The thinker-creators gathered here take inspiration from Christina Sharpe’s command that “we must become undisciplined.”1 True to “becoming” rather than “being,” the voices of “Becoming Undisciplined” express ongoingness, incompleteness, even uncertainty. In the form of essays, interviews, self-writing, letters, maps, film, and visual and performance art, these works ask what it means to veer from disciplinary strictures while creating and envisioning change. “Discipline,” as refracted through the contributors’ lenses, comes to mean not only academic departments and fields but also genres, borders, judgment, policing. Most importantly, discipline comes to mean categories and classifications of race, gender, ability, sexuality, and professional status. Despite this variation and our refusal to situate this cluster in one field or even in more capacious rubrics of specific “studies” or “humanities,” common threads emerge. Perhaps none is more prevalent than a sense of imperilment that calls in turn for disassembling the entrenched institutions and values that have created conditions for loss as well as—perhaps—transformation.
— Heather Houser & Stephanie LeMenager
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Strict academic disciplinarity limits possible future-making, requiring us to imagine the educated, professionalized individual as its idealized outcome, prioritizing mastery and “real-world” knowledge application. Here, we imagine how intellectual work might exist otherwise. We explore laboring toward community building, sincere conversation, and discomforting engagement with potentially unanswerable questions. In this epistolary exchange, we share texts and respond to them and one another generously, writing the future without prescription. These letters invite “political analysis in everyday terms” (Anzaldúa and Moraga xlv), record our labor, honor others’ labor, and offer a kind of undisciplined/undisciplining thinking, teaching, and learning.
Jasmine Lee, CSU San Bernardino
Alexandra Cavallaro, CSU San Bernardino
Jason Magabo Perez, CSU San Marcos
Yumi Pak, CSU San Bernardino
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Dear Friends,
First/always, thank you for sharing: texts, time, energy. Devising this project, we talked about representing the work; conversations; the raw, unpolished, collaborative, messy, always-in-progress stuff worth showing up for. We talked about how this project might open up and extend that stuff, invite new interlocutors, build, and also tear down. I came to you all as a newly-minted PhD with a hunch: something about what I had been doing that led me to that point, though and because it led me to that point, wasn’t working. I encountered Chaput’s essay while writing my dissertation, at the height of my critique-fatigue. Following capitalism’s perversions, as I was doing in that project, wasn’t enough. Talking back until I was empty wasn’t serving. Arguments don’t always move people; they certainly don’t move institutions. Logic fails when those logics are of and for the systems that limit us. And so, we gather, improvise, try, steal, respect, reject, honor, play, imagine, listen.
Yours in all of it,
Jasmine
Dear Future,
When our colleague first called us “the future of the department,” we laughed. But then we adopted it as our own and began the work of reimagining and dreaming a future that allows all of us to thrive. We continue to envision a future that we will never arrive at, but will always be part of an unfolding, a becoming, a simultaneous dismantling and rebuilding of the world we want to live in. And we will build that future—our future / their future / the future—with everything we’ve got. I’m glad to be here, with all of you.
Love,
Alexandra
Dear Future,
I just returned from Walgreens where I met a kindergarten teacher buying supplies and little toys to gift to students. I let her know that I appreciated her commitment to our young people. I don’t really know how to describe how witnessing such a sincere teacherly gesture sunk me. I’m relearning what it means to show up. I’m inspired by Eve Tuck’s application of “complex personhood,” which I read here as an invitation to replicate for and with students the generosity we extend to each other as friends, comrades, collaborators. What does it look like to hold space open mindful of our varied capacities, limitations, complexities, inconsistencies, histories, contradictions, and joys? I’m wondering what kinds of resources or small gestures all of our students might need right now, and always, what we all need from each other, and how the classroom or space within/without/underneath/beyond the university might facilitate meaningful dialogue on how to meet those basic needs. How might we practice that future right now, in every gesture, every presence, every gift, every question, every unfolding?
Love,
Jason
Dear Future,
This morning I’m dreaming about a moment when our efforts toward collaborative, experimental, contingently legible, patient, and revolutionarily humble inquiry will be so capacious, so expansive, that structures and practices built on rubrics, grades, disciplinary policing, assessments, and capitalist value systems fall apart.
Love,
Jason
Dear Future,
Kelley describes a note he keeps to remind him of the work: “‘Love, Study, Struggle.’” In that order. Jason, thank you for sharing your encounter at Walgreens. I love that you helped her feel seen. It’s a reminder that teaching well often means going off-script, making space for joy and wholeness.
Last week, a student sent her professors (including me) a long email explaining that she had fallen behind and requesting extensions. There had been an unexpected death in the family, reported first on social media; a phone service interruption that cut her off from loved ones as she mourned; a flu; a compromised immune system; a plumbing failure; household members absent, taking extra hours to cover for sick coworkers; a fence claimed by wind; an ailing neighbor. Cue the feelings: exhaustion, the emotional labor of teaching; overwhelmedness, the struggle and how it crosses boundaries and makes demands on all of us; frustration, that this student felt compelled to perform suffering in exchange for empathy and flexibility. I replied, and I have yet to hear back. Sadness.
Love, Study, Struggle—
Jasmine
Dear Future,
Last week, I cried in front of my students. One asked about the emotional toll of teaching in prisons, while watching students labor and live under inhumane conditions. “Does it ever get to you?” she asked. “The short answer,” I replied, “is ‘yes’ and ‘all the time’.” The longer answer is that no one should do this work if they can avoid being affected by the space of the prison with its sharp physical and mental surfaces. No one should do this work if you don’t mourn Yusef, sent to solitary for having a cell phone, a dedicated student ripped out of class with no goodbye. No one should do this work if they do not mourn Chris, who, as a gay man, is moved around so often that he loses the small support network he has built every time. No one should do this work if they don’t mourn the fact that students endure strip searches, constant surveillance, and capricious changes of rules. Carry it all with you.
But I don’t think you need to go to a prison to think deeply about the emotional labor this work requires and how institutions reject students’ human needs. You don’t need to go to a prison to see the policing that happens in educational spaces, the pain students feel compelled to perform to get flexibility that should be built in automatically. Burn this to the ground.
Thank you for making space for me to mourn with you.
Love,
Alexandra
Dear Future,
I ask students all the time what English is as a discipline. I ask them what it means for the discipline to discipline. None of this is new, but it doesn’t mean it’s insignificant. I think it starts to move us away from a paranoid reading to a “merely” reparative one, as Sedgwick shares.
I’m thinking about how students are disciplined long before meeting us. Like Jasmine’s student who felt she had to disclose in order to be “deserving” of her extension—as though that is how grace works—or my students who tested positive for COVID 19 and panicked because they couldn’t figure out how to send me proof. When did our students learn this? When did students learn that pain was quantifiable and needed assessment for value? What is a process of undisciplining?
We text about this, but to include it here made sense, in this form of writing to/with you: the letter as a space to think through undisciplining. In This is How You Lose the Time War, Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s character Red writes to Blue, “[t]here’s a kind of time travel in letters… You could leave me for five years, you could return never—and I have to write the rest of this not knowing… this is a fascinating technology, in its limits” (42). The letter as an unmooring of time—“the time is always now,” as Baldwin says—and also as intimacy. You write letters for a specific reader, but if it is meant for someone who may never receive it, if they presuppose not only a larger audience but perhaps even an audience that will never be known, does that eradicate intimacy? Or does it ask us to think differently about what intimacy does (as Black feminism, Black queerness have long been guiding us)? I guess for me undisciplining is simultaneously about an undoing of linear time and a reworking of intimacy—things that we are disciplined against. We keep talking about disciplines in crisis, the university in crisis, but it’s as and not in for so many of us.
xxxxxx.x.
xxxxxx.y.
Dear Future,
It saddens me to hear about students struggling for flexibility. That you’re always already extending compassion to your students, Jasmine, that you’re modeling feeling as pedagogy, Alexandra, and that you recognize the beautifully undisciplined autonomy of students before they enter the classroom, Yumi, reminds me more and more about the complexities of the classroom, as physical space, as stable vestige of historical-colonial violence, as routinized encounter and enclosure, as structure of feeling, knowing, sensing, doing. That we work with so many first-generation students raises the stakes in what we wittingly or unwittingly model in these classrooms. I’d never want students to be naive about the lived, dehumanizing reality of racial capitalism. Neither would I ever want students or us or anyone to feel that there was no space or time for refusal, inaction, pause, momentary freedom-dreaming.
Love,
Jason
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This is one of nine contributions from the ASAP/J cluster of Becoming Undisciplined. Read the other pieces here.
This cluster is a digital supplement to a print forum in ASAP/Journal 7.1, which you can read here.
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Endnotes
- Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 13.
Jasmine Lee
Alexandra J. Cavallaro
Jason Magabo Perez
Yumi Pak