We set our pedagogical project on, at, with, and under the table. We see the table as a setting that, drawing on Paulo Freire, scripts relationality—and for Freire, a radical pedagogical project begins with dialogical relations. However, the table was not our initial point of departure; rather, we arrived at it through hours of dialoguing, conjecturing, laughing, and snacking around the object that now lies at the center of this project. It just took us some time to lift the tablecloth. This outline details the trajectory of our discussions, including the questions that propel this project, the interlocutors we’re thinking with and alongside, and a proposal for an eating-lecture.

Key Questions: Trajectories and Crossroads

What is our goal? Who is our audience? What are our individual skills? What “theories” and “critical approaches” best inform our project, (i.e. are we going to cite Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui or Catherine Walsh, of whom Cusicanqui is deeply critical)? What is the language? Feminism, Queer Studies, Black Studies, Mestizx and Indigenous Studies, English, Spanish, or Portuguese? Spillers, Spivak, Freire, or de Sousa Santos?

We ask these questions from the outset as we gesture towards their working-through. What we do know is that action, thinking as doing, will propel this project. We also know our audience will be whomever is in the room with us for our performance.

How do we engage decolonial theory in a pedagogically engaged performance practice?

At the heart of our project is an understanding that language—particularly written text—cannot account for the plenitude of meanings and life-worlds that exceed the categories available to Western languages. As such, we are not proposing a paper, which risks petrified paraphrasing and the “game of who cites whom” Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui warns against; we are planning to do, to produce a space of generative discomfort and vulnerability in that doing.

Our goal is not to create a pedagogical program. We realized that, within the scope of this assignment, we would only have the bandwidth, resources, and time to practice a program or workshop with the other students in the seminar—which, while impactful, isn’t quite what we want to do. There are numerous successful examples of decolonial and anti-hegemonic pedagogical projects, among them The Black School, an experimental art school (recently exhibited at the New Museum) which promotes radical anti-racist education through artmaking; the many Theater of the Oppressed organizations throughout the world; our group-member Paulo’s work with indigenous educators at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Brazil; and Lanchonete Lanchonete, a cafeteria and community space in a favela of Rio de Janeiro (discussed more below). Each of these programs resists what Freire calls the educational “banking concept” and what Finkel and Monk call the “Atlas Complex”: clearly demarcated hierarchical relationships which, positing the student as an empty vessel and the teacher as the carrier of the world’s knowledge, place burdens on both.

Like these initiatives, we feel it is urgent to confront and challenge our sociopolitical and academic legacies, find ways to build and sustain community in and out of the classroom at NYU, and engage in pedagogy beyond the textbook. In addressing these imbricated urgencies, our goal is to critically engage in performance important texts in decolonial theory and practice by putting out the invitation for their gustatory consumption.

Why eating?

We’re interested in both eating (the physical, psychical, and epistemological act of taking something into the body) and commensality (the practice of eating together). Our initial focus was on commensality, the ways in which food functions as an occasion for dialogical relationality. Our point of departure is the community space Lanchonete Lanchonete, which variously acts as a community cafeteria, artmaking space, extracurricular classroom, and safe environment for young students. Eating together creates the condition for learning in this space, an act that nourishes the body and mind as it builds community, communion, and relationality.

The table potentializes a radically horizontal relationality; however, as Zack has written previously, the table is also an exceptional site of violence, representational and alimental. To have a seat at the table is to have a political and agential voice. This is the table’s representational politics, what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak pinpoints as vertreten: to speak-for. Who gets to have a seat at the table, and who is occluded from a seat? Once at the table, who can speak, and who is silenced or unheard? Pedagogically, we might extend these questions to the syllabus: which writers and thinkers find places on syllabi, and once there, which voices do students and teachers amplify the most? Often, regardless of the discipline, the focus remains on “a few men from five countries in Western Europe (Italy, France, England, Germany and the USA).” We imagine that the syllabus for this course was assembled with these questions in mind, so we’d like to set the table for it.

However, the table is hardly commensal if we’re not eating together. On eating, Kyla Wazana Tompkins writes about queer alimentarity, “the alignment between oral pleasure and other forms of nonnormative desire,” and the ways in which minoritized bodies are considered edible and consumable. Here, cannibalism and anthropophagy take seats. In his much-cited “Manifesto Antropofágico” (Cannibal Manifesto), Oswald de Andrade posits Brazilian culture as an anti-colonial cannibalistic force which literally eats Western culture, incorporating it into its becoming. Written in 1928, the manifesto is commonly attributed to modernism, though its fragmented poetics betray this neat periodization. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro argues that both the 1928 “Manifesto” and Oswald’s avant-garde magazine Revista de Antropofagia mark a rupture with modernism: “The Anthropophagic ‘modernism’ is absolutely anti-’modernist’ and, above all, postmodernist, […] Antropofagia jumped over this other late postmodernism, devouring it in advance […]. The Cannibal Manifesto is ‘decolonial’ very avant la lettre. And it did not come from within any  North American university […].” In this regard, eating potentializes a certain untimeliness of inquiry and resistance to neatness. Eating is messy business.

We’d like to think with and alongside Tompkins and Oswald in our own pedagogical eating practice. To what extent is scholarly intake cannibalistic? What are the pleasures and violences constitutive of this cannibalism? Can we derive from Tompkins and Oswald’s ideas a decolonial cannibalistic pedagogy? And how might that look, feel, sound, smell, and taste?

Proposal: 

1. We propose a performative eating-lecture, during which we will open seats at a dining table for ourselves and our peers to eat every reading from the syllabus for Diana Taylor’s Fall 2018 graduate seminar “Decolonial Theories and Practices.” We will compose a script or score for the performance based on our research on the connections between pedagogy, performance, eating, commensality, sexuality, and decoloniality. Our eating-lecture will take place in class.

2. The digital component will extend the performance into a multimedia log of text, still images, and moving images. This part of the project will serve as an “archive” of our process and include a number of appendices: performative offshoots, polemics, poetry, collages, and recipes. We will also collaboratively compose a longer “artists’ statement” (resembling an essay) detailing our research and findings. Throughout our inquiries we will draw from decolonial theory, performance studies, black studies, queer studies, indigenous studies, disability theory, food studies, contemporary and modern art practice (including works by Lygia Pape and Gloria Camiruaga), and contemporary radical pedagogical programs.

3. The members of this group will work collaboratively throughout the preparation process. Thus far we have worked as a collective, and we will delegate responsibilities as needed.

 

Bibliography

Cusicanqui, Silvia Rivera.  “Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: A Reflection on the Practices and Discourses of Decolonization.” South Atlantic Quarterly 111, no. 1 (2012): 95-109.

Finkel, Donald and Monk, G. Stephen. “Teachers and Learning Groups: Dissolution of the Atlas Complex.” New Directions for Teaching and Learning 14 (1983): 83-97.

Freire, Paulo.  Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Translated by Myra Bergman Ramos. New York and London: Continuum, 2010.

Grosfoguel, Ramón. “The Structure of Knowledge in Westernized Universities: Epistemic Racism/Sexism and the Four Genocides/Epistemicides of the Long 16th Century.” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 11, issue 1 (2013): 73-90.

Lanchonete Lanchonete. https://www.instagram.com/explore/locations/684194621790612/lanchonete-lanchonete/.

Nyong’o, Tavia. “Unburdening Representation.” The Black Scholar 44:2 (2014): 70-80.

Oswald de Andrade. “Manifesto Antropofágico.” 1928.

Tompkins, Kyla Wazana. Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century. New York: NYU Press, 2012.

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. “Que temos nós com isso?” in Azevedo, Beatriz. “Antropofagia. Palimpsesto Selvagem.” São Paulo: SESI-SP Editora, 2016.

Wilks, Zack. “On the Table: Scripting and Unscripting American Domesticity.” Undergraduate thesis, Vassar College, 2017.

 

Natalia Aguilar Vasquez, Clairette Atri, Paulo Maia, Luisa Marinho, Zack Wilks