Zines in Third Space: Radical Cooperation and Borderlands Rhetoric

2. The Role of Imagination in Challenging Everyday Dominations: Articulation at Work in Producing Antiracist and Egalitarian

2 The Role of Imagination in Challenging Everyday Dominations Articulation at Work in Producing Antiracist and Egalitarian Social Agendas In her preface to This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation, Gloria Anzaldúa asserts that imagination “has the capacity to extend us beyond the confines of our skin, situation, and condition” (5). Chandra Mohanty, too, addresses the power and potential of imagination, suggesting that the idea of an imagined community is important because it can move individuals to “political coalitions woven together by the threads of opposition to forms of domination” (47). I draw on these and other theorists’ work (and in the following chapters focus more on the role of the decolonial imaginary) to explore the pursuit and formation of coalitions and the circulation of new perspectives and new knowledges in zines as third‑space sites. I propose that coalitions are born of articulations, which may be considered expressive and connective practices. Zines can be highly imaginative and connectional. As a result of this nexus of imagination, connection, and politics, zines are an excellent site for studying a certain kind of rhetoric, what I call borderlands rhetorics, that belongs to third space. Third‑space sites as I am proposing them throughout this work, are spaces in which the politics of articulation are necessarily at play. The politics of articulation are expressed in zines in which zinesters first imagine and then work to build coalitions across contexts and in pursuit of social transformation that is predicated 27 28 / Zines in Third Space on a radical democratics. By radical democratics I mean a participatory and emancipatory politics reflected in conscious coalitions.1 There is much to be learned about coalitional practices, especially in their potential to propose new knowledges that serve a social justice agenda. Throughout this chapter, I explore rhetorical operations as important parts of articulation theory and practice. Antiracist and of‑color zinesters often write of the everyday as a racialized and racist context that holds coalitional potential. Many of these zinesters identify boundaries of difference across which coalitions can be imagined and consciously pursued. Importantly, the zines I focus on do not work to conflate difference or pursue homogenized heterogeneity but instead demonstrate how differences can stay intact in coalitional contexts. One strategy identified in the of‑color zines and antiracist white zines I examined is a resistance to color‑blindness and the color‑blind racism that it insidiously reproduces.2 Importantly, zines often reveal an informed understanding of the challenges of intersectional work, especially as they work to apply it through the practices of articulation across local and global contexts to better understand historic and ongoing experiences of exclusions and oppressions.3 In I Dreamed I Was Assertive, Celia Perez reflects on everyday contexts and how saturated they are in racism. She notes that in her “whole secondary ed program there were only two black students and one Latina (me)” (issue 2 n.p.). She discusses the public school where she teaches and the many ways dominance and color‑blind racism are reproduced in the teachers’ lounge, the classrooms, and the curriculum. Zinesters engage an understanding that spaces and the social interactions that constitute them, and are constituted by them, are imbued with racial meanings and racialized inclusions and exclusions, at once symbolic, historic, and material.4 In its caption, “always and never the same,” the cover of Rubyfruit Manifesto #2 calls readers to consider the mis/treatment of people as mass productions of sameness while also calling readers to a sense of the unpredictable by implying that people are always in the process of becoming and in that process should be understood as never simply the same (see Figure 2.1). In this example from Rubyfruit Manifesto #2, the zinester uses a raw cut‑and‑paste visual to highlight the stark and inhumane reality of Nike factory workers in Vietnam not earning a living wage (see Figure 2.2). In asking readers to simply “think about it,” the zinester is assuming that the issue of a living wage is obvious and that any thoughtful person would grasp the magnitude of injustice in confronting how a transnational conglomerate such as Nike can get away with such gross and mass exploitation. Though the cut‑and‑paste style is informal with a sense of impromptu, especially in its visual assemblages, this zinester also includes a relatively more formal Figure 2.1. “she is always and...