of an airline pilot killed on September 11th, helped design museum programming and, in one interview said, I am hard pressed to deny it [I am an Islamophobe]. There’s no such thing as an irrational fear of Islam or Muslims when we know that virtually 90% of terror attacks in the world are committed by radical Muslims. (Otterman 2014) In one tweet she wrote, “When are citizens going to rise up and demand the govt acknowledge that Islam is a transnational threat, that govt denial is killing us” (Otterman 2014). Despite these bigoted statements, Debra Burlingame remains on the board. Again, the museum’s leadership ignored these critiques—as they did with the controversial film— and issued a statement in support of Burlingame. Throughout the museum, visitors read words such as terrorist and hijacker—words which typically have been used to refer to Muslim acts of violence since September 11th. Otterman (2014) notes, “Discussion of Islam in the museum is almost entirely within the context of terrorism.” In addition, terms such as Islamist and jihadist are used frequently. The use of phrases such as radical Islamic extremists or Islamic terrorists is actually much disputed by politicians and scholars, but the museum uses these terms freely to describe the events. For example, in the “historical impact” curriculum resources section of the 9/11 Memorial & Museum website titled “Islamist Extremism in the Last 20 Years,” students are asked to list all the “terrorist attacks conducted by Islamist extremists in the past 20 years” and to answer questions such as, “What is ­Islamist extremism? What are its goals? How do Islamist extremists work to achieve these goals?” (“Islamist”). The assignment is to work on a “mini-research project comparing an Islamist extremist terrorist attack from the last 20 years to 9/11. Each group will select a different terrorist attack” (“Islamist”). This assignment is categorized as appropriate for Grades 7–12. An assignment like this—listing all the terrorist attacks committed by Muslims—will likely alienate any Muslim students in the class while reinforcing the notion that Islam is a violent religion and that violence in the world is caused by Muslims. Alternative assignments could examine, for example, acts of terrorism committed by all types of people. An assignment comparing the terms “terrorist” and “lone wolf” based on the attacker’s identity would also be less likely to perpetuate stereotypes. The problem with using “Islamist extremism” instead of “violent extremism” is that it causes people to associate Islam with extremism. ­A kbar Ahmed, the chair of the Islamic Studies Department at A ­ merican University, explains that “the problem with using such language in a

184  Tamara Issak museum designed to instruct people for generations is that most visitors are ‘simply going to say Islamist means Muslims, jihadist means ­Muslims’” (Otterman 2014). Furthermore, Ahmed states, When you associate their religion [terrorists] with what they did, then you are automatically including, by association, one and a half billion people who had nothing to do with these actions and who ultimately the U.S. would not want to unnecessarily alienate. (Otterman 2014) The frequent use of the phrase “Islamist Extremism” in the museum and in the educational materials conflates Islam with violent extremism and promotes the idea that all Muslims are responsible for 9/11. The language used makes it clear that there is an American us versus a Muslim them.

Historical Representations The guided audio tour steers visitors toward an ahistorical understanding of September 11th events. The design of the museum and the audio tour order our movement through the space and guide our understanding of the events, so it is important to study these elements carefully to understand how September 11th is presented. At the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, the audio tour guides visitors through “a panoply of material substances strangely thrown together because of their arbitrary and coincidental relationship to history” (Sturken 2016). As is apparent in the 17 stops listed below, the audio tour of the museum is organized primarily in relation to various remnants: 1 Introduction 2 Memorial Hall: Vesey Street Stairs 3 Tribute Walk: Box Column Remnants (original footprint of tower) 4 Tribute Walk: Looking South (works of art) 5 South Tower Excavation Impact Steel 6 South Tower Excavation: Building the World Trade Center 7 South Tower Gallery: “Hope at Ground Zero” (photographs by drea Booher) 8 Memorial Exhibition: In Memoriam 9 Memorial Hall: Special Features (“Trying to Remember the Color of the Sky on that September Morning” artistic tribute to September 11th victims) 10 Center Passage (North Tower Antenna) 11 Center Passage (FDNY Ladder 3 Truck) 12 Center Passage Entrance to the Historical Exhibition

How Does It Feel to be a Problem at the 9/11 Museum?  185 13 Center Passage (Impact Steel suspended off the wall that was part of the North Tower) 14 Foundation Hall: The Last Column (“The last column driven from the site in a ceremony marking the end of the recovery”) 15 Foundation Hall Brick from Abbottabad 16 Foundation Hall Slurry Wall 17 North Tower Excavation 18 Special Exhibitions Gallery As is apparent here, the map of the museum guides visitors to view various remnants of the Twin Towers on September 11th so that the major focus of the museum is more about materials and less about historical context. The randomness of these different stops is overwhelming and confusing and prevents visitors from fully grasping the historical context of September 11th. This lack of historical depth and breadth is embedded in the design of the audio tour, even though the tour is at pains to create a full-­circle narrative of September 11th history. The narration is more focused on imparting a sense of closure than a sense of historical context. The tour’s narrator begins by describing what happened on September 11th. Then, the tour takes the visitor on the stops listed earlier. In a surprise move near the end of the tour, on the 15th stop, is an encased brick from ­Abbottabad, Pakistan. The narrator explains: You are standing by a case containing a small, unassuming artifact. Sometimes, the most humble objects carry the biggest stories. Almost immediately, counterterrorism experts suspected the 9/11 attacks had been carried out by al-Qaeda, a militant Islamist group led by Osama bin Laden. American intelligence agencies had been investigating bin Laden since the early 1990s. In 1998, the U.S. government indicted bin Laden for his support of international terrorism. Months later, bin Laden’s role in the bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania landed him on the FBI’s most wanted list. Nearly ten years after the 9/11 attacks, bin Laden was found in a hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan. This brick came from that compound. The inclusion of this brick is striking. Its presentation offers the impression of a full-circle closure with the death of Osama bin Laden. The first sentence visitors read as they enter the museum is, “On September 11, 2001, nineteen terrorists who were members of al-Qaeda, an Islamist extremist network, hijacked four California-bound commercial airplanes shortly after their departures from airports in Boston, Massachusetts; Newark, New Jersey; and Washington, D.C.” At the final stop in the

186  Tamara Issak museum, justice is served: bin Laden is captured and killed. In setting up the narrative this way, the museum denies visitors the opportunity to think about the broader historical context of September 11th. Sturken (2016) also has noted the inclusion of this brick in her analysis: This deceptively ordinary brick symbolizes an extraordinary set of political narratives in which a man, whose power came in part through his invisibility and capacity to wield power while in hiding, was the subject of a massive man hunt, a man whose murder was seen to offer a kind of national resolution to the tragic consequences of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 … The brick sits in the museum as a form of justification, an object that affirms the capacity of the nation for revenge. How could such a story ever have been imagined for this very ordinary brick when it was manufactured somewhere in ­Pakistan and placed by a worker within the building’s foundation? The bin Laden brick exudes a kind of agency, so powerful is its embodiment of this particular political and historical tale. It demands of us as viewers particular kinds of political responses. As a technological artifact, it can be defined as a composite of materials shaped in this form from a whole history of human built environments; as a highly symbolic political object, it stands in for an extremely complex history of violence, journeys, secrets, and revenge. (23) Indeed, the inclusion of the brick and the placement of the brick near the end of visitors’ museum experience neatly illustrates the ahistorical approach to September 11th. The audio tour and the mapping of the museum give visitors the impression that the September 11th attacks were perpetrated by evil ­Muslims because they hate freedom-loving Americans; thus, the museum tells a story of “We were attacked. We fought back and won. Here is a monument to our resilience and power.” This perspective obscures the United States’ long and complicated history in the Middle East, including its support of the Taliban from 1979 to 1989 (Cooley 2002). ­A merican soldiers are still stationed in Afghanistan and Iraq. The museum presents a historical narrative of exceptionalism. For example, one can view the outline of the original footprint of the tower along the tour. The narrator of the audio tour explains this is important because it “connect[s] you to what was once there.” In addition, a staircase is on display. The significance of the Vesey Street stairs is that they “became known as the Survivors’ Stairs. Seeing them here in the Museum, we are reminded that, in some sense, we are all survivors, living in a world defined by the events of that unforgettable day.” As visitors stand in front of the stairs, they are told, “We are all survivors.” Even if the visitors are not from New York City and did not physically

How Does It Feel to be a Problem at the 9/11 Museum?  187 suffer in or survive the terrorist attack, the staircase is used to represent the unification of Americans against an enemy attack. Throughout the museum, there is a subtle message that visitors are part of a collective American “we,” who are survivors—brave, patriotic, resilient, innocent, and heroic. Furthermore, describing the world as “defined by the events of that unforgettable day” demonstrates American exceptionalism and reveals the lack of historical depth in the museum’s treatment of 9/11. How might the curators have offered more historical context? There are other events that can be used as a point of reference to think about the September 11th attacks, such as the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Like September 11th, as Amy Kaplan (2003) notes, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a “sudden, horrific attack on civilians in an urban center” (83). Although different reasons prompted these monstrous acts of violence, both attacks killed thousands of innocent civilians—approximately 3,000 died on 9/11 and 80,000 died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The phrase, ground zero, was actually first used in reference to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. September 11th is not often compared with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, however; instead, it is most often compared to Pearl Harbor, the Japanese attack on a U.S. naval base in World War II (Kaplan 2003). Kaplan astutely notes the historical implications of this move: the term Ground Zero both evokes and eclipses the prior historical reference, using it as a yardstick of terror—to claim that this was just like the horrific experience of a nuclear bomb—while at the same time consigning the prior reference to historical amnesia. (83–84) She further explains how this historical approach reinforces a binary narrative: Ground Zero relies on a historical analogy that cannot be acknowledged because to do so would be to trouble the very binary oppositions and exceptionalist narratives erected on the ground—between before and after, between being “with us” or “with the terrorists,” between the “American way of life” and the “axis of evil.” (84) The fact that there is a museum of this scale and cost at Ground Zero disseminating this narrative of 9/11 illustrates American exceptionalism. The museum’s treatment of historical context is relegated to a small, dark, overcrowded peripheral room called the “Historical Exhibition.” By the time visitors reach this exhibition, they will likely feel so overwhelmed that the actual facts and history become too much to absorb. Indeed, the museum appears to have purposely consigned the historical

188  Tamara Issak exhibition to a small space, set to the side, in effect telling visitors they need only visit “if you have time” (emphasis added). If a visitor does spend time in the “Historical Exhibition,” the cherry-picked events depicted are likely to play into Islamophobic hysteria. For example, the audio tour guide introduces the museum’s director, Alice Greenwald, who declares: Within this space, artifacts, photographs, first-person testimonies, archival audio, and video recordings tell the story of the four coordinated terrorist attacks that occurred on the morning of September 11, 2001, which killed 2,977 people. (9/11 Memorial & Museum audio tour) Then she explains that the second section of the exhibition provides the “historical context” of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and “other precursors to 9/11, expanding upon and clarifying our collective understanding of who did this and why.” The third part focuses on the “immediate aftermath of the attacks; describes the rescue, recovery, and cleanup efforts at Ground Zero, at the Pentagon, and at the Flight 93 crash site.” Therefore, in the director’s own words, the historical exhibition is divided into three parts—the story of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, terrorist attacks before September 11th, and the immediate repercussions of the September 11th terrorist attacks. The historical context of 9/11 is presented only in light of other terrorist attacks on the United States by violent extremists who claim to be Muslim.

Conclusion In his observation of historical museum exhibits, Alan Gross (2005), a scholar in rhetorical theory and communication studies, writes, [T]here is no apparent order of importance among the persuasive means employed; rather, it is the orchestration of these means that is the proper object of study. As in a symphony, the individual components are meaningful, not in themselves, but only insofar as they participate in a persuasive whole. (5) As is apparent in the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, the individual parts of the museum brought together make a persuasive whole that presents a very particular narrative of September 11th that, intentionally or not, stereotypes Muslims. This narrative is cemented into a permanent structure for generations to come. The 9/11 Memorial & Museum has an important role to play

How Does It Feel to be a Problem at the 9/11 Museum?  189 in educating the public about September 11th and clarifying misconceptions. In the curriculum materials provided to public school teachers, the guided tour, the historical exhibition, and the mapping of the space, the leaders and curators of the museum deny the public the opportunity to reflect deeply and critically about September 11th. All the parts of the museum taken together construct a narrow definition of who we are as Americans and who they are in stark contrast. Where the 9/11 Memorial & Museum could have been a source of education, it reproduces stereotypes and blanket representation of Muslims and Islam. Rhetorically, it works not to illuminate history, especially for posterity, but rather to foment ethnic and religious division in keeping with U.S. political and military interests at home and abroad. In this political moment, our museums, libraries, and public media must work overtime to provide public education and promote cross-­ cultural understanding. In the case of the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, it is crucial that the curators provide a fuller story of 9/11—one that invites nuanced conversation about what happened and why. Instead, visitors come and go to the museum leaving with a sense of the horror of 9/11 but little historical, contextualized, nuanced explanations of the terror attacks. Turning on the news, they hear speeches by President Trump in which he fabricates stories about Islamic militants being in the 2018 caravan of migrants seeking asylum in the U.S. The Islamophobic rhetoric he uses to stoke fear is dangerous, and it causes real harm to Muslims in the U.S. and abroad. Given the focus on social justice and equity in rhetoric and composition, it is surprising how little attention is paid to Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism. Rhetoric and composition scholars have an important role to play in studying curriculum materials about 9/11, ­I slam, and Muslims, dispelling stereotypes about Muslims in their classrooms, and responding to public debates about the place of ­Muslims in the U.S.

References Carrillo Rowe, Aimee. 2004. “Whose ‘America’? The Politics of Rhetoric and Space in the Formation of U.S. Nationalism.” Radical History Review 89 (1): 115–134. Clark, Gregory. 2004. Rhetorical Landscapes in America: Variations on a Theme from Kenneth Burke. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Cooley, John K. 2002. Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America, and International Terrorism. New York: Pluto Press. Cotter, Holland. 2014. “The 9/11 Story Told at Bedrock, Powerful as a Punch to the Gut.” New York Times, May 14, 2014. https://nyti.ms/1oNhcUy. Du Bois, W.E.B. 1994. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Dover Publications. Dwyer, Jim. 2015. “A Definitive Debunking of Donald Trump’s 9/11 Claims.” New York Times, November 24, 2015. https://nyti.ms/1T1zyzB.

190  Tamara Issak Earle, Chris. 2015. “Good Muslims, Bad Muslims, and the Nation: The ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ and the Problem with Tolerance.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 12 (2): 121–138. Elliot, Debbie. 2017. “Virginia Teenager’s Death Puts Spotlight on Road Rage.” National Public Radio, June 23, 2017. www.npr.org/2017/06/23/534111225/ should-the-killing-of-nabra-hassanen-have-been-called-road-rage. “Exploring Afghani Culture through Literature.” 9/11 Memorial & Museum. www.911memorial.org/sites/default/files/CC_Afghani%20Literature_0.pdf. Farrell, Stephen. 2014. “9/11 Museum Opens to a Somber Crowd.” New York Times, May 21, 2014. https://nyti.ms/1gl9Yau. Feuer, Alan. 2014. “As 9/11 Museum Opens, These New Yorkers Will Stay Away.” New York Times, May 16, 2014. www.nytimes.com/2014/05/17/ nyregion/9-11-museum-not-a-must-see-site-for-all-new-yorkers.html. Gross, Alan G. 2005. “Presence as Argument in the Public Sphere.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 35 (2): 5–21. Haag, Matthew, and Jacey Fortin. 2017. “Two Killed in Portland While Trying to Stop Anti-Muslim Rant, Police Say.” New York Times, May 27, 2017. www.nytimes.com/2017/05/27/us/portland-train-attack-muslim-rant.html. Hussain, Murtaza, and Maryam Saleh. 2018. “Bigoted Election Campaigns, Not Terror Attacks, Drive Anti-Muslim Activity.” The Intercept, March 11, 2018. https://interc.pt/2HoRyVg. “Islamist Extremism in the Last 20 Years.” 9/11 Memorial & Museum. www. 911memorial.org/sites/default/files/ Islamist%20Extremism%20in%20 the%20last%2020%20years_0.pdf. Ivanova, Mina. 2013. “A Stab in the Eye of America or A Center for Multi-Faith Dialogue? Ideology and Contested Rhetorics Surrounding the Proposed Muslim Community Center near New York City’s Ground Zero.” In Venomous Speech: Problems with American Political Discourse on the Right and Left, edited by Clarke Rountree, 359–378. New York: Praeger. Kaplan, Amy. 2003. “Homeland Insecurities: Reflections on Language and Space.” Radical History Review 2003 (85): 82–93. “Letter to National September 11 Memorial & Museum Regarding Concerns over Film, ‘The Rise of Al-Qaeda.’” 2014. Interfaith Center of New York. April 24, 2014. https://interfaithcenter.org/letter-to-national-september-11memorial-museum-regarding/. Lichtblau, Eric. 2016. “Hate Crimes against American Muslims Most Since Post9/11 Era.” New York Times, September 17, 2016. https://nyti.ms/2cOyV19. “Museum.” 9/11 Memorial & Museum. www.911memorial.org/museum. Otterman, Sharon. 2014. “Film at 9/11 Museum Sets Off Clash Over Reference to Islam.” New York Times, April 23, 2014. https://nyti.ms/1f2Usj0. Pierce, Lee. 2014. “A Rhetoric of Traumatic Nationalism in the Ground Zero Mosque Controversy.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 100 (1): 53–80. Schmidt, Samantha. 2018. “Man Who Yelled ‘Get out of my Country’ Before Killing Indian Immigrant Pleads Guilty, Faces Life Sentence.” Washington Post, March 7, 2018. http://wapo.st/2HgDYTR?tid=ss_tw&utm_term=. adcfc7eab0da. Senie, Harriet F. 2016. Memorials to Shattered Myths: Vietnam to 9/11. New York: Oxford University Press.

How Does It Feel to be a Problem at the 9/11 Museum?  191 Shear, Michael D. 2017. “New Order Indefinitely Bars Almost All Travel from Seven Countries.” New York Times, September 24, 2017. www.nytimes. com/2017/09/24/us/politics/new-order-bars-almost-all-travel-from-sevencountries.html. Sodaro, Amy. 2018. Exhibiting Atrocity: Memorial Museums and the Politics of Past Violence. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Stokols, Eli, and Daniel Strauss. 2015. “Donald Trump Calls for ‘Total and Complete Shutdown of Muslims’ Coming to U.S.” Politico, December 7, 2015. www. politico.com/story/2015/12/donald-trump-shutdown-of-muslims-216504. Sturken, Marita. 2015. “The 9/11 Memorial Museum and the Remaking of Ground Zero.” American Quarterly 67 (2): 471–490. ———. 2016. “The Objects that lived: The 9/11 Museum and material transformation.” Memory Studies Volume 9 (1): 13–26. Talbot, Margaret. 2015. “The Story of a Hate Crime: What Led to the Murder of Three Muslim students in Chapel Hill?” New Yorker, June 22, 2015. www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/06/22/the-story-of-a-hate-crime. “Targeted: 2018 Civil Rights Report.” 2018. Council on American Islamic Relations, 2018. http://islamophobia.org/images/Targeted_2018_Civil_ Rights_Report.pdf.

13 Dismantling the Wall Analyzing the Rhetorics of Shock and Writing Political Transformation Steven Alvarez Leading up the 2016 presidential election, the rhetoric about “the wall” on the Southern U.S. border with Mexico became a euphemism for speaking about undocumented immigration from Latin America. Despite most undocumented immigration occurring on the U.S. border with Canada (Masis 2017), the wall became a way to disparage the perceptions of Latinx and Latin American immigrant communities and question citizenship status, while using racism as a tactic for pushing through privatizing austerity measures under the guise of a “civilizational war against immigrants” (Klein 2017, 6). Directed at the border, the rhetoric of building a wall became the figure by which the Trump campaign could focus an illustrative example of a “quick fix” to solve the issue of a browner nation. On that fateful June day of 2015, when Trump announced his presidential candidacy, he zeroed in on Mexican migration to the United States: When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people. (2015) The real estate mogul turned reality television star based his campaign on the notion that one of the reasons for the U.S. decline was immigration from Mexico. Trump focused on generalizations to speak about an entire nation, race-baiting while also scapegoating U.S. problems on the characters of supposed inferior people bringing their inferiorities to the United States. “They’re not sending you,” he said to an audience of supporters cheering off camera. “They’re sending people that have lots of problems,” whom he divides from his exceptional crowd of U.S. people. The dichotomy of “us” and “them” already demonstrates the mental wall the candidate had constructed in his imagined sense of national belonging, where he “assumes” only “some” of the immigrants from Mexico in the United States are “good people.” Rather, the assumption

Dismantling the Wall  193 should be that the immigrants from our neighbors to the south are good people and that some bring crime. Even that, however, still implies a mental wall that divides and dehumanizes immigrants. Trump’s 2016 “Make America Great Again” presidential campaign directly played to the notion that the United States achieved greatness in an earlier era from which it had since declined, partly because of heightened immigration from Latin America. This rhetoric suggested a better time in U.S. history, specifically international postwar glory of the late 1940s and into the 1950s. This mythical, bygone era began to wane, it would seem, with the transformative, liberal democratic changes of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, which challenged domestic inequalities. In fact, this supposed making of American greatness was built on oppression of ethnic minorities, women, and the working class, while also fear mongering for economic systems that challenged capitalism. This mythic greater America of the past was not a place imagined as being inclusive to all, and certainly not a place where all felt a sense of belonging. This so-called greater America today after Trump’s election is characterized as the walled state that continues to value some people more than others, erasing a history of a nation that amassed its wealth from enslavement, dispossession, settler colonialism, and systemic dehumanization. In this Trumpian U.S. narrative, walls are the metonym for concentration of wealth, power, and advantage for unfettered greed through unjust laws that only apply to those who own the most property, the laws to designate their property, and where ownership comes into contact. In these cases of social disarticulation, the walled categories of division grow more firm, often reinforcing the deeper-seated prejudices that are otherwise censored in everyday interactions, while opening the door to financialize, marketize, privatize, and militarize a corporate agenda without public dissent. In this chapter, I urge writing instructors taking a political turn to consider how our students and we can locate these walls in order to dismantle them through composition projects that imagine a social field that is inclusive of racial, ethnic, religious, and gender divides. I offer a critical lens for understanding how walled perceptions attempt to erase social struggles, while simultaneously alienating the possibilities for social transformation. I make the case that the rhetorical analysis of neoliberal “shock” politics is the first step for students to understand the utopian possibilities for political transformation and dissent, possibilities that reveal how the politics of division and separation have alienated collective action. To put the current political moment in historical context in courses I teach, I turn to 9/11, another 9/11, that is, 9/11/1973, the Chilean coup d’état that marked a critical juncture in history where the terms of neoliberal politico-economic destabilization emerged in Latin America. Building on the study of the “free-market revolution” beginning with the 1973 Chilean coup d’état, followed by

194  Steven Alvarez the ideology of neoliberalism, and the assaulting concentration of wealth upward compounded by the Trump administration, I argue that students can use conscious-raising storytelling, such as counterstory, to dismantle the walls of individualism, greed, and free-market ideologies by uncovering how systemic shocks are narratives that never completely silence the voices of dissent in the democratic process. While it would seem that such rhetorical interventions cannot impact systemic economic/political structures, on a micro level, the speculating of possibilities is the first step to resolving shocks to the system in productive, transformative ways that can have reverberations in a widening critical consciousness. I end the chapter with a call for students to write speculative works in genres that strategize possibilities for transforming the future by studying rhetorics of shock in the past and present, bringing critical and creative studies of narrative to the fore. The intent in all this is to present an additional set of tools for writing instructors, aligning this as another approach for the work of the political turn this collection advocates.

The Wall: Class(ification) Struggle and Categories of Perception Trump’s insistence that he is a “nationalist” offers a telling example of his ideas of a walled state of exceptionalism (Trump 2018). Further, his continued push to build a wall on the U.S. southern border estimated to cost tens of billions of dollars, and leading to a 2019 government shutdown, is symbolic of a presidency that prides itself on “security” to protect U.S. exceptionalism. But this wall is one that elites have been building to maintain distance from a general populace that they both fear and disdain. As Klein puts it, In an age of ever-widening income inequality, a significant cohort of our elites are walling themselves off not just physically but also psychologically, mentally detaching themselves from the collective fate of the rest of humanity. [… in] a Blackwater-style economy in which private players profit from building the walls, from putting the population under surveillance, from private security and privatized checkpoints. (180–181) To be sure, walls do not stop people, nor do they stop languages, histories, stories, or even capital. Of course, the wall was never intended to disrupt the flow of capital—the construction of the wall actually would be an economic project intended to give work to Americans who would labor to build a privatized security state. Rather, the intention of building a wall was to further militarize the border to prevent bodies from transnational movement. The mobilized expansion and isolation

Dismantling the Wall  195 of capital across borders speaks to the economics of geopolitics and how borders simultaneously function democratically and violently. In the Trumpian imagination, the wall becomes the physical manifestation of speculative capital’s concentration of militarized power via monopolization and simultaneous dispossession. Though these walls would appear to stabilize a social view of reality, during moments of “shock,” walls can crumble creating a social disarticulation, or collective disorientation, by which radical pro-corporate measures construct new forms of social domination. Under the Trump administration, these political tactics of constructing material and mental walls of perceptions preserve categories of division, or what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1984) describes as the classification struggle to define the categories of perception that shape social reality. These categories of division are theoretical and practical sites of social struggle, or the mental walls by which we perceive their place in the world and possibilities for transforming it. The categories of division that construct this border wall are rooted in the ideology of neoliberalism, or “neoliberal tyranny of the market” (Bourdieu 2003, 9). This ideology is a “mode of domination based on the institution of insecurity, domination through precariousness” (29). The tenets of this historically evolved stage of capitalism include: 1 Dominating influence of global speculative finance, led by institutions that transfer vast amounts of wealth concentrated in the hands of the elite. 2 The privatization of public goods. 3 Capital accumulation by relentless rent-seeking, debt collection, and outright dispossession. 4 Subjection to the rule of the market. 5 The self-actualization of individualism, whereby individuals are obliged to maximize their human capital. 6 Increased militarization and surveillance (often privatized) to squelch dissent from the general population in order to protect the elite.1 From these tenets of neoliberalism, we can figure how categories of division shape ideological framing, or the mental walls that structure our perceptions of social reality. These walls are those that prize austerity, the rule of the rigged “free” market, mass incarceration, financializing conflict, investing in destabilization “developing” nations in return for extravagant profits, and the concentration of wealth. It is no wonder, then, that the symbol of Trump’s presidency from the moment he announced his candidacy was a wall. Indeed, the election of Trump to the presidency reinforced these walls as he handpicked a cabinet of billionaires who would shape governmental policy to further their neoliberal

196  Steven Alvarez agenda. To be sure, these walls seem insurmountable, but as history teaches us, even the most solid of walls will decay, and with imagination they can be melted into air. Bourdieu’s sociological framework for understanding perceptions of categories of division that establish the walls of defining social reality have been useful for me to theorize a pedagogy that seeks to locate these walls in ourselves and to dismantle them in order to imagine a social field that challenges inequalities. That is, the more we are aware of the walls within us, the more we are able to visualize dismantling them, and to craft assignments that challenge students to dismantle them. The task of sociology, according to Bourdieu (1996), is “to uncover the most profoundly buried structures of the various social worlds which constitute the social universe, as well as the ‘mechanisms’ which tend to ensure their reproduction or their transformation” (7). This aspect of identifying the “buried structures” means uncovering the ideological masks that have sedimented the categorizing walls that reproduce social inequalities, or that limit the mass recognition of social reality and that are buried deep in worldviews, as they “make meaningful the world which makes them” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). Class struggle, in this case, can be considered as a classification struggle, understanding class as the verb “to class.” This class struggle, then, is one of competing visions for the classification of the social world, or the legitimacy of one group’s division of the world as the legitimate vision of the world. Principles of division, inextricably logical and sociological, function within and for the purposes of the struggle between social groups; in producing concepts, they produce groups, the very groups which produce the principles and the groups against which they are produced. What is at stake in the struggles about the meaning of the social world is power over the classificatory schemes and systems which are the basis of the representations of the groups and therefore of their mobilization and demobilization: the evocative power of an utterance which puts things in a different light (as happens, for example, when a single word, such as “paternalism,” changes the whole experience of a social relationship) or which modifies the schemes of perception, shows something else, other properties, previously unnoticed or relegated to the background (such as common interests hitherto masked by ethnic or national differences); a separative power, a distinction, diacrisis, discretio, drawing discrete units out of indivisible continuity, difference out of the undifferentiated. (Bourdieu 1984, 479) Over time, these struggles become the mechanisms by which groups learn their place in the world, which, in turn, become internalized as

Dismantling the Wall  197 cognitive perceptions and embodied as practices. The classification schemes represent social structures that reproduce inequalities as fundamental meanings of the social world by which individuals read their place, as well as the places of others around them. The perception of division, therefore, is fundamentally based on exclusion, binary thinking, and structures of belief. No doubt, physical walls are dangerous, but much more dangerous are these internalized walls that pass unnoticed, natural, or even neutral. Further, as these walls become the basis of cognitive structures, they manifest themselves as “practical knowledge” of the social world. That is, these walls become embodied social structures that frame perceptions, which on the surface appear uniquely individualized as commonsensical, reasonable, and practical, though on a macro scale harmonize as shared divisions. Rhetorically, we can recognize this aspect of “commonsense” as topoi subject to sociological scrutiny for transformative potential. The walls, therefore, have foundations that are not stable, and because of this power, at opportune times, attempts to circumvent divisions in order to build new walls, walls which attempt to further divide the populace so that the dominant groups reconstitute their elite status while concentrating power. These opportune moments are jolts to the social structure, or moments of social disarticulation wherein the politics of “shock” reconfigure new categories of division as immediate walls that establish evolved schemes of perception that become political tools for symbolic domination. Yet, once we understand the historical contexts of the construction of these reinforced walls, we can produce instruments of dismantling them in order to defend against such domination and potentially retell the story in ways that are collectively transformative.

Rhetorical Analysis of Shock and the Chilean Playbook While it would seem that the election of Trump to the presidency was a shock to the political system, his election was actually “less an aberration than a logical conclusion—a pastiche of pretty much all the worst trends of the past half century” (Klein 2008, 9). No doubt, Trump captured a sense of the crisis of economic change, but the maneuvers he exploited within the working class, in particular, had been appearing much earlier, especially the U.S. oil crisis in the 1970s which helped to spark neoliberalism, of which Trump’s election is a continued backlash. Trump’s election was the culmination of a series of crises, crises which created social disarticulations in politics, the economy, and culturally. Yet, the experience of disorientation in Trump’s election were less threatening than real shocks that came from disarticulations, such as natural disasters like Hurricane Maria in 2017 and how the administration dealt with (or did not deal with) such predicaments.

198  Steven Alvarez In No is Not Enough, Naomi Klein describes the shock doctrine as “the quite brutal tactic of systematically using the public’s disorientation following a collective shock—wars, coups, terrorist attacks, market crashes, or natural disasters—to push through radical pro-corporate measures, often called ‘shock therapy’” (2). For people in the United States, 9/11 sent shockwaves through the nation, causing a social disarticulation still felt nearly two decades later. The event resulted in much of the increasingly militarized policing Americans recognize as becoming natural in a “war on terror” that does not seem to be ending anytime in the near future. Since 9/11 in the U.S., the categories of “enemy” and “terrorist” have become normalized or understood as topoi in the war on terror and our understanding of “homeland security.” No doubt, this state of perpetual wars across the globe has become an everyday facet of life. For college students, learning about the historical context for the current political moment situates how conceptual walls have been in the making over the course of a couple of generations. Indeed, the topoi of September 11, 2001, has had long-standing ramifications for the construction of U.S. Homeland Security for the U.S. neoliberal state, and this is certainly clear for students. But 9/11 was certainly not the beginning. For that, some turn to the presidency of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s as paving the way. Yet, even the neoliberal state of the Reagan presidency found inspiration from another neoliberal state, Chile. For Chileans, the date of 9/11 has its own resonance, that is, September 11, 1973, when a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-backed coup d’etat deposed the democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende and established a right-wing military junta led by General Augusto ­Pinochet. The destabilization of the Chilean state was a manufactured crisis that sent shocks through the political system, and today widely understood as the “test case” for neoliberal reforms during a time of social disarticulation. It also marked the point when a democratic government transitioned to a military dictatorship, one recognized by the U.S. for its own corporate interests in South America, and in the rich copper industry in Chile. The playbook for the coup came straight from Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom (1962), the Bible of Chicago school economics that theorized the rule of liberalized market tyranny centered on privatization, deregulation, and slashing social spending (Klein 2008, 94). Under the dictatorial rule of Pinochet, Chile banned trade unions, privatized social security and hundreds of state-owned companies, cut government spending (except for the military), opened the state to foreign imports, and eliminated tariffs that protected Chilean manufacturing (96). The dictator would remain in power for 17 years, and for another 16 years after would hold high government positions including commander-in-chief of the Chilean army until his death in 2006. The history of the Chilean coup may not be something U.S. undergraduate students are familiar with, but it is something they can comprehend

Dismantling the Wall  199 and analyze rhetorically and in historical context. Introducing students to this history is important, in no short part to understand U.S. imperial interventions abroad. Speaking to this history in ways that offer tools for rhetorical analysis and fleshing out further how shocks to the system can become points for understanding how the frames of categories can become weaponized. One text to break down this historical moment is Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, which also has a documentary film (Whitecross and ­Winterbottom 2009). Reading selections from this book along with the watching clips from the documentary and analyzing the historical moment from a counterstory angle can raise to consciousness competing narratives as competing visions of the world and illustrating how social categories become internalized as mental walls. But to perform a rhetorical analysis, I suggest two additional texts to compliment Klein’s work for ­conscious-raising activities. Because U.S. students will be quite familiar with Disney cartoons, I suggest assigning Ariel Dorfman’s and Armand Mattelart’s How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic ([1971] 1991) as a text that offers both tools for analysis and examples of decoding animated texts for political rhetoric. Dorfman and Mattelart’s book is based on the state-sanctioned Donald Duck comics that circulated throughout Latin America that did the propagandistic work of attempting to inculcate an ideology based on obedience to the military state and its war on anti-communism. El Pato Donald, as the character was recognized in Latin America, circulated in comic books that ­depicted the heroic duck defending free-market capitalism against communist enemies. Dorfman and Mattelart poured through thousands of Pato Donald comics performing Marxist rhetorical analyses of problematic characters demonstrating that the seemingly playful stories imported oppressive U.S. values that promoted a sanitized version of the U.S. interventionism. Indeed, Disney exported cultural productions into Chile, and implicitly in these productions were the encoded walls of perception that interpret the world in an “us” versus “them” struggle, similar to the idea of walls from another Donald with whom we are familiar with, Donald Trump. Through the analysis of Dorfman and Mattelart, students can understand how “shock” can become a tool of the state to further a neoliberal agenda by a populace disoriented from disastrous events. With the example for a rhetoric of shock, students can then perform a similar analysis to more recent events in the United States, such as Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans or Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. With the tools of unpacking shock, students could then turn to news reports, music videos, or other cultural texts that speak to these historical moments and their aftermath, piecing together counternarratives that have begun to tell the history from lesser-known points of view.

200  Steven Alvarez Another text that zeroes in on the rhetorical dimension of shock to the Chilean system is the 2012 film No (Larraín [2012] 2013). The film portrays the end of the Pinochet dictatorship, after 15 years of rule after the coup when Pinochet faced aggressive international pressure to legitimize his regime. The government called for a yes/no referendum vote to keep Pinochet in power. The film focuses on a marketing campaign to unseat Pinochet, using public relations to “sell” to the Chilean people a democratic alternative. The film specifically relies on rhetorical persuasion in political advertising to defeat the ideology, or telling a different story of possibility and transformation, of “using advertising language, but building a political concept behind it.” No is a remarkable film that narrates the power of rhetoric and story to dismantle walls that seem indestructible but also creates a counterstory of the future by understanding history as a message to craft change. The film also portrays the conscious-raising work of rhetorical analysis in advertising to stir public opinion, and this, of course, lends to classroom discussions about the power of narratives to make political change. The shock doctrine in Chile is only one example by which students could conduct rhetorical analysis. Turning to the events in South America can offer a tool of defamiliarization whereby students can examine the politics of shock abroad, then turning the lens to the United States, or more familiar circumstances. The intention in either context, however, is the same: analyzing moments of shock as social disarticulations that recognize a mode of domination, one with a common narrative based on insecurity leading to a deregulation of markets, eroding the welfare state, and increased militarization to silence dissent. With the tools of rhetorical analysis, students could then turn to writing the possibilities for a transformative future, a speculative future grounded in telling a new story, a counterstory. Like in the film No, Klein argues, the hope of a future is telling a new story that dismantles walls that divide people, to narratives that realize our common humanity. For Klein, we have to tell a different story from the one the shock doctors are peddling, a vision of the world compelling enough to compete headto-head with theirs. This values-based vision must offer a different path, away from serial shocks—one based on coming together across racial, ethnic, religious, and gender divides, rather than being wrenched further apart, and one based on healing the planet rather than unleashing further destabilizing wars and pollution. (8) Klein argues for dismantling walls of division instilled by the “shock doctors” for common visions of what is possible, a “values-based vision” that counters one based on neoliberal categories that reinforce the

Dismantling the Wall  201 precarity of “serial shocks.” Through writing, students can speculate about what a reality that continues along the lines of what dystopian shock looks like, or what the potential for a utopian future could be. Understanding that writing offers a possibility to consider a different story, a counterstory, can be the first step to applying a rhetorical analysis of shock into the transformative potential of narrative, all challenging the categories of social walls that intend to divide rather than unite people in their shared humanity. If framed this way, we can examine how cultural texts construct and circulate conceptual walls, and how the walls of the moment, the walls of Donald Trump, have predecessors, and, likewise, these predecessors have been met with popular resistance.

Storytelling as a Tool for Writing Political Transformation In We Gon’ Be Alright, Jeff Chang (2016) reminds us that we see each other from different vantage points of power, but that space where we come together, allowing us all to think about the ways we are broken and how we might mend the ways we break each other, how we might imagine healing, reimagine history, and dream freedom. (159) I have argued that the walled categories of perception that have led to the election of Donald Trump have distanced us from finding ways to overcome differences, in spite of shared circumstances that great affect our sociomaterial circumstances. As Chang reminds us, walls do not prevent us from imagining a history without walls, nor do walls prevent us from dreaming. In writing classrooms, students can potentially speak back to shock politics through speculative writing, texts that are grounded in illustrating the futurity of a post-shock world and the possibilities for dreaming of an alternative to neoliberal divisions. Speculative texts have models in dystopian fiction, for example, where students could imagine a world severely affected by climate change, or, conversely a world where solutions to climate change have been achieved. To engage in this kind of storytelling, students can build from the tools of rhetorical analysis of shock to demonstrate the possibilities of a different world. In this kind of writing, students would speculate through their writing, drawing from the affordances of speculative work that “takes up certain implicit conditions of our personal and social lives, and makes these conditions fully explicitly in narrative. It picks out ‘futuristic’ trends that are already embedded within our actually social and technological situation” (Shaviro 2015, 2). After engaging with rhetorical analysis of shock, the reconfiguration

202  Steven Alvarez of walls of perception can be rewritten as counterstories that speak to dominant narratives that have underwritten social reality. Though these counterstories may not effect changes in material conditions, they do invoke the agency to imagine collective identities as a way forward in the political turn, countering aspects of neoliberal individualism. The work of Aja Y. Martínez is illustrative as to how this could look in a writing class. For Martínez, counterstory offers a methodology to address racialization in the academy and a tool for critical race theory to debunk “stock stories” that reaffirm dominant categories that disenfranchise scholars of color. According to Martínez (2014), Counterstory, then, is a method of telling stories by people whose experiences are not often told. Counterstory as methodology thus serves to expose, analyze, and challenge stock stories of racial privilege and can help to strengthen traditions of social, political, and cultural survival and resistance. (38) The aspect of resistance to division aligns with Klein’s call for different stories that counter the powerful narratives of the “shock doctors.” A counterstory methodology that speaks to social speculation, however, attempts to rewrite structural configurations, moving beyond personal interactions, but to imagine stories of history, and the counterstories of history, grounded in understanding critical race theory (Martínez), the “darker sides” of history (Mignolo 2011) and the stories of the ­“people’s history” (Zinn [1980] 2005). One can imagine, for example, a speculative text that imagines a world of more borders, or one without them. How would societies react? What would economies resemble? What would a world in the future think looking back to the Trump presidency? Reading works of speculative fiction, such as The Parable of the Sower (Butler 1993), The Handmaid’s Tale (Atwood 1986), Brave New World (Huxley [1932] 2013), The Hunger Games (Collins 2008), or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Dick 1968), can offer examples for building a fictional world that imagines futurity. Further, these texts ask students to be both critical and creative in reflecting on the present in imagining future possibilities that construct strategic arguments that counter stigmatizing xenophobic disputes that intend to divide people rather than unite them. In my courses, students have examined how conceptual walls have served to divide and imprison aspects of U.S. culture and used speculative storytelling as both ways to imagine what future worlds could look like (see appendix). The Netflix series Black Mirror 2 has been especially useful in considering how technology has played a role in surveillance and domination. Students familiar with the series

Dismantling the Wall  203 often riff on ideas from the show to construct future worlds grounded in present realities, as the current political climate lends itself to imagine worse-case scenarios, which most students have undertaken in their speculative writing. With rhetorical analysis offering the criticality of such projects, the creative element of writing a piece of fiction can enact sophisticated sets of illustrative claims and warrants that appeal to unifying visions for novel forms of political action. Of course, the danger is that some students may not be prone to imagine a different world, or one that may not necessarily be politically progressive in outlook. In such cases, meeting the formal standards of analysis and creative output will still serve them to imagine futurity through writing. The hope, however, is that by studying the historical context of shock and understanding its profound geopolitical consequences, students will come to see how the walls they have inherited through socialization are culturally constructed and that the possibility for constructing a better world will be the work they carry forward.

Notes 1 Adapted from Steven Shaviro, No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 7–8. Also adapted from Klein, No is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need (Chicago: Haymarket, 2017), 79–80. 2 Black Mirror, created by Charlie Brooker, on Netflix, www.netflix.com/ title/70264888.

References Atwood, Margaret. 1986. The Handmaid’s Tale. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Black Mirror. Created by Charlie Brooker, on Netflix. www.netflix.com/ title/70264888. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. Boston: Harvard University Press. ———. 1996. The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power. Translated by Lauretta C. Clough. Palo Alto: University of Stanford Press. ———. 2003. Firing Back: Against the Tyranny of the Market. Translated by Loïc J. D. Wacquant. New York: New Press. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loïc J. D. Wacquant. 1992. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Butler, Octavia E. 1993. Parable of the Sower. New York: Warner Books. Chang, Jeff. 2016. We Gon’ Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation. New York: Picador. Collins, Suzanne. 2008. The Hunger Games. New York: Scholastic Press. Dick, Philip K. 1968. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? New York: Doubleday.

204  Steven Alvarez Dorfman, Ariel, and Armand Mattelart. 1991. How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic. Translated by David Kunzle. New York: I.G. Editions. Friedman, Milton. 1962. Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago: University of ­Chicago Press. Huxley, Aldous. [1932] 2013. Brave New World. New York: Random House. Klein, Naomi. 2008. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Picador. ———. 2017. No is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Larraín, Pablo, dir. 2012. No. New York: Sony Pictures Classics, 2013, DVD. Martínez, Aja Y. 2014. “A Plea for Critical Race Theory Counterstory: Stock Story vs. Counterstory Dialogues Concerning Alejandra’s ‘Fit’ in the Academy.” Composition Studies 42 (2): 33–55. Masis, Julie Julie Masis. 2017. “Way More Migrants Are Now Sneaking Across the US-Canada Border.” GlobalPost from Public Radio International, Podcast Audio, January 12, 2017. www.pri.org/stories/2017-01-12/ illegal-immigration-and-refugee-claims-canada-are-rising-fast. Mignolo, Walter. 2011. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global ­F utures, Decolonial Options. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Shaviro, Steven. 2015. No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism. ­M inneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Trump, Donald. 2015. “Presidential Announcement.” Time Magazine, June 16, 2015. http://time.com/3923128/donald-trump-announcement-speech/. ———. 2018. “Houston Rally.” C-SPAN, October 22, 2018. www.c-span.org/ video/?453256-1/president-trump-campaigns-senator-ted-cruz-houston& start=1534. Whitecross, Mat, and Michael Winterbottom, dir. 2009. Shock Doctrine. ­London, UK: Renegade Pictures 2010, DVD. Zinn, Howard. [1980] 2015. A People’s History of the United States. New York: Perennial-Harper.

Appendix

Assignment Description for Composing Speculative Writing

As we have seen in class, speculative literature presents a world of ­futurity, often marked by oppressive societal control and the illusion of a perfect society. This is achieved by various means, such as extensive propaganda for social control, censored information and free thought, a charismatic leader worshipped by society, societies walled off from others, destruction of nature and the environment, and militarized conformity where individuality and dissent are squashed. For this assignment, you will write your own speculative dystopia or utopia, creating a world based on the texts from class and also featuring the elements of storytelling. Choosing two texts from class as your examples, study the characteristics of the fictional worlds and how their leaders convince their populations to follow their rule. Use this scenario to write an original story including key elements of storytelling, including a clear beginning, middle and end, and following a logical progression. A key element in telling a story is the plot. To have a plot, there must be some kind of conflict or problem to be solved. You should also give a detailed description of the setting, illustrating what the characters perceive in the world you create. Also, transitions from one thought to another should be appropriate, and details should be plentiful and varied. You should also introduce at least two characters who have distinctive personalities, points of view and appearances, and also include elements of dialogue. Your story should be between 1,800 and 2,000 words long, double-­ spaced. You are welcome to include illustrations or other media in your story.

14 Pass the Baton Lessons from Historic Examples of the Political Turn, 1967–1968 Shannon Carter I first met John Carlos in person during a book signing in Washington D.C. for his memoir The John Carlos Story: The Sports Moment That Changed History (2011). In front of a room packed so full they had to bring in additional chairs, this human-rights activist spoke candidly about his experiences before, during, and after the controversial “Silent Protest” at the Mexico City Olympics in 1968—track and field medals around their necks, black-gloved fists raised, and heads bowed as the national anthem played. According to Doug Hartmann (2003), “[i]t was a polarizing moment because it was seen as an example of black power radicalism … Mainstream America hated what they did” (27, emphasis added).1 At the time, the press labeled the Silent Protest a “Nazi-like salute” (Los Angeles Times 1968) by a “pair of dark-skinned stormtroopers” (Musburger, Chicago American 1968) in “an act contemptuous of the United States” (Chicago Tribune 1968). 2 More than half a century later, characterizations like these feel eerily familiar. When, months before Donald Trump’s inauguration, San ­Francisco 49ers’ quarterback Colin Kaepernick “took a knee” during the Star-Spangled Banner, the NFL described the demonstration as “­willingly immers[ing] himself into controversy.” His “refusal to support the American flag as a means to take a stand has brought incredible backlash before and likely will in this instance.” (Wyche 2016). 3 Within the year, of course, Kaepernick would lose his lucrative career in the NFL and “#TakeaKnee” would surge into a major movement briefly dominating international news and social media. In his first year in office, Trump himself would tweet about the Take a Knee movement more than 38 times. “If a player wants the privilege of making millions of dollars in the NFL, or other leagues,” Trump tweeted on September 27, 2017, “he or she should not be allowed to disrespect our Great ­A merican Flag (or Country).” “Stand proudly for your National Anthem,” he tweeted almost a year later, “or be Suspended Without Pay!” (Trump 2018) Rhetorical, embodied demonstrations like these have much to teach us about the material dimensions of what this volume is calling a “political turn,” a call to focus on early 21st-century political exigencies that, in many ways, look much like those in place more than half a

Pass the Baton  207 century ago. To this end, I apply a Marxist approach to two racial justice efforts enacted by track-and-field athlete and human rights activist ­ exico John Carlos: (1) his participation in the iconic “Silent Protest” in M City in 1968 and (2) a similarly controversial public demonstration of resistance the previous year when he was a radicalized student of color from Harlem on a track scholarship at my own rural, conservative, working-class, then recently desegregated campus (East Texas State University, now Texas A&M-Commerce). Today, our mid-sized (13,000), PhD-granting, public university about an hour’s drive from Dallas ranks high in “overall diversity” (#282 out of 2,718 colleges nationwide).4 At the time, however, enrollment at East Texas State University (hereafter ET) was dominated by white men and women from the mostly rural, segregated communities across the region. In both embodied, rhetorical events, Carlos sought to expose the inexcusable, mutable contradictions between the promises and realities of America in 1968 and my community in 1967. Both exemplify what “taking the political turn” can look like beyond the academy with much to teach us about the possibilities for collective action from within the ivory tower, always, of course, in deep collaboration with and in the service of social justice movements already well underway outside the university’s walls. To emphasize the materiality of social movements, I approach the metaphor “pass the baton” as a mechanism through which to investigate the local, embodied, material dimensions of activism—those moments of contact between individuals and physical, often mundane texts through which rhetorical events emerge and circulate in larger political economic systems to reify or disrupt injustice. Just as sprinters “pass the baton” in track and field, so, too, must activists rely on an extensive network of figurative batons passed over space and time to challenge injustice. I borrow this conceptual framework of “passing the baton” from ­ Carlos himself, who characterizes his participation in the Silent P ­ rotest as an effort to “pass the baton” to disrupt injustice over time. The moment of contact through which I took up this symbolic form from Carlos’s outstretched hand was at a Writing Democracy workshop in Las Vegas at Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) in 2013. By that point, Carlos and I had been working together for a couple of years. Coincidentally, as we explain in the Introduction to this collection, that particular conference marks the first time the Writing Democracy project would explicitly began to take “the political turn,” as indicated by our 2013 workshop titled “The Political Turn: Writing ‘Democracy’ for the 21st Century.” This turn, coupled with that year’s conference theme on “The Public Work of Composition,” suggested to us a strong need to hear from activists affiliated with neither our field nor academia more broadly. Thus, with the encouragement of conference chair Howard Tinberg and the permission of the CCCC Executive Committee, I invited John Carlos to deliver a featured presentation we

208  Shannon Carter called “The Silent Protest: Open Hands, Closed Fists, and Composition’s Political Turn.” The day before he delivered that inspiring presentation in a ballroom at the Riviera Hotel on the Vegas Strip, he’d join us in a crowded, stuffy conference room during our Writing Democracy workshop to share why and how his own life took such a deeply political turn. “Today,” he told us, “I hold my baton out and ain’t nobody there to take it.” What are we doing about it? What can we do about it? How might our field recognize, support, and help sustain the passing of the baton across social movements and over time? One possibility, I suggest, is to use our expertise in how rhetoric works to investigate and teach our students about historic examples of the political turn we advocate.

To Pass/Receive a Baton As a mechanism through which to investigate significant moments of physical, material contact in political engagement, the idea of passing the baton signifies how historical social movements seem to travel into new territories and over time. When theorizing social change, we tend to focus on the baton itself, approaching a direct political action like the Silent Protest as a symbolic “passing of the baton” from those around the globe suffering from and fighting against the tyranny of racism and poverty to those who had not yet joined the fight. While Carlos expressed frustration about his perceived inability to hand off the baton he presented through the Silent Protest, he does not suggest social justice can be transmitted directly from one person to another. In describing the intentions behind the Silent Protest in the decades since, both Smith and Carlos have consistently revealed a deep awareness of the dynamic networks through which social justice ebbs and flows. As Tommie Smith put it in 1967, more than a year before that iconic moment in Mexico City, [y]ou must regard this suggestion as only another step in a series of movements … I don’t think this boycott … would stop the problem, but I think people will see that we … are a race of proud people and want to be treated as such. (quoted in Drake 1967, 22) In this way, in passing the baton at ET and in Mexico City, they demanded to be seen, just as Kaepernick would half a century later. As Franz Fanon (1952) insists, “He who is reluctant to recognize me ­oppresses me” (218). Rather than focus on the transfer of a baton from one hand to another, I turn instead to the networks in which that exchange takes place. The political turn is not one moment of transmission between individual activists but many moments in constantly rearticulating networks across social movements that give the illusion of such a transmission.

Pass the Baton  209 Taking the political turn, I argue, means understanding, developing, and ­supporting networks that produce the possibility of rhetorical moves like the Silent Protest or Take a Knee—a network of circulating batons, endlessly activating a field that produces change. The nexus of the chapter is the dialectic between Carlos as an individual political actor and the historical and social contexts that produced him.5 The circulating networks are the contexts—historical, social, economic, legislative, judicial, technological—in which social change happens. A perpetual cycle of alienation from the means of production challenges agency as one attempts to pass the baton for social justice. As an athlete ostensibly representing a college and a region (East Texas) then a nation (America at the Olympics), officials treated Carlos’s body as little more than a machine, pushing him to run drills just as bosses push industrial workers to speed up on assembly lines (Brohm 1978; Young 1986). In what follows, I trace not only those ideological, material, embodied forces that produce and foster the conditions necessary to pass the baton but also those actively resisting and often silencing those efforts. I target systems not individuals (Williams 1991; Bell 1993, 2005; Delgado and Stefancic 1998; Delgado 2012). My goal is first to understand the ways in which collective action involving people, texts, and symbolic forms can enact broader social change and, second, to suggest how we might undertake the political turn on our own campuses, within our field, and in the streets.

Pass the Baton: The Movement of Texts, Bodies, and Symbolic Forms In track and field, the baton is a hollow cylinder that is carried by a sprinter in a relay race and transferred to the next runner in the team at the end of each stage. In treating “passing the baton” as a mechanism for understanding social justice, I do not suggest that political action can be reduced to individual acts of courage or persistence; instead we need to think about passing the baton collectively, generationally. When the starter pistol goes off in track and field, participants sprint from a clearly marked, supposedly fair and equitable starting point painted on a level playing field toward an equally obvious and officially regulated finish line exactly 400 meters away. However, the historical, material, and political contexts significantly inform the lived experiences of everyone involved. In the Olympics Games, for example, the commodification of the athlete’s body is a multi-billion-dollar industry, from the staggering costs of expansive changes to the host city’s infrastructure to television broadcasting rights, international sponsorships, domestic sponsorships, licensing, tourism, and, to a much lesser extent, ticket sales. While the athletes generate profit, they typically receive very little compensation for their work themselves (Lyons 2018).

210  Shannon Carter In social justice, of course, successfully passing the baton is not ­ ependent upon a clear “victory” of anti-racist rhetoric over clearly ded fined racism nor even individual racists. To pass the baton in this sense concerns not individual groups in isolation but rather the ways in which preexisting, already rearticulating networks alternatively disrupt and reinscribe one another—for example, how institutionalized racism is both embedded in and rearticulated by class conflict. In other words, the racial oppression Carlos experienced as a student athlete in Texas from 1965 to 1967 and, soon thereafter, as a representative of America in the 1968 Olympics is inextricably linked to class exploitation of any labor force, including organized sports.

John Carlos in the Archives I “met” John Carlos in my university archives long before I met him in person at the Politics and Poets Bookstore in Washington, D.C during his book signing in 2011. I did not go into the archives looking for him. Like nearly everyone else save the most visible, largely conservative, allwhite alumni who would have been his classmates, I had no idea he’d ever even set foot on my campus. As part of a then-new book project on racial justice in my historically conservative, rural, working-class community, I sought evidence of student activism in the decades surrounding ET’s desegregation. Until I found his name in a clipping from a campus newspaper in 1967 buried in a slim “Negro Affairs” folder among the President James G. Gee papers, Carlos’s presence was entirely absent from local public memory. As I would soon learn, this tight-knit community of ET alums had spent decades actively suppressing any public association between ET and this iconic figure. That suppression began even before Carlos quit the ET Track Team and moved his family back to Harlem more than 50 years ago. Despite winning a Bronze Medal at the 1968 Olympics, for example, Carlos’s name was conspicuously absent from the “Highlights of 1968” published in that year’s Locust, ET’s yearbook. Despite earning a place in far more prestigious Halls of Fame across the globe in the decades since, he would not be inducted into our own until 2012, months after my very public, high-profile, relatively aggressive campaign for ET to grant Carlos an honorary doctorate (which he received in May 2012) and my close, public, no less aggressive collaboration with the Director of Athletics to bring Carlos and his co-author Dave Zirin to ET as part of the national book tour for the John Carlos Story (2011) just one month after I met them in the nation’s capital. In fact, my presence in Washington when I met Carlos at that bookstore just a month earlier was mere happenstance. I was in town for a workshop coincidentally held that very week at the National Endowment for the Humanities offices for projects awarded NEH grants in

Pass the Baton  211 the 2011–2012 funding cycle. Coincidentally, too, my own digital humanities project included a documentary featuring Carlos’s and other ­A frican American student activists’ time on our campus in the late 1960s and early 1970s (see Carter 2011; Carter and Dent 2013; Carter et al. 2015). Before the book signing, I picked up three copies of his newly published memoir, including one to take back to the university archives, flipping through the pages eagerly as I waited for his talk to begin, and there it was—an entire chapter dedicated to his time on our campus called “Trouble in Texas.” Until I found Carlos in the archives and began circulating texts, public programming, digital humanities projects, and related materials across the region that countered the narratives dominating local public memory since he left ET in 1967, Carlos had not set foot on our campus. Once he did, at my invitation, he was moved almost to tears. “ET may have left me,” Carlos explained in the commencement address in which he became the first African American to receive an honorary doctorate from our university, “but ET never left my heart.” On the surface, then, it might seem I simply picked up the baton Carlos offered on our campus in 1967 and to the world the following year, ­relaying it to the current moment to help enact the targeted social change. In passing that baton into contemporary contexts, my role was to force the history of student and community activism into local public memory by publicly honoring and celebrating the human rights efforts of arguably the most controversial figure ever associated with ET. C ­ arlos’s relationship to ET had been actively, consciously, and persistently erased from local public memory. However, by the time I began this book project, nearly 50 years after he was a student at ET, these social justice networks had been well established and further strengthened decades earlier through what Jacquelyn Dowd-Hall (2005) calls the “Long Civil Rights Movement,” a period that … took root in the liberal and radical milieu of the late 1930s … accelerated during World War II, stretched far beyond the South, was continuously and ferociously contested, and, in the 1960s and 1970s inspired a “movement of movements” that “def[ies] any narrative of collapse.” (1235) By the time Carlos and I first began working together, the alumni working hardest to suppress any public criticism of race relations at ET had lost considerable strength as their numbers dwindled and campus administration and faculty shifted left. The critical dialectic at play in our everyday lives had strengthened the networks through which social justice could flow and subsequently pass the baton. When I stumbled upon Carlos’s name in the archives, the Silent Protest itself had already been

212  Shannon Carter receiving national and international attention for several years, treating (and, essentially, commodifying) that image and, by extension, Smith and Carlos themselves as heroic and courageous rather than “un-­A merican,” “dark-skinned stormtroopers.” By that point, of course, Carlos had also published his memoir with David Zirin, the outspoken socialist and sports editor for The Nation, with a foreword by Cornel West and ringing endorsements by high-profile figures like Michael Moore as well as a nomination for the 2012 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work/ Biography/Autobiography. With or without my help, Carlos could no longer be ignored, though without my intentionally loud, high-profile campaign to grant him an honorary doctorate and a place in the ET Hall of Fame. Yet without some level of deliberate rhetorical intervention, Carlos’s connection to ET would likely have remained absent from local public memory until and unless another community-embedded ­researcher and teacher entered the archives with similar goals. Most significantly, perhaps, today Carlos’s association with my campus is good “branding” for ET. To deny him an honorary doctorate or place in the ET Hall of Fame in this climate would embarrass ET officials, perhaps drawing unwanted attention through negative mainstream press, social media campaigns, and demonstrations. During my campaigning, I took full advantage of the politics of the current moment, ready to bring any attempts to block these efforts to area news. I didn’t have to. This time, ET did the right thing. That Carlos’s association with ET is now “good branding” is, itself, an interesting, deeply complicated turn of events that deserves far more attention than is available in the current chapter, especially with respect to more recent developments at the time of this writing like Nike’s choice to make Colin Kaepernick the face of their 30th anniversary ad campaign.6 Nike’s decision, in the words of New York Times reporters, “to capitalize on the so-called Resistance movement in a way it only recently realized it could” paid off big, with stock prices skyrocketing as they landed “the young, urban market it long targeted” (Cresswell et al. 2018). Passing the baton for social justice matters. The Silent Protest matters. Kaepernick’s decision to “take a knee” rather than “show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses … people of color” matters. Yet, capitalism’s tendency to commodify all human actions has only accelerated and intensified under current conditions.

Carlos “Passes the Baton” in Mexico City (1968) Through the Silent Protest, John Carlos and Tommie Smith passed the baton the moment they raised their fists, the moment the tens of ­thousands of people in the Olympic Stadium and the millions more watching this live broadcast in their living rooms and neighborhood bars

Pass the Baton  213 registered what they were seeing and reacted with enthusiastic support or rabid fury. That now-iconic image would continue to pass the baton over the coming days and weeks (in contemporary media), then through public memory and over time, decades later appearing on the walls of college dorms (and even the sequined glove of Michael Jackson), in retrospectives on significant anniversaries (e.g., Sports Illustrated August 5, 1991), through news coverage of the increasingly visible violence law enforcement officials have been inflicting upon black bodies for centuries, the subsequent emergence of Black Lives Matter (“BLM: Herstory”), the Take a Knee movement, and even Nike ads. “I was there to make a statement,” Carlos explained at the time. “I was ashamed of America” (quoted in Axthelm 1968). To pass the baton is not necessarily to change hearts and minds. By itself, a raised fist cannot render systemic inequities visible. By itself, a raised fist will not force awareness of white privilege among those who experience its benefits. Rather to pass the baton is to reinforce and, as much as possible, strengthen, the network of symbols already set in motion, symbols to be subsequently taken up and enacted upon by local publics (Frazer 1990; Warner 2003). Of course, even at the time, not everyone condemned the Silent Protest. Many baby boomers remember that moment with much excitement. After John Carlos delivered his ­featured presentation at CCCC in Las Vegas in 2013, for example, he was surrounded by people eager to share with him what it was like to see two proud black men refuse to blindly embrace an unjust global power. As he made his way through the casinos lining paths between our hotel rooms and the convention center, people old enough to remember the Silent Protest stopped Carlos for photographs. At that year’s Bedford/ St. Martin’s party, people lined up to shake his hand. My own mother uses one word to describe that moment when she witnessed the Silent Protest as a teenager sitting on the floor in front of her television in rural Kansas: “electrifying.” The Movement of People across Borders: 1968 Passing the baton requires people to travel over networks that include built environments (i.e., roads, airport runways, Olympic stadiums), technology (i.e., planes, cars, athletic equipment), and, of course, the circulation of capital that makes these built environments and travel across them possible (i.e., gasoline, plane tickets). That may seem obvious, but histories of social justice efforts rarely account for the central role economic systems play in every aspect of daily life, including agitation against the dominant social order. To pass the baton in Mexico City meant Carlos had to travel from his home in Harlem to college in Texas back to Harlem then to California on a track scholarship at San Jose State and, finally, Mexico City. Tommie Smith’s movements rendered

214  Shannon Carter the Silent Protest possible, as well. Born the son of migrant farm workers in a remote community in East Texas not far from ET itself, Smith spent his early childhood picking cotton in what is now the university town surrounding ET, albeit nearly 20 years before Carlos joined the ET track team. From East Texas, Smith would move to California to, somewhat ironically, pick grapes, then to San Jose and, finally, Mexico City. ­Notably, the time Smith spent in Texas as a child would give him a more sympathetic perspective on why oppressed people in the South might be reluctant to push back, a perspective Carlos struggled to understand as a young activist at ET who had spent many of his teenage years with Malcolm X at a neighborhood mosque in Harlem. As Smith explains more than a year before the Silent Protest, “… the guys are more afraid than anything … How would you like it if you” speak out “and you go back to your home in the South to find a double barrel shotgun sticking in your front door?” (Drake 1967, 22). This interview in which Smith is quoted—“Tom, Lee Discuss ­Boycott”—circulated one of the first unfiltered accounts of why black athletes might even contemplate something as risky as a boycott. In fact, before taking the interview to press, this reporter gave Smith and Lee ­Evans, the other radicalized sprinter the reporter interviewed, an opportunity to “read this report in its entirety and at least concur as to its ­factual content” (Drake 1967, 3). As Track and Field News reporter Dick Drake explains in his introductory remarks to this interview: Reams of copy have been devoted to the possibility of such a ­boycott—and much of it based on misinformation—but little has dealt with the question of why the blacks would forfeit an opportunity to compete in the most important athletic event the many of them have highly devoted countless hours striving to reach. (3, emphasis in original) I will return to this interview at some length in the following section as it played a central role in activating the networks that enabled the publication of Carlos’s controversial remarks about my campus in 1967. I mention it now for two reasons—the reporter’s emphasis on physical, embodied forces behind activism and second, the publication date, just days before the meeting in Los Angeles from which the Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR) would emerge and less than a week before Carlos would encounter this very same interview at ET when he picked up the latest issue of Track and Field News (Carter 2011). First, I turn to the central role Drake (1967) himself places on the material nature of information flow. He speaks of the “misinformation” dominating reports about the boycotts as circulating through “reams of paper” and the “typewriters” to which “pressmen the world over [would] rush … to picture Tommie as a militant Negro leader or as an

Pass the Baton  215 athletic stooge for extremist black groups” (3). Known as “the fastest man in the world,” Smith had been appearing in the sports pages for some time. Recently, however, reporters had begun to take note of his politics. “In the United States,” a Japanese reporter asked Smith at the World Games in Tokyo on September 3, 1967, “[a]re the Negroes now equal to whites in the way they are treated? What about the possibility of boycotting the 1968 Olympics?” (quoted in Drake 1967, 3). At that point, news of a boycott had yet to reach Smith. Just days earlier, comedian and activist Dick Gregory, himself a former track star at Southern ­Illinois University, had raised the possibility an Olympic boycott when officials stripped Mohammed Ali of his heavyweight title. While mainstream me­ apers. dia hated Smith’s answer, they knew immediately it would sell p “Depending upon the situation,” Smith explained, “you cannot rule out the possibility that we (US) Negro athletes might boycott the ­Olympic Games” (quoted in Drake 1967, 3). Almost immediately ­following the widespread publication of his remarks, Smith’s fame switched to notoriety. Thus, the networks that would both enable and effectively silence the Silent Protest and even Carlos’s attempts to pass the baton at ET the previous year can be charted across a series of flashpoints, a collection of networks fueling what would become the Silent Protest, including press coverage of Smith’s athletic prowess and Mohammed Ali’s refusal to contribute to the endless suffering in Vietnam, as well as Smith’s very presence at the World Games in Tokyo making it possible for a Japanese reporter more interested in Smith’s politics than his athletic performance to approach him about the boycott. In that very same interview Carlos would begin reading at the ET post office just days later, Smith identifies his conversation with the Japanese reporter as the moment he himself picked up the baton represented by the boycott. By implication, Smith appears to have strengthened his grip around the baton the moment the reporter jotted Smith’s response in his notebook and incorporated it into an article for the Japanese press, inspiring “pressman around the world to rush … to their typewriters,” dedicating “reams of paper” to “misinformation” about Smith’s politics (Drake 3). As Smith himself explains, [i]f this individual in Japan would not have asked me about the possibility of a boycott in 1968, I might not have begun thinking about this specific suggestion. All of a sudden something suddenly flashed into my mind. Is there something to it? (Drake 1967, 22, emphasis added) The networks activated by Smith’s remarks to the Japanese press would contribute to an array of overlapping, dynamic networks from which the OPHR would emerge and ultimately fall apart. OPHR itself is not

216  Shannon Carter directly responsible for the Silent Protest. However, this organization and the texts, people, and symbolic forms enabling and enabled by its circulation made the Silent Protest possible. Without OPHR, there would be no Silent Protest. Without a meeting of Olympic-bound athletes in a Baptist Church in Los Angeles just a few days after Drake’s interview with Smith, there would be no OPHR. OPHR founder Harry Edwards, a mentor of ­Tommie Smith and, later, Carlos, organized and led that meeting of the Western Black Youth Conference over Thanksgiving weekend in 1967. As Edwards explained at that LA meeting: For years we have participated in the Olympic Games, carrying the U.S. on our backs with our victories, and race relations are worse now than ever. Now they are even shooting people in the streets. We’re not trying to lose the Olympics for the Americans. What happens to them is immaterial. If they finish first, that’s beautiful. If they finish 14th, that’s beautiful, too. But it’s time for the black people to stand up as men and women and refuse to be utilized as performing animals for a little extra dog food. You see, this may be our last opportunity to settle this mess short of violence. (Rodgers 1967) Carlos had been invited to that event; however, he couldn’t afford to bring his wife and their two-year-old daughter to LA. Still the sheer volume of press coverage it received inspired local media across the country to approach radicalized, Olympic-bound athletes like Carlos. The Silent Protest as we know it would not have been possible were it not for a series of quite specific, analog, physical texts passed among people—that issue of Track and Field News, for example, a letter inviting Carlos to LA, international press coverage of the meeting and the resulting OPHR statement with its own associated documents (see “OPHR Demands”), local press coverage about Carlos’s position on OPHR, and the subsequent press and related activities that would quickly drive Carlos and his family back to New York. To pass the baton requires not only the circulation of texts but also people over borders and into new spatial relations. Just weeks after he left ET to return to Harlem, Carlos found himself at an OPHR meeting with Martin Luther King, Jr., himself. There, MLK announced his own plans to publicly endorse OPHR and encouraged Carlos to join the boycott (Carlos and Zirin 2011). Ten days later, that possibility died with MLK, shot dead on a hotel balcony during the sanitation workers protest in Tennessee (Carter 2011). A few months after that, San Jose State would recruit Carlos for their track team, where he would combine forces with athletes who, like Tommie Smith, willingly put their futures on the line. As Smith explained just days before the official formation

Pass the Baton  217 of OPHR, “I would give up athletes in a minute to die for my people” (Drake 1967, 23). MLK’s death contributed directly to OPHR’s dissolution; his public endorsement promised to significantly expand and broaden the reach of OPHR’s message. The boycott’s success depended in no small part on the international spotlight certain to shine upon this symbolic gesture through MLK’s association. Other factors crippling OPHR included recurring threats upon the lives of OPHR participants and their families and the fact that soon before the Olympic Games began a few of OPHR’s key demands had already been met. For example, in response to OPHR pressure and related campaigns, the International Olympic Committee eventually refused to allow Apartheid-ruled South Africa to compete. Regardless of the reasons, OPHR no longer existed when Carlos and Smith stepped onto the track at the Olympic Stadium. In other words, the Silent Protest required people to move across borders, like Carlos (Harlem to Texas to Harlem to California to Mexico City) and Smith (Texas to California to Mexico City) as well as ­Martin Luther King, Jr. (most clearly from Harlem to the Lorraine Motel in Memphis Tennessee). Had MLK lived to endorse OPHR, Smith and Carlos and countless other African American athletes would likely have boycotted the Olympics after all. Of course, had Carlos and Smith remained in California, there would be no Silent Protest either, at least not as we know it today. The Movement of Symbolic Forms: 1968 Passing the baton involves the movement of symbolic forms into new spatial-temporal relations. As Martin Luther King, Jr., argued in one of his final speeches: The black revolution is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes. It is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws—­ racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism. It is exposing evils that are rooted in the whole structure of society … and suggests that a radical reconstruction of society is the real issue to be faced. —­Martin Luther King, Jr., quoted in Taylor. (2018) Similarly, as Carlos and Smith have explained multiple times over the decades, the Silent Protest represented solidarity with those suffering from and fighting against the tyranny of ongoing injustice, not only across the Jim Crow South in America but also in the North, where the black power movement had begun to reach a fever pitch, in South Africa, where Apartheid still reigned, in Vietnam, where countless lives continued to be lost, and in the very city hosting the Olympics, where

218  Shannon Carter the blood of student protesters and passersby was being silently washed away—literally—following the Tlatelolco Massacre, when, just days before the Silent Protest, Mexican officials had effectively cleared the streets in preparation for the world’s spotlight by firing into the crowd of thousands protesting the oppressive regime of President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz and killing 200–300 university students and bystanders. The “closed” (Corbett) or “clenched” fist has a long history as a symbol of defiance and solidarity commonly associated with both broad left politics and the struggles of oppressed groups, including the revolutionary Industrial Workers of the World in the early 1900s, the Popular Front’s anti-fascism message in the Spanish Civil War two decades later, and, of course, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the black power movement. In more recent years, this symbol has circulated in collective challenges to, for example, union busting in Wisconsin and, through Black Lives Matter, police brutality. Similarly, the term “silent protest” is a form of civil disobedience with its own history and symbols—an act of nonviolent resistance in which the protestors remain silent. A relevant historical precedent is the Silent Parade or “Silent Protest” in New York on July 28, 1917, a march of more than 8,000 people organized by W.E.B. Dubois and the NAACP in response to the East St. Louis Riots earlier that year during which white mobs killed as many as 250 African Americans (Lewis 2009). The networks enabled and impacted by the Silent Protest include the history of sports in general and the Olympic Games in particular. ­Marxists like Ben Carrington and Ian McDonald (2009), Chris Bambery (1996), Tony Collins (2013), and Ian McDonald (2015), have argued that sports, by definition, divide people through a direct competition between individuals or presorted collectives (teams). “Sport restores to mankind some of the functions which the machine has taken away from him,” explains Jean-Marie Brohm in Sport: A Prison of Measured Time, “but only to regiment him remorselessly in the service of the machine” (1978, 58). I do not suggest sports have no real purpose outside “the service of the machine”; however, a Marxist framework asks us to critique all human activity through the logic of capitalism. The modern ­Olympics, for example, began in 1896 as an international competition among individual amateur athletes. Very soon thereafter, however, the Games were politicized and commodified as they transformed into an international competition among nations (in 1912) taking place at World’s Fairs populated by retailers’ displays and other international symbols of industry and commerce as early as 1900 (in Paris) and 1904 (in St. Louis). Ever since, national rivalry, patriotism, and market forces have dictated the shape and function of the Games. As the New Socialist argues in “Marxist Theories of Sport: Nation, Commerce and Pleasure” (2010), “over the years, the Games have been a blatant vehicle for international political one-upmanship.”

Pass the Baton  219 Much as Mexico City would in preparation for the world’s spotlight in 1968, in 1936 Nazi Germany would clear the streets of anti-Semitic propaganda and send 800 “gypsies” to internment camps. Inherently a competition among nations and, today, a multi-billion-dollar industry, the Olympic Games, according to Christopher Hill (1996), “ha[ve] been marked by acrimony or worse and the recollections of contretemps or disaster long outlive the warm glow of competitive interaction” (35–36). The 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany hold particular resonance for the Silent Protest. History treats Jesse Owens, the first black athlete to represent America in the Olympics, as a heroic example of social change. Winning four gold medals in track and field, Owens is remembered as “single-handedly crush[ing] Hitler’s myth of Aryan Supremacy … [T]he master athlete humiliated the master race” (Schwartz n.d.). In a battle between nations—flag against flag, salute against salute—it seems ­A merica won. Artifacts from the 1936 Olympics that continue to circulate even today include an image that is almost as iconic as the ­Silent Protest: Jesse Owens, Olympic gold medal around his neck, wears a jersey clearly marking him as a representative of America with the l­etters “U.S.A.” across his chest, placing his hand to his forehead in a traditional, military-style salute to his country. All around him, Nazi officials and even bronze medalist Lutz Long raise their right arms to salute “der fuhrer.” Through these symbolic acts, both medalists signal their unwavering, patriotic loyalty to their home countries, in Long’s case to Hitler’s myth of Aryan supremacy with a Nazi salute. In the Silent Protest, by contrast, Carlos and Smith raise their fists to draw attention to the tensions between America’s promise and its realities. Similarly, silver medalist Peter Norman (Australia) demonstrates solidarity with Carlos and Smith by wearing a pin for the OPHR on the lapel of his jersey, signaling similar injustices against the aboriginal people in his home country. ­Mainstream Australians hated this symbolic act just as Americans hated the Silent Protest. Unlike Nazi Germany, our country did not openly promote white supremacy as part of our brand. Even so, the ethos of the white “master race” continued to hold much currency in America. As Owens explains, When I came back to my native country, after all the stories about Hitler, I couldn’t ride in the front of the bus. I had to go to the back door. I couldn’t live where I wanted. I wasn’t invited to shake hands with Hitler, but I wasn’t invited to the White House to shake hands with the President, either. (quoted in Smith 2010, 1050) He struggled to find work, pumping gas and, eventually, racing horses. “People say that it was degrading for an Olympic champion to run against a horse,” Owens explains, “but what was I supposed to do? I had four

220  Shannon Carter gold medals, but you can’t eat four gold medals” (quoted in Schwartz n.d.). Yet despite all experiences to the contrary, Owens “uncritically absorbed” the American myth of equality, to invoke Antonio Gramsci’s “contradictory consciousness” (1971), wherein equality seems possible for a black man in a country built on the logic of capitalism that is, as David Roediger (2017) explains, always already “sought, exploited and needed, and created difference” (27). Lisa Lowe (1996) puts it this way: [C]apital has maximized its profits not through rendering labor abstract but precisely through the social production of difference marked by race, nation, geographical origins, and gender. The law of value has operated by creating, preserving, and reproducing the specifically racialized and gendered category of labor power. (27–28) In 1955, Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed Owens as “Ambassador of Sports” (“German Myth 10” 2004). From that point on, Owens settled into a relatively comfortable, middle-class life funded, in part, by delivering speeches about the value of hard work and serving as an ambassador for America in the Olympics (Ginter 2014). In this capacity, officials at the 1968 Olympics called upon Owens to talk Smith and Carlos out of any public demonstrations that might tarnish this spectacle of American patriotism. At the time, Owens insisted upon the efficacy of what Edward P.J. Corbett (1969) would soon call “the rhetoric of the open hand,” suggesting open, “reasoned” discourse could enact social change. “The black fist is a meaningless symbol,” Owens told Carlos and Smith in the locker room at the Mexico City Olympics. “When you open it, you have nothing but fingers—weak, empty fingers” (quoted in Johnson 2011, 272). For Carlos, for Smith, for OPHR and its founder Harry Edwards, ­ rhetoric indeed for the entirety of the black power movement, Corbett’s “ of the closed fist” had become the only reasonable, available path, one Corbett criticized for what he described as a type of persuasion reliant upon “non-rational, non-sequential, often non-verbal, frequently provocative means” (288). In response to Corbett’s CCC article, Robert M. Browne (1970) challenged Corbett’s characterization of “the closed fist” as inherently violent. “A fist may be closed in order to strike,” Browne agrees, “but it may as well be closed to protect its members from danger, or keep grip on something precious. Maybe it’s holding a seed. As for the open hand, it looks friendly but isn’t it empty?” (190). Almost 20 years later, Richard Marback (1996) is even more critical of the open hand, noting “the open hand that invites discursive participation in democratic processes can be far from benevolent and not wholly inclusionary” (182) arguing for the necessity of “the closed fist coerciveness” and “contestatory rhetorics” when confronting “race, gender, and class inequities” (196).

Pass the Baton  221 Among the working class, the logic of capital renders the “rhetoric of the open hand” little more than an empty gesture. As Marx argues in The German Ideology, the ruling ideas are the ideas held by the ruling classes to serve themselves not a black son of a sharecropper in the rural south at the height of the Jim Crow era. No matter how sound and well-reasoned the argument, altering the structuring forces of racism with “reasoned” discourse is impossible because, as Roediger (2017) has argued, racism is not only part of the history of capitalism but also the logic of capital. Taylor (2011) puts it this way: [O]ppressions can reinforce and compound each other. They are born out of the material realities shaped by capitalism and the economic exploitation that is at the heart of capitalist society. It is the material and economic structure of society that gave rise to a range of ideologies to justify, explain, and help perpetuate that order. In the United States, racism is the most important of those ideologies. (emphasis added) The “rhetoric of the open hand” depends upon a just, fair, and equitable system in which all participants have equal access to the public spaces necessary for democratic deliberation. “Man,” Carlos recalls Owens saying, “we have to give them more time.” Carlos’s response, “in your day, they was telling you the same thing. I say, tell them John Carlos said time done run out” (Kyun Nnamdi Show 2012). The “open hand” reinforces existing networks of oppression by delaying the transmission of social justice. A few years after the Silent Protest, Owens himself would agree. In his memoir I Have Changed, Owens (1974) finally picked up that symbolic baton extended by the Silent Protest a few years earlier: “I realize now,” he explained, “that militancy … [is] the only answer where the black man [is] concerned, that any black man who wasn’t also militant … was either blind or a coward” (quoted in Gitlin 2017, 43). Of course, the Silent Protest did not—indeed could not—convince individuals not to be racist in a society organized around white supremacy. Instead, their “rhetoric of the closed fist” tapped into the increasingly vibrant and visible networks pulsating with the energy of the Long Civil Rights Movement. Neither did the Silent Protest itself enact meaningful, sustainable social change. Even so, the Silent Protest helped move the needle toward justice at the time and, importantly, today, as that iconic image circulates, gaining momentum in the aftermath of Trump’s election.

Passing the Baton at ET: 1967 Less than a year before Carlos raised his fist in Mexico City, a few days after that meeting of more than 200 athletes in a Sunday school room in

222  Shannon Carter L.A. where Harry Edwards announced the formation of OPHR, ­local press began approaching ­Carlos at ET. Soon thereafter, area media began circulating a statement by ­Carlos that, as the Silent Protest would on an international stage less than a year later, frightened and angered white community members who were stunned to hear rhetoric many associated with Malcolm X and the Black Panthers uttered so close to home. Describing the injustices black ET students and community members faced, Carlos seemed to invoke his mentor Malcolm X when he told a Dallas News reporter, “If conditions don’t change, something is going to happen at ET” (quoted in Stowers 1967, emphasis added). As ­Malcolm X (1964) declared of the black power movement just three years earlier, We declare our right on this earth … to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary. By the time ET area reporters began approaching Carlos, the networks surrounding a phenomenon Sports Illustrated had been calling “The Revolt of the Black Athlete” (Olson, July–August 1967) were pulsating with the energy necessary to fuel increasingly heated conversations about the OPHR. Carlos was well aware of these conversations, and he had a firm grip on that baton. He planned to use the local stage these networks provided to pass the baton along to the ET community. At ET, as he explained in the Dallas News, black bodies remained in control of the “master.” Long after civil rights legislation mandated otherwise, restaurants [tell us] they don’t serve Negroes … [Y]ou go into a place to shoot a game of pool and they tell you Negroes aren’t allowed. I could wear an Olympic gold medal around my neck and I still wouldn’t be served in those places If conditions don’t change, something is going to happen at ET. (Stowers 1967, emphasis added) The moment Carlos and his young family arrived from Harlem in ­August 1965, for example, Jim Crow met them at the Dallas airport by introducing him to segregated bathrooms and water fountains (Carlos and Zirin 2011). The route from the airport to their new home at ET took them under a lighted billboard on Main Street in a town adjacent to this rural university town that read, “Welcome to Greenville: Blackest Land, Whitest People.”7 Rather than use his name, locals regularly called Carlos “Boy.” In a vaguely plantation-like move, Carlos’s track coach—his anatomy professor, no less—justified running the handful of black athletes at ET much harder than everyone else because, as Coach

Pass the Baton  223 Brown regularly insisted, black bodies benefit from “extra bones” and “a tail” (Carter 2011). A neighbor terrified Carlos’s two-year-old daughter when the father of her playmate ran toward them yelling, “Get away from that n*****!” (Carlos and Zirin 62). “We agreed to make a home for ourselves in Commerce,” Carlos recalls decades later. “But every last shred of dignity that we took with us to Texas was challenged” (64). “Thinking about it now,” one self-described Texan would explain immediately after the Mexico City Olympics the following year, “a guy like Carlos lasting a year and a half in a redneck town like Commerce is one of the most amazing records in track and field” (Axthelm 1968). They expected this treatment in the South, Carlos would explain in his memoir decades later, but he didn’t think of Texas as “the South.”8 Public memory of the Civil Rights Movement rarely circulated in Texas given the absence of symbols of publicized white resistance by figures like Bull Connors or Arkansas Nine or events like church bombings. In White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion in Dallas, 1841–2001, historian Michael Phillips (2006) reveals the propertied classes across Dallas worked tirelessly to brand the city and surrounding areas as a civilized, dignified region in control of any potential for collective action on behalf of and in opposition to civil rights legislation.9 Around the same time, ET launched a full-scale marketing campaign to brand this campus as “The South’s Most Democratic College,” which included propaganda projecting imagery of an idyllic, peaceful campus where, unlike the rest of the South during this tumultuous period, people reportedly refused to contribute to the chaos surrounding the Civil Rights Movement. In other words, this advertising campaign insisted that, people of color knew their place and life for white community members would remain largely unaffected by civil rights legislation. “Privilege,” Shannon Jackson (2001) argues, “is a performance whose efficacy relies on the feeling that nothing dramatic is happening” (8) in their idyllic university town. Until Carlos began talking to area press, ET had successfully projected the illusion that “nothing dramatic is happening” (Carter and Conrad 2012). Against this backdrop, college athletes like Carlos may be seen as producing profits for their colleges, albeit less clearly than workers do for factory owners.10 According to Derek Van Rheenen (2012), “athletic labor is regularly evaluated in terms of its relative performance or production”; therefore, “[c]ommodification occurs whether human labor is transformed into a material product, such as a pair of shoes, or reified as athletic production” (554). Usually compensated through scholarships that cover little more than tuition and books, college athletes neither own nor control the production process or the products of their labor, which, in turn, alienate them from the full creative potential of labor (Messner 1992; Sage 1998; Eitzen 2000; Coakley 2009). Most significantly, alienated labor creates relations of opposition, a structural function that fundamentally resists collective action.

224  Shannon Carter ET—the institution extracting surplus value from Carlos’s labor— was founded in 1889 to serve the area’s white, isolated, poor farmers, “regardless of previous educational experience or ability to pay” (Mayo quoted in Gold 2008), a campus built by former slaves where subsequent generations would feed the students, maintain the growing physical plant, and clean faculty homes for more than 70 years before any of their family members or neighbors would be permitted to enroll as students (Carter 2012a; Carter and Conrad 2012; Carter and Dent 2013). Just as the Silent Protest symbolized a rejection of the blind patriotism embedded in every aspect of the Olympic Games, Carlos’s description of the racial climate at ET in local news as “discriminating” and “terrible” marked an outright rejection of unmitigated school spirit based on a utopian vision of a deeply flawed community. Likewise, as a representative of ET Carlos broke the relative silence about the state of race relations across the region. “You go out of state to a track meet and you are representing not only your school but your entire state,” he told the Dallas News, yet “[d]iscrimination at ET has hurt me personally.” Carlos thus broke the illusion that “nothing dramatic [was] happening” (Shannon 8), predicting in fact that “If conditions don’t change, something is going to happen at ET” (quoted in Stowers, emphasis added). Embarrassed by his remarks and fearing the athletes (labor) might begin to organize, ET officials scrambled to silence Carlos and restore order by coercing an article in the campus newspaper titled “Negro ­Athletes Refute Statements” in which the other black athletes insisted that “We are not behind Carlos” and “We didn’t appoint [Carlos] as a spokesperson” (Anderson 1967b, 8). In doing so, they assured the local white community that despite what Carlos said, nothing was ­“going to happen at ET” (Carlos quoted in Stowers 1967). Although the collective statement appeared at the time to be a completely voluntary response by black athletes no less outraged by Carlos’s statements than white community members, the circumstances under which it was published deserve our attention. “Negro Athletes Refute Statements” at once drew its strength from and contributed to a much larger, extremely well-­established series of networks created by, expanded, and reinforced again and again by bondage, violence, and other oppressive forces designed to control black bodies. These overlapping networks of white supremacy easily overcame the networks of black resistance that gave Carlos’s position a public forum. The article announcing that none of the other black athletes were “behind Carlos” emerged from a two-hour meeting of all black athletes mandated by ET leaders, which track coach Delmer Brown began with the phrase, “[l]ove it or leave it” (quoted in Carter 2011). No records describe exactly what happened behind those closed doors; however,

Pass the Baton  225 we can speculate. Rather than demonstrating unanimous disapproval of Carlos’s position, the black athletes likely feared retaliation, capitulating to the administration’s effort to divide the team members and deter any opportunity for collective action. The larger context included student demonstrations that seemed to appear on every campus but ET protesting, among other things, America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Student unrest elsewhere threatened local leaders at ET with the possibility of collective action on their own campus. The Vietnam War threatened the lives of athletes who might otherwise be attracted to the idea of organizing. College enrollment meant deferment status. Without alternative funding sources, losing a scholarship meant losing the ­military deferment status they held as college students. In other words, anyone unwilling to discredit Carlos would likely find themselves carrying a gun in the jungles of Vietnam the following term. In these ways, ET officials drew from and contributed to the energy flowing through networks fueled by U.S. imperialism and growing resistance to the ­Vietnam War.

The “Materiality” of the Baton The flashpoints I have identified in this chapter function as instances of batons passed to activate new spatiotemporal relations. They do not function as starting points. Identifying the starting point for any social action, even those making up the Long Civil Rights Movement, does not seem possible. Instead, we should approach these flashpoints as kairotic moments, those “opportune, spontaneous” spaces (Hess 2011, 47) and “passing instant[s] when an opening appears which must be driven through with force” (White 1987, 13). These spaces emerge from social movements that circulate through animated, constantly rearticulating networks. Access to those “opportune, spontaneous” spaces, I argue, depends upon one’s access to the technology through which texts quite literally disseminate—that is, objects like those journalist Dick Drake identifies as facilitating his interview with Smith at his apartment, including the “tape recorder” and “transcription” he used to capture their answers to the questions he composed for his contribution to the November 1967 issue of Track and Field News, which was mass produced, sold, and delivered, eventually appearing in Carlos’s mailbox and, in doing so, directly linking him to the boycott that led to the Silent Protest. As I explain in the previous section, this particular interview in Track and Field News may be the first national forum in which radicalized athletes had the opportunity to explain in their own words why they might choose to boycott the Olympics. As Smith admits in that interview, “I really want to go to the Olympics, but I’ll pass it up if I have

226  Shannon Carter to—for a just cause” (quoted in Drake 1967, 22). Nearly half a century later, Carlos reveals the significant impact that interview had on his own life: “I was reading that” interview with Smith and Evans “at the same time I was living that … in terms of social issues that was taking place in society. I was actually living those same issues at East Texas State University” (The Kojo Nnamdi Show 2011). In his walk from the post office, Carlos remembers poring over every single page. Though he had always considered himself to be, as he puts it, “involved in the movement,” that interview marks a flashpoint in his life wherein he took a political turn not unlike those represented in this collection ­(Carter 2011). The Movement of Symbolic Forms: 1967 The rest of the resolution at ET declaring “Negro Athletes Refute ­[Carlos’s] Statements” deserves our attention. In it, the “Negro Athletes” seem to express the “double-consciousness” W.E.B. Dubois (1903) identifies as the inevitable result of white supremacy. “[B]esides the normal prejudices that are encountered in everyday life,” they state simply and ironically, “there is no dissension or static between the two groups” (quoted in Anderson 1, emphasis added). Significantly, their counterstatement at once suppresses the symbolic forms of resistance embedded in Carlos’s public statement and transmits those very same symbols by affirming that the problems Carlos raised did, indeed, exist as “normal prejudices that are encountered in everyday life.” Despite these inequities, they would neither admit nor contribute to any “dissension or static between the two groups.” This decision perpetuated the same rhetoric of civility that had been circulating across the region for years. A key example of the oppressive forces spread through rhetorics of civility is the speech delivered three years earlier by then ET president and notorious racist James G. Gee to announce the campus’s immediate desegregation. “It is my fervent hope and prayer,” Gee declared, that this event will go down in “the annals of history” as, above all, “a dignified integration” (Gee 1964, emphasis added). Whereas people of color at ET may have agreed with Carlos’s characterization of area race relations, his public statement threatened to break open the veneer of ET as unfailingly “civil,” “peaceful,” and “just,” much as Carlos would of America through the Silent Protest the following year. As Nancy Welch (2012) has argued, … civility reifies injustice … [W]hile civility in manners and speech would appear to enable expansive democratic participation, civility also serves in a liberal democracy as a powerful ideological tool by a propertied class seeking to curtail the public participation that

Pass the Baton  227 might also result in a more expansive conception of public rights … Civility functions to hold in check agitation against a social order that is undemocratic in access to decision-making voice and unequal in distribution of wealth. (2012, 37, 36, emphasis added)11 That’s exactly what the resolution by ET athletes was designed to do— to “hold in check” any potential for collective action. Instead, Carlos demonstrated what Welch calls “uncivil rhetoric,” (a stance not unlike Corbett’s “rhetoric of the closed fist”), which Welch argues “has been [historically] necessary to challenge civil boundaries of a civil society that would shield vast realms of injustice from democratic reckoning” (2012, 37). Through institutional discourse characterizing Carlos’s position as “uncivil,” ET officials effectively absorbed much of the impact of ­Carlos’s words, just as Olympic officials would on the international stage the following year. Even so, students at ET retrieved the baton from Carlos’ outstretched hand anyway, fueling networks circulating resistance with a surge of increasingly radicalized activist groups that spread across our campus almost immediately after Carlos left ET (­see Carter 2012, 2013). With the desegregation speech in 1964 and the collective resolution designed to discredit Carlos a few years later, ET officials set the tone for what Charlotte Linde (2009) calls the “institutional narrative,” the ways in which “institutions work their pasts, specifically how institutions and their members use narrative to remember. And in remembering, how they work and rework, present and represent the past for the purposes of the present and the projection of a future” (3). For my own campus even today, the “institutional narrative” surrounding ET’s history of race relations remains almost exactly as Gee “prayed” it would when our college finally integrated—a “peaceful,” dignified” campus. In a number of significant ways, efforts to locally suppress the efficacy of networks circulating racial justice elsewhere appear to have been quite successful, a reality that I found unsettling enough to begin investigating nearly a decade ago, leading me into the university archives and, soon thereafter, to Carlos and numerous other student activists, including a high-profile, regional chapter of the radical group Students for a Democratic Society deeply hidden from public memory (Carter 2011, 2012, 2013). At once conservative and deeply political, ET officials like Gee, like those who challenged Carlos, instinctively understood their fight to be within existing systems, the place, I argue, for all political actions designed to protect white, male, heteronormative privilege. Thus, the 1967 resolution ET administration coerced from the other black athletes and Gee’s desegregation speech in 1964 announcing the policy change that

228  Shannon Carter would later enable these same athletes to enroll may be understood as embodying the “civil rhetoric” Welch challenges and the “rhetoric of the open hand” Corbett endorses. By contrast, efforts like the Silent Protest and Carlos’s statement in the Dallas News sought to disrupt existing systems by refusing to “represent”and, by extension, endorse America as is, replete with class conflict and racial discrimination. In both rhetorical events, Carlos passed the baton outward, in an attempt to tug loose systemic injustice.

Passing the Baton Today The connection between Colin Kaepernick’s decision to take a knee and the Silent Protest sparked headlines like “Kaepernick’s Knee and ­Olympic Fists Are Linked by History” (Longman, New York Times 2018). Kaepernick didn’t have to look for the baton passed through the Silent Protest, as that iconic image had been circulating for years across networks animated through the ebbs and flows of social movements. These overlapping networks interpolate meanings, alternately inscribing the Silent Protest as a lightning rod for human rights and an ungrateful, unpatriotic demonstration of hate. Though the Take a Knee movement may have lost momentum in mainstream news, it continues to circulate through social media to high school cheerleading (2019), college basketball, a string of players in the Women’s National Basketball Association (Kahn 2017), even back into the NFL, including the #ImwithKap indicating a fan’s decision not to watch Super Bowl 2019. My key focus has been one athlete and lifelong activist for human rights, John Carlos, and two singular efforts to pass the baton (on my campus in 1967 and in Mexico City the following year), one on a local scale, one global.12 However, as much as the raised fists, I am interested in the networks that make gestures like these possible. Such a perspective helps us see social movements as driven by collective forces rather than individual heroes and to grasp the materiality of social justice struggles, at once global and always already local.13 By passing the baton more than half a century ago, Carlos called upon us to unite around a class consciousness inextricably interwoven with race. At the Silent Protest, he left his jacket unzipped to represent “the working man,” stepped onto the medal stand without shoes in order to represent rampant “poverty around the world” and wore beads around his neck to represent America’s ugly history of stringing black bodies up in trees. In seeking ways to contribute to social justice and encouraging our students to do the same, let’s look not only at Carlos and Smith’s raised fists or Kaepernick’s kneeling but also at the deeper messages they voiced and the networks that circulate their words and gestures. That’s where social change happens.

Pass the Baton  229

Notes 1 Gold medalist Peter Norman (Australia) sacrificed his career by wearing an Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR) button proudly on his jersey, something he was very eager to do. Over the years, both Smith and Carlos have regularly celebrated Norman’s sacrifice, and both served as pallbearers at his funeral. 2 Excerpts from LA Times, Chicago American, and Chicago Tribune quoted in Dave Zirin’s “Forty-Five Years Later John Carlos and Tommie Smith Have Never Been More Relevant” (2013). 3 In an NFL exclusive interview reported in same article, Kaepernick makes clear he knew the risks: “If they take football away, my endorsements from me, I know that I stood up for what is right” (Wyche 2016). 4 Today, our campus ranks relatively high in “overall diversity” (ranked #282 out of 2,718 colleges nationwide): White, 49.9%; African American, 21.2%; and Latinx, 19.7% (“Texas A&M-Commerce Student Population: Who Goes Here?”). Of course, a diverse student population does not preclude racism. While certainly better than when Carlos was a student here, ET still has a long way to go, as I will explain. 5 Of course, as Marxists insist, we are always already a product of our own historical, social, political circumstances. 6 Interestingly, Nike’s 30th anniversary overlaps with the 50th anniversary of the Silent Protest. 7 From a telephone conversation with me in March 2013. 8 Elsewhere (“A Clear Channel: Circulating Resistance in a Rural University Town”) I discuss the reasons why Texas has been more commonly associated with the West more than the South. 9 After the passage of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, for example, the Dallas branch of the nationally networked white supremacist organization of Citizens Councils produced and screened an industrial film designed to persuade Dallas business leaders to help curtail any public pushback against desegregation likely to draw the attention of national press because that violent, ugly resistance is, essentially, bad for business. 10 Scholarships “pay” student athletes for their labor. In turn, these athletes represent the campus by competing with student athletes from other universities likewise maximizing profit. Unlike football games for high-profile teams like the University of Texas Longhorns, competitions among Division II teams rarely draw profits from ticket sales, though intercollegiate sports definitely profit from branded clothing, advertising partnerships, and corporate sponsorships. Most significantly, racking up wins draws attention to the campus, which, in turn, attracts new students, potentially higher salaries for the Athletic Director, coaches, and staff, and, most importantly, donors. Student athletes receive no other compensation for their labor. As with any other member of the working class, student athletes forfeit all surplus labor to those who own the means of production. 11 Dana L. Cloud (2015) makes a similar argument with respect to academic freedom, suggesting “the call for civility masks the presence of contending interests and inequality” (12). 12 As I’ve argued, by raising their fists in 1968, the Silent Protest drew upon the networks expanded through the Long Civil Rights Movement. Nearly 50 years later, Kaepernick would tap into increasingly animated networks circulating narratives of social responsibility, especially unprecedented movements like Black Lives Matter that drew upon the explosion of circulation possible through social media, ensuring injustices like the murder by white

230  Shannon Carter police officers of Alton Sterling in Louisiana in 2016 are as visible as possible. A bystander recorded the struggle, which quickly went viral with the hashtag “blacklivesmatter,” subsequently organizing demonstrations on the ground, which their own content, strengthening and fortifying the networks of black resistance in ways that actively resist counter movements like ­#AllLivesMatter. Horrifyingly, no police officers involved in this murder have been charged. 13 As Allister Pennycook insists, “all actions happen locally; no matter how global an incident, it still always happens locally” (2010). Everything is connected, and no discourse can exist apart from the series of interconnected, overlapping, constantly rearticulating networks that carry meaning across new spatial relations and over time.

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Pass the Baton  233 Olson, Jack. July–August 1967. “The Revolt of the Black Athlete.” Sports Illustrated. Pennycook, Alistair. 2010. Language as a Local Practice. Abingdon-on-Thames, England: Routledge. Phillips, Michael. 2006. White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion in Dallas, 1841–2001. Austin: University of Texas Press. Rheenen, Derek Van. 2012. “Exploitation in College Sports: Race, Revenue, and Educational Reward.” International Review for the Sociology of Sport 48 (5): 550–571. https://goo.gl/X7oof6. Rodgers, Johnathan. 1967. “A Step to an Olympic Boycott.” Sports Illustrated, December 4, 1967. Roediger, David. 2017. Class, Race, Marxism. Brooklyn, NY: Verso Books. Sage, G.H. 1998. Power and Ideology in American Sport: A Critical Perspective, 2nd ed. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics. Smith, Jesse Carney, ed. 2010. Encyclopedia of African American Popular Culture. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. Stowers, Carlton. 1967. “Carlos Hits Prejudice.” Dallas News. December 3, 1967. Schwartz, Larry. n.d. “Owens Pierced a Myth.” ESPN.com. www.espn.com/ sportscentury/features/00016393.html. Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. 2011. “Race, Class, and Marxism.” International Socialist Organization: SocialistWorker.org, January 4, 2011. https://socialist worker.org/2011/01/04/race-class-and-marxism. ———. 2018. “Martin Luther King’s Radical Anticapitalism.” The Paris Review, January 15, 2018. www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/01/15/rememberingmartin-luther-kings-radical-class-politics/. “Texas A&M-Commerce Student Population: Who Goes Here?” College Factual. www.collegefactual.com/colleges/texas-a-and-m-university-commerce/ student-life/diversity/#secOverall. Trump, Donald. 2017. Twitter Post, September 27, 2017. 1:11 p.m. https://twitter. com/realdonaldtrump. ———. 2018. Twitter Post, August 10, 2018. 7:18 a.m. https://twitter.com/ realdonaldtrump. Welch, Nancy. 2012. “Informed, Passionate, and Disorderly: Uncivil Rhetoric in a New Gilded Age.” Community Literacy Journal 7 (1): 33–51. White, Eric Charles. 1987. Kaironomia: On the Will-To-Invent. Cornell University Press. Williams, Patricia. 1991. The Alchemy of Race and Rights. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wyche, Steve. 2016. “Colin Kaepernick Explains Why He Sat During the National Anthem.” NFL Media, August 27, 2016. www.nfl.com/news/ story/0ap3000000691077/article/colin-kaepernick-explains-why-he-satduring-national-anthem. Young, T.R. 1986. “The Sociology of Sport: Structural Marxist and Cultural Marxist Approaches.” Sociological Perspectives 29: 3–28.

234  Shannon Carter Zirin, Dave. 2008. “The Explosive 1968 Olympics.” International Socialist Review 61. www.isreview.org/issues/61/feat-zirin.shtml. ———. 2013. “Forty-Five Years Later, John Carlos and Tommie Smith Have Never Been More Relevant.” The Nation, October 16, 2013. www.thenation. com/article/forty-five-years-later-john-carlos-and-tommie-smith-have-neverbeen-more-relevant/.

15 The Visa Border Labyrinths 310 Colombian and U.S. Artists and Scholars Write Their Way Through Tamera Marko This is a story about a context of writing that is often invisible to many across the academy: the visa application. Yet, doing these visa applications and visa renewals, over and over again, is a core part of the (often grueling) material conditions of labor that more than 1.5 million1 of our fellow colleagues and students currently navigating schools throughout the United States. The ways our colleagues and families navigate visa processes, and what these processes cost and teach us, reveal an ongoing and profound labor inequity in our schools. This labor inequity—between those who must apply for visas to have the legal right to study, work, and live alongside us and those of us who do not need visas—impacts people of all ages in K-20 schools in every state in the U.S. This article reflects on how and why I designed, and for the last 11 years have continued to teach, a transnational First-Year Writing class in which students in the United States and students in Colombia write U.S. visa applications together. The research and writing of visa applications are part of a yearlong translingual writing class (Spanish and English) dedicated to designing, mounting, and hosting an art exhibition in Boston and other cities in the United States. We call this project PBM, “Proyecto Boston Medellín” (Image 15.1).

Image 15.1  P  BM South Fronteras 2018: art, conversations, and research collaborations with immigrants in East Boston.

236  Tamera Marko The roots of PBM (2008–2019) are grounded in a collective understanding: the meaning of education, especially as it engages with material solutions to daunting humanitarian and environmental challenges we face now and requires us to focus less on citizenship of a nation and more on what it means to belong to our shared humanity across our local communities, our cities, and our planet. Put this way, we can see that visas are enforced in the name of citizenship, but they are really about keeping us apart, fragmenting us from the power of belonging. Writing these visas together—from our positions on both sides of the border— subverts this fragmentation and brings us together in relationship, even before we cross international borders to meet each other in person. PBM seeks to remove material barriers and lift up material possibilities to come together. My writing students at Emerson College in Boston and my art students at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Medellín work together over two semesters to do the research and writing necessary for the Colombian students to come to the United States and exhibit their art. Their art distills their research, lived experiences, and perspectives on 21st-century social justice and environmental crises and their possible solutions. Their art focuses on potable water, food security, women’s rights, the rights of trans and undocumented people to be in public spaces, immigration, de-homogenizing culture from neoliberal capitalist structures, demobilizing guerrilla groups, reclaiming centuries-old techniques of organic farming, land tenure, and more. These themes, globally relevant, are especially salient now given that Colombia just legalized a National Peace Accord in November 2016 and, in that spirit, ­lawmakers, advisors, policy makers, demobilized members from many sides of the violence, academics, and poets revised Colombia’s Constitution in 2017 to include how to effectively conduct this Peace Process, including the establishment of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions. Colombia, I suggest, is an example of the worst (more than 70 years of undeclared civil war among nine warring groups) and best (2016 National Peace Accord) of what many nations are literally grapple with regarding war and peace. The very extreme nature of the Colombia example should not be dismissed as a national outlier, but rather what makes very clear issues that, if we look carefully, exist in many countries throughout the world because of ways that national politics and infrastructures operate within grossly inequitable global capitalist politics and economies. I also want to add that while PBM is a collaboration between Writing Studies and Art, this kind of project could flourish in any discipline. As always, the map is not the territory. But I hope my article here makes clear salient features of why these visa applications are so important. In the following sections, I explore: (1) what visas are and what is at stake; (2) why PBM and why Colombia; (3) why there is so much silence about visa processes; (4) PBM pedagogical approaches and surprises

The Visa Border Labyrinths  237 learned from two PBM writing workshops in the United States (English) and in Colombia (Spanish); and (5) a call to action to move from a national imaginary to a transnational and even planetary imaginary by redefining belonging and expertise.

Visas and What Is at Stake In addition to the visa holder’s access to study and work, these visas also determine whether families and children of the primary visa holder have the legal right to live together in the same country. Then there are a series of visas—one for each member of the family—that determine the conditions under which each one can legally receive income for work, have access to health insurance or to study. Many visas for the highest level of researchers, such as scientists working on transnational projects for which the U.S. government and its State Department and Department of Defense have invested millions of dollars, do not allow the ­faculty scientist’s visa to be permanent nor the visa holder’s time working in the United States to count toward eventual citizenship. This highlights the way the visa structure, even for hundreds of Ph.Ds., postdocs, and faculty, serves as a system of highly educated immigrant itinerant labor force of university indentured scholars at the constant mercy of having to turn over their work and then be “sent back.” These colleagues sustain their research, all while they and their families must live in constant tension—their future being in permanent limbo. Visas are not just a core part of the material conditions of economic labor—they are also part of the emotional labor that many of our colleagues navigate every day. These visa labyrinths are the work on top of the work. True, academic visa issues are definitely on the most privileged end of the visa spectrum. This is a reason, I think, student and faculty visas are not talked about with the same verve and dedication as visa issues for immigrants working as janitors at our schools or at food carts in the public streets surrounding them. The visa issues particular to children and workers deeply deserve their own research and analytical spotlight. This distinction right now is particularly poignant, given the U.S. Trump Administration’s revocation of hundreds of thousands of immigrant families in the United States who have a certain kind of visa called Temporary Protected Status (TPS). I want to emphasize that we need to start seeing the vast privilege spectrum of visa applications as connected to the same problem. Visas are inextricably intertwined with nationalism, racism, and the logic of capitalism within a military industrial, neoliberal context. I also want to say this: I am writing this article to highlight empowerment, radical hope, and concrete strategy through pro-immigrant pedagogical and research practices we can do now. This is possible because (1) schools are one of the last bastions of institutional rhetorical,

238  Tamera Marko political, socioeconomic and intellectual power and (2) belonging to the university—as a student, a faculty member, an administrator, or a worker—gives U.S. visa applications, in the eyes of the U.S. embassy, powerful legitimacy. Therefore, we can collaborate on writing our way through the visa border labyrinths. And do so in plain sight. Because we are doing this in accordance with our schools’ mission statements, curricular structures, and learning objectives, such as those outlined in Emerson College’s Core Value’s statement, 2 to engage in “exemplary and thoughtful use of technology”; “intercultural competence in an increasingly global world”; “active, meaningful interaction with local, national and global communities”; “responsible use of resources (human, financial and physical facilities)”; and to do so with “moral courage.” These Core Values are similar to those of the official mission statements of many other schools throughout the United States. Our project team includes those working in and across Colombia and the United States. We occupy different points of access along the visa privilege spectrum: me, a faculty member who is a native U.S. citizen and, because of my U.S. citizenship, does not need a visa to travel to Colombia; students and administrators and janitors and community leaders, who were forced to build their own neighborhoods after being displaced by war. Some of us have no visa status: that is, some members of our team are undocumented. Growing up in the San Diego-Tijuana region in Southern California since the 1970s, near the border with the most people crossing it every day in the world, I have engaged with loved ones nearly all my life who must navigate what is often an excruciating process of applying for visas or living in fear of not receiving them or living under the secret shadow of their nonexistence or imminent expiration. Later, as I did my graduate studies, worked as a human rights journalist, and then a university faculty member, I collaborated with students and colleagues navigating visa applications as core to the material conditions of their labor. This issue of immigration documentation is not new. Now, however, the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric impact us daily in a scale and style that perhaps we have not before experienced. (Mis)representations of immigrants used to justify these policies have reached a new level of dangerous absurdity: children held for weeks, sometimes months at detention centers because they or their parents are undocumented, the ­military and police force threaten caravans of children and families coming up through Mexico, and TPS ends for hundreds of thousands of immigrants in Latin America. Policies and rhetoric implemented under the Trump administration have been stripped humanity, and this, in turn, has empowered those who have long shared these kinds of anti-immigrant sentiments (white supremacist and xenophobic groups and xenophobic groups and individuals) to speak and lash out in concrete action on the public streets and at nearly all institutions of our society in the United States.

The Visa Border Labyrinths  239 The current turn in U.S. and global political leadership makes our work more urgent than ever. Given that by 2050 an estimated one-sixth of the world’s population will be displaced and live in communities they had to build with their own hands,3 we live in an era of global crisis that is not just a political, economic, or environmental crisis. We are living in an era of global rhetorical crisis. That is, who gets to tell their stories and who will listen? If we are to make our schools, our communities, our countries, our borders more inclusive, who will we invite to the table to collaborate on solutions? True, stories alone do not achieve justice. So, how does opening up the table to these diverse stories contribute to the achievement of social and economic justice? It begins by keeping the telling of the story in the words, image, and person of the storyteller, as much as possible. This is why over the last 11 years, we in our writing collective have been breaking our silence in the academy about these visa processes and doing so within the already-existing curricular and institutional structures and overall mission statements of our respective U.S. college and Colombian university. After more than 11 years and more than 310 students in Colombia and in the United States, we came to realize that a powerful strategy for our Colombian counterparts to obtain a U.S. visa was much more than filling out the application form. We also build, through social media, what I have come to call “belonging platforms” (1) a website about the artists, our transnational university writing class, and the exhibit itself; and (2) an ongoing social media exchange between the students in Colombia and the United States.4 Both belonging platforms organically grow and flourish long after the class project and art exhibition is over. Four of the artists in the first Colombian student PBM cohort more than 11 years ago are now faculty, professional artists, urban planners, and lawyers: now we coalesce our respective teams to co-direct other pro-immigrant projects. These belonging platforms have two distinct target audiences. The website we initially design for the U.S. embassy and the social media exchanges designed for the students to come to know each other and their work. I have found that the most powerful factor in obtaining a U.S. visa was our belonging to a university in our respective countries and, especially, being invited and hosted by a college in the United States. These factors overrode other categories of “not belonging” that would usually result in a U.S. visa being denied. This “not belonging” includes not having a bank account, having grown up in an informal (squatter) neighborhood, or being young enough that the U.S. embassy officials suspect the applicant plans to stay in the United States and “illegally” work. It was the process of doing the U.S. visa applications that most deepened my U.S. and Colombia students’ relationships to the project, to their collective research writing, and, ultimately, to each other as human beings. Over time, collectively writing the U.S. visa application became much less about filling out a form and much more about a steadily deepening

240  Tamera Marko consciousness. For the students in the U.S., this consciousness was largely regarding the inequity of the material conditions of life that leads people to leave everything they know and love in the first place, to pursue one’s dreams, and, in some cases, to survive. The U.S. students, in this context, then could more meaningfully see and feel the inequity of labor that their Colombian counterparts did to cross borders for their studies and art. For the Colombian students, this consciousness tended to most deeply be a sense of empowerment: that they are not alone and can write themselves across borders and do so collectively and transnationally. As one of our former PBM Colombian artists said recently, this process taught me that “not all people in the United States voted for Trump.”

Why PBM, Why Colombia? We are partnering with one of the most powerful public university research systems in the Americas dedicated to connecting education with understanding societal crises and solutions—the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Also, the UN campus in Medellín, with whom we partner in PBM, is one of the only two campuses in the American continent that is also a national ecological reserve. Given the mission of the Universidad Nacional’s campuses to include all Colombians in quality university education and to connect this education with improving the quality of life of society and environment of the nation and our planet, many of our PBM artists are from some of the lowest economic strata in the country. Often, this economy is connected to another issue: Colombia, which recently signed a National Peace Process, has undergone an undeclared civil war for nearly 70 years. As a result, Colombia is home to the largest number of internally displaced people in the world outside, most recently, Syria. This means Colombia is also home to some of the world’s greatest expertise in resilience, self-settled communities, peace process, and engagement in diverse human and environmental contexts to sustain our humanity and our planet. The Universidad Nacional is a powerful model for the educational systems our planet urgently needs.

Another Way to Apply for a U.S. Visa: Expertise, Belonging, and Relationship Visas are not (just) ink on a piece of paper. Visas are a series of labyrinths. These labyrinths are unpredictable, cross multiple time zones, and economic currencies, and you, the visa applicant, must leave your loved ones behind, then, often alone (physically and administratively), enter these labyrinths without a totally concrete map nor a clear end in sight. The “end,” a visa stamp in your passport, is determined by people you do not know and hold a powerful position with a government from a country where you were not born. When put in this position, you

The Visa Border Labyrinths  241 do not automatically have the legal rights afforded there to that country’s citizens. Because there is no citizenship that allows travel to every country in the world without a visa, this is also true: we are all undocumented somewhere. Whether you need a visa or not is based on your citizenship. Visas, in the United States, are inextricably intertwined with nationalism and the conceptual, political, and economic infrastructures employed to uphold and defend the nation. Therefore, citizens of countries with the most fraught political and economic relationships with the United States and countries with the most impoverished economies and political stability often navigate the fiercest economic, psychological, and emotional costs to apply and sustain their visas, or their visa applications or renewals are simply denied. For example, in the 1990s, when Medellín (Colombia) was considered the most dangerous city in the world based on the highest rate of homicide in the world, citizens of Colombia were among the most denied visa applicants, not just to the United States but anywhere in the world. There is a border—often invisible to those who do not need to cross it—between those who are required to navigate visa labyrinths and those who are not. The invisible borders, for those of us who have never been stopped at them, are very hard to see and thus to understand the pain of being rejected at them. It might be difficult to even believe that these invisible borders exist, because their very existence contradicts the marrow of a democratic liberal arts ideal dedicated to diversity and inclusion. Perhaps one way we can all see these borders for a moment is this exercise: what does it take to acquire a U.S. visa and for whom? Why? People who perhaps have the most need to apply for a visa—those displaced from their homes by war—have challenges in applying for a visa so extreme most never apply, and those who do are usually denied. However, many of our PBM artists in our transnational writing class are the children and grandchildren of the founders of displaced communities in Colombia. A dream among the community founders we work with is to have a summit in which the founders of the displaced communities cross the U.S.-Colombian border and share their stories with audiences in person. However, we knew this would be very difficult, given the displaced leaders’ lack of formal footing in the capitalist and national system of their country (no bank accounts, no formal jobs, and often no high school education or very little formal education at all). When we learned that some of their children were attending university and on government scholarship in Colombia, we realized we had a source of potential border-crossing legitimacy: university status. The visa process (see Nixon and Lee 2017), of course, varies greatly for people between these two extremes (a desplazada in Colombia versus an academic). What would Farconely, a desplazada in Medellín have to do for her story, and herself as its storyteller, to cross the U.S.-Colombian border? Farconely would have to find access to a computer and someone to help

242  Tamera Marko her read the U.S. visa application form online. For the questions asking her if she has ever been engaged in illegal activities in her country, she might pause, perplexed at how to answer. She lives in a country in conflict that forced her to flee her home with only the clothes on her back and her children in her arms. As a displaced person she illegally “invaded” land owned by someone else in Medellín to build her home and community. Is that illegal? She must also apply for a passport, which many people can receive in one day in Medellín. For this, however, she will have to get her cédula, her national identity card, which she had lost on her journey to Medellín or never needed in her rural pueblo where everyone knew everyone. At the Municipal Office, social workers will ask her questions about the town she fled, and they will try to contact her town’s surviving residents and research media coverage of massacres there to prove her identity and story. This could take months. She then must go to a bank. On this day, she hopes it does not rain because armed security guards might not let her in with mud-splattered clothes. With a code she buys at the bank, she must call a U.S. embassy official who will ask more questions before granting her an appointment in Bogotá. If this official speaks English to her, Farconely will not understand. If the five-minute code she can barely afford is not enough to complete the transaction, she must buy another code at the bank. If she is granted an appointment, she must ask for a letter of invitation from someone in the United States who promises to provide food and housing during Farconely’s stay there. It costs $70 to send this letter to Farconely, who does not have a mailbox. Farconely must then make the 12-hour bus ride between Medellín and Bogotá. In Bogotá, a city of nine million people with some of the world’s worst traffic, Farconely must overcome her confusion over which three bus changes she must make to arrive at the embassy. There, she will wait outside in the courtyard open to the sky. For six hours, she waits. They call her name, and she stands tiptoe at the window to speak through the holes drilled into bulletproof glass that separates her from the embassy official. The official speaks in rapid-fire English questions, “Why do you want to go the United States?” “Are you planning on working there?” When Farconely cannot respond out of exhaustion or fear, the official will likely deny her application. The application form asks: “Have you ever been denied a visa for travel to the United States? Explain.” Often, when people answer yes, they are denied a visa again. Unless she is applying for political asylum, she must hide her experience as neighborhood founder and thus desplazada from U.S. embassy officials because it reveals her poverty and direct connection with violence via armed actors in direct contestation with the state. To many embassy officials, poverty implies that Farconely is going to the United States to work, which is forbidden on a tourist visa. Her displacement at the hands of armed actors implies to some embassy officials that Farconely herself might be a violent actor in the United States.

The Visa Border Labyrinths  243 The entire visa application process, including her plane ticket, would cost Farconely two years of income and more than one week off work. At no point during this process is Farconely’s story part of the story. What is the process for me, a white, native English-speaking U.S. citizen and academic, to go to Colombia, document Farconely’s story, and return to the United States to circulate it? Ten minutes booking my plane ticket online in my home, 60 seconds at the immigration booth in ­Medellín, and about one-quarter of one month of my family income, an expense fully reimbursed by a university research grant. I can conduct all these transactions in my native language. I do not ask for time off from work because this is my work. At the airport in Medellín, I am greeted with photographs of flowers on signs that say in English, ­“Welcome to ­Medellín!” At the immigration booth, the official and I speak eye to eye, with no bulletproof glass between us. No visa application required. Farconely’s story as “my” research is central to every juncture of my journey’s story.

Why the Silence? It can seem risky to complicate one’s job status with talk about additional, time-consuming, and expensive paperwork. This can be even more the case at institutions with little diversity and limited funding and personnel to process such visa paperwork. It is also existentially alienating to try to explain at, say a faculty cocktail party, how yes, I miss my partner and my child an ocean away, but I must remain here and they must remain there until my visa is sorted out and the person you are speaking with has no idea what you are talking about or brushes it off as a small detail with a joke. This kind of micro-moment experience, sometimes daily, can be painful, but it is not the worst. The very worst fear is being named as criticizing the host government and/or institution sponsoring the visa and then being denied a visa, its renewal, or having the one they do have revoked. If your visa is denied or expired, you can no longer work or study legally where you live and must return to your home country or go to another country where your passport allows you to legally be—or make the excruciating decision to become undocumented. For some, this means—even after years of work to earn a Ph.D. and complete research, even after excelling at everything otherwise necessary required of the academy—the death of an academic dream. Elsewhere, I have written about the unequal experiences of visa processes among writers in our research collectives, mostly to explain how someone’s story crossed a border to be published in a particular journal (Marko 2014) and introduce a concept I call doble desplazamiento/­ double displacement (Marko 2012): first people are displaced by violence and forced to flee their homes, often with only what they can carry in their arms, their children. Then they are displaced again from their own

244  Tamera Marko story of displacement. That is, others, most who have never experienced this kind of displacement—journalists, government leaders, military leaders, police, academics—tell the story of those who are displaced. In another article (Marko et al. 2015), we wrote about the harrowing border-crossing journeys writers in our Proyecto Carrito collective navigated to build a life at Emerson College in the United States and the resulting documentation issues they must still navigate as writers and in their work as immigrant janitors at our college to dare to publish their stories about it (see “Mobility Movilidad”). Over the last two decades, I have spent weeks, sometimes months waiting for my partner’s visa stamp, while I struggle to juggle the economic, logistical, and emotional labor as a single parent and to do so suddenly. Like many other partners waiting on the other side of the border, I go through the motions, with a clenched heart, with no idea when my partner might return, if at all. My partner and I then play a (very serious) game I call vidas paralelas, parallel lives. That is, we dream of all the beautiful possibilities that exist for our lives in one country if we receive the visa stamp, and in another country if we do not. This means imagining new jobs, a different place to live, new communities, and even languages new to one or both of us. As employed academics, this is a great privilege compared with many others waiting for visas. It is, however, stressful, to move through life for years, not knowing if you will be granted the legal right to sustain your roots where you are. So before beginning this project, I oscillated carefully (and to some extent still do) between two poles of thought. (1) As a white, U.S.-born, native English-speaking, highly formally educated woman who is living and working in the country and language native to me, do I have the right to break this silence? This question is unsettling and sometimes agonizing. I consider this question even more completely here, because it seems so much of a deeper version of breaking silence—given that I write with the intention to publish. And yet, (2) in Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, Ethiopia, Korea, Taiwan, Guatemala, ­E cuador, each country where I have worked as a human rights journalist, university teacher or researcher, the visa labyrinths have always been at the forefront in my conversations with people I encountered. This included students, their parents, fellow journalists, academic researchers, ministers of education, city mayors, and one poignant moment that haunts me still. I was then a journalist. The minister of water in a country in Africa and his family had invited my photographer colleague and me to their home for a dinner. This was just after a time in which that country was experiencing drought so severe, thousands of people and animals were dying. The minister of water wanted to speak with people at research centers in the U.S. about overcoming drought and maintaining sustainable water sources. But, for reasons he did not know, his U.S. visa was denied.

The Visa Border Labyrinths  245

PBM as Pedagogscape Visas are a core part of our colleagues’ and students’ lives. In my time working with artists’ and scholars’ visa processes, colleagues and students have told me in what, across languages and countries of origin, is a stunningly common refrain: at each step in the visa labyrinth, they say they must face their fear of death. The death of their project, of their funding, of their degree, of their career, of their ability to remain united with their family—the death of their hope. It seems apropos to describe a structure of feeling around all this visa paperwork in terms of an oft-used term for visa-related everyday micro-aggressions: death by a thousand [paper] cuts. Colombians need visas to travel to nearly every country in the world. In a competition for who gets to tell the stories of Colombia, despite storytelling being a core to their centuries of culture, they are blocked from the global sociopolitical and economic resources to compete with dominant international and especially English-language media and academic outlets. In this way, then, Colombians’ stories about Colombia and about themselves are displaced to the periphery of the cultural flow that represents them and their country. The scholarly, community, and sometimes media stories about violence are very important and, in many cases, fundamental to more profoundly understand violence and to address the hopes and multiple perspectives regarding human rights violations. In the international arena, however, there is a consequence of this voluminous production about Colombia as only violence: it reduces the global image of Colombian culture—the people and past, present, and future—to nothing more than violence. The idea of radically complicating the direction and narrative content of this massive cultural flow of a global cultural imaginary about Colombia seemed overwhelming. Where would we begin? Our project thus began with a question: “What happens when the official, academic, and popular stories about your hometown do not match what you archived in your family album?” Our response has been to build an ongoing transnational community-literacy archive. In particular, community members choose not only to talk about truth commissions and their trauma of displacement—they also want to talk about resilience, the way they built their homes and their communities. This ongoing archive now includes 7,000 hours of stories with 700 displaced families from 16 self-settled (“squatter”) neighborhoods in Medellín. We began working on this archive in 2007 as part of a civic-engagement project, DukeEngage Colombia, founded when I was a Mellon Faculty Fellow teaching in the First-Year Writing Program at Duke University. As a core part of this program we created “Programa Compañerx,” in which Universidad Nacional de Colombia students applied to be friends who educate our Duke students about their city, mostly by hanging out with them and showing them their city. During every application season,

246  Tamera Marko I receive worried phone calls from parents in the United States when they learn their child has applied to our Colombia program. Is what we see on the news true? Often, they add, Well, Duke University or MIT or Emerson College would not have a program there if everything we see on the news is the only truth, right? A professor would not bring students there if it were not safe, right? With equal intensity, parents usually ask me another question: do I bring my own daughter there? When I respond, yes, since she was in the womb, this too gets added to a kind of professorial-parental legitimacy, undergirded by my faculty position at renowned U.S. universities. This parental conceptualization and eventual acquiescence to their child’s participation in Medellín reveals the dominant power that parents and students in the United States are granting to an elite university (Duke, MIT, Emerson) to represent an image of another city (Medellín) and country (Colombia). This would also allow us to engage with a problem that has always haunted us. We could bring students from the U.S. to Colombia with relative ease because U.S. citizens do not need a visa to travel. In stark contrast, it had been difficult to bring Colombian students to the United States. This was mainly for two reasons: (1) each time I asked the administrations of the U.S. universities about inviting the Colombian students to come as a bilateral move with our international programs, I was told it was not financially or institutionally feasible and (2) the expense and time involved the visa process the U.S. requires of all Colombians. This highlights the way that most U.S. international study abroad and civic-engagement programs, including ours, are dedicated to a one-way cultural flow to and from a U.S. university center. The long-term outcomes of these programs then occur within a framework of a national imaginary, not a transnational one. We decided that the student texts and our increasingly successful archive provided us with enough proof that it would be worth, in the name of reciprocal pedagogy, reversing the cultural flow of who gets to represent the image of Colombia. Representing Emerson College, Duke ­University, and MIT at a meeting in July 2009 at the Universidad ­Nacional de Colombia in Medellín, we presented pedagogical possibilities we saw in themes emerging from what our U.S. and Colombian students were posting on Facebook, blogs, and emails, all of which we read seriously as organic public texts with deep meaning. This meeting was with Universidad Nacional de Colombia de Medellín’s deans, administrators, and faculty members. Everyone around the table agreed that we should begin this journey. Thus, PBM was born. For the call for applications, we chose a social justice theme. However, we wrote the description broadly enough to inspire each Colombian student to propose and create a project that was what students really wanted to explore. The themes in 2010 and 2011, respectively, were “Medellín: violencia is not the whole story” and “MUJERES: Medellín/WOMEN: Medellín.”

The Visa Border Labyrinths  247 We developed PBM by engaging with three questions. (1) How can the storyteller move with their story from Colombia the United States with already-existing curricular goals of our respective curricular goals, (inter)disciplinary practices, and university institutional structures and resources? (2) How can our project reach audiences that we identify as being most meaningful to our project? (3) How can we integrate academic research, art, and social engagement among students, faculty, administrators, and off campus community members?

PBM Visa Writing Workshops Almost immediately after we began, I realized the visa process itself had to be a core part of our writing class. Our first target audience then was not the public we envisioned for our art exhibition. It was, instead and unavoidably, the U.S. embassy. Thus, I decided, with shaking hands, to draft my first curriculum in 20 years of teaching college writing about visa applications as a rhetorical situation and how to negotiate them as a genre. What follows are the Student Learning Objectives (SLOs) from my first visa writing curriculum. (SLO #1): We will learn what the visa applications are and how to write them. This will give students who have no experience writing visas a glimpse into navigating the labyrinthine corresponding processes visa applicants must do. This will give the students who do have to apply for visas an opportunity to see their experience as valuable expertise. Through doing our class’s transnational visa ­writing—with real human relationships and border crossing for an academic-art project at stake—students will learn that we do not all do the same work and levels of intensity to be and remain together in the same classroom. (SLO #2) Then, with this work and emerging consciousness in mind, we will move our imaginary and concrete transnational representative power beyond the visa form and onto a much broader and self-empowered virtual landscape. That is, in tandem with filling out the actual visa application form, we will design and publish a website with the Colombian artists’ biographies and art projects and do the writing necessary to inspire many audiences to read it. (Marko, 2011) Workshop 1: The Universidad Nacional de Colombia and The Aula5 in Medellín The first PBM happened like this: I started by inviting seven students at the Universidad Nacional to consider doing an art exhibition at Emerson in Boston. As we sat in a circle on the cement ground outside a café near

248  Tamera Marko the university, they all agreed. For the last year, these seven had been collaborating with my students from Duke and Emerson in Medellín. From that moment, we mobilized resources at our respective educational institutions. It took us 18 months to raise the money and fumble through the necessary administrative processes. Our exhibit was in October 2010. The entire exhibition operated as a class project in my First-Year Writing classes. The Colombian students did it as an independent research project through their faculty members in the Art Department at the Nacional. We had no other official support. We were given permission to occupy a one-room conference space at Emerson for our exhibition. The day we came to mount it, we were suddenly told we could not put anything on the walls. So, Jota Samper, then a co-director, drove to Home Depot and used his architecture skills to design and teach us how to build, ironically enough, walls. In four hours, we mounted, held, and dismounted our entire exhibition. The audience was standing-room only, and people began to read our website in classrooms and art spaces across the United States and in Colombia. Those PBM students wrote their final undergraduate theses reflecting on their PBM experiences. In April 2011, the Dean of the Department of Art and Architecture at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Medellín invited me to teach a month-long writing workshop in the following July. I agreed to teach it if I could hold most of the workshops at El Aula internacional, an independent cultural space open to all members of the university and community for educational experimentation and social justice workshops. This was to work with four art students who we had selected via a transnational jury team from Emerson College and the Universidad Nacional to come to the second PBM exhibition I would direct in Boston in October. A major reason I was invited to come work with the artists was to complete their U.S. visa applications, including prepare them for their trip to the U.S. embassy in Bogotá. I decided to move beyond just the bureaucratic and logistical work of filling out a form. I designed this workshop around the visa process as a rhetorical situation which we, as writers and artists, would strategize to construct our project’s ethical, political, and academic tone. In general, PBM intends to disrupt the dominant flow of stereotypes about Medellín and Colombia. This exhibition was titled “Proyecto Boston Medellín 2013: Medellín Mujeres.” And the purpose of the call for applications was to “complicate … representations of women in Medellín by including diverse and empowered social, cultural and physical contexts in which women build the city.” We sought to also counter the ubiquitous representation of Colombian women in terms of prostitution, mail order brides, and sex tours. We began by creating a website in which the artists—in this case all young women—present themselves and their work in their own words and images. This link would then be included on their visa application.

The Visa Border Labyrinths  249 In other words, we had an urgent need to create a website for one audience in particular: the U.S. embassy. This was especially important since three of the four artists came from extremely low-economic households; their families did not have bank accounts, and dozens of times after class they had to find a place to sleep as they could not afford the bus fare back home. One artist lived in an informal neighborhood, meaning she did not have a state-recognized home address. Usually, any one of these challenges would yield an automatic denial of a U.S. visa. However, the artists each had other powerful contexts we knew the U.S. embassy would value. We hoped that, in the opening page of our website, the officials would see an instant snapshot of academic, artistic, and human legitimacy. That is, the artists were indeed university students who had been selected through a rigorous transnational application process offered in two languages and were invited by a U.S. college known for its arts and communication education. We embedded this PBM page within our larger website about our other storytelling projects, situating it within the broader ethos of an established collective that had successfully done this work before in the United States. Furthermore, the artists presented a snapshot of themselves as human beings, with clearly defined projects that they had been researching for years. I knew my Emerson and Universidad Nacional students could collaborate to package this into something aesthetically, intellectually, and emotionally compelling. We work from the assumption that if the embassy officials can see their humanity and artistic promise as young human beings with hopes and dreams for their ­education—values embodied by the idea of “The American Dream”— then they may be more likely to stamp their passports with a visa. I wanted to design curricula that raised the consciousness of these young people on both sides of the border about the resources they have individually and c­ ollectively—as students and as writers—to write themselves and their work across borders. By the end of this course project, I wanted students to transcend beyond a simple sense of accomplishment in a school assignment to a concrete and sustainable sense of empower­ ernando Lona sings in a song by the same name, cidadão do ment, as F mundo, a citizen of the world. Many students at Nacional work full time, using the month in which we planned to offer this course to make extra money, spend more time with their families, and study. So, I was shocked to find my workshop full within 24-hours of its posting. We set the cap at 15 students; 57 applied. Some of them, from word of mouth, heard about our informal PBM workshops at cafés and in my living room, in a rented studio in Medellín and in the basement office of my apartment in Boston. They understood the need for mobility of (their) stories and (themselves) as storytellers and the crucial role that writing a narrative of self and project, in English, plays with mobility in the world.

250  Tamera Marko I accepted 18 of the 57 students who applied. We wrote in steps. First, we read examples of successful grant applications and academic/ professional portfolios of successful artists. We also learned about art produced by immigrant artists who work transnationally throughout the Americas. Then we researched grants awarded by the institutions to which each student was applying. Finally, we modeled our own applications after ones that had been accepted. We gave and received written and oral critiques on our writing at every class. We wrote and revised in teams. By the second week of class, I had reviewed nearly 100 pages of student writing. They wrote in Spanish, English, Portuguese, and German. Officially, the class was scheduled for three days a week, three hours each session. At the request of the students, we met four days a week, for five hours each session. In the fourth week, I began meeting with some students at 5 a.m. before their work or class. The Aula director, a dear friend, gave me the keys to the space so we could work as early or as late as needed. Sometimes, I brought a sleeping bag and just slept there. Pedagogical needs quickly began to take shape. The first pedagogical train wreck: audience. We quickly learned that although the students could name their audience and had dedication (e.g., forfeiting vacations or sleep to complete their homework), they could not imagine writing about themselves. The Colombian students read the question on an online grant form (Tell Us About Yourself in 250 Words) as coming from another planet. In Columbia, one rarely shares personal information with strangers. Applications for Colombian universities do not require personal essay. In the United States, my students usually love to write about themselves. They’ve been taught to and rewarded for doing it their entire writing ­ olombian lives in school. In dramatic contrast, this assignment for my C students was terrifying (and sometimes creatively paralyzing). Reeling with this challenge of a room full of students with more ganas, desire to learn to write than I had ever seen, I felt like I just might drown in failure. This seemingly simple application question had forced our dissonant writing cultures to crash into each other. Adding to the tension was the fact that our responses to these application questions were fundamental to our transnational mobility, our ability to cross borders. That day I asked them to respond to a different, albeit related question. Regarding this application, what are you afraid of? They began to write volumes. Feverishly. I am afraid of abandoning my family. I am afraid of what I don’t know. I am afraid of losing myself in another culture. I am afraid of being alone, of being penniless, of being unloved. I am afraid of my rage. I do not want to need to go into the belly of the beast to do my work! Among their writing, a theme began to emerge. Each writer had to somehow come to terms with the idea of the need to imagine beyond the mountain valley to an unknown (English-speaking)

The Visa Border Labyrinths  251 audience and to tell this stranger about themselves, their personal lives. This also meant something worse: doing this work so that they could pay to ask permission to go to the United States, a country where most of them had never wanted to go due to U.S. anti-immigrant policies that had already hurt their families and loved ones. Working within this cosmology of written fears and anger, I designed an assignment that took another step back from writing directly to the application question. In pedagogical terms, we approached the grant application within the Colombian culture of proper and formal introductions between strangers, focusing on concrete skills of how to research about this new audience. In class, we turned our gaze from each other and our attention away from our fears and instead analyzed the photographs, videos, and related texts at the website of each institution to which the writers were applying. We then worked with the same kinds of pedagogical techniques I teach as a core part of the First-Year Writing Program at Emerson. Inspired by Joseph Harris’s book Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts, we began by making lists of key words and images we found on these websites and discussed what we would later do with them in terms of “forwarding” and “countering” and “taking an approach.” We researched cultural, political, and economic meaning behind these key words for the foreign audience thousands of miles away from Medellín. Since nearly all the applications required it, we then turned to the genre of academic proposition statements in Kenneth Bruffee’s A Short Course in Writing. For example, one student applied to study at the Frei Universität Berlin in Germany. He researched the website to learn about the university’s mission statement and specific program interests and then researched these in the context of German history. One of this university’s mission statements is “liberty.” This university, its website tells us, was founded in response to the World War II division that created West and East Berlin. In the 2010 context, what did “liberty” mean now? How might this student merge this mission of “liberty” with those of his program at the Universidad Nacional de ­Colombia in Medellín? Working with key words and personal statements are never as simple as they might seem, especially when working transnationally and doing so in a neoliberal context. Nearly everyone wrote their first drafts in Spanish. This revealed two more important challenges to teaching writing in a transnational context. First, the students could not find a way to conceptualize in Spanish how to imitate the structure and tone of the English-language proposition statements. After in-class discussion about why, we came to realize it is because Bruffee’s proposition statements are very culturally determined and, in a way, that requires the writers to frame their ideas in ways confined by institutional and national power structures of U.S. imperialism that many of them struggle against. This is because they were writing outside of Bruffee’s originally intended context. These

252  Tamera Marko students were writing this as Colombians in Colombia and in Spanish. As Adriene Rich (1996) says “This is the oppressor’s language, but I need it to speak to you.” These proposition statements were requiring the Colombian student writers not just to translate their ideas into another genre and language; they were forcing them to assimilate their cultural and relational frame into a narrow U.S. cultural and academic approach that mirrored the U.S. English-language dominant academic style: direct, linear, blunt, with little time spent on honoring hierarchical respect between applicant and reviewer. This style values immediate statement of thesis or request and self-­ promotion over first building a relationship with the reader. Steeped their whole lives in a cultural upbringing and way of life in Colombia that finds this counterproductive to building and sustaining relationships, especially in terms of respecting elders and other authority figures, the students’ first responses to this style ranged from fear to disbelief to resentment to outright anger. Every student expressed, in resistance to this style, strong emotions against it. In Colombian terms, this proposition style appears at face value little more than arrogance in the form of writing. In the form of a U.S. tourist in Medellín, this proposition style would embody the stereotype of “the ugly American.” In the form of a U.S. military general burning coca fields in Colombia, a U.S. embassy official standing behind a bulletproof window of the Colombian embassy visa application line, or a U.S. politician discussing (unequal) free trade agreements with Colombia, this proposition style is, in no small part, what sustains their stories and themselves as storytellers in a peripheral position within the dominant global cultural flow that (mis)represents Colombia. Yet, a proposition statement is precisely what we need to be able to move over the mountain and across the border to talk to you. This general feeling of rage and helplessness and ambivalence regarding Colombian international mobility being controlled by U.S. policies and procedures was not new—to any of us. Naming it as part of our writing process was, indeed, new. There was something else: the concept of chicanear. In English, this translates roughly as to brag. Chicaneando is a deep offense across ­Medellín. To talk about yourself, your accomplishments, even your hopes and dreams with too much hope might come across as aggressive and rude entitlement. Once, while waiting in the lobby of the Alcaldía de Medellín, the City Mayor’s Office, to meet with the Mayor of Medellín, I began reading a wall on which that administration’s accomplishments and goals were printed. The whole thing began with, No es para chicanear, pero … This not to brag, but … This anti-chicanear phrase was the largest font on the wall. However, I suggest the only people who really do not need to chicanear, to promote themselves in some way to do their dreams, are those holding the power, an observation that sometimes unsettles my

The Visa Border Labyrinths  253 Colombian friends and colleagues and students when I say it. For all the people in my workshop, and nearly every PBM artist we have worked with so far, chicaneando, respectfully and accurately done, is absolutely necessary to cross the border. Teaching this delicate rhetorical dance between two very different cultures, institutions, and languages has been a pedagogical and writing challenge we grapple with constantly. Significantly, this visa form and process is often antithetical to dedicated to humane, equitable, and accurate representations, and thus, this visa form’s misrepresentations is not right. Yet, this is the oppressor’s language and I need it to speak to you. Within this context, students began to move toward not translation but translanguaging. In other words, we did not just change languages but actually named what we were doing and the structures of power within which we were operating and against which we were resisting. We considered the ideas in Caroline Ramanzoglu’s edited volume Up Against Foucault: Explorations of Some Tensions Between Foucault and Feminism as a model for our own approach to writing applications. The articles in this volume analyze the consequences of the absence of a gendered perspective in Foucauldian theories of power, while at the same time maintaining what the feminist writers find meaningful in his theories about how power works. The Colombian students then began to focus on “I” statements and experiment with promoting themselves in writing (I have worked as a mechanical engineer; I speak three languages; I am a first-generation college student; I am an Afro-­Colombian woman from Chocó studying medicine). On paper, they began to see images of themselves, their accomplishments, and their place in the world from a perspective of empowerment. Ironically, writing in the language of the oppressor and facing the glaring awareness that we are doing so helped us sustain a critical eye toward its role in socioeconomics and politics of power. Part of maintaining a sense of dignity and authenticity with this power maneuver of writing up against our target audience and doing so in a translingual way: Spanish had equal value (and often more meaning) than English in the room and within the initial drafts. We studied what A. Suresh Canagarajah identifies as “plurilingualing.” Plurilingualing focuses on the ways that people who speak multiple languages and dialects communicate with each other. Canagarajah argues that in his native South Asia, plurilingualing predates colonial times and, in this way, is part of the ecology of the culture of the regions. In our class, translingualing and plurilingualing become our workshop ecology. In our case, this meant that Spanish was not to be translated by exchanging one word for another but rather was to be strategically integrated into a process of transnational meaning communication. In this process, the students were able to distinguish what part of their project was about them personally, what was about their subject (community

254  Tamera Marko members, issues), and what about this they were willing and/or inspired to revise in English to communicate to non-Spanish-speaking U.S. audience. The impact of their writing moved far beyond just fulfilling the application at hand. It impacted the way they framed and reframed their art projects and their personal, academic, and professional reasons for creating them. This, in turn, helped them define how they envisioned their own place—as writers—as they move their art and themselves across borders through the Americas and the world. Not everyone completed their applications. In the end, four students, though they attended every workshop, did not finish. Two were overwhelmed with work and family responsibilities. Two said that their workshop experience taught them that they did not, in fact, wish to write their way across borders but preferred to remain in Colombia. Fourteen students completed their applications. Each of them received what they applied for. Now it was time for the four PBM 2 artists—­ biographies and project statements drafted—to write their visa applications for the U.S. embassy. Workshop 2: Emerson College in Boston I returned to Boston and began the second phase of PBM: a Translingual First-Year Writing Class at Emerson with Emerson students. We follow the same curricular goals and learning objectives of all classes in the First-Year Writing Program at Emerson but with a twist: each student is encouraged to write in all of the languages they have in their lives. My students must apply to this class over the summer and write responses to questions about why they are interested in working on issues of art, immigration, and documentation. On Day 1, I introduce them to the PBM project and people in Colombia via live video conference, and we explain we will study visa application labyrinths that we will write through so our Colombian PBM team members can cross the border into the United States. For many students, this is the first class in their first year in college. Every year, we learn that some of the Emerson students had just recently suffered through visa processes themselves in order to come to college. The intensity of their economic and emotional trauma ranges widely: from a few hours of paperwork and quick embassy interview, to months of traumatic waiting, to being detained at the airport upon entering the United States, held in a windowless room for 48 hours, with only apple juice, a few granola bars, and no permission to call home. Almost without exception, the most traumatic and expensive visa processes were experienced by students of color and from countries with tense socioeconomic and political relationships with the United States. Some of the other students in our class, born in the United States, had never heard of a visa: they thought, at first, we were talking about a credit card.

The Visa Border Labyrinths  255 Our own class’s visa stories represent a microcosm of the racialized, geopolitical, and economic relationships between and within our respective countries. Those with the most traumatic visa stories often spoke about them in whispers. This is how we began to learn to lean in to listen more. Some students spoke only English, had never traveled outside the United States, and had rarely interacted with anyone who did not look like or have a similar life experience as them. Yet, they signed up for our course. And stayed. We came to find that our PBM and visa writing processes needed their perspectives. In fact, as we moved on with this curriculum, it was their questions, research, and dedication to better understand their own astonishment and ignorance—how could I not know about this?!, they often asked—that inspired us to see what those who do not have to experience the visa process had been trained to not see. Students in both countries began to share with each other not just the mountains of paperwork they had to complete, the exorbitant fees, and the time they had to sacrifice—they began to open up about how they felt about it. They sometimes expressed this through poems, songs, drawings, and digital animations. We curated the biographies, project statements, and other multimedia textual exchanges into a website that each artist included in their visa application. Throughout this process, we engaged our college-wide First-Year Writing curriculum’s processes of writing, research, peer review, and reflection and learning objectives of developing genre awareness and navigating specific rhetorical situations. The toughest rhetorical situation? Filling out the visa application form itself. Some of the form’s questions embodied ways that racism and the logic of capitalism within a military industrial neoliberal context is justified and employed in the name of nationalism, specifically protecting the nation. This is one of the dozens of questions in the DS-60 visa form all applicants for a U.S. visa must fill out, including our PBM artists: Are you part of the conflict in your country? Many would argue that if you live in Colombia, then yes, you are part of the conflict. Because you are impacted by it directly. Then our class members begin looking at each other around the room: are we too part of the conflict? Until the Obama Administration, for the last 80 years, the U.S. has provided more economic aid to Colombia than to any other country, most of this in recent decades in the form of military funds and sources. Our class research and discussions prompted by this question and how much it irked and hurt our Colombian counterparts who had to officially respond to this on their visa application, was especially powerful the first year of PBM with the theme: Colombia: Violencia is not the whole story … Have you worked in prostitution? Do you plan on engaging in prostitution in the United States? These visa questions were particularly unnerving for our class discussions the year our PBM focus was about more accurate representations of women in Medellín, especially in

256  Tamera Marko contradistinction to online stereotypes that reduce women in Colombia to images of sex tours, mail-order-brides, and prostitutes. After we had spent some weeks working our way through the DS-60 visa application form questions and delving into corresponding research, navigating complex emotional responses, building trust among each other, we discussed how to finally design our website for our first audience: the U.S. embassy who would review it for our PBM colleagues’ visa applications. We did not change the truth, but we redesigned our presentation of it to more convincingly complement the content, tone and spirit of other official writing that U.S. immigration requires (letters, online applications, proof of citizenship, bank statements). For our redesign, we analyzed the texts from the U.S. embassy outlining the U.S. visa application process. This took twists and turns with consequences I was not always prepared for emotionally or pedagogically. Every one of the five PBM projects, on the day the Colombians are making their way on the bus or by plane to the U.S. embassy in Bogotá, I go about my day with a thick knot in my stomach. The second PBM year, like the first one, a Colombian student called me on my cell phone, her voice shaking as she shivered in the high mountain Andes air outside the U.S. embassy, crying. The embassy had denied her visa. The first year this visa denial happened the embassy official said it was because the student did not speak enough English. The second year this visa denial happened, the official had refused even to look at the inch-high stack of documents she had compiled for the interview. The application process, which had taken eight months to compile and cost six-months-worth of minimum-wage income, was, in five seconds, denied. The embassy official, the student said, did not even look her in the eye through the bulletproof interview window. When I narrated this story a few hours later to my students in Boston, three of my students began to cry. In the next class period, a student asked to read her writing assignment out loud to the class. She had chosen to put Gloria Anzaldúa’s article “How To Tame A Wild Tongue” and the PBM student’s visa denial in conversation with another text: her own lived experience with this subject. She is Colombian. She narrated how the U.S. embassy has denied her mother’s visa application to visit her in the United States—seven times. At one point, she had to stop reading her essay because she began to sob. Another student tearfully asked, why don’t you go home to see your mom? The student answered, I am home. Here. I cannot go there. I have not seen my mom in person in nine years. More class members, including myself, were in tears.

A Radical Idea: Redefine Belonging and Expertise I am writing this article as part of an effort, for decades, to connect the depth and breadth of this issue that keeps immigrants with different legal, socioeconomic, and professional statuses disparate from each other, as if

The Visa Border Labyrinths  257 we are not all working intentionally and strategically as part of the same context. I am writing in the gut-wrenching trenches of struggling with visa issues that are now on the brink of deporting my Proyecto ­Carrito ­ sorio. He is writing partner, colleague, and dear friend, Mario Ernesto O from El Salvador and has TPS. He has lived in the United States for more than 25 years, owns his house and lights up with joy every minute he is with his daughter. It is one of our Saturday night writing sessions at my kitchen table, the only time Mario has off between his job at Emerson and his second job cleaning bathrooms at a hospital in Boston. ­Mario, a pencil in hand, is working out what he will say in two weeks as the first speaker at the opening of a new social justice center at our college. I listen to him sift through his hopes and dreams for multiple possibilities if his TPS expiration is or is not overturned, as I struggle with what sentences to cut from the overdue draft of this way too-long article. We both hear Mario’s seven-year-old daughter giggling as she plays with my 11-year-old daughter. Minutes before, Mario’s little girl had suddenly burst into tears because she knows her Papi might be forced to leave the country in a few months and she, born a U.S. citizen, will stay. Her life lately, like that of the children of the 200,000 El Salvadorians facing the Trump administration’s expiration of their TPS status and imminent deportation, has oscillated between giggles and tears. Working in intense collaboration at every step over the last 11 years with four academic institutions, multiple disciplines and academic departments in two countries, two languages, and two cultures complicated further by a range of personalities and styles—at times stretched patience, time, and money on both sides so thin that our shoulders slumped with near defeat over our desks in the wee morning hours. My Emerson students and I in the snow of deep Boston winter and our ­Colombian counterparts in the torrential tropical rains relentlessly pelting the city of Medellín. Working at this inter-institutional and transnational level meant giving up, to some degree, the pedagogical, schedule, and linguistic autonomy I had as a teacher over my classroom. It also meant taking pedagogical risks that not all students embraced. If we as faculty, students, and administrators who do not have to worry about visas do not coalesce with those who do, how can we fight with any success at making material changes for dignity, quality of life, and stability for those of our faculty and student colleagues, let alone immigrant workers with TPS, about to be ripped away from the homes they own and, most importantly, the children they love in a country where they have lived half their lives? It is important to note that our ability to do this project required, at various times, people in power at our respective institutions in both countries to make decisions to support PBM, including, faculty, dean, vice presidential, presidential and chancellor offices, and boards of trustees. Three people involved in this project over a decade have worked with

258  Tamera Marko us to channel this power of belonging in both Colombia and the United States: Luis Serna, Ryan Catalani, and Jota Samper. Sylvia Spears, Vice ­ merson President for Equity and Inclusion in the Social Justice Center at E College, has sustained powerful administrative and soulful support necessary for a project like this with so many border crossings at stake.6 Among the five PBM groups between 2010 and 2018, 38 out of 40 students and faculty received their visas from the U.S. embassy. In total, we did 13 exhibitions in six cities in two countries, and each of the artists completed their undergraduate degree in art at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia—many of them with honors—far above the average for this program. Practically, this means we identify what we have in our own lives— our status as university professors and students, our autonomy over course syllabus design, our classrooms full of writers, artists, and researchers, our access to technology, our communities and our ganas to engage with transnational collaborations—to do something. Our visa application processes were a form of “writing democracy” in the context of the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant contexts and policies that has contributed dramatically to democracy being further unwritten for immigrants in and coming to the United States. We learned we can write ourselves across borders. This essay respectfully acknowledges that included in the inequity of material labor conditions that U.S. visa holders is stress and trauma. Here, I emphasize that this stress and trauma should not reduce our vision of visa negotiations to being a liability or handicap but should be recognized for what it really is—expertise. Hard-won expertise. Visa holders must negotiate a relentless simultaneity of multidirectional demands amid a din of vague and contradictory sources to research accurate information about ever-changing visa requirements; manage budgets and time across multiple institutions, countries, time zones, languages, economic currencies, and legal systems and do so all while upholding other dimensions of professional and personal life. Finally, they must do this in a context of an uncertain future: that is, where they will be legally allowed to live, study, and work. This expertise, in turn, requires highly developed transnational communication skills, patience, courage, and sustaining a self-initiated drive to code switch between systems of power—just to get work done or get through the day. Navigating these visa labyrinths, as a citizen in one country and a non-citizen or, in inhumane legal terms, “an alien” of another, requires sustaining intellectual, economic, sociopolitical, institutional, psychological, physical, and emotional labor. Thus, the material conditions involved here bring into play the totality of what it means to be an academic and a human being. For all these reasons, I argue that visa holders have the potential to be among our most meaningful colleagues. In fact, I believe that navigating visa labyrinths should be listed on a curriculum vitae and discussed in cover letters and job interviews. By critically engaging with the material labor conditions with real live people applying for visas to study and work on some of our 21st-century

The Visa Border Labyrinths  259 most pressing social justice and environmental crises and solutions, PBM attempts to make pedagogical and scholarly space to not reduce the idea of rhetorical mobility or the visa spectrum to the Trump era, nor to it being just a national problem. By employing empowerment, radical hope, and concrete strategy through pro-immigrant pedagogical and research practices, we through PBM are working toward something that we hope transcends the nations and borders: to redefine belonging.

Notes 1 According to The Migration Policy Institute, as of March 5, 2018, roughly 1.21 million international students with visas are enrolled in universities across the United States. See (Zong and Batalova 2018). 2 See the Emerson College online version of its Strategic Plan: Vision, Objective and Values. www.emerson.edu/about-emerson/strategic-plan/visionobjective-values. 3 I am grateful to Debora Mutnick for highlighting the latest IPCC report. 4 In 2014, to support the unexpected growth of PBM and our other transnational immigrant-university collaborations, including a full-time web designer/documentary filmmaker/budget director Ryan Catalani who has managed more than $100,000 of incoming funds, we formed a nonprofit Mobility Movilidad, Inc. 5 The Aula was founded by Camilo Castro, a professor of architecture at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. He also dedicated 20 years of his life to founding and directing a program La Cátedra, in which hundreds of Colombian students crossed borders and to creating pedagogical, economic and spatial infrastructure for organic university-community collaborations. My dear friend, Camilo died of cancer in July 2014. 6 Others in Writing Studies have been fundamental in this work: Paula Mathieu, Diana George, Steve Parks, Jessica Pauszek and other editors and reviewers of this book, who have patiently and persistently pushed me to clarify these ideas and keep writing. This group also exemplifies something crucial: each one made a decision to channel their access to power for our project. Nobody in this list here speaks Spanish or is an immigrant or a visa holder, but all of them are U.S. citizens with powerful positions in U.S universities and colleges. Others at Emerson in vice presidential statuses and members of the board of trustees who played crucial roles in our project, including coming to Colombia to observe. In Colombia, in the disciplines of Art, Urban Planning and Architecture Camilo Castro, Edgar Arroyo Castro, Luis Serna, and Juan Luis Mesa. John Trimbur, who as Founding Director of the version of the First-Year Writing Program at Emerson College, supported my building this transnational project. Previously, I had worked with Joe Harris, the Founding Director of the Duke University Writing program in which 20+ postdocs (then Mellon fellows) from a range of disciplines taught First-Year Writing.

References Bruffee, Kenneth A. 2007. A Short Course in Writing: Composition, Collaborative Learning, and Constructive Reading, 4th ed. New York: Pearson. Freire, Paulo. 2000. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum.

260  Tamera Marko Marko, Tamera. 2012. “Disrupting Doble Desplazamiento in Conflict Zones: Alternative Feminist Stories Cross the Colombia-U.S. Border.” Reflections: A Journal of Public Rhetoric, Civic Writing and Service Learning 12 (1): 9–53. ———. 2014. “We Also Built The City of Medellín: Desplazadas’ Family Albums as Feminist Archival Activism.” Taking Risks: Feminist Stories of ­Activist Research in the Americas, edited by Julie Shayne. New York: SUNY Press. Marko, Tamera, Mario Ernesto Osorio, Eric Sepenoski, and Ryan Catalani. 2015. “Proyecto Carrito: When The Student Receives an ‘A’ and the Worker Gets Fired. Disrupting the Unequal Political Economy of Rhetorical Mobility.” Literacy in Composition Studies 3 (1): 21–43. Marko, Tamera. 2011. “Taller de La Escritura Transnacional: Writing Ourselves Across Borders.” Syllabus for workshop with the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, sede Medellín. Mathieu, Paula. 2005. Tactics of Hope: The Public Turn in English Composition. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers, Inc. Mobility Movilidad, Inc. 2018. Mobility Movilidad. www.mobilitymovilidad. org/. Nixon, Ron, and Jasmine C. Lee. 2017. “Getting a Visa to Visit the U.S. Is A Long and Extensive Process for Most.” The New York Times, March 16, 2017. www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/03/16/us/visa-process-unitedstates.html. Ramazanoglu, Caroline, ed. 1997. Up against Foucault: Explorations of Some Tensions between Foucault and Feminism. New York: Routledge. Rich, Adrienne. 1996. “The Burning of Paper Instead of Children.” In The Will to Change: Poems 1968–1970. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Inc. Zong, Jie, and Jeanne Batalova. 2018. “International Students in the United States.” The Migration Policy Institute, www.migrationpolicy.org/article/ international-students-united-states

16 Conclusion Further Notes on the Political Turn Deborah Mutnick, Shannon Carter, Stephen Parks, Jessica Pauszek “We Have to Act As if It Were Possible”—Angela Davis (2019, 55) Our goal in Writing Democracy was to map a response to the current moment in and beyond the classroom, contributing to the enactment of a “political turn” capable of achieving social and economic justice for all and averting the worst consequences of the direst environmental crisis in human history. As Rosa Luxemburg wrote in the aftermath of the political upheavals of the 1960s, “[W]ithout such a vision …” and “without a philosophy of revolution, activism spends itself in mere anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism, without ever revealing what it is for” (quoted in Dunayevskaya 1982, 194). The vision we offer here suggests: (1) a need for political direction, a turn to the left that can steer us ­toward a clear analysis of the problems we face and decisive actions to solve them; (2) a commitment as educators to take action, guided by a “Marxist ethical compass” (Welch 2019, 61)1 that directs us not only to ­Marxist traditions but also to the work—sometimes one and the same— of ­African-American, Latinx, and Indigenous activists, and across locations from classrooms to faculty unions and councils to professional organizations to progressive movements and parties; and (3) the enactment of educational work—­research, teaching, and learning—that explains and continues to investigate historical material realities in all forms and across disciplines, including the current crises of overaccumulation, environmental devastation, and intensifying global inequality, with its especially tragic consequences for working-class and poor people of color worldwide, as well as how they differ from previous crises and systemic restructurings of capitalism. We thus hope this book enables readers to imagine how we can collectively contribute to the struggles ahead. In 2014, we were honored to bring Angela Davis to the Conference on College Composition and Communication. Assessing the impact of the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street in her interview with Ben Kuebrich and LaToya Sawyer, Davis observed: My sense is that we always have to organize as if it were possible to create a movement that will change the world. Sometimes it may not

262  Deborah Mutnick et al. happen, but we have to act as if it were possible. If we don’t act as if it were possible, when those conditions arise, we won’t be ready. (55) At that point, Occupy had disbanded. Even so, the activist knowledge and networks it had absorbed from previous social movements—not only transformative models like the U.S. Civil Rights Movement but also the Zapatista rebellion of 1994 and other left struggles for internal, direct democracy—could be seen in whole new layers of society that sprang to action after Trump’s inauguration in January 2017. This political reawakening energized the Women’s March the following day, which drew millions of protesters out to the streets and sparked spontaneous airport demonstrations later that month against Trump’s imposition of a travel ban on seven Muslim majority countries. It also contributed to the revival of Democratic Socialists of America, which has more than quadrupled its membership since the election from 8,500 in 2016 to 50,000 at the time of this writing. Trump’s election, however, also emboldened white nationalist rhetoric and violence, resulting in a surge of racist, anti-Muslim, anti-­Semitic hate ­ ongregation crimes, including a savage attack in 2018 on the Tree of Life C in Pittsburgh in which a white nationalist 2 killed eleven congregants; and in March 2019, a tragic massacre by yet another white nationalist who shot 50 people dead at two mosques in New Zealand. As Tamara Issak (2019) reminds us, the rhetoric deployed by Trump and other populists “group[s] entire nations of people as enemies” and sends “a clear message ... to Americans that Muslims are a threat” (178). It is also worth sounding a cautionary note about anti-Trump activism that, in 2019, divisive internal charges of anti-Semitism on one side and racism on the other within the Women’s March undercut and ultimately split the team behind the 2017 event into camps. Before we can undertake the kind of mass movement needed to achieve a truly democratic society,  the left must confront, analyze, and mend such divisions. As we argue throughout Writing Democracy, it is imperative that we forge solidarity based on anti-racist, feminist, pro-labor, internationalist principles in order to contribute to coalition- and movement-building from below as the global masses, including us, are catapulted into a diverse working class opposed to a tiny but powerful global capitalist elite that persists even in the face of catastrophe in placing profit above human need.

“Episodes in the Struggle for Revolutionary Consciousness”—John Trimbur (2019, 36) Our hope is to inspire renewed discussion, examination, debate, and clarification of possible trajectories of struggles that seek to alter or abolish capitalism. In particular, we encourage further scrutiny of four

Conclusion  263 beliefs that have historically guided different enactments of left-wing politics: (1) the liberal belief that desirable reforms—perhaps, for example, a ­return to a “New Deal,” or, for that matter, a Green New Deal— can save capitalism, distributing wealth more equally and ensuring safety nets through Keynesian economic controls over unfettered free markets; (2) the anarchist belief of groups like Occupy Wall Street that politics consisting of democratic, antihierarchical practices will in themselves usher in a more egalitarian, just society; (3) the black feminst belief giving rise to intersectionality theory that racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression are interlocking and must be central to any attempt to mitigate or undo the dehumanizing effects of capitalism (Combahee River Collective 1977; Crenshaw 1994); and (4) the Marxist belief that in its unrelenting production and reproduction of class, racial, gender, and other inequalities, capitalism is incapable of producing and sustaining a just, fair, equitable society given and must, therefore, be abolished. Elements of all four perspectives are informed by and in turn inform activist theories and practices across social justice movements, many of which we deeply admire and, in some cases, emulate. At the same time, differences in political perspective exist even among the four of us, not in our common desire for a just world but in our analysis of the sources of oppression and exploitation and thus the critical question, as Nancy Welch puts it, of how we get there. The kinds of conversations we have had among ourselves are precisely the ones we feel must happen in and beyond the academy. In order to “get there,” do we need an explicitly Marxist project? One merely informed by Marxism? One driven by intersectionality or decolonial theories? Are these theoretical positions incompatible? Can they, in fact, mutually inform one another? We all agree that solidarity is crucial for building the kind of social movements that can bring about systemic change, and that racial, gender, class, and other forms of oppression are interlocking, but do we see these categories of identity as commensurate with one another?3 How do we believe racial, sexual, linguistic, another forms of oppression can be ended? How do we understand class division? The exploitation by the capitalist class, with its access to enormous state and economic power, of the working class? Or the reality, close to home for those of us who are academics, that contingent labor makes up 73% of faculty in higher education (Flaherty 2018)? We realize these differences in perspective can be divisive. That divisiveness has cost the broad left dearly, splitting us into factions and ­reproducing liberal ideologies that weaken and repress resistance. Yet the differences can also be transformative and emancipatory in combining, for example, lessons from indigenous, black, and women’s history with the analytical tools of Marxist analysis. As Lisa Lowe (1996) explains, [C]apital has maximized its profits not through rendering labor abstract but precisely through the social production of difference

264  Deborah Mutnick et al. marked by race, nation, geographical origins, and gender. The law of value has operated by creating, preserving, and reproducing the specifically racialized and gendered category of labor power. (27–28) The fact is, conversations across these perspectives has never been more important. Regardless of the path we take, we have to combine forces in a collective fight against the tyranny of right-wing forces and their pursuit of unfettered capitalism and its long history of racial injustice and genocidal policies in the Global South. To this end, we look to embed traditional composition arguments not only in Marxist theory but also in a rich terrain of strategies and traditions. As John Trimbur (2019) puts it in the opening chapter of this volume, analyzing left-wing thought in rhetoric and composition as refracted by larger historical forces, even at the bleakest moments … counter-revolution still cannot permanently cancel the prospects of the left … The history of the left may look cyclical, like the changing seasons of capitalism’s eternal present. But we must see the motion of history not as an interminable repetition but as episodes in the struggle for revolutionary consciousness. (36) We thus see a political turn as a two-pronged approach, first to develop a better analytical grasp of the larger, transnational forces reshaping human and natural history, and second to maintain an activist orientation to our roles as teachers and researchers in solving the twin crises of capitalist overaccumulation and environmental degradation and the associated intensification of impoverishment and precariousness of the world’s masses. For example, in her contribution to this volume, Vani ­K annan (2019) writes about her participation in student protests against Syracuse University’s unilateral decision to shut down a sexual assault advocacy center and impose other cutbacks. She reflects deeply on this activist work in response to historical student movements—­ including the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Students for a ­Democratic Society—and struggles for ethnic studies programs, free speech at the University of California-Berkeley, and open admissions at the City ­University of New York and other public universities. In relation to these student-led movements and her dissertation study of the Third World Women’s ­A lliance, she writes: “[T] hese histories deconstructed the false binary of ‘campus’ and ‘community,’ and demonstrated how movements led by young people crossed these ­contexts” (133).

Conclusion  265 As we hope to have made clear by now, the political turn we imagine is necessarily a multidimensional project involving theoretical, practical, and educational elements to be taken up in classrooms, schools, disciplines, professional organizations, unions, and myriad communities. It comes at a time of deep questioning within the field of rhetoric and composition of its professional organizations, labor practices, and paradoxical roots of first-year composition as gate keeper and liberator. It comes as well at a time in which the transnationalization of capital and associated austerity measures are trifurcating higher education along the same lines as the economic stratification, roughly speaking, of an elite, wealthy 1%, a technocratic, intellectual class of 20%, and an increasingly precarious, impoverished 80% of “surplus humanity” (Robinson 2016, 3). Examples include the corporatization and rising costs of higher education and a watered-down curriculum of basic literacy, numeracy, and vocational skills intended to undermine critical thinking and inculcate obedience and passivity, reinforced by banal consumerism, in masses of students. In light of these effects of transnational capitalism on education, ­Deborah Mutnick (2019) argues in this volume that a Marxist ­pedagogy for the political turn must resist these forces in the classroom, in intensifying labor struggles, and in solidarity with movements led by workers, students, and the growing worldwide precariat, including the ranks of adjunct faculty in higher education. Such a pedagogy, she explains, must be “born of the school of radical political struggle,” combining “a commitment to strive for praxis” with pursuit of “historical materialist analysis of social and natural realities” that explains, among other things, racial, gender, class, and other forms of oppression and exploitation (101). It must thus foster approaches to teaching that “aim to comprehend the inner, often hidden, abstract inverse” of what Marx called the “phenomenal forms” and insist on curriculum that promotes critical thinking and “presumes the desire and capacity of all human beings to learn …” (101).

“In What World Shall We Live and How Do We Get There?”—Nancy Welch (2019, 61) We must use our positions as teachers and scholars to take an explicitly political turn like those represented in this collection. We must fight to reclaim education from neoliberal policies, embedded in racist paradigms, inside the belly of the beast, to apply our skills as educators, writers, and researchers to struggles for social, economic, and environmental justice, and to educate our students across institutional strata to think critically. In other words, we must take Marx’s famous dictum to heart and not only interpret the world but contribute to changing it—and we

266  Deborah Mutnick et al. must understand that proposition as a core principle of educational objectives at all levels. We must ensure that critical inquiry, research, and higher order skills are taught in all our institutions as prerequisites for work, love, life, and democracy. This mandate comes as multiple crises define a critical turning point in world history in which transnational capitalism has both created the potential for a global, revolutionary movement of labor and the dispossessed and exerted increasingly repressive, disciplinary actions to dissolve and derail such a movement. As Nancy Welch (2019) concludes in her chapter in this volume, In exposing and resolving this contradiction, composition and rhetoric has a role to play. Rather than teach “moral precepts obligatory to all” and reinforce the shackles of neoliberal morality, we can seek the standpoints of exploited and oppressed people in struggle and the further contributions to a liberatory ethics they and their struggles will make. (78) Citing Lenin’s call for revolutionary movements led by and true to the interests of the “vanguard of the oppressed,” she describes, for example, “the intersecting aspirations of the Me Too, Black Lives Matter, and Fight for Fifteen” movements when McDonald’s workers led by African Amerian and Latinx women walked off the job in Fall 2018 to protest sexual harassment (78). Fundamentally Welch insists, we must not only ask “In what world shall we live? and How do we get there?” but also “according to whom? and in whose interests?” (61). An overriding concern in response to Welch’s question about the world in which we shall live is how to safeguard life itself not only for future generations but for human as well as plant and animal species in the immediate future. Since we began this book, along with many other scientific reports, the October 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report warned that a dozen years remain to effect policies to keep global warming to 1.5°C. The following month, the current ­ ational ­Climate administration released the second part of the Fourth N Assessment, which similarly laid out the disastrous consequences of a failure to reduce anthropogenic CO2 emissions, including ruinous ­wildfires like those in California, where the town of Paradise literally burned to the ground, and destructive hurricanes, coastal flooding, extreme heat, and drought. Against this backdrop, the political turn as we see it must be informed by historical materialism, which means our focus includes not only the current moment (the Trump era, for example) or a particular issue (such as police brutality) but also the material conditions by which society produces and continually reproduces injustice. As we’ve argued throughout,

Conclusion  267 the election of Donald Trump in November 2016 is not an anomaly but rather a symptom of a failing system. Despite evidence to the contrary, many continue to argue that Trump won because the left ignored the very real challenges experienced by white, working-class, typically rural families. Yet a plurality of Trump voters earns more than $100,000 (­Silver), and Trump carried the votes of more white college graduates than Hillary Clinton (Huang et al.). As Michael Phillips (2016) argues, Demonizing the white working class as disproportionately prone to white supremacist thinking serves a reactionary political agenda. It delegitimizes the economic pain suffered by the white working class in an age of mounting debt, downward mobility, decreasing life expectancy, and shrinking opportunity. (n.p., emphasis added) While acknowledging Philips’ point, we argue that the working class as a whole is diverse, especially in this era in which, as Marx and ­Engels ([1845] 2019) predicted, “entire sections of the ruling class are, by the advance of industry, precipitated into the proletariat, or are at least threatened in their conditions of existence” (14). Moreover, as intersectionality theory makes clear, racial, sexual, and other forms of oppression are produced and reproduced by the logic of capitalism that exploits difference and sows division. In other words, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (2011) insists, While it is true that oppressions can reinforce and compound each other, they are born out of the material relations shaped by capitalism and the economic exploitation that is at the heart of capitalist society. In other words, it is the material and economic structure of society that gave rise to a range of ideas and ideologies to justify, explain and help perpetuate that order. In the United States, racism is the most important of those ideologies. (n.p.) Thus, we understand that the working class is historically heterogeneous and increasingly composed of masses of people who cannot subsist without salaried employment—diverse in their racial, sexual, national, and other identities, including differing levels of education, employment, and skill sets—pitted against a savage transnational capitalist class which makes up a tiny fraction of the world’s population. In delineating the character of the political turn we advocate, we have worked hard to theorize and enact a principled, critical discussion of the relationship between intersectionality theory, including anti-racist, anti-sexist, and decolonial global and disciplinary perspectives, and Marxist historical materialist theory of class division and the relations

268  Deborah Mutnick et al. and forces of production. As Dana Cloud (2019) puts it in her interview in this book, We definitely need to realize that the labor movement is not and has not been a predominantly white movement throughout US history. But labor and radicals need to theorize and organize ­intersectionally—connecting oppression and the fights against it to resistance to exploitation and economic precarity. (112) Cloud’s interview is the first of several variations on the political turn that take up questions of what and whom we are addressing. These meditations range from building solidarity in labor struggles (Kahn) to situating student movements opposing racism, homophobia, and austerity cuts to vital support systems as a political force in higher education and surrounding communities (Kannan), to thinking through the psychology of building a political turn that might “nudge” students into awareness of their own passive acceptance of the status quo and encourage action against racial, gender, class and other forms of oppression (Feigenbaum). Other meditations on the political turn in this section show how we can resist neoliberal tendencies in higher education by turning the classroom from “a site of passive learning into an active space for collaboration and action” (Clegg 160) and by advocating the establishment of partnerships between two-year colleges and universities that find common cause in support for students at two-year colleges as “a matter of social justice” that is also “the work of anti-racism, class consciousness, and democracy” (Jensen 165). The variations on the political turn included here reflect ongoing conversations in Writing Democracy and, more generally, in academia and social and labor movements about reaching wider audiences, building partnerships, forging solidarity across struggles, and infusing those sites of struggle in and out of the classroom with critical consciousness—­ conscientização—that can help orient students, diverse publics, and us to comprehend, analyze, critique, and engage in historical circumstances we inherit and that call on us in every epoch to make our own history. While “democracy” remains a contested term, one of the clear lessons for us from our own activist involvement, annual workshops, contributors’ chapters to this book, and discussions in our field’s research, ­listservs, social media, and professional forums is that democracy on the left is a precondition for radical social change. Racism, sexism, heterosexism, and other forms of oppression intertwine with the psychological and social advantages of whiteness—what David Roediger ([1991] 2007) calls “the wages of whiteness.” These particular material embodiments of class division and exploitation must be interpolated into theories of ­anti-capitalist, radical social transformation. In Class, Race, and

Conclusion  269 Marxism, Roediger (2017) “urges less dismissiveness towards opposing positions “and argues against” sidelining of the consideration of race or, as in the case of liberal multiculturalism, by neglecting questions of class” (26). The political turn we advocate will not work without a deep understanding of how racism and sexism and other specific forms of oppression are both interlocking and interwoven into the history and logic of capitalism. We thus see critical education as a necessary element of a political turn, first as a catalyst for critique, sparking research and dialogue about the nature of neoliberal capitalism in all its complex forms as well as the possibilities for radical alternatives to it, and second as a call to action to join activist struggles, not only the battles of unionized (or non-­unionized) academic workers on the front lines of corporate attacks on higher education but also those taking place beyond university walls from Black Lives Matter demonstrations to the Dakota pipeline protests at Standing Rock to the Fight for Fifteen movement to raise the minimum wage. A corollary to action, though, is critical consciousness achieved by discovering and drawing out the pedagogical content of everyday and political life as well as scientific and social realities. The pedagogy of the political turn is thus an appeal to scholar/activists to engage critically not only in their own fields of study but also in open-minded research, debate, and discussion about how to achieve true democracy, equality, and freedom in light of the embeddedness of racism, sexism, heterosexism, xenophobia, and other forms of oppression in the relations of production that results in what Lisa Lowe (1996) calls “the social productions of difference” (28). The need for ongoing investigations of these unsettled, urgent questions can also be seen in the last section of the book on “taking the political turn,” beginning with Tamara Issak’s (2019) moving account of her experience as a Muslim woman researching the 9/11 Museum in Lower Manhattan, an institution promoted as a way to commemorate the victims of the attacks on the U.S. Issak writes of her visit to the museum: That day, I felt I understood Du Bois’s definition of double ­consciousness—the “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others” (2). I was hyper aware of my surroundings and how my movements and expressions could be interpreted. For all I knew, … these people were grouping me with the perpetrators as a follower of Islam. (177) Also taking up the issue of xenophobic rhetoric, policies, and ideologies, Steven Alvarez (2019) analyzes the “rhetorics of shock” felt by undocumented Latin American immigrants in this period of rampant xenophobia in the U.S. and abroad, nowhere better epitomized than by Trump’s obsession with building a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico. By teaching

270  Deborah Mutnick et al. students about the U.S.-backed coup against democratically elected President Salvador Allende in Chile—“another 9/11” than the one they now learn about in school—Alvarez builds “on the study of the ‘free-market revolution’ beginning with the 1973 Chilean coup d’état” (193). From there, he takes up “the ideology of neoliberalism, and the assaulting concentration of wealth upward compounded by the Trump administration” (194). On a hopeful note, he concludes “that students can use storytelling to dismantle the walls of individualism, greed, and free-market ideologies by uncovering how systemic shocks are narratives that never completely silence the voices of dissent in the democratic process” (194). For lessons on what she calls “the materiality of social justice,” ­Shannon Carter (2019) shifts our attention to the political turn taken by sprinter and lifelong human rights activist John Carlos, best known for raising his fist in the iconic “Silent Protest” in Mexico City in 1968. Using the metaphor “pass the baton” to suggest how the circulation of physical, material, texts, people, and symbolic forms enacts social change, she also describes a local demonstration against injustice in which Carlos was involved a year prior to the “Silent Protest” as a student on her own campus, which had just begun to desegregate in 1965. She ends almost half a century later with the now iconic image of NFL Quarterback Colin Kaepernick kneeling during the National Anthem, this time sparking not only a firestorm of criticism but also an entire movement (#TakeaKnee). Through these narratives, Carter theorizes “networks that produce the possibility of rhetorical moves ... endlessly activating a field that produces change” (209). Finally, Tamera Marko (2019) investigates the often invisible, fraught act of applying for a visa endured by more than a million and a half international students and scholars whose chances to study and work abroad are increasingly diminished by xenophobic, anti-immigrant ­rhetoric and policies. Based on her experience developing a translingual curriculum for PBM Proyecto Boston Medellín (2008–2019) that involves first-yearwriting students at Emerson College and art students at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Medellín, Colombia, she shows how visas serve as “invisible borders” whose “very existence contradicts the marrow of a democratic liberal arts education ideal dedicated to diversity and inclusion” (241). Marko writes: “Perhaps one way we can all see these borders for a moment is this exercise: what does it take to acquire a U.S. visa and for whom? Why?” (241). *    *    * We come full circle, then, back to how a political turn can contribute to a decisive shift in a Gramscian “war of position,” the long interregnums between what John Trimbur calls “episodes of revolutionary consciousness” in which it is necessary to work within the cultures of capitalism to build and unify mass movements for social transformation. We end by

Conclusion  271 reiterating Angela Davis’s invocation “to act as if it were possible” and Welch’s description of a “Marxist moral compass” to ask not only in what world shall we live and how do we get there but also according to whom and in whose interests. Intensifying global contradictions have produced multiple crises, including unprecedented degrees of inequality and precarity; increasing numbers of “surplus humanity” consigned to increasingly impoverished, precarious lives; assaults upon communities of color on a global scale by militarized police; and the existential threat posed by climate change. Nor is it headline news that the liberal arts and sciences are imperiled and that mainstream views of education have shifted dramatically to the right. As the professoriate continues to lose ground, and academic programs at all levels contract under regimes of austerity, corporatization, flat wages, and rising rents and prices, teachers and students alike will face questions that we believe a consciously anti-racist, feminist, democratic, Marxist approach can productively answer: Whose interests are served by the corporate university? Who suffers, who benefits? And what alternatives are there to a system whose purpose, redefined by decades of neoliberalism, is increasingly unclear not only to students and their caregivers but also to us, teachers and scholars? How best to educate a critically conscious, historically grounded, scientifically literate population, in and outside classrooms, responsive to the pressing issues of our day? First, we can do so by employing a historical materialist approach that moves from the appearances of things to uncover the underlying structures of reality in investigations of the natural, physical, and social world as well as of overtly political problems like climate change, immigration, economic inequality, racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, and so forth. With this anti-racist, anti-­ heterosexist position, dialectical materialism further permits us to pursue abstract and concrete epistemological problems not as isolated events and processes but as interrelated manifestations of the laws of nature as well as the contradiction between capitalism’s relentless drive for profit and its inability to satisfy human need. We hope in this volume to have generated further conversation, inflected by Marxist aspirations for a society organized to meet human need rather than reap private profits— aspirations that are at once deeply rooted yet repeatedly negated in our own disciplinary past, educational history, and American politics—not because we can predict how these current crises will resolve themselves but because we, like millions of others worldwide, are determined to do what we can to win the struggles from below.

Notes 1 Citations of chapters in this volume are not included in the reference list. 2 We honor the lives of those lost in unspeakable tragedies like these by refusing to use the killer’s name. Immediately following the massacres in Christchurch, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern made clear: “One thing I can assure you—you won’t hear me speak his name.” As many

272  Deborah Mutnick et al. perpetrators want fame, we wish to contribute to the growing movement across media who insist upon leaving the killer anonymous, focusing instead on the victims. 3 See Barbara Foley’s (2018) “Intersectionality: A Marxist Critique” for a very clear explanation of the value of Marxist analysis in offering “an adequate explanatory framework for addressing the root causes of social inequality in the capitalist socioeconomic system.”

References www.socialjusticejournal.org/punishment-and-policing-in-the-trump-era/ Combahee River Collective Statement. 1979. Internet Archive. https://archive. org/details/Combahee1979. Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams. 1994. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.” In The Public Nature of Private Violence, edited by Martha Albertson Fineman and Rixanne Mykitiuk, 93–118. New York: Routledge. Dunayevskaya, Raya. 1982. Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Flaherty, Colleen. 2018. “A Non-Tenure Track Profession?” Inside Higher Ed, October 12, 2018. www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/10/12/about-threequarters-all-faculty-positions-are-tenure-track-according-new-aaup. Foley, Barbara. “Intersectionality: A Marxist Critique.” Science and Society 81 (2): 269–275. Lowe, Lisa. 1996. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Robinson, William I. 2016. “Global Capitalism and the Restructuring of Education: The Transnational Capitalist Class’ Quest to Suppress Critical Thinking.” Social Justice 43 (3): 1–24. Roediger, David R. 2007. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. New York: Verso. ———. 2017. Class, Race, and Marxism. New York: Verso. Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. 2011. “Race, Class, and Marxism.” International Socialist Organization: SocialistWorker.org. January 4, 2011. https://socialist worker.org/2011/01/04/race-class-and-marxism.

Index

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” refer to notes. AAUP see American Association of University Professors (AAUP) Abraham, Matthew 45 Academic Advisory Board for Homeland Security 114 ADA see Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Advocacy Center 131, 132, 264 affective fidelity 73 African National Congress 48n10 Afrikaans 44, 45 Ahmed, Akbar 183–4 Alcaldía de Medellín 252 Alexander, Buzz 143–5 Alexander, Marisa 56 Alexander, Michelle 5 Alexander, Neville 44–5, 46, 48n10, 48n12 Ali, Mohammed 215 Allende, Salvador 198, 270 Alvarez, Steven 19, 192, 269 American Association of University Professors (AAUP) 28, 115 American Indian Caucus 9 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) 132 Andelora, Jeff 164 anti-abortion campaign 66 anti-capitalism 43, 261 anti-imperialism 43, 261 anti-Muslim violence 178, 179 anti-racism 43, 165, 268 anti-Semitism 76, 262 anti-Vietnam war movement 37 anxiety-inducing perfectionism 31 Anzaldúa, Gloria 256 APSCUF see Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculty (APSCUF)

Arab Spring 2, 5, 12, 54, 76, 77, 86, 261 Ardern, Jacinda 271n2 Arizona State University 34 Arkansas Nine 223 Artz, Lee 123, 126, 127 Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculty (APSCUF) 123, 126, 128 Audience 17, 70, 101, 123–9, 153, 247, 250, 251, 256, 268 The Aula 250, 259n3; visa writing workshops at 247–54 Australia 56 Au, Wayne 96–8, 101 availability bias 140 Baca, Damián 45 Baird-Giordano, Joanne 165 Baker, Ella 58 Bakhtin, Mikhail 12 Bambery, Chris 218 Banfield, Grant 82–3 Baraka, Amiri 45 Barber, William 46 Bartholomae, David 47n4 Battle of Seattle (1999) 46 Baudrillard, Jean 38 Beckles, Jovanka 45 Behavioural Insights Team 140 Bentham, Jeremy 141 Berkeley Free Speech Movement 133 Berlin, James 12, 37, 45, 47n4, 47n6 Bernie Sanders campaign (2016) 27, 31, 59n3, 86 bias correction 146 Bierman, Peter 123, 128 Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation 32 Binghamton University 134

274 Index Bitzer, Lloyd 98 Bizzell, Patricia 12, 37, 47n4, 163 Black and Puerto Rican Student Community, CUNY (BPRSC) 37 Black English 42, 47n9 Black Liberation Movement 41, 51 Black Lives Matter 2, 5, 8, 14, 18, 46, 51, 72, 86, 213, 218, 229n12, 269 Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Robinson) 9–10, 41 Black Mirror 202, 203n2 Black Panther Party 16, 37, 42 Black Power movement 36, 37, 39, 41, 74 Bloch, Ernest 63 Board of Trustees 76 Bolivia 6 Bolsanaro, Jair 83 Bolshevik Revolution 46 Bolsonaro, Jair 3 Boston Commons 60, 67, 77 Bourdieu, Pierre 195, 196 Bowles, Samuel 37 BPRSC see Black and Puerto Rican Student Community, CUNY (BPRSC) Brady, Mia 154 Brandt, Deborah 88 Brave New World (Huxley) 202 Brazil 83 Brecht Forum see Marxist Education Project Breen, Sheryl 156–7 Brodkey, Linda 38 Brohm, Jean-Marie 218 Brown, Delmer 224 Brown, John 55 Brown, Michael 14, 51 Brown v. Board of Education 229n9 Brown, Wendy 31, 47n2, 88 Bruffee, Kenneth 251 Bureau of Justice Statistics 134 Burke, Kenneth 12, 70, 123, 181 Burlingame, Debra 182, 183 business plans 156–8, 160 Caffentzis, George 90 California State University 178 Cambodia 53 Canada 6, 31, 83 Canagarajah, A. Suresh 253 Capital (Marx) 63

capitalism 36, 62–4, 90, 92–3, 103n6, 220, 255, 263, 264; neoliberal 4–7; racial 9–10; transnational 16, 95 Capitalism and Freedom (Friedman) 198 Carlos, John 206–8, 270; on archives 210–12; “passes the baton” in Mexico City (1968) 212–21; movement of people across borders 213–17; movement of symbolic forms 217–21 Carmichael, Stokely 41 Carrington, Ben 218 Carter, Joyce Locke 28 Carter, Shannon 1, 19, 206, 261, 270 Castro, Camilo 259n6 Castro, Edgar Arroyo 259n6 Catalani, Ryan 258, 259n4 CCCC see Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) Celtic Cross 117 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 198 Chang, Jeff 201 Chartist movement 95, 103n7 Chatterjee, Piya 131–2 Chavez, Cesar 36 Cherokee Nation 11 Chicano Power movement 74 Chile 76, 270; neoliberal capitalism 4 Chilean playbook 197–201 choice architecture 139–42 CIA see Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Ciccariello-Maher, George 117 City Mayor’s Office 252 City University of New York (CUNY) 37; student movements 133–5; Black and Puerto Rican Student Community 37 civic action 150, 151 Civil Rights Movement 4, 55, 74, 87, 100, 223, 262 Clark, Gregory 181 class acts 66–9 Class Politics: The Movement for the Students’ Right to Their Own Language (Parks) 40, 41 Class, Race, and Marxism (Roediger) 10, 268–9 class struggle 10, 38, 41, 64, 76, 86, 87, 95, 196 Clay, Jeff 57–8

Index  275 Clegg, Geoffrey 18, 150 climate justice 2, 5 Clinton, Hillary 267 Cloud, Dana L. 17, 61, 64, 66, 70–3, 111–22, 229n11, 268 code of conduct 156, 158–9 cognitive development, theory of 97 Cold War McCarthyism, in higher education 101–2 College Composition and Communication 47n5 Collins, Tony 218 Colombia 236, 240, 241 Comer, Emily 71 commodity of labor 96 “Common Ground” principles 76, 77 Communication Workers of America 127 communism 36, 46, 102n3 Communist Manifesto, The (Marx and Engels) 87, 92 Communist Party USA (CPUSA) 11, 16, 48n14, 51 Competency-Based Education 32 composing speculative writing, assignment description for 205 composition: and language politics 39–45; and neoliberalism 30–5; and New Left 35–45 Composition in the Age of Austerity (Welch and Scott) 29, 32, 33, 35, 167 “Concessions” to institutional exigencies 33–4 Condition of the Working Class in England, The (Engels) 62 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) 1–2, 11–13, 28–30, 38–43, 45, 47n8, 51, 164, 172, 213; Black Caucus 9; Executive Committee 40, 43, 207 Conference on Community Writing 12 Connors, Bull 223 Connors, Robert J. 45 conscientious nudges 142–7 consciousness 32, 34, 40, 41, 64, 75, 78, 89, 93, 97, 101, 120, 177, 199, 240, 249 Constructing Marxist Ethics (Thompson) 62 Contingency, Exploitation, and Solidarity: Labor and Action in English Composition (Kahn) 168

contradictory consciousness 220 Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, A 82 Corbett, Edward P.J. 220 Cotter, Holland 180 Council on Basic Writing 11 Cox, Anicca 47n8 Cox, Laurence 4, 10, 83, 90 CPUSA see Communist Party USA (CPUSA) Crenshaw, Kimberlé 85 critical consciousness 43, 74, 268, 269 Critical Resistance 52 critical service-learning 18, 153 Crow, Jim 217, 222 Crowley, Sharon 12, 45, 47n6 Cuba 59; literacy campaigns in 100 cultural turn 112 CUNY see City University of New York (CUNY) Curran, Thomas 31 Current Affairs 142 Cushman, Ellen 11 Dakota pipeline protests 269 Dallas News 227 Daniel, James Rushing 85 Davis, Angela 13, 16, 41, 51–9, 261–2, 271 Davis, Jordan 57 de Blasio, Bill 135 Delano Grape Strike (1965–1970) 36, 46 democracy: liberal 8; literate 37 Democratic Party 6, 60, 72 Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) 31, 46, 86 Denmark 31 Department of Defense 237 Department of Public Safety 132 Dewey, John 74, 89, 166 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Dick) 202 doble desplazamiento/double displacement 243–4 Dobrin, Sidney I. 84 Donehower, Kim 151 Dorfman, Ariel 199 double consciousness 177, 266 Dowd-Hall, Jacquelyn 211 Drake, Dick 214 DSA see Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)

276 Index Dubinsky, James 153 Du Bois, W.E.B. 177, 218, 226 Duck, Donald 199 Duffy, John 66, 68, 69, 72 DukeEngage Colombia 245 Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne 63 Dunn, Michael 56, 57 Durst, Russel 47n5 Eagleton, Terry 47n6 economic equality 4–6, 83 Ecuador 6, 244 Ede, Lisa 47n4, 123–9 Education Industrial Complex (EIC) 163, 171, 172 Edwards, Harry 216, 220 Egypt 5 Ehrenreich, Barbara 68 Ehrlich, Howard J. 39 EIC see Education Industrial Complex (EIC) 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Marx) 82 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 36, 220 Elazabawy, Shaikh Mostafa 182 Ellison, Ralph 10 Ely, Susan 169 Emerson College 236, 238, 244, 246, 270; visa writing workshops at 254–6 Endicott, Katie 68 Engels, Friedrich 62, 64, 87, 92, 93, 95, 101, 102–3n3 English in America (Ohmann) 37 English Only movement 42–3 entrepreneurialism 30 epidemic of overproduction 93 epistemic authority 170–1 equity 170–1 equity-centered partnerships 166–8 Erlbaum, Max 46 Eurocommunism 112 E306 “Writing About Difference” 38 expertise 256–9 FAFSA see Free Application for Federal Student Aid Faigley, Lester 37 faithful felling 72–8 Fanon, Frantz 9, 63, 100 Federal Excess Property Program 134 Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) 10, 12, 38 Federici, Silvia 90

Feigenbaum, Paul 17, 138, 268 Feuer, Alan 180 Feyh, Kathleen 73 Fight for Fifteen (minimum wageraising) movement 72, 269 Fishman, Rachel 154 Fleckenstein, Kristie S. 75 Foley, Barbara 86, 272n2 Forum: Newsletter for Issues about Part-Time and Contingent Faculty 38 Foster, John Bellamy 91, 92, 103n5 Fourth National Climate Assessment 266 Fox, Tom 37 Frances Beal Society 134 Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) 148n2 Freedom Rides 35 Freedom Schools 35, 100, 101 free-market revolution 193, 270 Free Speech Movement (1964) 35, 133 Freire, Paulo 8, 12, 99 French Revolution 100 Friedman, Milton 199 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster 12 FWP see Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) Gallagher, Chris W. 32, 33, 166–7 Garner Eric 14, 51 Gee, James G. 210, 226, 227 George, Diana 259n6 German Ideology, The (Marx and Engels) 64, 102n1, 221 Germany 76 Gilded Age 6 Gilyard, Keith 40, 45 Gintes, Herbert 37 Giordano, Joanne Baird 167 Giroux, Henry 37, 150 Gladwell, Malcolm 126 Gleason, Barbara 163 Goldwater, Barry 36 Gramsci, Antonio 95, 96, 200 Gray, Briahna 46 Great Recession 10, 87 Greece 6 Green New Deal 59n3, 100, 263 Gregory, Dick 215 Griffiths, Brett 170, 171 Gutierrez, Rochelle 118

Index  277 Hairston, Maxine 38 Haiti 53, 59n2 Hall, Stuart 38 Hamad, Wadood Y. 69–70, 71 Hamers, Fannie Lou 58 Handmaid’s Tale, The (Atwood) 202 Harbour, Clifford 166 Harris, Joe 259n6 Harris, Joseph 251 Hartmann, Doug 206 Hartsock, Nancy 64 Harvard Reports of the 1890s 34 Hassel, Holly 167 Haywood, Ian 103n7 Hegel, Thomas 82 Heyer, Heather 14 higher education 88–91 Higher Education for American Democracy 163, 172 Hill, Andrew 31 Hill, Christopher 219 historical materialism 91; theory of 2 historical materialist analysis 7–10 Holzer, Jenny 62 horizons of hope 72–8 Horner, Bruce 37 Hosseini, Khaled 181 House, Veronica 153 Howard, Tomorrah 69, 70 How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic (Dorfman and Mattelart) 199 human rights 4, 5, 7, 19, 207, 228, 245 Hunger Games, The (Collins) 202 Hunger Games competition 73 Hurricane Katrina 199 Hurricane Maria 197, 199 Hurston, Zora Neale 10 I Have Changed (Owens) 221 Imagined Life 148n6 Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent, The (Chatterjee and Maira) 131–2 #ImwithKap 228 India 6 Indianapolis Resolution 12, 47n8, 167 Industrial Workers of the World 218 Inside Higher Education 116 institutional narrative 131, 227 intercultural communicative competence 34

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 83, 266 International Socialist Organization 112, 116–19 International Workingmen’s Association 94, 95 intersectional practice 7–10 IPCC see Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Iran 76 Ireland 6 Islamic extremism vs. violent extremism 182–4 Islamophobia 18, 178, 179, 189 Israel Defense Force 45 Issak, Tamara 19, 177, 262 Is William Martinez Not Our Brother? (Buzz Alexander) 143 Italy 76 Itliong, Larry 36 Jackson, Michael 213 Jackson, Shannon 223 Jackson State 36 James, C.L.R. 63 Jensen, Darin L. 18, 162, 169 Job Act 6 John Carlos 19 John Carlos Story: The Sports Moment That Changed History, The 206, 210 John Dewey and the Future of Community College Education (Harbour) 166 Johnson, Lyndon B. 36 Kaepernick, Colin 206, 208, 212, 228, 228n3, 270 Kahneman, Daniel 140 Kahn, Seth 17, 123, 268 Kannan, Vani 17, 130, 264, 268 Kavanaugh, Brett 64, 71 Kelley, Robin D.G. 41, 47n9 Kelly, Ernece B. 11, 40 Kent State 36 King, Martin Luther, Jr. (MLK) 40, 46, 55, 58, 216–17 Kite Runner, The (Hosseini) 181 Klein, Naomi 83, 102, 194, 198–201 Kluge, Alexander 64 Knowles, Mary Tyler 41 Krause, Eleanor 102n2 K-20 schools 235 Kuebrich, Ben 16, 51, 52, 54, 57, 261

278 Index Ku Klux Klan 57 Kynard, Carmen 12, 41, 47n9, 130 Labor Notes 65 labor, theory of 94 Labov, William 47n9 La Cátedra 259n5 language politics, composition and 39–45 Larson, Holly 170 Latin America 56 League of American Writers 11 Le Blanc, Paul 76 Lefebvre, Henri 12 Lenin, V. I. 72, 76, 91, 94–8, 101, 103n8, 266 Le Sueur, Meridel 10 Levin, Brian 178 Lewontin, Richard 103n5 liberal democracy 7, 8 libertarian paternalism 140; transcending 142–4 libertarian paternalist roots of nudging 139–42 Liebig, Justus von 91 Linde, Charlotte 227 linguistic diversity 34, 43 linguistic homogeneity 34 linguistics of community 43 Lipton, Eric 83 literate democracy 35, 37 Living Stipend campaign 138 Long Civil Rights Movement 211, 221, 229n12 Long, Lutz 219 Lorde, Audre 4 Lovas, John 164 Lowe, Lisa 220, 263–4, 269 Lugones, Maria 120 Lukács, Georg 64 Lu, Min Zhan 37 Lumumba, Patrice 63 Lunsford, Andrea 123–9 Lynch, Paul 84 Lyotard, Jean-François 38 McAdam, Doug 126 McCann, Brian 114 McDonald, Ian 218 McDonald, James C. 47n8 McDonald’s 72, 266 Macron, Emmanuel 83 Maira, Sunaina 131–2 Malcolm X 214, 222

Manchin III, Joe 71, 72 Marback, Richard 220 Marko, Tamera 19, 235, 270 Martínez, Aja Y. 202 Martin, Lockheed 71 Martin, Trayvon 13, 51, 57 Marxism 3, 9, 10, 37, 61–2, 69; black critiques of 2 “Marxism without guarantees” 38 Marxist analysis 7, 8, 93, 263, 272n3 Marxist Education Project 100, 101 Marxist ethics 60–78; class acts 66–9; faithful felling and horizons of hope 72–8; materializing ethics 69–72; morality 62–5 Marxist pedagogy of the political turn 82–103; case for 84–8; higher education 88–91; “revolutionary educator” 91–6; summation and generalization 96–8 Marxist theory 2, 12, 85, 86, 91, 95, 98, 102, 264 Marx, Karl 2, 8, 12, 16, 61, 67, 71, 82–5, 87, 91–5, 101, 102–3n3, 121, 221, 265; on ecological materialism 91; on morality 62–5 materializing ethics 69–72 Mathieu, Paula 259n6 Mattelart, Armand 199 Mesa, Juan Luis 259n6 metabolic rift, theory of 84, 103n5 #MeToo movement 2, 46, 71, 72, 86 Metropolitan Community College 169 Mexico 6, 83 MLK see King, Martin Luther, Jr. (MLK) Modern Language Association 28 Moody, Kim 65 Moore, Jason 103n5 Moore, Michael 212 morality 62–5, 74 Mouvement des Gilets Jaunes 83 Mutnick, Deborah 1, 17, 32–3, 58–9, 82, 261, 265 NAACP see National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) naïve realism 146 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) 218; Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work/ Biography/Autobiography. 212

Index  279 National Communication Association 115 National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) 9, 11, 28–9, 34, 39, 40, 43, 47n8 National Defense Education Act 34 National Education Association 127 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) 210–11 National Language Policy (NLP) 30, 39; cosmopolitan outlook 44; English Plus orientation 43; in South Africa 44 National Peace Accord (2016) 236 National Peace Process 240 National Security Agency 14 Navajo Nation court alliance 71 NCM see New Communist Movement (NCM) NCTE see National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Negt, Oskar 64 NEH see National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) neoliberal capitalism: rise of 4–7 neoliberal cosmopolitanism 34 neoliberalism 4, 90, 119, 150–1, 194, 195; composition and 30–5 Neoliberalism’s War on Education (Giroux) 150 neoliberal rationality 87 Netflix 202 New City Community Press 38 New Communist Movement (NCM) 46, 48n14 New Deal 4 New International, The 74 New Left 48n14; composition and 35–9 New Socialist 218 New University Conference (NUC) 39–42, 47n9 New York Marxist School see Marxist Education Project New Zealand 262, 271n2 Nicaragua: literacy campaigns in 100; U.S.-backed Contras in 42 Nilsen, Alf Gunvald 4, 10, 83 9/11 Memorial & Museum 177–89; historical representations 184–7; Islamic extremism vs. violent extremism 182–4; us versus them approach 181

Nixon, Richard 5, 36 NLP see National Language Policy (NLP) No (film) 200 No is Not Enough (Klein) 198 Norman, Peter 219, 228n1 North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University 35 North Texas State 34 Norway 31 NUC see New University Conference (NUC) Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Thaler and Sunstein) 140 nudging toward political turn 138–48; choice architecture 139–42; conscientious nudges 142–7; libertarian paternalist roots 139–42 Obama, Barack 27, 38, 54, 148n4; Administration 32, 140 Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria 45, 86 Occupy Wall Street 2, 13, 27, 46, 51, 54, 59, 86, 87, 100, 263 Ohmann, Richard 12, 35, 37, 39 Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR) 214–17, 219, 220, 222, 228n1 Ong, Aihwa 150–1 OPHR see Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR) Ordaz, Gustavo Diaz 218 Organization of American Historians 28 Osorio, Mario Ernesto 257 Owen, Robert 94, 102–3n3 Owens, Derek 84 Owens, Jesse 219–21 Oxfam International 6, 87 Parable of the Sower (Butler) 202 Paris Commune (1871) 64 Parks, Stephen 1, 13, 38, 40, 41, 45, 47n9, 48n13, 111, 114–16, 118–20, 259n6, 261 Parry, Benita 63 partnerships 169–70 PASSHE see Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education (PASSHE) “pass the baton” metaphor 206–29; Carlos in Medico City (1968) 212–21; East Texas State

280 Index University 221–5; materiality of 225–8; movement of symbolic forms 226–7; movement of texts, bodies, and symbolic forms 209–10; today 228 PA Student Power Network 128 Pato Donald, El 199 Pauszek, Jessica 1, 259n6, 261 PBM see Proyecto Boston Medellín (PBM) PCC see Progressive Composition Caucus (PCC) Peckham, Irvin 166 Penn State English Department’s Program on Writing and Rhetoric (PWR) 151 Penn State University Student Farm 150–60 Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education (PASSHE) 123 Pennycook, Allister 229n13 person-to-person negotiations 67 phenomenal forms, theory of the 98–100, 265 Phillips, Michael 223, 267 Pillen, Leslie 156 Pincus, Fred L. 39 Pinochet, Augusto 4, 198 plurilingualing 253 political turn 1–4, 7, 8, 10–15, 20, 111, 119, 123, 130–6, 261–72; historical examples of 206–29; Marxist pedagogy of 82–103; and two-year college 162–72 Political Turn in and Beyond the Trump Era, The 147 Poor People’s Campaign 46 Pope-Ruark, Rebecca 154 Portugal 76 P-12 partnerships 166 Pratt, Mary Louise 43–4, 47n9 Precariat, The (Standing) 139 Prison Creative Arts Project 143 Prison Notebooks, The (Gramsci) 96 professional autonomy 170–1 professionalization 16, 34, 165 Professor Watch and Canary Mission 29 Programa Compañerx 245 Progressive Composition Caucus (PCC) 11, 39, 42, 43 progressive perfect standard 146 Progressive SIG and Caucus Coalition (PSCC) 45, 48n13

Proyecto Boston Medellín (PBM) 235–7, 239–41, 270; as pedagogscape 245–7; visa writing workshops 247–56 Proyecto Carrito 257 PSCC see Progressive SIG and Caucus Coalition (PSCC) PWR see Penn State English Department’s Program on Writing and Rhetoric (PWR) Rabocheye Dyelo 96 Race Rebels (Kelley) 41 Rachel Corrie Courage in the Teaching of Writing Award 45 racial capitalism 9–10 racialized class exploitation 41 Radical Departures (Gallagher) 166 Radical Teacher 38 Rajashekharaiah, Jagadeesh 158–9 Ramanzoglu, Caroline 253 Ransbury, Paige 154 Readings, Bill 89, 90 Reagan, Ronald 4, 112; post-Vietnam revanchism 36 Reality Bites: Rhetoric and the Circulation of Truth Claims in the U.S. Political Culture (Parks) 111 “Red for Ed” movement 65, 69 Reed, Touré F. 46 Reich, Adam 123, 128 Reich, Nina 112 renewable products 150–60 Resnikoff, Betty 41 return on investment 89 revolutionary consciousness 262–5 “revolutionary educator” 91–6 Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts (Harris) 251 Rheenen, Derek Van 223 rhetorical analysis of shock 197–201 rhetorical realism 111 Rhetoricians for Peace 11 Rich, Adriene 252 Rise of Al Qaeda, The 182 Robinson, Cedric 9–10, 41 Robinson, William I. 5, 89, 265 Roediger, David R. 10, 220, 221, 268–9 Rose, Mike 37 Ross, Jacqueline 41 Rowe, Carrillo 181 Rural Literacies 151 Russia: literacy campaigns in 100 Russian Revolution 75–6, 77

Index  281 Russian Social Democratic Labor Party 96 Rustin, Bayard 58 Salaita, Steven 28, 29, 117, 132 Salazar, Julia 45 Salt Lake Community College 169 Samper, Jota 258 Sawhill, Isabel V. 102n2 Sawyer, LaToya Lydia 16, 51–3, 56, 261 Sayers, Sean 69 Schell, Eileen 12, 45, 47n8, 48n13, 130 scholarship 168–9, 229n10 Schooling in Capitalist America (Bowles and Gintis) 37 Schulman, Jason 103n6 Schwartz, Joseph 103n6 Scott, Tony 12, 30, 32, 167 SDS see Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) SEIU see Service Employees International Union (SEIU) sensationalism 140 Serna, Luis 258, 259n6 Service Employees International Union (SEIU) 42 SFSP see Sustainable Food Systems Program (SFSP) Shankar, Maya 148n4 Shaughnessy, Mina 37 Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, The (Klein) 199 shock, rhetorical analysis of 197–201 Shor, Ira 12, 37 Short Course in Writing, A (Bruffee) 251 Silent Protest, Mexico City Olympics (1968) 206–9, 211–19, 221, 222, 224–8, 229n6, 229n12, 270 Simon, Brian 95 “situated rhetoric” responsive to exigencies 98 Skinnell, Ryan 33–5 SLOs see Student Learning Objectives (SLOs) Small, Robin 93 Smitherman, Geneva 12, 40, 41, 43 Smith, Tommie 208, 212–15, 217, 220, 228n1 Smucker, Jonathan 139, 145 Snowden, Edward 14

Social and Behavioral Sciences Team 140 socialism 59n3, 78, 102–3n3 social turn 111, 112 socioeconomic inequality 27 Solidarity Day School 100 Sophia Smith Collection 132 South Africa 44–5; national language policy in 44 Spanish Civil War 218 Spears, Sylvia 258 Spivack, Gayatri 47n6 Students’ Right to Their Own Language (SRTOL) 39–42, 45 Stalinism 61 Standing, Guy 139 State Department 237 Stephens, R.L. 46 storytelling, as tool for writing political transformation 201–3 Street, Brian 12 Student Learning Objectives (SLOs) 247 student movements 130–6 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee 133, 264 student projects 156–8 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) 36, 227, 264 Students’ Right to Their Own Language 12 Sturken, Marita 180–1, 186 Sullivan, Patrick 164 Sunstein, Cass 140–2, 144, 147n1 sustainable audiences 150–60 Sustainable Food Systems Program (SFSP) 152 symbolic capital 27 Syracuse’s Westside 11 Syracuse University 136n1, 136n2 Syria 5 Take a Knee movement 209, 213, 228 TA see Teaching Assistant (TA) Tax Cuts (2017) 6 Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta 46, 117, 118, 221, 267 Teaching Assistant (TA) 132 teaching resistance, in age of Trump 159–60 Temporary Protected Status (TPS) 237, 238, 258 Tetreault, Laura 47n1

282 Index Thaler, Richard 140–2, 144, 147n1, 147n2 Thatcher, Margaret 4, 32, 112; TINA and 36 THE General Body 131 Their Morals and Ours (Trotsky) 74, 75 Thelin, William 47n5 theoretical blind spot 98–100 Theses on Feuerbach (Marx) 8, 93–4 Third World politics 37 Third World Women’s Alliance 264 This Changes Everything: Capitalism Versus the Climate (Naomi) 102 Thompson, E. P. 64, 69 Thompson, Michael J. 62 Thought and Language (Vygotsky) 97 Thousand Splendid Suns, A (Hosseini) 181 Thunberg, Greta 83 Tinberg, Howard 207 Tlaib, Rashida 45, 86 Tlatelolco Massacre 218 Toronto Socialism School 100 Toth, Christie 164 TPS see Temporary Protected Status (TPS) Track and Field News 214, 216 transnational capitalism 17, 95 Trimbur, John 16, 27, 48n12, 259n6, 262–5, 264, 270 Trotsky, Leon 17, 74–8, 95 Truman Commission 163–4, 172 Trump, Donald 3, 5, 14, 15, 27, 67, 150, 151, 154, 164, 178, 189, 194, 195, 197, 199, 201, 206, 238, 259, 262, 266, 267, 269; anti-Muslim travel ban 29; “Make America Great Again” presidential campaign 6, 18, 60, 193; and Paris Agreement (2015) 83; and State of Emergency 135; and teaching resistance 159–60 Truth and Reconciliation Commissions 236 Turning Point USA 7 Tversky, Amos 140 Two-Year College English Association (TYCA) 164, 165 two-year college, political turn in 162–72; epistemic authority 170–1; equity 170–1; equity-centered partnerships 166–8; future thinking 171–2; partnerships 169–70;

professional autonomy 170–1; respect 170–1; scholarship 168–9 TYCA see Two-Year College English Association (TYCA) Uberification of services 156 Uehling, Karen 169 UIUC see University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) U.K. see United Kingdom (U.K.) UN: scientific panel on climate change 78 UNESCO: “Universal Declaration of Bioethics and Human Rights” 159 United Kingdom (U.K.) 31; neoliberal capitalism 4; Nudge Units 140 United States (U.S.) 6, 7, 30, 31, 36–7, 44, 54, 56, 59, 61, 87, 100, 112, 235; neoliberal capitalism 4, 5; visa 238–43; West Virginia teachers’ strike (2018) 65, 67–8, 70, 71, 77 Universidad Nacional de Colombia 236, 140, 270; visa writing workshops at 247–54 University of Akron 89 University of Beirut 135 University of California, Berkeley 34 University of Illinois UrbanaChampaign (UIUC) 28 University of Maryland 134 University of Nebraska-Omaha and the college 169 University of Texas Longhorns 229n10 University of Utah 169 University of Virginia 14 Up Against Foucault: Explorations of Some Tensions Between Foucault and Feminism (Ramanzoglu) 253 U.S. see United States (U.S.) U.S. Homeland Security 198 Venezuela 5 Very Like a Whale (White) 167 vidas paralelas 244 Villacañas de Castro, Luis 98, 99, 103n4 violent extremism vs. Islamic extremism 182–4 virtue ethics 66, 68 visa border labyrinths 235–59 visa writing workshops: at The Aula 247–54; at Emerson College

Index  283 254–6; at Universidad Nacional de Colombia 247–54 Vygotsky, Lev 12, 89, 91, 96–100 wall of U.S.–Mexico, dismantling 192–203; categories of perception 194–7; class(ification) struggle 194–7; rhetorical analysis 197–201 Walmart 76 “war on drugs” 5 WD see Writing Democracy (WD) WD Workshop, St. Louis (2012) 13 We are the Union: Democratic Unionism and Dissent at Boeing (Cloud) 119 We Gon’ Be Alright (Chang) 201 Weisser, Christian R. 84 Welch, Nancy 12, 17, 30, 32, 60, 167, 226, 265–71 Welton, Michael R. 101, 103n8 West, Cornel 212 West Virginia teachers’ strike (2018) 65, 67–8, 70, 71, 77 White, Edward M. 167 White House 61 White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion in Dallas 1841–2001 (Phillips) 223 white supremacy 2, 119, 226

Wilde, Lawrence 68, 69 Wiley, Mark 2 Wilkey, Chris 11 Williams, Johnny Eric 117 Williams, Raymond 47n6, 112 Woman of Color Feminisms 52 working-class consciousness 72 Working for Respect: Community and Conflict at Walmart (Reich and Bierman) 123 Works Progress Administration (WPA) 10, 28, 34 World Bank 4, 5 WPA see Works Progress Administration (WPA) Wretched of the Earth, The (Fanon) 9 Wright, Richard 10 Writing Democracy (WD) 1, 3, 4, 38, 51–3; political turn and 10–15 Wyoming Resolution (1986) 12, 38, 39, 47n8 Yellow Vest movement 83 Zapatista rebellion of 1994, 262 Zimmerman, George 13, 51, 56, 57 Zirin, Dave 210, 212 zone of proximal development (ZPD) 97, 99

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