#eve tuck

[propertiesofjoy]

a glossary of haunting, eve tuck & c.ree

[erodingsinner]

A Glossary of Haunting (2013) by Eve Tuck and C. Ree. 

[hesitationss]

A Glossary of Haunting (2013) by Eve Tuck and C. Ree

But why haunting?

Haunting is the cost of subjugation. It is the price paid for violence, for genocide. Horror films in the United States have done viewers a disservice in teaching them that heroes are innocent, and that the ghouls are the trespassers. In the context of the settler colonial nation-state, the settler hero has inherited the debts of his forefathers.

Monsters

People who deny the persistence of settler colonialism are like the heroes in American horror films, astonished that the monster would have trouble with them. Denial is a key component of the plotlines, the evil might get you if you look too deeply at the horror. You can only look between fingers on a hand that covers your eyes.

[sirenita00]

[woman-loving]

Poststructuralist theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987) teach us that desire is assembled, crafted over a lifetime through our experiences. For them, this assemblage is the picking up of distinct bits and pieces that, without losing their specificity, become integrated into a dynamic whole. This is what accounts for the multiplicity, complexity, and contradiction of desire, how desire reaches for contrasting realities, even simultaneously. Countering theorists that posit desire as a hole, a gap, or that which is missing (such as, and somewhat famously, Foucault) Deleuze and Guattari insist that desire is not lacking but “involution” (p. 164).[4] Exponentially generative, engaged, engorged, desire is not mere wanting but our informed seeking. Desire is both the part of us that hankers for the desired and at the same time the part that learns to desire. It is closely tied to, or may even be, our wisdom. [...]

-- Eve Tuck, "Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities," Harvard Educational Review, Vol 79, No 3, Fall 2009.

[whentherewerebicycles]

“At the risk of bruising friendships, I also ask that we think fully about theories of change that rely on raising awareness or raising visibility. This theory of change assumes that people are unaware of an injustice or issue or illness or social calamity, and that in making them more aware, we ready them to take appropriate action. It is a theory of pre-change. It assumes that people will generally do the right thing with the right information. It anticipates that the reason for inaction thus far is missing information, or lack of depth of understanding of the significance or need.

Raising awareness is a cousin theory of change to documenting change—both often rely on circulating narratives and tropes of the mutilated body, the broken spirit, the flooded neighborhood. Images of destruction compete for dollars on Facebook, to wrench the most sympathy for donations, for charity, for compassion, for hashtag solidarity, for newsworthiness, for value, for mattering. There is no relationship between the evocativeness of the photograph and the amount of the donation that goes to those in need. There is no relationship between the story of loss and the supplies that come.

So much of what we do to compel change relies on raising awareness. But what if we—as communities, as collectives—were to disbelieve awareness as change? What if we, as Indigenous peoples, as people of colour, as disenfranchised peoples, believed that our own awareness, our own knowing, is enough to make change? What if we did not wait for others to also know but are inspired by our own knowing? What if we hold true that we are the ones who need to know, and not others? What if we believe that we are the ones who can make change, and that others are not more powerful than us to effect change? These are radical questions that throb at the heart of what gets taken for granted as the work of social justice, of organizing, of public scholarship. [...]

In this neoliberal, settler colonial moment, it can be so difficult to imagine other theories of change. It requires a sort of mental yoga to even remember other theories of change. In our book, Youth Resistance Research and Theories of Change, Wayne Yang and I created a list of other popular theories of change and I can never remember what was on the list. I have to look at the list to remember, because raising awareness and documenting damage figure so prominently in my imagination.”

—Eve Tuck, “Biting the University that Feeds Us,” in Dissident Knowledge in Higher Education

[florizels]

It[Decolonization] is not converting Indigenous politics to a Western doctrine of liberation; it is not a philanthropic process of 'helping' the at-risk and alleviating suffering; it is not a generic term for struggle against oppressive conditions and outcomes. The broad umbrella of social justice may have room underneath for all of these efforts. By contrast, decolonization specifically requires the repatriation of Indigenous land and life. Decolonization is not a metaphor for social justice.

Tuck and Yang, from “Decolonization is not a metaphor”

[athousandgateaux]

Settler fantasies of adoption alleviate the anxiety of settler un-belonging. He adopts the love of land and therefore thinks he belongs to the land. He is a first environmentalist and sentimentalist, nostalgic for vanishing Native ways. In today’s jargon, he could be thought of as an eco-activist, naturalist, and Indian sympathizer. At the same time, his cultural hybridity is what makes him more ‘fit’ to survive--the ultimate social Darwinism--better than both British and Indian; he is the mythical American. Hawkeye, hybrid white and Indian, becomes the reluctant but nonetheless rightful inheritor of the land and warden of its vanishing people. Similarly, the settler intellectual who hybridizes decolonial thought with Western critical traditions (metaphorizing decolonization), emerges superior to both Native intellectuals and continental theorists simultaneously. With his critical hawk-eye, he again sees the critique better than anyone and sees the world from a loftier station. It is a fiction, just as Cooper’s Hawkeye, just as the adoption, just as the belonging

Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is not a Metaphor” pg. 15-16