The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent

9. Nobody Mean More: Black Feminist Pedagogy and Solidarity

237 9 nobody Mean More Black Feminist Pedagogy and Solidarity Alexis Pauline Gumbs Nobody mean more to me than you. —Monica Dennis, student in June Jordan’s 1984 class on Black English I was born a Black woman and now I am become a Palestinian. —June Jordan, “Moving towards Home” Introduction: Becoming nobody Nobody black taught English at John Jay College of Police Science before Audre Lorde. Nobody dare teach “black English” in the State University of New York (SUNY) system before June Jordan. Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen. Nobody knows my sorrow. Nobody Palestinian can claim home in Palestine. Nobody mean more to me than you. This chapter is a meditation on what it means to be nobody in a university economy designed to produce somebody individuated, assimilated , and consenting to empire. Is it possible instead to become nobody in the academic space? Is it is possible to align with the illegible oppressed/ contemporary subaltern, the falling apart abject nonsubject, inside a university English class? Here I seek to reframe and refract these questions through the archive of June Jordan and Audre Lorde’s teaching in the public university system from the late 1960s through the 1980s and their writing during that period. This chapter looks at the complexity of the administrative function of teaching writing in an early black studies/women’s studies context through two pieces 238 · alexIS PaUlIne GUMBS of creative poetic and nonfiction writing by Audre Lorde and June Jordan on their own teaching. Concrete: discipline, discipline, relation, and Becoming Struggling not to reproduce nationalistic exclusion in one of the first black studies classes in New York City, Audre Lorde writes “Power,” a poem about the legal sanction of police brutality, while she herself is an employee of the College of Police Science in the City University of New York (CUNY) in the early 1970s.1 A decade later she will be using her view as a diasporic daughter of parents from Grenada to relate to the U.S. military invasion of the first black socialist republic, analyzing it as the imperialist exportation of U.S. racism. By the early 1990s, at the end of her life, Audre Lorde will be one of the founding mothers of Sisters Supporting Sisters in South Africa (SISA) and will be challenging the German chancellor Helmut Kohl in an open letter published in several German newspapers on behalf of people of color and immigrants in Germany suffering from neo-Nazi racist violence.2 Struggling to explain the relevance and urgency of black English in her SUNY Stonybrook classroom, June Jordan creates a multilayered pedagogical narrative on the intergenerational dispersal of love between her own generation and the generation of her students in a police state. Eventually, Jordan will be standing with MADRE and the women of Nicaragua against the policing of the hemisphere by U.S. neoliberal economic interests. She will also poetically explain that the fact that she was born a black woman is not a barrier to the fact that she must become Palestinian in solidarity against U.S.-supported Israeli imperialism: “I am become a Palestinian.” Palimpsest: a Process of Becoming This chapter is inspired by June Jordan’s declaration on becoming Palestinian , which exclusively uses primary texts and secondary sources by black theorists writing in the Americas. It distinguishes poetics and relation in “Power” and “Grenada: An Interim Report” by Lorde and mediates on the possibility of becoming nobody in Jordan’s “Nobody Mean More to Me Than You and the Future Life of Willie Jordan” and “Moving towards Home.”3 Using published texts and their unpublished contexts as primary palimpsests in a critical discourse on relating and becoming as modes of solidarity, this chapter draws on theories of poetics, relation, and becoming in Sylvia nOBOdy Mean MOre · 239 Wynter’s “Ethno or Socio Poetics,” Edouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, and Michelle Wright’s Becoming Black. In Disciplinary Matters, intellectual historian Nick Mitchell distinguishes between the intellectual and administrative functions of black studies as a disciplinary form.4 Disciplines do indeed discipline, administrating norms and validating forms of knowledge, forms of life, and some embodied realities over others. Hired to manage the post–civil rights transformation of the public university population, Jordan and Lorde refused to become the “master ’s tools” and sought to use the classroom as a space to interrogate the violent police management of the postindustrial underclass...