“Pivoting Between the Past/Present and Towards the Future/perfect of Autoethnography”

[From the 2021 Autoethnography Special Interest Group: “Looking Back and Moving Forward” themed preconference at the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, May 19, 2021]

In this current historical moment, with the global pandemic of COVID-19 still ever-present, we have been forced to pivot. Pivot from the processes of daily living to protect self, family, and society. Pivot, from the practicalities of in-person pedagogical practices to a ZOOM world of mediated teaching; a prophylactic performance of pedagogical intimacies. ¹ Pivot, from the co-presence of critical, casual, and communal encounters with colleagues at occasions such as ICQI. Pivot, in an epidemiological ethnography with the sociological imagination, in which we do autoethnographies in relation to disease, society, and culture; compounded by the tumult of civil unrest and outrage. ² Here I am coining the notion of “epidemiological autoethnography” in conjunction with C. Wright Mills heuristic construct of the social imagination. To reimagine the insights leading to action that autoethnography can contribute to a present-future society in cases of both disease and dis-ease.

During the pandemic of disease, political and civil unrest we have been required to position ourselves on the side of safety and justice, against those who would threaten our life and livelihood through both action and inaction. All with very real consequences, establishing diverse positionalities of resistance; Antivaccinatinators, QAnon, Black Lives Matter, Stop Asian Hate, Trans Hate, Attack of the US National Capitol, Brexit, and more. ³ In such a climate—facial coverings and body armor are not optional. And in the processes of all, many have pivoted from the past tense of what we knew as an experience of living to the shifting past-perfect-present to possibilize on the new normal.

For me, autoethnography always pivots between the past (not the past perfect) ⁴ —which does not exist in relation to the present—now of liberating the self from burdens of bodily and psychological trauma or desire and making those critical reflections public—as a templates of sociality. ⁵ This for others to witness and engage in a cultural study of human experiences—striving towards their own new normal.

That phrase, “new normal” has been used repeatedly of late. ⁶ It refers to a seemingly bizarre situation, recognizably abnormal, that one needs to get used to as the ongoing—and thus the new regular—state of things. The new normal—to which autoethnography often tries to disrupt after trauma or desirous triumphant, as an act of remembrance and recovery.

And while I am usually a jovial and optimistic person, I have always resisted the “old normal.”

The “old normal” that perpetuated and permitted overt racism and sexism, and class domination in America.

The “old normal” that did not recognize the human dignity of the huddled masses longing to be free despite what that big white lady in the New York harbor professed.

The “old normal” that has maintained a caste system of white supremacy and Black degradation as a historic economic model. ⁷ And perpetuate an ontological terror linked with blackness and being Black in America. ⁸

The “old normal” that left scars on the backs of Big Black Joe and Big Black Bertha—scars of slavery so deep that they inadvertently passed them along on the psyches of their progeny as cultural trauma. But thankfully, they also passed along faith, persistence, tenacity, and true grit flowing through Black blood.

The “old normal,” you know, that plays out on the streets of everyday life—and even in the Ivory Tower, where liberal minds supposedly prevail, and where rhetorics of implicit bias linger with a stench on the breath of some who approach cries for Diversity Equity and Inclusion with strategies of containment, like hush money for histories of exclusion.

The “old normal” in which “Black grief is perceived as threat and white rage is treated as sacrament.” ⁹

The “old normal” like ole school shit that still calls into question the Black queer or the otherly othered gendered queer as a double damnation in humanity. ¹⁰

The “old normal” that stands as our collective history, where words and practices like inequity were forged in steel as a natural order, but not in God’s kingdom.

I, too, yearn for a new normal. But not just one that is regulated by our newfound appreciation for technology through a coronavirus informed exodus or seclusion.

Not a new normal made determinative in the residues of a corrupt commander-in-chief whose 45th status will live in infamy.

Not a new normal situated in the aftermath of living through the traumas of our times.

Not a new normal that emerges from the ashes like a phoenix with a newfound resistance and renewal of hope through herd (h. e. r. d.) immunity in relation to those who heard (h. e. a. r. d.) and acted upon the necessity of care for community and country. ¹¹ The phoenix can become Sankofa in a ritualized turning-back to retrieve not just the past but our memory of the possible; in such (re)membering ourselves to our past sense of self, which we have forgotten to reforge our identities in the present for the struggle ahead. ¹² But a new normal of high sensitivity to racial and gender injustice, and a collective immunity against silence and complacency in which we build antibodies of resistance to hatred, violence, inequity, and bias.

“I, too” yearn for a new normal that demonstrates on the streets for equality through a progressive patriotism: for the potentiality of humanism, for BIPOC lives across territories of state, nation, cosmologies, and gendered possibilities including Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex, Queer, Curious, Asexual, Pansexual, Gender-non-conforming, Gender-Fluid, Non-binary, Androgynous, and all those yet unnamed in the acronyms signified with the + or the etc., etc., etc. We also need to know and call them by their names and identities. Let us let-go of our investments in the particularly-presumed-to-be-normal to embrace the future-perfect-(plural)-progressive of diverse beings that liberate self and others. ¹³

Like Langston Hughes, I too sing for a new America and for a new world (meaning outside the scope of my citizenship to include your location and your citizenship), that will realize the covenant that all people are created equal. ¹⁴

We have not yet fully seen the “new normal” and what it promises. But like the second coming of my savior (or your savior: ___________________________ fill in the blank with his name, or her name, or their name, or its name.) I hope that we will not just recognize him, her—they/them—it—on arrival, but we will plan for the arrival and the renewal of possibility. Plan for our joint humanity in the—what is to come; not in the afterlife, but in the new normal of what will come (or go) in the future. I stand poised for what is to come from this terrible time (of Covid-19 and the new Civil Rights Movement). I am poised for a new, new normal. But of course, autoethnography has always been poised on the precipice of anticipating the new normal. Always pivoting between the past and the present.

I push for autoethnographies that work toward normativities of the future. ¹⁵ Auto-ethnography that always explore the relationship between the past and the present in relation to the future to the—What next question? To the—What you gonna do about it question? To the—What are the constructive calls for civic action in our work? ¹⁶ Like discussions of theology, I often “see the task of [autoethnography] as the re-interpretation of past traditions”—past happening for how we want to live for today. Our current focus in autoethnography pays scant attention to the future. ¹⁷ But I suggest that we should engage a hermeneutical approach to autoethnography that integrates the past, present, and future dimensions of the interpretive process of lived experience paying special attention to the future. ¹⁸ A future that results from the lessons learned from the past, cultivated, and dynamized in the present and activated as building blocks for a time made real in our desire for change. Autoethnography as a criticality of the self in culture that activates the processes of information, formation and transformation. ¹⁹ In a way that binds time and projects possibility, thus moving autoethnography through the continuum from the past, past-imperfect-present into a present-future-not-yet perfect and beyond, to support our individual and collective being (and becoming). ²⁰

How do we engage in an emboldened autoethnographic futurity in which we take not just the pains and joys of the past, but the lessons learned from a critical reflexivity to empower our futures? To empower our collective futures as citizens, as neighbors, as friends, and lovers. And our futures as JEDI warriors—yes Jedi warriors that is Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion; JEDI warriors to reimagine our possibilities and potentialities. ²¹ In such a quest: Light sabers as weapons and as tools to illuminate our paths are required. I am talking about striving toward an autoethnographic futurity that speaks to possibilities and potentialities. I often turn to Jose’ Esteban Munoz when he wrote:

Possibilities exist, or more nearly, they exist within a logical real, the possible, which is within the present and is linked to presence. Potentialities are different insofar as while they are present, they do not exist in present things. Thus, potentialities have a temporality that is not in the present but, more nearly, in the horizon, which we can understand as futurity. Potentiality is and is not presence—and its ontology cannot be reduced to presentness. ²²

But as we remind ourselves so often—autoethnography has the potential “to systematically analyze (graphy) personal experience (auto) in order to understand cultural experience (ethno).” ²³ But for what purpose? For what intentionality—political purpose and political intention? ²⁴ I say: To build better futures. To build better possibilities of living for self and others. To make real the ineffable search of moving towards and reaching the horizon of our future. Toward that which makes manifest the potentiality of humanness, of our humanity in relation to each other. To celebrate the essence of our being—both fully present and fully alive.

We need to get on with the transformative work of autoethnography as cultural studies, cultural activism, and cultural transformation. Most of us may be vaccinated against Covid-19, but what kind of life are we vaccinated for? For what futures in the new normal of our potentiality? Maybe autoethnography can be another form of worldmaking; creating a different world through everyday interventions. ²⁵ Which could serve as a project of dynamizing what we know to be autoethnography in/as “research [for] a politically and socially-just society; autoethnography as a socially-conscious act” for real change for self and society; ²⁶ being and writing about the change that we want to see in the world—and putting effort towards that change. In such case, autoethnography becomes an act of reconstruction, rebuilding the world, anew, through critical self-storying for social and cultural transformation.

[To the reader: Please read the following notes as dialogical engagements—for that is the nature of endnotes and bibliographies. The evidence of interlocutors engaged in collaborative sense-making towards scholarly production and a better tomorrow. Several of the notes signal dialogues or comments that emerged in the break-out or chat room of the SIG that related to (and I relate to) thisperformative text. I honor the contributions and collaborative-twin spiritedness of my colleagues below].