critical response: moraga, duncan & powell

            In response to this week’s readings, I am thinking about one of the threads I see connecting each of the texts, namely the way each author articulates the relationship between bodies, material experiences, memory, theory, and systems of hegemonic power. In particular, I feel like the authors express the way that hegemonic epistemologies do not speak to or make room for embodied ways of knowing. In history of disease, Duncan describes racist experiences with her mother’s doctor. She writes, “He checks her blood pressure as though her arm is not attached to a body” (161).  I think that this gives insight to some of the ways that racialized bodies become compartmentalized in particular discourses, as though our relationships to trauma or memory do not affect our bodies. Duncan describes a relationship between memory (forgetting or remembering) and the narrator’s mother’s pain and disease. During this part of the text, I was thinking about my grandmother and the way alzheimer’s affected her ability to remember and to know who her family was, and what it means that my memories of her are only of her forgetting. I think about what it would mean for me to be able to speak with her today, and to have her perspective and her own account of our family’s history and her experiences as a Black woman living in the south and in Detroit in the 60s and 70s. Most of the stories I know about her have been told to me by other people, mostly men. Duncan writes, “The girl has been told that the disease will affect her mother’s memory, her mother’s ability to remember. Yet she is not prepared to be forgotten. She is not prepared to be misnamed” (159). I think that the narrator taking on the task of remembering for her mother reflects the how wellness and wellbeing is connected through time and kinship. I am especially interested in the urgency with which the narrator takes up this project of remembering for her mother.  Although the narrator is speaking about her mother, who is ill but living, this reminds me of Saidiya Hartman’s work on the Middle Passage, wherein she asks what our responsibility to our dead is. Similarly, while attending the Otherwise Worlds conference last week, I was struck by Andy Smith’s similar evocation of what it would mean to center the dead in our frameworks and analyses. I am interested in thinking about what it means to understand memory (familial, historical, ancestral, etc) in terms of responsibility. I think that of course, there is a sense of emotional responsibility to remember, but also to think about how we are still in relationship with our dead. 

Duncan elaborates on memory in her piece, writing “It is by small acts that change occurs, through a process of critical remembering…We begin to alter history. Growing up, I heard to many Asian and Asian American women tell stories of wars and deaths. So often, this is all America wants to know or will believe about our lives. The stories they demand are constant and unchanging; the images of us silent, fixed, and suffering” (164). I am interested in what Duncan describes as ‘critical remembering’ and notions of representation and suffering, particularly the way that images of suffering are consumed depending on who is suffering and who is the audience. Moraga also writes extensively of suffering and of the question of representations and visibility of suffering. In her poem What Does it Take?, she writes, “Women do not coagulate into one hero’s death; we bleed out of so many pores, so constant that is has come to be seen as the way things are” (57). This poem reminded me of the way that systems of violence and biopower attach meaning and values to various lives and deaths. I am thinking especially about representations of black suffering and death, and whether or not the consumption of black bodies that have had violence inflicted upon them are ever even allowed to be suffering within the consumer’s imaginary. I am wondering about how discourses which make particular bodies unhuman normalize violence, while at the same time reserving perceived victimhood only for particular kinds of people who experience violence.

            Another aspect that stuck out to me at the academic and activist conferences I attended last week was the notion of creativity and imagination is liberatory.  Several scholars articulated the way that neoliberalism strips us of the creative, noting that imagination has to be central to liberatory scholarship and activism. Moraga suggests a complex relationship between bodies and the academic industrial complex.  She writes, “If the academy, in its very mission, denies the body, except as the object of theoretical disembodied discourse, The Body with a capital “B”, then what is the radically thinking “othered” body (the queer, the colored, the female) doing there?” (175). Moraga argues that art (the meeting of mind and matter per her definition), cannot exist within the academy, as an explanation for the academy’s inability to consider bodies and embodied experiences. I think that this connects to Powell's point about ghosts, particularly the ghosts of knowledge that are not recognized within academic discourses/stories.