Abstract
This work is an attempt to understand critical-pedagogical-performative-autoethnography. This effort took place in an independent study that we understood as a pedagogical encounter. As a way to communicate my learning, this experimental text was written. I present it here with the hope that the following words will perform the meaning for the readers.
That is my working sentence. I have written these words many times, before my meetings with Norman Denzin. I have also written other words around them hoping they help me see how they belong together. I have gone word by word trying to understand them and the words surrounding them. My working sentence has helped me to open these dialogical encounters with Denzin. We have talked around my drawings. As in my working sentence, a hyphen rather than a period connected our talks in that performative dialogue (Madison, 2010), that pedagogical encounter. Not a single paragraph was written before the first draft; this is the second draft. I continue word by word.
“I,” a character, a word to talk myself
“I,” just a character but also a word
“I,” performing the universal-singular nature of myself
“I” am not more than a character in a story
What I saw, what I thought, what I hoped
What I see, what I think, what I hope
A discourse of possibilities
Spaces that are not yet
Moments coming
Imagination turning the personal into the political
A radical democratic imagination
A critical imagination
A hope for change challenging hopelessness
And sometimes, a lost way home
A landscape made into a field; World made into text
A move to share that liminal space
Respectful performance visiting sacred spaces
Listening rather that reading
Speaking from the heart, writing too
Someplace, a “view from above”
Someplace, a “view from a body”
Someplace, we carry our stories
Someplace, we ask for other’s
Someplace, we leave carrying theirs and ours
Waiting to be told, once again
Storied worlds
The map official, objective, and abstract
The story practical, embodied, and popular
The map cutting up,
The story cutting across
The tacit, the habitual
Words spoken, some written
Worlds spoken, hardly written
A division of labor,
An apartheid of knowledge,
Political economy of understanding,
A scream in the swamp
Words incapable to “communicate its [their] unsayable claims to truth” 1
Undocumented-illegal-not legible hybridity,
Defying the class-based arrogance,
The race-based scriptocentrism,
The masculine citizenship;
Troubling the writing machine of being
“I have sometimes thought that the mere hearing of those songs would do more to impress truly spiritual-minded men and women with the soul-crushing and death-dealing character of slavery, than the reading of whole volumes.” 2
Pedagogy of the oppressed,
Pedagogy of love,
Pedagogy of hope,
Pedagogy of freedom,
Border pedagogy, too
Culture is also a verb
Way of knowing and showing,
Countercultures of enslaved and dispossessed people
Forcibly excluded from acquiring literacy
Nonetheless, a culture of resistance.
No longer ensemble of texts, but
A repertoire of performance;
Politics being played, danced, and acted,
Sung and sung over and over
A hungry I,
A performative I,
Infinite layers of our selfness
Searching for a method,
Searching for co-performance
Beyond any ethnographic textualism
Nourished in the ground of participatory experience
We do not walk the one-way street of abstraction
Our radical move is to turn, and return, insistently, to the crossroads;
We remain revitalizing connections,
Mutually replenishing each other,
Pedagogically powerful encounters
Then
Researcher- researched,
Teacher- learner,
Performer- performed,
Inhabiting liminal spaces,
Places we visit,
Places we come back from
Harmed, but alive
I imaged a place,
Where the words critical-pedagogical-performative-autoethnography belong together;
Where critical imagination become transformative writing;
Where story is history, troubles are issues, and healing social justice.
I imagined a “we” where every “I” has a place.
A place where I could tell some stories as a
profesor menor, periferico y pecador.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.