Betweener Autoethnographies A Path Towards Social

Justice, 1st Edition

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To all who have been seeking paths to social justice
through unreasonable hope for reconciliation, healing,
and unconditional inclusion in the large human family.
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CONTENTS

List of figures ix
Series Editor Foreword x
Acknowledgments xii

Introduction 1

PART I
Performing Social Justice 7
1 Expanding the Circle of Us 9
2 Locating Betweener Autoethnographies in Qualitative Inquiry 15

PART II
Betweener Autoethnographies 25
3 Betweenness in Writing and Performativity: Betweeners
Speak Up 27
4 Betweenness in Systemic Exclusion: When Janitors Dare to
Become Scholars 39
5 Betweenness in Decolonizing Inquiry 83
viii Contents

PART III
Contemporary Issues on Us versus Them 107
6 Betweener Autoethnographies 109
7 Traveling Identities 119
8 Activism through Decolonizing Inquiry 125

References 131
Index 137
FIGURES

5.1 Copy of the first page from Pero Vaz de Caminha’s letter to
King Manuel I of Portugal, signed May 1, 1500, detailing his
first arrival in the new land and encounter with its indigenous
inhabitants. The letter reads “Eram pardos, todos nus, sem
coisa alguma que lhes cobrisse suas vergonhas. Nas mãos
traziam arcos com suas setas. Vinham todos rijamente sobre o
bater; e Nicolau Coelho lhes fez sinal que pousassem os arcos.
E eles os pousaram.” (They were dark-skinned, all naked, without
any covering for their shame. They carried bows and arrows in their
hands. They came tensely toward the shore; and Nicolau Coelho made
a sign for them to put down their bows. And they put them down) 91
5.2 Chief Raoni 98
SERIES EDITOR FOREWORD

Betweener Autoethnographies: A Path Toward Social Justice is a utopian manifesto. In

these troubled divisive times the authors ask: How do we get from Us versus
Them? To Us and Them? Is that possible? If so, how? Here is where we see
betweener autoethnographies being, perhaps, useful, hopeful, necessary.
This book is a consensual dialogical collaboration by two Brazilian scholars,
working in American academia, who find common ground in an ontological
stance that embraces the indivisibility between the study of being and being in
and of itself. This book is about rethinking performance autoethnography, about
the formation of a critical performative cultural politics, about what happens when
everything is already performative, when the dividing line between performativity
and performance disappears; they call this betweener autoethnography.
This is a book about what this form of writing means for writers who want to
perform work that leads to social justice. It is for writers who have a desire to
contribute to a critical discourse that addresses central issues confronting democracy
and racism in post-postmodern America, life, narrative, Trump, and melodrama
under the auspices of late neoliberal capitalism.
Betweener Autoethnographies: A Path Toward Social Justice stands on the shoulders
of its predecessor, the award-winning Betweener Talk: Decolonizing Knowledge Pro-
duction, Pedagogy, and Praxis. It too embraces the dialogical, performance turn in
the human disciplines. Thoroughly grounded in the worlds of the colonizer, the
dialogue works back and forth across Paulo Freire, Gloria Anzaldua, Soyini
Madison, Dwight Conquergood, Mary Weems, Bryant Alexander, Tami Spry,
and various Third World feminisms.
Betweener performance autoethnography is a blurred genre. It is many things
at the same time. It bends and twists the meanings of ethnography, ethnographer,
and performance. There is no separation between the writer, the ethnographer,
 Series Editor Foreword xi

the performer, and the world. Betweener performance autoethnography makes the
writers self-visible through performance, through performance writing, through the
writers’ presence in the world. Betweener performance autoethnographers
are committed to changing the world one word, one performance at a time. The
community is global.
Autoethnography is easily confused with other terms. It is not: ethnography,
autobiography, biography, personal narrative, personal history, life history, life
story, or personal experience story. It works from broad theoretical standpoints
but does not privilege theory over visceral experience. It is more than personal
writing or cultural critique. It is more than performance. But it is performative. It
is transgressive. It is resistance. It is dialogical. It is ethical. It is political, personal,
embodied, collaborative, imaginative, artistic, creative, a form of intervention, a
plea for social justice. Clearly this discourse is not standing still. Writing selves are
performing new writing practices, blurring fact and fiction, challenging the
dividing line between performer and performed, observer and observed.
After Marcelo and Claudio, I too seek a critical autoethnographic betweener
discourse. This requires a productive dialogue between indigenous and critical
(race) scholars. It involves a revisioning of critical pedagogy, a regrounding of
Paulo Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed in local, indigenous contexts. It understands
that all inquiry is political and moral. It confronts the tension between the Western
critical theory paradigm and indigenous knowledge, theory, and praxis. It uses
methods critically, for explicit social justice purposes. It values the transformative
power of indigenous, subjugated knowledges. It values the local pedagogical
practices that produce these knowledges. At the same time it studies the political,
ethical, and aesthetic technologies that transform the practices of indigeneity into
marketable commodities and performances. It seeks forms of praxis and
inquiry that are emancipatory, collaborative, and empowering. The critical
betweener performance scholar is an allied Other. Marcelo and Claudio show
us how to be this way.
There has never been a greater need for a militant utopianism which will help
us imagine a world free of conflict, terror, and death, a world that is caring,
loving, truly compassionate, a world that honors healing and difference. This
powerful book helps us imagine our way into this space.

Norman K. Denzin
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In our second endeavor

Certain things are different and yet
Certain things remain
The pleasure of feeling grateful . . .
We couldn’t have done it alone, and we are very thankful for the support and
encouragement by Norman Denzin, Hannah Shakespeare, Matt Bickerton
Inspired by Anzaldúa and Paulo Freire
And
By those who honor differences
People who put their bodies in the line of fire for ideals of social justice
Bodies that make impossibilities possible
Brothers and sisters everywhere working to advance decolonizing pedagogies
People who have touched our lives, who make hope indispensable
Dani, Analua, Francisco, Sylvinha, Drica, Sherekao
To my brother Marcelo
To my brother Claudio
To all interested in expanding a sense of Us
Betweeners for inclusive dreams of social justice, democracy, liberty
Together we are a force
We resist because we must, there are no other options
As our muse says
Onward!

We also want to acknowledge the presses in which previously published

manuscripts appeared in full or in part: the University of California Press, for
 Acknowledgments xiii

“When janitors dare to become scholars” and “Betweeners speak up”; Sage, for
“Classrooms as decolonizing sites,” “Dismantling the myth of the lone expert,”
and “Performing betweener autoethnographies”; Taylor & Francis, for “Decoloniz-
ing constructions of childhood” and “Missing bodies”; and Peter Lang Publishing,
for “Migrant stories.”
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INTRODUCTION

How do we get from Us versus Them to Us and Them?

Is that possible?
If so, how?
If not, how close to it can we get?
How do we get from Us versus Them to just Us?
Is that possible?
If so, how?
If not, how do we keep on trying anyway?
These questions are more urgent, more pressing than ever
Our survival depends on our ability to expand the notion of Us
The circle of Us
The spaces between Us and Them need to be filled with compassion over hatred
With cooperation over non-zero sum propositions
With stories where We resonate with Their humanity, and vice versa
We have a long and hard road ahead
Alone, despair seems inevitable, paralyzing
Together, we might be able to keep Our bearings toward social justice
In times of increasing Us versus Themism
In times of greater exclusionary politics
In times when hope for social justice seems to have lost its way

***
We have been witnessing an escalation of Us versus Themism in Brazil, where
we grew up, in the U.S.A., where we live and labor, in our South American
neighbors, in our European allies, in places that have been making steady, albeit
2 Introduction

slow for those on the wrong side of the track, progress toward greater inclusion
since the middle of the last century. The rise of the global right, founded on
notions of purity of race, culture, religion, and traditional gender binaries, is
palpable in the political success of parties with anti-immigration crusades, with
the rise of populist nationalism based on a narrative of “a need to take care of our
own,” with renewed attacks on LGBTQ+ individuals and communities, with a
disingenuous narrative linking civil war refugees with organized terrorist organi-
zations, with fear-mongering stories of the Other.
In the U.S.A., Donald Trump won a presidential election by inflaming the
notion of Us versus Them. They are rapists and criminals, he said about Mexican
immigrants. He is not a war hero, he said of Senator John McCain, because
Trump doesn’t like soldiers captured in battle. He said he could see blood coming
out of Megyn Kelly’s eyes, he could see “blood coming out of her wherever,”
when she asked him questions about his misogynistic comments on women
throughout his public years. Trump repeated his claim, during his presidential
campaign, that he could see Muslims in New Jersey celebrating the 9/11 attacks.
“It did happen. I saw it. It was on television,” he claimed. On the Syrian refugees
crisis, Trump made fellow humans who lost their homes, families, cities, jobs,
careers, country, and a deep sense of belonging into a flat stereotype of them: “I
don’t want the people from Syria coming in, because we don’t know who they
are. We don’t know who they are. And I don’t want them coming in.” Trump
has called, in public and with documented records, Blacks lazy, saying that laziness
is a trait in Blacks, “it really is, I believe that. It is not anything they can control”
(O’Donnell, 1991). Trump has made fun of a disabled journalist who was critical
of him. He single-handedly birthed and raised a movement to delegitimize
Barack Obama as President of the United States on the premise that Obama was
not an American citizen, was not one of Us. And after Obama produced his birth
certificate, Trump attempted to delegitimize him as intelligent enough to have
gone to an Ivy League university, gotten a law degree, or written a book on his
own (Coates, 2017). Trump has twisted the Take a Knee movement in the
National Football Association from a protest against racial inequality in America,
and undisputable fact, and made it into an Us versus Them issue. According to
this approach, if you take a knee during the national anthem, you are against Us,
against America, against soldiers, against the flag, against patriotism, against the
sport itself. Not being upset about the actual point of protest, racial inequality, in
the Take a Knee movement is, in and of itself, a clear expression of white
supremacy in the U.S. And supremacy ideologies are founded in the hostile
notion of Us versus Them. It could not thrive in a cooperative notion of Us and
Them. It could not exist if humanity got to the point of realizing there is no
Them in our globalized, technological, warming, and overpopulated times.
Trump and his supporters have magnified the adversarial notion of Us versus
Them in domestic and international communities with their American First
boastings, unilateral exit from international agreements on nuclear power, trade,
 Introduction 3

climate, and the sustainability of planet earth. Trump has called for the annihila-
tion of entire countries, such as North Korea and Iran, if they don’t toe his line
and fully submit. Nuclear war has suddenly become a real threat again in
the divisive wake of Us versus Them narratives and shouts. That, and much more
along the Us versus Them ideological and rhetorical lines, is what his campaign
meant by Make America Great Again. Stoke Us versus Themisms and you are
likely to divide people along race lines. It worked for his presidential campaign.
Across all classes, education levels, geographical location, age groups, even gender,
Trump won the majority of White votes. He is not alone in the Us versus Them
frame of mind. He represents a large portion of the American obsession with Us
versus Themisms, at least 62,984,825 Americans, or 46.09 percent of those who
voted in 2016 (Federal Elections Commission, 2017).
The list of narratives that stoke polarizing notions of Us versus Them is long,
intense, and so outrageous that most people seem too overwhelmed to counter-
argue every wedge pounded between Us and Them. Even worse for social justice
and humanistic notions is the fact that the Us versus Them ideology Trump
represents and leads is in control of the greatest political and ideological platform
of our times, the White House and its control of the most massive financial and
military power in the world. The (re)turn toward ideologies of domination and
exclusion imperils everyone and anyone outside of their very narrow circle of Us,
and it is not confined to the U.S.A.
We also saw the rise of the global right and their Us versus Them agendas in
the United Kingdom with Brexit, which was mostly supported by anti-immigrant
sentiments, and a series of similar nationalist parties rising again in Western
Europe. Populist narratives of cultural purity and tradition have been used as
justification for violence against the Other in nations that worked hard to unify
and create economic cooperation after the two world wars of the 20th century.
And so we (re)turn to a combative and hostile ideology of Us versus Them in the
second decade of the 21st century, just when we needed the opposite, an
expansion of the circle of Us. Globally, humanity’s situation is not ideal, to say
the least.
Take the plight of refugees of climate change and civil war conflict, for
instance: “The number of refugees, asylum-seekers and internally displaced
people around the world has topped 65 million,” the United Nations High
Commissioner on Refugees announced in the summer of 2016.

One in every 113 people on Earth has now been driven from their home by
persecution, conflict and violence or human rights violations. Two other
ways to wrap your mind around that number: Each minute, 24 people
around the world flee their home because of violence or persecution. And if
the world’s displaced people were their own nation, it would be larger than
the United Kingdom.
(Domonoske, 2016)
4 Introduction

Take the violence carried against the Other, against Them, in the wake of
Brexit and the Trump presidential campaign. Jo Cox, a 41-year-old woman,
mother of two young children, a member of the UK Parliament, was shot and
stabbed to death, outside a library in Leeds, UK, killed by a man who apparently
shouted “Britain First!” during and after the attack, a few days before the country’s
referendum over whether to stay or leave the European Union. Britain First is a
right-wing group that often stages provocative anti-Muslim demonstrations in the
UK. Jo Cox had won an election as a member of the Labour Party after a long
career in humanitarian work and her outspoken support for Syrian civilians and
refugees.

***
We see the raising of walls all over Europe against desperate refugees of war in
Syria and northern African lands and wonder if there wasn’t a way to raise open
arms instead.

***
Closer to our other home, Brazil, where we were born, raised, and became
brothers in joy, hope, and love, we have seen a strong (re)turn to a dominant
ideology of Us versus Them, of hostility against the Other, of exclusion, of lame
excuses for development at the cost of lives and ecological systems. We see the
soft coup in Brazil against a democratically elected president from the Worker’s
Party, Dilma Rousseff, the first female president of our motherland, and wonder
if a male president would have been impeached under the same circumstances.
We wonder if a member of the historical Brazilian elite would have been called
stupid, dumb, and ignorant in public, and with such insistence. We wonder how
people who blamed Dilma Rousseff for everything wrong with Brazil could so
easily believe the Us-versus-Them propaganda spun by the corporate media
giants. We wonder how protests against Dilma Rousseff and the Worker’s Party
included protests against Paulo Freire and his pedagogy of the oppressed. How
can anyone protest against liberation and humanization of those historically
oppressed? By making Them, the historically oppressed, seem innately different
from Us, less than Us, ungrateful for the meager handouts thrown Their way, by
making Them a menace to Us.

***
Back in the U.S.A. As we were talking about the news, the world, our work
together, our teaching, our lives, our friendship, our beloved ones, our unknown
brothers and sisters, we heard about the Orlando shooting, the 49 people who
were shot dead, the 53 people who were injured, the 102 families who were
immediately dragged into horror by a 29-year-old man who was able to legally
buy weapons of war for personal use.
 Introduction 5

Why did the shooter want to kill people dancing and having fun at a
nightclub?
Why did he target a gay club?
Why did he call 911 and pledge allegiance to ISIS?
Why did he post about his allegiance to extremists groups like ISIS, Hezbollah,
and Al-Qaeda, who are at war with each other?
Why was the shooter a regular client at Pulse before his rampage?
Why was the shooter a user of gay dating apps?
We don’t have ways to answer these questions now. And even the investiga-
tors and prosecutors pouring over intelligence about the shooter’s virtual life
won’t, likely, get the full picture, however long they dig. But it is clear to us that
hatred toward the Other is at the center of his imaginations, decisions, and acts
leading to the Pulse massacre.
Us versus Them
Us and Them
Who is Us?
Who is Them?
What narratives create and reify these circles?
Who creates and reifies these circles of inclusion and exclusion?
For whose profit?
At whose expense?
The visual distance between Us and Them seems small to us
The linguistic distance between Us and Them seems a lot wider
The geographical distance between Us and Them seems irrelevant
At least in our hyper migrant realities and lived experiences
But the imaginary distance between Us and Them feels gargantuan to us
That is where we see betweener autoethnographies being, perhaps, useful
Hopeful
Necessary
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