Gravyland: Writing Beyond the Curriculum in the City of Brotherly Love

2. Edge Politics: Oppositional Strategies and Collective Politics

35 2 Edge Politics Oppositional Strategies and Collective Politics Unrecognized producers, poets of their own affairs, trailblazers in the jungles of functionalist rationality . . . they trace “indeterminate trajectories ” that are apparently meaningless, since they do not cohere with the constructed, written, and prefabricated space through which they move. They are sentences that remain unpredictable within the space ordered by the organizing techniques of systems. Although they use as their material the vocabularies of established languages . . . although they remain within the framework of prescribed syntaxes . . . these “traverses” remain heterogeneous to the systems they infiltrate and in which they sketch out the guileful ruses of different interests and desires. They circulate, come and go, overflow and drift over an imposed terrain, like the snowy waves of the sea slipping in among rocks and defiles of an established order. —M IC H E L DE C E R T E AU, The Practice of Everyday Life W H E R E D O OPP O S I T ION A L MOM E N T S come from? How can our daily practice foster such moments and encourage their growth into successful strategies for change? Urban Rhythms had imagined itself as a space where student voices could resist their interpolation, à la Lukacs, into narratives that diminished their agency and their community. As the project continued , however, it became clear that a more systemic set of interventions was necessary, that the hybrid nature of “voice” necessitated both a pedagogical and a political set of actions. In this way, Urban Rhythms provided insight on the type of work necessary for writing programs premised on progressive social values and committed to expanding literacy rights within local communities . For real change to occur, we learned, an important step was to connect classroom pedagogy to progressive community organizations. 36 | GR AV Y L A N D But are community partnerships really enough? The community partnerships typically discussed in composition/rhetoric journals have been with public schools and small and medium nonprofits. Such partnerships are often formed to blunt or stop conservative social policies on issues such as education , homelessness, and welfare. Implicit in these partnership models is a conception of hegemonic change that works by gaining the consent of those in local agencies to expand or broaden the service opportunities offered. Within such a framework, New City Writing could be understood as an intermediary between local literacy teachers and surrounding communities, offering programs that were marked by a broader definition of literacy (and literacy services). Although such work is valuable, I want to show a possible limitation of such a framing and argue that New City Writing and, by extension , writing programs in general need to take on a more expansive view of partnership based on an alternative and oppositional model of hegemonic politics—one that recognizes the need to respond directly to the coercive power of the state. In speaking of oppositional politics, however, I do not mean to imply a politics simply based on negation—an effort designed just to stop the forward progress of conservative or reactionary politics. Rather, what I hope to demonstrate is the extent to which the category “oppositional” can also come to stand for the development of an organized community collective that can push for progressive social and political priorities. As defined by James DeFilippis, Robert Fisher, and Eric Shragge, such community efforts “stand in opposition to dominant values and power relations while working to extend and protect social and economic rights.” “The implication,” they write, “is that the organizations do not ‘de-responsibilize’ the state. They have an understanding of both the relationship between the community and the state as well as the importance of state intervention to either regulate the market or provide programmes to improve social and economic conditions” (2006, 38). The term oppositional, as I use it, comes to stand for both working against conservative politics and working toward progressive social and political goals. To develop this argument, I want to examine the creation of the Philadelphia Writing Centers Project, an effort that positioned itself against educational and political trends that had limited the value of community-based Edge Politics | 37 voices at the city’s public schools. Initiated toward the end of 1998, the Philadelphia Writing Centers Project was originally located in one middle school and was a classroom-based project designed to restore an engaged and expansive sense of community in the school’s...