Education is a Political Project
Our breath is the new syllabus
“There is a task we have before us of understanding this apparently new geopolitical constellation of power, this “new world order”. What knowledges of it can we derive at this juncture, in this place? Place and space are important sites in the processes of knowledge production. What kind of liberatory praxis can we engender at the meeting of these transnational practices? These are some of the central questions you have set for yourselves in juxtaposing the new world order to liberatory teaching practice, in your desire to draw a different kind of map, “to put forward,” as Toni Morrison phrased it in the context of the necessary analytic task that awaited U.S literature, “a wider landscape…to draw a map…of a critical geography…without the mandate for conquest.” This critical mapmaking is a gesture that makes of education an explicitly political project.”
— M. Jacqui Alexander in Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations of Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (2005), Chapter 3, “Whose New World Order?: Teaching for Justice”, pg. 91
If we didn’t know it before, the last four years have made it abundantly clear: education is a political project. A mapmaking praxis gesturing toward a world we can survive. These days it seems the most I can manage is persistence, nothing more, nothing less. Sustaining as a stain on the failing imperial project. What does generative conflict without violence look like? Do they know? Do we know? The liberatory Palestinian uprising of October 7th, reverberates the same old new questions. What shape shall our breath take inside the smog of necropolitics? How can I bend time to ensure there’s enough of it to put my oxygen mask on first? Are we close enough, can I reach you in time to help you put yours on too? What are we breathing towards?
Alexis Pauline Gumbs points us toward collective breathing as ceremony, as a survival technology. Alexis Pauline Gumbs pointed me towards Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations of Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred — a text that has me imagining the ways community based education might serve as a ceremonial survival technology. A technology for destabilizing the “new world order”, while giving us space to practice the skills we need to navigate the erotic dis-order of the worlds we’re gesturing towards. The worlds we’re building that honor the forests of this planet as the lungs that make our breath possible. The worlds we desire where our breath is sacred once again.
Our breath is the new syllabus. Our survival is the new curriculum. But where is our classroom? This critical geography we must carve out to practice the dis-order that our new world calls for. Black feminist pedagogies have always been critical to my practice. It wasn’t enough to inhale black feminist research — I had to lick it — I had to play with it — I had to stir it — I had to serve it — I had to perform it — I had to breathe it. This was the desire that seeded Seeda School. Inspired by a character that could breathe when I couldn’t seem to catch mine. A character living on a Black River stained with the detritus of ancestral memory, where data farms are data forests. A wider landscape, without the mandate for conquest, called Cykofa. In this world the people of Cykofa have traditionally hosted their data within the DNA of the trees, but what happens when Seeda discovers a rip in the dendrochronological memory, exposing select datasets from our world? In 2021, I began living inside that question. In 2021, I began to catch my breath.
“Is there a way of being intellectual that isn’t social? When I think about the way we use the term ‘study,’ I think we are committed to the idea that study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice. The notion of a rehearsal – being in a kind of workshop, playing in a band, in a jam session, or old men sitting on a porch, or people working together in a factory – there are these various modes of activity. The point of calling it ‘study’ is to mark that the incessant and irreversible intellectuality of these activities is already present.”
— Fred Moten in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (2013) by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, pg. 110
Gesturing toward a map of return, I began to ask, “what would Seeda do if they could access our universe from their prison-free reality?” This performance took the shape of Seeda School where I ask you to rehearse1 the worlds we need in the futures we desire, now. In 2020, I declared “Every Body is a Teacher Now” and I still believe that. This is why the spring Seed A World Retreat has been specifically visioned for those of us desiring to introduce teaching into our creative ecosystem — to expand and fund the time spent writing our books, painting possibility, photographing what’s invisible, facilitating inevitable futures, recording new sounds of belonging, developing lavender software, organizing people power and expanding our imagination. More time rehearsing inside the worlds we’re building. More time speculating. More time experimenting. More time practicing. More time breathing.
What shape might your syllabus, curriculum, classroom take on the wider landscape of the web? Allowing us to catch our breath, if only until tomorrow…
Join us for the Upcoming Worldbuilding Workshop
Where we will ask these questions in real time. Register to this 2-PART workshop series to find out how to “Seed A World Rooted in the Truth of Your Desire” and “Resource A World Rooted in the Truth of Your Needs”. In the first workshop, you’ll learn how to fund and expand your impact and time inside your creative practice. Together we’ll go over how to design, market and sell a digital course offering inspired by your interdisciplinary art practice, cultural work and/or community organizing. In the second workshop, you’ll get clarity on how to price your digital course in alignment with your needs and values using the Price Calculator. We will ensure your offer isn’t priced at a point that prioritizes making it accessible to everyone else that it becomes inaccessible to you as the creator.
Back For the Worldbuilders on Thursday
Follow along and use the upcoming podcast episodes as supportive guides for navigating the spring Worldbuilding Workshops. Coming Thursday: “Build a School, Build a World” is a 4-part podcast series based on the questions in the Creative Offer Questionnaire to Oneself helping you discover what your digital course offering might be. Mark your calendars! April is full of breath work.
April 15th: Seed A World Retreat Enrollment Opens
April 16th: [Workshop @ 12PM EST] Seed A World Rooted in the Truth of Your Desire
April 25th: [Workshop @ 12PM EST] Resource A World Rooted in the Truth of Your Needs
April 29th: Seed A World Retreat Enrollment Closes
April 30th: First Day of Class Inside the Seed A World Retreat
With desire,
Ayana
Beverly Buchanan, Artist, 1940-2015
Someone who knew me well And that I’d lived In many a gray shack My mother transformed With flowers Took me to your house To meet you: To see the shacks You rescued from our shame And transformed with your wit, Small nails, old boards, And paint. I was enchanted to see My mother’s magic Emerge From the end Of your brush. Now you have left us. The streaming Light through all your shacks’ Cracks Like the streaming genius Of your own obsessed mind. How do we make new And restorative of soul The old pain? How do we learn To carry with grace and humor All that has happened to us? Buchanan, for instance. Whose name Was that before it was slapped across The memory of the enslaved? Your ancestors In Africa were not Buchanans And may have been esteemed artists Every one of them, For all we know. Ah, Beverly, All of us in our age clan Are in the homestretch now. We will not be far behind you. Trailing our chalk, our pencil sticks With which we wrote and drew in the dirt, Our paints made from berries, barks, And tears. With open hands We have offered our art Made from whatever scraps Were left over from our destruction, Their absence from The big house table of greed and ignorance Never missed. This poem is to say how glad I am To have the shack You made for me. Red as a strawberry! I would never have thought of that; yet How right it has turned out to be. For I do not wallow in sadness Though it visits more often these days Than I would like; The world is dying In so many ugly ways And humans with it. And yet, against all odds I realize There will always be a Beverly Buchanan Arising from a virtual “nowhere” To cobble together the broken pieces -Left over from the beauty That is destroyed- And paint them red For dancing.
©2015 by Alice Walker (Source)
McKittrick, Katherine. “Ruth Wilson Gilmore Just Told Us: Abolition Is Presence, It Is Life in Rehearsal. It Is Not the Recitation of Rules. Freedom Is a Place. Freedom Is a Place. Guys. Get into It!” Twitter, 26 Oct. 2020.
Thank you. All blessings:::