Rhizomes of Blackness

Rhizomes of Blackness Awad Ibrahim

“I shall narrate a significant incident in my own journey of becoming Black. I find myself thus smuggled, as it were, into my own research” (5)

Foucault (1980) semiotics of control  Barthes (1983) complex semiotic languages

To fall under the eyes of power—the gaze—is to find oneself within discourses of closure where the Black body is already authored, read, and constantly stabilized across time, language, culture, and space (11)

at the dawn of the twenty-first centuryknown as late modernity, postmodernism, and/or after postmodernism (Faye, 2012; Jameson, 1991; Lyotard, 1984; Trifonas, 2004), when identity formation is increasingly mediated by technological media, who learns what, and how is it learned? How are these mediated identities formed and performed? (12)

end result is a “bricolage,” a “rhizomatic assemblage,” a “new flaneurie,” a hybrid “third space” (15)

I intend to argue that Whiteness has become an arborescent category, a rigid map and a clearly demarcated cartography against which Blackness is mapped, categorized, and signified.” (18)

critical ethnography research project: a political and pedagogical project that seeks and works its way towards social transformation. It has “an underlying set of assumptions, a structure of relevance, and a form of rationality” and it is “determined both by real and present conditions, and certain conditions still to come which it is trying to bring into being” The assumption underpinning my project is that Canadian (and US) society is “inequitably structured and dominated by a hegemonic culture that suppresses a consideration and understanding of why things are the way they are and what must be done for things to be otherwise.” (Simon and Dippo, 1986) (16)

    -> For my research into the teaching of Computer Science, how computational literacy is manifesting a new form of semiotic control, it will be necessary to adopt the stance constructed by scholars like Ibrahim. There is a certain irony to this, in that I will be reiterating the move always made by White people doing identity work, of “playing in the dark” (Morrison). 

    -> My work will be based on “using the master’s tools” (bell hooks)

similar to Timothy Stanley (2011), I intend to argue that Whiteness has become an arborescent category, a rigid map and a clearly demarcated cartography against which Blackness is mapped, categorized, and signified.” (18)

The Rhizome of Blackness is organized as an ethnography of contrasting cases: at one school, Marie-Victorin, Blackness is striated. 

The other two schools are modeled as smooth

There is no one process of becoming Black. There are multiple, complex, contingent, shifting, multilayered, and rhizomatic processes of becoming Black.  (196) Unlike the students at Marie-Victorin, who experience the rhizomatic processes of becoming Black, the students in Sunnyside and Maxwell High, most of whom were born in Canada, experience themultiplicity, complexity, and rhizomatic nature of Blackness, which is experienced differently by different people. My goal in this book was to track ethnographically how people experience both: the rhizomatic processes of becoming Black (MV) and the rhizome of Blackness (Sunnyside and Maxwell High) (197)

Outcomes: radical antiracist pedagogy: “the pedagogy of the imaginary”, (198)     —> romanticism 

dialogic liberation (Freire) (207)     How do we reconcile this with the rhizome?

how do we as a nation, as groups, and as individuals imagine ourselves as well [as] others? What impact does this imaginary have on others, and how can we as pedagogues work with this imaginary to make people imagine themselves and others differently? (209)

199-200 what this pedagogy looked like 

The heart of Ibrahim’s project is the redefinition of Blackness from static to rhizomatic.      I hope that my introduction of the rhizomatic process of becoming Black is a rupture and a radical shift from this era of colonialism and imperialism where the identity Blackness is one-dimensionally represented (213). 

Chapter I

race is relational [to other categories] (31) Blackness: centralizes the body; invokes identity (32) sealed into objecthood (32, quoting Fanon, 1967)

rhizomatic spaces: striated (when power “controls, sedates, imposes, limits”) and smooth (“a welcoming space where people are free to become themselves and to assemble themselves with others as they desire”) (52), moving from one space to the other is “articulation” (quoting Hall, 1986)

Bhabba: in the West’s cultural tradition, “although there is always an entertainment and encouragement of cultural diversity, there is always a corresponding containment of it."(53, quoting Bhabba, 1990, p. 208)

Outline:      Introduction introduces the theoretical frame, addresses method, personalizes the project. 

    Chapter 1 builds the ‘situation’ 

    Chapter 2 traces striated racialization, as experienced by a teacher and students. [no rhizome]

    Chapter 3 turns to structural features (2 schools smooth     Chapter 4: Language learning, representation and imagination (striation)

    Chapter 5: Rhizomatic third space

        tracing variations in language use

            162: Language and identity

            166: Embodiment, control

            189: Linguistic & cultural code-switching

Ibrahim’s Critical Ethnographic Project

The Rhizome of Blackness is framed as a critical ethnographic project committed to social transformation.  Broadly, Ibrahim’s strategy is to declare his underlying assumptions, use them to reveal realities of his subjects’ experiences (hopefully also awakening the same consciousness in his reader), and then to propose a way forward. This method emerges from the author’s underlying assumption, that Canadian (and US) society is “inequitably structured and dominated by a hegemonic culture that suppresses a consideration and understanding of why things are the way they are and what must be done for things to be otherwise.” (p. 16) Ibrahim takes up the metaphor of the rhizome and the arborescent to argue that Whiteness “has become an arborescent category, a rigid map and a clearly demarcated cartography,” which also imposes a rigid definition of Blackness on those who fall under the White gaze (p. 11, 32, 213) The contrasting case studies presented in chapters 2-4 illustrate a contrast between the striated (overtly hostile) and smooth (antiracist) experiences of becoming Black under Whiteness. In attending to both individuals’ lived experiences and the structural features that make these experiences possible, Ibrahim draws on both ethnographic and sociological methods. Ibrahim draws on several strategies to map the rhizomatic nature of Blackness, such as tracing the spread of cultural influence via linguistic variation. The transformation Ibrahim hopes to enact through the text is a reconceptualization of Blackness as a “pedagogy of the imaginary” (p. 198) in which those bound up in Blackness are the ones doing the imagining: “I hope that my introduction of the rhizomatic process of becoming Black is a rupture and a radical shift from this era of colonialism and imperialism where the identity Blackness is one-dimensionally represented” (p. 213) 

Freire’s  and a romantic faith in the imagination 

Keats’s negative capability  (which ironically celebrated whiteness for many of the same qualities Ibrahim enacts in Blackness. 

a “pedagogy of the 

Ibrahim’s approach incorporates ethnographic and sociological approaches as he varies his unit of analysis from the individual’s lived experience to the structural features of more and less welcoming schools. 

. 

Ethnographic and sociological 

Does not distinguish between whether Blackness is rhizomatic or whether it could be. 

(207)