Desborde: Overflow and the Politics of Resistance

Belén
Santiago
Pedro
Luke
Mira

Our investigation focuses on the edge of the acceptable in protests and politics. Through an array of complementary analytical approaches, we will explore this edge in order to draw broader conclusions on the role of desborde/overflow in the performatives acts of protest, language, and dance. We will explore a spectrum of participation ranging from individual actors to collective action and complement our written findings with photographs, video interviews, and interactive mapping to reflect the diversity and dynamism of the politics of resistance. The spatial limit of the investigation is New York City, but we expect to discover networks of actors, solidarity, and influence that will both seep through and surge over the boundaries of the five boroughs. As a matter of fact, our project benefits from the international/global/pluriversal aspect of its members, who will contribute comparative analyses to New York forms of protest and will enhance transnational connections.

Interviews with individual actors and representatives of collective movements will form the practical backbone of our investigation. As part of the decolonial endeavor, we will invite our interviewees to participate in this collective project by bringing their thoughts and their experience in the way they choose. Our collection of materials (videos, photos, writings, thoughts) will form a non-hierarchical collective assemblage of enunciation in itself. Pedro will contribute his talent as a filmmaker to the group as we compile footage and interviews and work towards a multi-faceted, collaborative analysis of overflow. We wish to interrogate, collaboratively with our interviewees, the position that New York occupies in the neoliberal imagination. Can a real desborde happen in New York? Could desborde result in a series of a series of systemic changes? What does it mean to resist in New York? Those are questions that we will share with our interviewees.

The first step to explore the edge of the acceptable and moments of its rupture is to identify this edge. Boundaries play a crucial role in protest, specifically in urban spaces such as New York City. The First Amendment of the US Constitution guarantees the rights to Free Speech and to Assembly. But what are the limits of protest? And what happens beyond them? The portion of the project that Luke will coordinate examines protest through the lens of legality in order to scrutinize how (and when and where) dissenting discourses are allowed to intrude into the public sphere. We will problematize the permitting process for demonstrations by examining moments of transgression as well as cooperation with local, state, and federal laws. Specifically, we will consider moments of overflow, or of subversion of the process for ‘legal’ protest to analyze the how neoliberal dynamic attempts shapes dissent within the realm of ‘acceptability.’ Through interviews with organizers of progressive movements as well as permitting organizations and a theoretical examination grounded in the writings of theorists such as James M. Jasper, Mustafa Emirbayer, Juan Camilo Cajigas-Rotundo and others, we hope to examine moments of individual and collective overflow in the public sphere.

The part that Belén will coordinate, by incorporating the analysis of David Thoreau’s ideas of civil disobedience, will explore how different social organizations struggle with challenges and examine specific strategies and tactics of resistance in the center of the economic, finance and cultural development of New York. Specifically, this research will focus Decolonize this place as a heterogeneous movement oriented to take action to make visible practices and discourse of patriarchy, racism, sexism, military intervention, colonization, migration policy, labor condition, displacement, and gentrification. During their actions as a collective, they use the institutional framework for demanding the elimination and disarticulation of cultural production that reinforcing these discourses without favorable outcomes at the same time that they are working to engagement participant from other communities to achieve visibility.

Mira will grab us by the hand and pull our analysis onto the dance floor. How do dance halls, dance, so to speak, with collective movements in New York City such as the organizations integrated into Decolonize this place? Mira will explore the edge of legality in the dance hall performative space, and the function of the dance floor as a sacred space of resistance within current neoliberal acceptances of protest. As our group investigation moves from the general to the specific, the theoretical to the practical, Mira will focus on the Chiquita Brujita, a New Yorican performance artist. She will explore acts of music-sharing and dancing that are considered Caribbean ancestral practice, a decolonizing collaborative process of resistance. Specifically, Mira will analyze Chiquita Brujita’s presentation of “A Night of Brooklyn Brujeria” on September 20th of 2018, a year after Hurricane Maria as an entrance point into how political resistance births new collective movements that decolonize urban collective ceremonies and ritual spaces.

Santiago, using language and linguistics as his critical lens, will facilitate the collective exploration of translation as an act of resistance. We consider the linguistic and cultural space which writers of indigenous origin in America inhabit an intermediate territory. Such writers are bi-cultural and bi-lingual creators, as Walter Mignolo would say, and use this space in their favor as a site of resistance. Although translation may perceived as a form of cultural assimilation between a dominant language culture and a subordinate one, some authors have weaponized language as a tool of resistance that can call into question the dominant / subordinate binarism while reversing the silencing of their cultures, languages and policies. In the same manner, translation beyond the linguistic realm, as it is mobilized by Boaventura de Sousa Santos, enables a dialogue of forms of resistance to counter epistemice.

We will invite Odi Gonzalez, a Peruvian poet and NYU professor, to collaborate in our investigation of overflow and resistance. Odi occupies a liminal space that affords us an invaluable perspective on the questions of protest and desborde via border thinking. Though he is a member of the academy, we may also view him as an “infiltrator” in how he uses the privilege of academia to deepen his poetic art. He writes in English, Quechua and Spanish “at the same time” and is the author of a trilingual dictionary in those languages.The use of Quechua in our project will explore another avenue for decolonization. We hope that the use of indigenous linguistic structures can impact the way we understand our collectivity within the project of Politics of Resistance.

Understanding desborde as a political/cultural instrument in pursuit of decolonization opens a space for critical thought; a space for countering dispositifs of subjectivation, whether external or internalized.