The Mothership Connection: Utopian Funk

from Bethune and Beyond

Boni Wozolek

The Urban Review

Issues and Ideas in Public Education

ISSN 0042-0972

Urban Rev
DOI 10.1007/s11256-018-0476-7

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https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-018-0476-7

The Mothership Connection: Utopian Funk from Bethune

and Beyond

Boni Wozolek1

© Springer Nature B.V. 2018

Abstract
In this paper, educational pathways emerge from the nexus of ancient narratives and
future possibilities. Such imaginings are as much attributed to the African Ameri-
can intellectual tradition as to contemporary Afrofuturisms, including those born
in histories of Blackness. The overlay of what was and what is not yet is signifi-
cant because it engenders educational potentialities that are central to aesthetics and
onto-epistemological wonderings. The author uses seminal dialogues from scholars
like Sojourner Truth, Mary McLeod Bethune and Anna Julia Cooper as a spring-
board for envisioning Afrofuturisms in which schooling functions to transgress the
assemblages of violence and capital of shame that pervade classrooms and corridors
contemporary education. Not unlike the call of Sylvia Wynter, Sun Ra, bell hooks,
Octavia Butler and other Afrofuturist activists of the feminine, this paper (re)imagi-
nes schooling from the roots of its past and the future conditional they portend.

Keywords  Schooling · African American intellectual tradition · Afrofuturism ·

Critical race feminisms · Assemblages of violence · Capital of shame

Well you better listen my sisters and brothers,

Because if you do, you can hear
There are voices still callin’ across the years.
And they’re all crying across the ocean
And they’re crying across the land
And they will till we all come to understand…
None of us are free
None of us are free
None of us are free, if one of us are chained,
None of us are free (Burke 2002)

* Boni Wozolek
blwozolek@loyola.edu
1
Loyola University Maryland, 4501 North Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21093, USA

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What would education be if, as Taliaferro Baszile et al. (2016) wonder, the phrase
“black lives matter” was the guiding principle in schools and schooling? How would
our schools function? How would we do curriculum theorizing and the work of edu-
cational foundations differently? In the context of schooling, sociocultural norms
and values are informed by historical forms of oppression (Quinn and Meiners
2009; Valente 2011; Watkins 2001; Winfield 2007) and by contemporary influences
(Crichlow 2013; Giroux 1997; Yosso 2005). Imagining the “not yet” (Pinar 1998,
p. 1) of schools is therefore the confluence of historical, contemporary and future
possibilities.
It is, as Solomon Burke (2002) popularized, but Ray Charles (1993) first sang, a
“calling across the years” that brings us to the possibilities of educational ideals, the
“not yet” of schooling. Further, as foundational scholars of color have articulated
(e.g.: Cooper 1892; Woodson 1933), the roots of these omissions are often firmly
entrenched in everyday schooling (Watkins 2001; Winfield 2007). Attending to the
way that society and culture influence what happens in schools, and how schools
reinscribe sociocultural norms, this article speaks to historical and contemporary
questions of equity and access in schooling as well as the everyday experiences of
marginalized students.
Similar to recalling an original tune, this process of evoking historical perspec-
tives and voices is significant. As Robin Thicke and Pharell claiming that their
Blurred Lines didn’t overly “borrow” from Marvin Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up,”
ignoring voices is often marginalizing and a colonization of cultures and ideas, even
when done by those “in group”. What is complicated about these issues is that there
is a long past of reappropriation of chord histories, structures, rhythms, and melo-
dies in various black arts traditions. For example, in jazz, there are many songs writ-
ten off the changes of “I got rhythm” and hip hop regularly samples other songs to
create something anew. The difficulty here is that Robin Thicke and Pharell plagia-
rized and while claiming an homage to Marvin Gaye.
Such coopting and colonizing is particularly significant in schools because,
much like discussing aesthetics and education through Dewey’s (1934) scholarship
without either being in conjunction to or in critical discourse with DuBois’ (1926)
dialogue, the omission of histories becomes a tool for marginalization. In schools,
leaving out such voices not only eliminates intellectual and social histories but, over
time, it appropriates narratives, ideas, and ways of knowing. The omission of ideas
and histories is therefore not only an epistemological but an ontological coloniza-
tion. The inclusion of these voices complicates cultural memories (Winfield 2007)
that have normalized the current moment in schooling while actively engaging in the
imagining of educational futurisms.
This paper first evokes “what was” in aspects of the African American intellec-
tual traditions in order to more deeply explore “what is” and what “might be” as
expressed through the lens of Afrofuturisms. This is done to more deeply consider
potential pathways of being and knowing for people of African descent in American
schools. Like focusing a kaleidoscope, the braiding of historical and contemporary
dialogues converges into a picture of emergent possibilities in schooling that are
an assemblage of its sociohistorical and cultural parts. This is significant because
much like a kaleidoscope allows different constructions of the possibly by unfolding

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differently each time using parts of the whole mechanism, using assemblages of
historical and contemporary dialogues reveals the possibilities of schooling while
attending to past and present educational contexts, ideas, and ideals.
This argument begins by addressing questions of ontology and epistemology
both theoretically and practically, clearly articulating the multiple understandings
through which ontologies are often discussed in and outside of educational research
and practice. The work of envisioning potential educational utopias in the works of
early twentieth century Black intellectuals is an analysis of a series ontological ques-
tions rather than a set of epistemological steps: How do schools be? How do they
be with students? How do students be with schools? How do students be in broader
contexts? To answer such questions, I attend the ways that foundational scholarship
within African American intellectual traditions have outlined ontological notions of
schooling. Specifically, this lineage is explored through what I have come to think
of as assemblages of violence (Wozolek 2018b) and an accompanying curriculum of
ontological resistance at the nexus of race, gender and schooling.
The significance of this curriculum deeply resonated in the context of the late
1800 to early 1900s amid the consistent, normalized violence against people of
color and women. At this time, scholars like Cooper, DuBois and Woodson articu-
lated theories and practices that were in friction with connections between schooling
and the pervasive physical violence that was coupled with a sociocultural practices
and policies of social exclusion that were levied against people of color. Such con-
cerns are central to our contemporary experiences and are abundantly evident in the
continuing maiming and killing unarmed bodies of color. It is present in #black-
livesmatter and other associated movements that seek to call much needed attention
to this continuing onslaught of assaults, and the ways in which the greater public
is often more consumed with gestures like the removal of a Confederate flags from
Amazon than attending to the deep-seated cultural iterations that have normalized
these issues.
Next, this article attends to the ways that foundational scholarship is imbricated
within Afrofuturisms to explore how such understandings resonate with past and
potential future ideals of schooling. Like many robust dialogues that are compli-
cated by sociopolitical, historical, and cultural ideas and ideals, Afrofuturisms is
discussed here at the nexus of conversations centered on such sociocultural precepts
as they intersect with various forms of the arts. As it is discussed further below, this
paper uses Afrofuturistic dialogues—or a focus on the African diaspora as it inter-
sects with technology across the arts in popular culture—to argue for representa-
tions of blackness that have been historically whitewashed from educational spaces.
As these forms of blackness have been excluded from schooling, it has caused onto-
logical trauma for communities of color in general and African American communi-
ties specifically. The purpose here is to use African American intellectual traditions
as they intersect with Afrofuturistic dialogues to think about what might be if black
lives mattered in school as they do in these traditions.
It is important to note that this paper attends to systemic injustices that dispro-
portionately impact marginalized youth. While these injustices happen across spaces
and places, it is important to remember that physical and emotional violence found
in schools and schooling consistently plays out in urban schools alarmingly high

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rates (Ladson-Billings 2009; Meiners 2016; Morris 2016). Following Gershon’s

(2017) dialogue on urban schools and schooling, this paper similarly understands
urban schools as places located in cities that are predominantly comprised of eco-
nomically, socially, and politically disenfranchised students of color. Gershon writes
that “although this definition is explicit or implied, it is worth noting because some
of the most elite and expensive schools are also in many major U.S. cities, often but
a few short blocks from some of the most underserved, underserviced schools in the
nation” (p. 4). The theorization of violent assemblages as they intersect with Afri-
can American intellectual traditions, and the potential corrective lens for schooling
within Afrofuturisms is significant to urban youth is because these are the very con-
versations meant, as Garvey (1922) consistently argued, to positively impact black
youth across contexts but, as it is explored here, in urban spaces specifically.
Because what counts as “urban” is often fluid and easily contested, this paper
also attends to Gershon’s (2013a) discussion on vibrational affect, using the terms
“resonance” and “dissonance” to call attention to the way ideas inter-act (Schwab
1969) within and between individuals. As Gershon (2103a/c) notes, these terms are
a deliberate move away from ideas of relevance. In this case, I am arguing that res-
onance attends to individuals’ subjectivities while relevance focuses on dominant
ideas and ideals. This is because relevance is always a consensus perspective where
those in the majority confirm to one another that a given perspective is valued over
other possibilities.
As is the case with Afrofuturisms, a historical and contemporary dialogue that is
complicated by resonance and dissonance is central to recovering “histories of coun-
ter-futures created in a century of Afrodiasporic projection and as a space within
which the critical work of manufacturing tools capable of intervention within the
current political dispensation is undertaken” (Eshun 2003, p. 301). What follows is
an examination of transgressive positionalities in schooling that are deeply rooted in
historical narratives, contemporary ideas, and conditional futures.

Assemblages of Violence: Onto‑epistemologies and the Matter

of Doing

How are ways of being ordered within systems of schooling? While there are many
approaches to discuss ontology, here I focus on two constructions of “being” and
“becoming” as they are resonant with the scholarship of within African American
intellectual traditions and Afrofuturisms. Although ways of knowing are central to
these traditions in general and to African diasporic dialogues specifically, ways of
being are also firmly rooted in these conversations and their many artistic represen-
tations. However, as schools across the United States continue to focus on knowl-
edge production through standardization, this paper attends to ontological chal-
lenges and possibilities within these conversations to examine the knotted nature of
being, knowing, and schooling (Nespor 1997) as it can be understood through histo-
ries related to the African diaspora.
The first construction used here is Massumi’s (2002) discussion of the ontoge-
netic. Similar to the work of scholars like Anzaldúa (1987), Johnson (1987), Sharpe

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(2016), Simpson (2014), to name a few, Massumi argues that one’s way of being is
constantly in an emergent state of being and becoming. Echoing Maxine Greene’s
statement, “I am not yet” (Pinar 1998), Massumi discusses the ever-emergent pro-
cess of becoming. For example, students, teachers, and administrators are both inde-
pendently in a personal state of becoming while being affectively knotted with each
other and the sociohistorical systems of schooling. Being and becoming is therefore
deeply personal and necessarily relational. Ontogenetics is as much about space and
place as it is about relations, especially in places like schools where such factors are
knotted (Nespor 1997) with everyday experiences.
Second is Barad’s (1999) framing of the onto-epistemological. Barad argues that
emergent states of being are always embedded in socio-political ways of knowing
and therefore tied to ethical decisions that ultimately influence the onto-epistemo-
logical. In the example using the hidden curriculum,1 Barad might note that all peo-
ple are performative agents, making decisions on how to act, react and enact as local
actors within a school. By using the ontogenetic alongside the onto-epistemolog-
ical, I am underscoring the multiple ways that these scholars’ work recognizes an
individual’s onto-epistemology as both emergent and tied to the socio-political. For
example, as I have argued elsewhere (Wozolek 2012), although a mother’s ways of
being, knowing, and doing is nested with her child’s growth, it is also tied to socio-
cultural, historical, and political understandings of m/othering. In other words, who
we are is always “not yet” and emergent in a socio-political process.
Although African American intellectual traditions have been helpful in contem-
porary scholarship as a foundational step toward complicating questions of school-
ing (Brown and Brown 2010; Gordon 1993; Grant et al. 2015), these traditions tend
to be addressed through arguments that focus on students’ ways of knowing. After
all, it is posed as an “intellectual tradition” and, despite the contemporary disman-
tling of the Cartesian split, the tradition still tends to be used in epistemological
frameworks. For example, in some educational contexts, African American intel-
lectual traditions are used to address questions of achievement and policies (e.g.,
Harper et  al. 2009; Perry et  al. 2004) rather than ontological possibilities for stu-
dents of color.
While there are several examples of these traditions being used to talk about
ontologies, particularly in critical feminist traditions, the use of African American
historical scholarship tends to be used through an epistemological rather than onto-
logical lens. Yet, the nested and layered complications of what we know and who
we are is central to African American intellectual traditions. As it will be discussed
in detail later in this article, authors like DuBois and Woodson often discussed ways
of knowing through ontological scopes. The framing of ontology and epistemology
as being knotted (Barad 1999) in this case is significant as scholars like Cooper,
Bethune, Truth, DuBois and Woodson also argued for the messiness of knowing and
being within a socio-political context.

1
  The hidden curriculum, or the cultural norms and values that underscore schools, is used here not only
through Jackson’s (1968) arguments of compliance to culture but also Apple’s (1971) hidden norms and
values.

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One possible way to address these knotted understandings within our contem-
porary moment, particularly within feminist traditions, is through the constructs of
intersectionality (Crenshaw 1991; Yuval-Davis 2006). This is because intersection-
ality provides a lens that focuses on questions of race, gender, and schooling in ways
that destabilize normalized identities of whiteness and considers identities of school-
ing through counternarratives, or critiques of dominant constructions of meaning
expressed in the lived experiences of marginalized peoples. However, as Puar (2013)
argues, “intersectionality always produces an Other… who must invariably be seen
as resistant, subversive or articulating a grievance” (p. 53). In this construction, the
other that is produced is the complex intersection of identities of individuals and
groups that are already marginalized.
In the production of the Other in schools, women of color and queer youth of
color tend to be particularly impacted and further marginalized for their narratives
and everyday interactions within the systems of schooling. This is not to say that
dialogue on intersectionality is not resonant within the scope of imagining educa-
tional utopias: Quite the opposite, as intersectionality, and understanding the ways
it unintentionally creates Others, is central to unpacking marginalization in schools.
Transgressing historical and current trends in schooling means acknowledging the
systematic and ongoing Othering of marginalized populations to imagine new pos-
sibilities. By recognizing the limitations of intersectionality, it can be used in dia-
logues as a tool to correct the all-to-familiar epistemological violence (Puar 2013)
taken against marginalized populations.
In conjunction with intersectionality, Puar (2013) offers Deleuze and Guattari’s
(1987) construction of assemblages as a critical framework to undergird conversa-
tions on ways of being, knowing, and how they interact through intersectional dia-
logues. Puar (2013) writes that “intersectionality attempts to comprehend political
institutions and their attendant forms of social normativity…while assemblages, in
an effort to reintroduce politics into the political, asks what is prior to and beyond
what gets established” (p. 60). Similar to Barad’s (2003) discussion of performative
metaphysics, where matter is not considered through its being but by its doing, Puar
(2013) conceptualizes the framework of assemblages through the human and non-
human interactions where the assemblage is employed as a complex set of sociocul-
tural, political, historical and deeply personal interactive crossings. Keeping in mind
Haraway’s (1985) Manifesto for Cyborgs a theoretical possibility that was contested
in feminist spaces for the human-nonhuman binary the cyborg image creates, Puar
argues that the framework of assemblages and the image of the cyborg push at what
the body signifies rather than how it was materialized. In this space, assemblages
and cyborgs are explored not for what they are but for what they represent.
To be clear, this is not an argument that people exist like cyborgs. As Chude-
Sokei (2015) argues, the characterization of people of color through this lens tends
to reinscribe the very racialization and dehumanization that the cyborg metaphor
is meant to disrupt and dismantle. Black feminists, especially those whose daily
experiences include the normalization of rape, might critique a conflation of human
and non-human parts to describe on one’s way of being, particularly as these parts
land on and between bodies. In the context of this paper, this critique of the cyborg
is consciously noted and used in conjunction with assemblages to discuss parts of

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being that exist on, with, and near bodies as a framework to critique social insti-
tutions. This is particularly necessary for students in urban schools who are often
reduced to the bottom line of neoliberal education, caught between being repre-
sented as a test score and be-ing in schools with minimal funds that were crafted
through sociohistorical and political policies that intentionally enacted inequitable
funding models in and for cities (Harvey 1973; McKittrick and Woods 2007) and
their schools (Helfenbein and Huddleston 2013).
Whether it’s through a post-human or critical feminist lens, assemblages are often
complicated through the experiences of marginalized people and groups. An exam-
ple of the complication of assemblages can be found in a narrative inquiry study I
conducted in 2016 in India. There I spent time listening to women who were victims
of domestic violence and were currently residing at the only running women’s shel-
ter in the state. In the context of this shelter, there were multiple pathways to cul-
turally normalized violence against women’s bodies and minds that impacted their
ways of being and knowing. Similar to Ahmed’s (2010) discussion of affect exist-
ing in, on, and between bodies, violence was a medium through which sociocultural
norms and values negatively affected and impacted these women, their young chil-
dren, and their extended families.
It is important to note that the purpose is not to compare the context of domestic
violence victims in India to the continuing violence against African Americans in
the United States. Rather, the reason I have used this study is to show how vio-
lence exists across contexts and cultures, falling intentionally on particular bodies
and beings as a form of social, interpersonal, and political control. Although I have
written about violence against queer ways of being (Wozolek 2018a; Wozolek et al.
2016) and youth of color (Wozolek in press), there is significance in using an inter-
national context to think about the multiple ways violence proliferates and is entan-
gled in everyday interactions in the United States and subsequently its schools.

Forming a Violent Assemblage with/in Shame: An Indian Context

Aside from the appalling physical treatment the Indian women who lived at the
shelter received in their homes, many explained that simply moving out was not an
option as their husbands would harass the woman in her new home, or temporary
location (such as her parent’s house) until the family would, out of shame, send her
back to her husband to avoid what ranged from daily calls, to he or his family and
friends shouting loudly outside the house until she was sent home. These are exam-
ples where, despite the husband’s violent actions, it was the woman who felt pub-
licly shamed through loud displays of a husband’s legal and marital possession of
the woman. She became culturally culpable for his violence if she ignored these dis-
plays and he could use the public attention to garner community support. This was
not support of the violence but support of marital vows and sociocultural norms.
Not unlike Bourdieu’s (1973) discussion on cultural capital, where people uti-
lize non-financial forms of resources to gain social, economic and cultural sta-
tus, here the men utilized what I call a capital of shame to force women to return
home. Capitals of shame are how those with privilege and power negatively employ

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sociocultural norms and values that at once cultivate criteria for shaming, then uti-
lize those criteria as a means to declare people or groups publicly noticeable in their
incompetence or impotence across all manner of interactions, possibilities, and/or
ways of being, knowing, and/or doing.
In this specific model, capital of shame is a construction where the man’s ability
to shame a woman extends to family. Her decision for physical or emotional safety
became tied to familial and patriarchal shame and this shame would in turn mean
some kind of physical or emotional punishment—either through returning home
or being social excluded by not fulfilling her familial obligations. However, given
that the shelter existed outside of the men’s personal or familial reach, the husbands
lost their capital of shame and often did not attempt to force the shelter to send the
women back home. Shame became a significant aspect in the daily interactions that
these women experienced which formed what can be understood as an assemblage
imbued with social, emotional, and physical violence.
If, as Puar’s framework of assemblages asserts, an assemblage is a metaphor for
considering the complex, entangled interrelations of things, ecologies, ideas, and
ideals, then, “assemblages of violence” (Wozolek 2018b) can serve as a framework
to describe the overlapping parts that normalize physical, verbal, and emotional
atrocities like those experienced by women at the shelter. Additionally, if, as Barad
(2003) argues, categories like being, like race, gender, and sexuality are events, then
the culmination of violent interactions are encounters between bodies, in ways that
conspire to create an event-ness of identity.
Although this may seem like a step too far, Massumi’s (2002) retelling and
analysis of an incident of domestic violence is but one example of the process and
events that constitute assemblages of violence. In this event, a woman is beaten for
interrupting a husband who was watching a sporting event on television. While the
recounting the exact details of this story is not as significant as attending to the clash
of sociocultural norms and values permitted the incident to occur, what is resonant
is the way that the assemblage of violence facilitated the event itself in the entangle-
ments of being, both human and non-human, in that moment. As Massumi explains,
the context is an entanglement of not only the couple and their histories, it is punctu-
ated by non-human factors like the television and the room.
Not unlike Weheliye’s (2014) dialogue on racializing assemblages, which “con-
strues race as a sociopolitical process” (p. 4), assemblages of violence represent,
among other things, the (in)visible modalities through which the normalization of
dehumanization is practiced and lived. For example, whether the violence it is seen,
heard, felt, or tasted, the entangled networks of pain remain: violence is painful and
such pain is an inescapable part of a violent event. Assemblages of violence attend
to what is seen and what is felt across the senses, the multisensual-ness of dehuman-
ization. It is this attention to the physical and emotional bruises that emerge in these
women’s narratives and the scars it leaves on their ways of being. A representation
of how they could possibly be, know, and inter-act in the world.
Additionally, through my work with this group, it became clear that assem-
blages of violence are sociocultural and practical tools that women could both use
and feel. Much like Wynter’s use of critical feminisms to examine assemblages,
assemblages of violence retain the possibility to step out of and even work against

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assigned categories and constructions that are necessarily generated from patriarchal
understandings.
Returning to the narratives of Indian women, where participants described mov-
ing back and forth between the shelter and their outside lives, the women who lived
in the shelter often had daily lives that were diametrically opposed to local and less
local sociocultural expectations, norms and values. This is because by utilizing the
shelter over familial ties to escape violence, they were cutting against the husband’s
capital of shame. Though the assemblages in which they were entangled were indel-
ibly entwined with acts of violence and the cultural ideals that engendered and
maintained such actions and reactions, the agency of these women to move against,
and in some cases past, these norms is also imbricated in their assemblages. The
construction assemblages of violence therefore attends not just to processes of being
and becoming under hostilities but also to the possible outcomes of resistance to
such aggressions. It is a process of making and remaking something that is and is
not still. An empirical articulation of sociocultural norms and values that affect and
are affected by violence, the, as Gershon (2013a) writes, beingknowingdoing of liv-
ing with/in violence in the global south, an inescapable assemblage of violence.
Reflecting on the assemblages of violence that have affected our systems of
schooling and our sociocultural norms and values is an examination into “what is
prior” (Puar 2013, p. 60). Imagining educational utopias cannot begin until the his-
torical components that have normalized violence in schools and in broader social
contexts against people of color has been analyzed. Much like the assemblages of
violence that normalized brutality against the women in India, assemblages of vio-
lence play out in the classrooms, corridors and schoolyards across the United States.
They exist because of the interactions of these political and historical parts that have
engendered racialized aggression. Transgressing these assemblages starts with an
analysis of African American intellectual traditions.

Sankofa: (Re)Imagining Educational Beings from Historical

Narratives

Sankofa:
Se wo were fi na wosankofa a yenkyi
It is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten.
(The Spirituals Project at the University of Denver 2004)
Scholars within African American intellectual traditions provide arguments
and activism that functioned to fight against sociocultural norms and values that
socially excluded people of color while excusing constant psychological and
physical violence toward brown and black bodies. Perhaps more significantly
to the charge of Afrofuturisms, and a way of pushing back on the assemblages
that function to normalize hatred and aggression, scholars within this tradition
worked to normalize blackness itself. This construction of socioculturally nor-
malized blackness spans from ways of being to ways of knowing within commu-
nities of color and broader social contexts. When envisioning the possibilities of

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schooling, examining this work is central to understanding “what was” in educa-

tion and how these scholars used their present context to see their own Afrofutur-
istic educational possibilities.
In order to grasp the significance of Afrofuturism in educational utopias, a reflec-
tion on foundational scholars’ understandings of the multiple ways schooling is
central to broader norms and values is important. Scholars like Anna Julia Cooper,
Mary McLeod Bethune, W.E.B. DuBois and Cater G. Woodson engaged in a vari-
ety of issues from women’s rights to racial equity, from sociopolitical segregation
to curricular criticism. For example, Cooper’s (1892) work clearly articulates the
necessity for women to be represented in positions of power in educational systems,
from the schoolhouse to the academy. She does so by drawing parallels between the
inequities in education as they relate to women and African American’s role in poli-
tics, the economy and sociocultural norms.
DuBois (1903) similarly attends to questions of racial prejudice and its impact
on African American individuals as well as its influence on sociocultural values.
For example, DuBois asserts that curricular policies and practices, particularly those
of Booker T. Washington, are counterproductive to sustainable changes in racial
progress. Finally, continuing a trajectory in many ways set by Cooper and DuBois,
Woodson (1933) offers a criticism of the educational system for African Americans
that was layered in social critique of the boundaries and borders people of color
faced at the time. Woodson’s arguments about possible trajectories for education and
his nuanced attention to social reform that was central to people of color and cur-
ricular challenges not only hold true today but are in many ways practical expres-
sions of Cooper and DuBois’ arguments that were made before and in tandem with
Woodson’s work.
What these scholars provided were counternarratives, long before counternarra-
tives were conceived in their contemporary sense, that necessitated questions of
equity and access in schools. Specifically, scholars like Cooper, Bethune, DuBois
and Woodson all wrote counternarratives that served to exist against the current
“racial imagery during this time in K-12 texts and academic discourse” (Brown and
Brown 2010, p. 60). To this end, the texts considered here are foundational exam-
ples of oppositional discourse that draw on exceptionally progressive pedagogies for
their time that proposed cultural and educational shifts.
These texts were not only foundational and progressive in their content and tim-
ing, but the significance of this work and their resonance with contemporary prob-
lems in schooling have, to a large degree, been overlooked in educational histories
and reviews. This is not to say that these voices have been historically lost. Scholars
such as Grant and Sleeter (1986), Gordon (1993), Winfield (2007), Watkins (2001),
Berry (2010), and Brown and Au (2014), to name a few, have built upon the work
of these foundational scholars to continue dialogues of resistance, resilience, equity
and access within schools. Further, foundational theorists have used this work to
explicate the contemporary experiences of students of color (e.g., Berry 2010; Ger-
shon 2013b; Wozolek in press). However, to some degree, what has been lost is a
focus on how this scholarship reflexively looked at the contexts that surrounded their
writing as a means to engender black ontologies as central to schooling and there-
fore as a backdrop to broader sociocultural ideas and ideals.

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How do schools affect our ways of being and, in turn, how do our ways of being
affect broader systems of schooling? The answer to these interrelated questions
exists in iterations and recursions where the student is an acting agent on the system
of schooling and schooling exists in-action (Schwab 1969) with the student’s ways
of being and knowing. A longstanding dialogue to this point exists across educa-
tional literatures (Cooper 1892; Jackson 1968; Truth 1851; Watkins 2001; Winfield
2007). The roots of these arguments can be traced back to scholars like Woodson
(1933), who wrote that schools doom children of color to lives of vagabondage
and crime, and Cooper (1892) who expressed concern about the many ways that
schools imprint negative ideals of femininity and submission on girls. Additionally,
literatures like those that focus on the forms of curricula (particularly the hidden
and enacted curricula) tend to unpack the how students affect school ecologies and
systems (Apple 1971; Nespor 1997; Schwab 1969). As Schwab (1969) expressed,
within these recursions schools exists in-action with its parts, including content and
local actors who live the everyday of schooling.
The study of ontology has taken a prominent role in contemporary educational
scholarship, particularly over the past 20  years (e.g.: Au 2012; Eisner 1992; Ger-
shon 2013a; Kincheloe 2003; Pinar 2014; Weenie 2008). Through understanding
the facets of one’s being that are simultaneously a sociocultural and personal con-
struction, or a person’s “is-ness” (Gershon 2013b), scholars can more effectively
unpack the multiple, nested layers between individual and group relationships. For
example, because the hidden curriculum is the underlying culture of norms, values,
and beliefs that are taught in and through school ecologies (Apple 1971; Giroux and
Penna 1983; Jackson 1968), the study of ontology becomes central to understanding
how the hidden curriculum affects one’s ways of being and, in turn, how one’s being
affects the broader hidden curriculum.
Woodson (1933) provides a salient example of the onto-epistemological framing
within the hidden curriculum when he argues that the educational system justifies
“slavery, peonage, segregation and lynching” (p. 5). He continues by stating that
“if you control a man’s thinking, you do not have to worry about his actions…He
will find his ‘proper place’ and will stay in it” (p. 5). Woodson is arguing that by
controlling what one knows, one also controls parts of a person’s way of being. In
addition, he is evoking an image of social responsibility for the development of an
onto-epistemology that elicits oppression over people of color.
One’s way of being is therefore emergently dependent on sociopolitical control
and the way she decides to respond to such power. This is similar to DeLanda’s
(2006) discussion on the braided roles of assemblages on one’s ontology. DeLanda
offers female refugees or children diagnosed with behavior disorders as examples
of how labels, social expectations and perceptions, and historical contexts form
the assemblages that affect one’s ontology. Woodson’s image of control is but one
example of how assemblages of violence use these overlapping and interacting parts
to predetermine one’s “proper place” in schools and society. To Woodson’s point,
the interaction between marginalizing parts has strong historical implications and
actions in “controlling a man’s thinking”.
While Foucault (1978) argues that there is no outside of power, the discussion
within the onto-epistemological is more closely related to Ortner’s (2006) discussion

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on power and agency. Ortner argues that while local actors may never find an out-
side to institutionalized power, they have a degree of agency that allows them to
act within such structures to enact some degree of change or create space for one’s
being. To this end, the individual has the ability to enact wiggle room within the
system in order to make significant decisions about responding and living within
such institutions. Again, much like assemblages interacted with and were a part of
the women in the shelter, African American scholars have longstanding histories of
attending to the agency that is central to responding to normalized violence (e.g.,
hooks 1994; Watkins 2001; Weheliye 2014; Woodson 1933) in schools.
Cooper’s (1892) scholarship varies from Woodson and DuBois in regards to the
ontogenetic and the onto-epistemological. She argues that women “can think as well
as feel, and who feel none the less because they think” (p. 50). This argument on one
hand discusses the onto-epistemological facets of knowing and being and, on the
other, touches on affect as layered within one’s ways of knowing and being. Coop-
er’s work, like Bethune’s (1938) Clarifying our Vision with the Facts, posits affec-
tive tensions in, between and through bodies, groups and cultures as knotted within
the onto-epistemological. This is not to say that DuBois and Woodson do not attend
to affect. However female scholars of color, like Cooper, Bethune and Truth, uti-
lized affective understandings in their construction of counternarratives that served
to “recount in accurate detail the story of the Negro population and…its societal
contributions” (Bethune 1938, p. 3). As hooks (1999) argues, it was through such
narratives that women of color worked to promote a “fundamental goal of liberation
for all people”2 (hooks 1999, p. 9).
These counternarratives not only deconstruct historical ideals of equity and
access, particularly as they relate to schooling but they are deeply entwined with
assemblages of violence and the intersectional dialogue that imbricates such assem-
blages. A poignant example of these dialogues can be found in DuBois (1903) argu-
ment for a double consciousness. Through this term, DuBois is arguing that through
understanding the psycho-social divisions of one’s identity, one can analyze social
injustices that cause the double-binds of one’s way of being. This is not unlike
Woodson’s (1933) description of the multiple ways of being an African American.
Similar to DuBois point on double consciousness, Woodson argues that the experi-
ence of being “African American” often resides in the challenges of being “African”
and “American”, a social construction that is often complicated by questions of class
and sociocultural ideals.
Cooper (1892) engaged in dialogue in and around assemblages through slightly
different inroads than DuBois and Woodson. In A Voice from the South Cooper
does not parse her identity in order to make her arguments. Rather, Cooper, much
like Sojourner Truth (1851) in her speech Ain’t I a Woman, utilizes the intersection
of feminist thought with critical race dialogues of the time to discuss educational

2
  To be clear, I am using hooks (1999) work here as a means to point out how scholars within the Afri-
can American intellectual tradition, particularly women attended to questions of inclusion within social
justice movements. It is not a parallel to tensions within the #alllivesmatter or #blacklivesmatter move-
ments.

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practices as they relate to broader social contexts. The messiness of intersectionality

and the framework of the sociopolitical aggressions that constitute assemblages con-
tinues to resonate in the scholarship of women of color such as hooks (1999), Lorde
(1984), McKittrick (2015) and Minh-ha (1989).
As such, there is a tradition of feminists attending to intersectional and assem-
blage dialogues that is significant not only in their scholarship toward intersectional
ends but also in their specific attention to intersectionality as a complex mess, as
inseparable facets of being and knowing is significant (e.g.: Cooper 1892; Bethune
1938; McKittrick 2015; Min-ha 1989; Truth 1851). While there are debatably mul-
tiple ingresses toward these intersectional dialogues (e.g.: indigenous studies, femi-
nist studies, queer theory), here I am attending to complex intersectional dialogues
through the feminist lens within the African American intellectual tradition. This is
because there is importance in the way that traditional feminists of color constructed
questions of identity and intersectionality by attending to self, affect, and knowing
as a messy state of becoming.
As scholars become more critical of intersectional work, inherent tensions arise
within identity politics (Crenshaw 1991; Keith and Pile 2004; Malewski 2009). By
this I mean that questions about who has the power to determine the relevancy of
another individual’s experiences, who can identify with particular ways of being and
what parts of being are necessary for “good” intersectional scholarship has become
folded into the discourse. These dialogues through the feminist lens, particularly
within the traditional roots of the African American intellectual tradition, avoid
these pitfalls of identity politics by honoring the messy nature of being and knowing
with an understanding that one’s being is significant as it is resonant to her experi-
ences, rather than relevant to a field.
While scholars like Cooper wrote about identities as an imbricated whole, other
scholars tended toward thinking of ways of being as a series of identities that were
in parallel play. As previously discussed, DuBois’ (1903) discussion on double-
consciousness is but one example of scholarly ontological divisions. Another salient
example can be found in Frederick Douglass’ (1855) autobiography, My bondage
and my freedom, when he writes about opening his eyes for the first time to the
cruelty of slavery and, in particular, the violence of his old master and explains that
brutality was “a part of the system, rather than a part of the man” (p. 35). Con-
versely, female scholars of color at the time identified with an onto-epistemological
framing, where local actors are as responsible for their role in the system as the sys-
tem is for maintaining sociocultural oppression.
The framework of assemblages of violence, specifically as local actors in school-
ing use their capital of shame to marginalize youth of color, is particularly reso-
nant within this historically seminal literature because of the multiple ingresses and
interactions with racialized ideas and ideals that were and continue to be normal-
ized. As I have written elsewhere (Wozolek 2015a, b), resistance to assemblages of
violence that both physically and emotionally impact students are both a reaction to
the violence itself but to the shame enacted against students of color for their ways
of being and knowing. The act of “controlling a man’s thinking,” through systems
of schooling can be physically and psychologically based. It is carried out as much
through policing and surveillance in schools as it is through a capital of shame that

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emotionally affects youth of color. This framework of assemblages and shame is cer-
tainly not absent in African American intellectual traditions. Further, questions of
racist social normativity that play out in violent interactions in schools is not only
present in this literature but is central to ideals of justice that are threaded through-
out this tradition.
Afrofuturisms compliments the African American intellectual tradition as we
move away from what was and toward “what is” or “what might be” in schools. This
is because it resonates with historical and political questions that are fundamental to
this tradition while inter-acting with the heterogeneous parts that engender assem-
blages of violence. Further, Afrofuturisms illuminate the sets of possibilities that
are central to educational imaginations in a way that is unique to prospects within
popular cultural that are built from Afro-historical wonderings. Afrofuturisms can
be understood as a kind of imaginative assemblages through which futures are con-
sidered in ways that are counternarratives to contemporary injustices. These coun-
ternarratives are examined through assemblages of violence and schooling below.

Connecting Afrofuturisms to the Classroom

“Not exactly crushed.”

“I know, but that seemed to be a good word to use on them – to show my igno-
rance. It wasn’t all that accurate either. They wanted me to tell them how such
a thing could happen. I said I didn’t know… kept telling them I didn’t know.
And heaven help me, Dana, I don’t know.”
“Neither do I,” I whispered, “Neither do I” (Butler 1974, p. 11)
Assemblages of violence exist across contexts and systems of schooling. They are
the human and non-human interactions that engender and maintain raced and racist
paradigms of education and the daily interactions that are normalized under racist
ideals and values. The function of these assemblages has not changed since African
American scholars like Anna Julia Cooper or Carter G. Woodson used their cultural
capital to argue against the sociocultural preservation of these assemblages. Assem-
blages of violence in the context of schooling serve to excuse racialized hostilities,
and devalue female, black, and brown ontologies of color. This is often enacted
through the use of teacher, administrator, and Anglo students’ capital of shame. The
consistent tensions between police officers and students of color serve as but one
example of assemblages of violence being played out in schools. Although these
violent assemblages have been discussed across contexts in this paper, it should be
noted that there is a longstanding history of such violence being engendered and
maintained in urban schools. Not unlike the assemblages of violence that maintain
normalized brutalities against women in India, assemblages of violence function in
urban schools through the confluence of historical, political, and cultural norms and
values.
The assemblage is as much the interaction of the police officer, who was not
taught to value black lives in schools, as it is the current curriculum that has pressed
the student of color into the event. It is at once the audience, many of whom record

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the event on their phones not as documentation but as part of the spectacle as it is
the affective tensions that stick and preserve racism in that moment and moments
that follow. As I have argued elsewhere (Wozolek 2018b), the impact of these
assemblages can be physical and emotional, epistemological and ontological, and
can stick on the bodies of students and broader social norms indefinitely. Schools
function as the multi-sensual assemblage of violence that enacts and maintains the
dehumanization of students of color through what we learn and how we learn it.
Afrofuturisms are one possible venue through which schooling can be reimagined
through assemblages where black and brown lives matter. Afrofuturisms, a term first
coined by Dery (2008) in his essay Black to the Future, imbricates questions of race
and futuristic fiction. Afrofuturistic scholarship seeks to connect historical dialogues
and studies of African diasporic culture with science fiction, historical fiction, fan-
tasy, and magic realism (Womack 2013). In the scope of this paper, it is significant
to note that “Afrofuturism” is not confined to popular culture in cinema and litera-
ture but instead encompasses the arts as a whole and extends to the wide array of the
arts, including new medias, visual arts, music and performing arts. This is important
because although some branches of Afrofuturism scholarship predominantly cri-
tiques fiction, particularly for its dominant White, male contributions (Morris 2012),
Afrofuturism as envisioned through a broader arts-based perspective tends to be
centered on larger historical questions of voice, power, and reflexivity (Eshun 2003;
Morris 2012; Nelson 2002; Womack 2013; Yasek 2006). Afrofuturisms in this con-
text is used through a “both/and” rather than a “neither/nor” of arts that critique
past, present, and future possibilities for people of color.
One example of this “both/and” inclusion of ideas can be found in Morris’ (2012)
argument that Afrofuturisms can exist in dialogue with critical black feminist schol-
arship. Morris writes that both Afrofuturism and black feminisms can “affirm,
rearticulate, and provide a vehicle for expressing a public consciousness that quite
often already exists while…[examining] the possibilities that open up when black-
ness is linked to futurity” (p. 153). Imagining educational futures at the intersection
of black feminisms and Afrofuturisms is critical because it seeks to reimagine edu-
cation from voices that have visibility achieved that which might be unfathomable
from some historical perspectives. One only need to reflect on Soujourner Truth’s
(1851) seminal speech, Ain’t I a Woman?, or Anna Julia Cooper’s (1892), A Voice
from the South, to know how blackness and womanhood have been articulated as
significant while being culturally and historically shamed over time.
The conversation between Afrofuturisms and black feminist scholarship (both his-
torical and contemporary) is used here to envision schooling as a space for a polyph-
ony of voices (Bakhtin and Holquist 1981) that resides in simultaneous resonance
and dissonance with each other and sociocultural future possibilities. Therefore, as
explored earlier in this article, to find “how such a thing [can] happen” (Butler 1974,
p. 11), the roots of black intellectual thought and schooling were articulated as a
foundation for futuristic possibilities.
Like African American intellectual traditions, Afrofuturisms functions to reclaim
histories rooted in the diaspora through counternarratives (Eshun 2003; Morris
2012). Though there are many examples of how these counternarratives are reso-
nant with African American intellectual traditions and schools as they exist today

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and may exist tomorrow, here I focus on two salient examples of how schools might
reimagined through an Afrofuturistic lens-science and art. While sociocultural shifts
toward equity are central to both the African American intellectual tradition and
Afrofuturisms, Afrofuturism scholarship and art tend to focus on connections to
popular culture and, more specifically, to themes often found in the realm of science
fiction. This emphasis on the nexus of science, technology, and the arts is significant
because it reclaims the important role of people of color3 in historically grounded,
scientific achievements (Ramírez 2008) in schools and broader contexts.
Much like Gill Scott-Heron’s (1970) Whitey on the Moon that resisted the socio-
cultural norm in the “space race that showed us which race space was for” (Bould
2007), or Marvel’s recent reboot of the Ironman series with Ironheart, Afrofuturistic
dialogues have repossessed science spaces for people of color in popular culture.
Given the achievement gap that negatively impacts students of color across subjects
but particularly in the sciences (Howard 2015; Flores 2007), an attention to Afrofu-
turistic dialogues in schools and teacher education programs becomes salient in an
attempt to reimagine schooling. One only needs to recall the extreme dearth of sci-
entists of color that are a core part of the K-12 curriculum, let alone the female sci-
entists of color who are generally absent from what is taught, and therefore valued,
in schools. Images like that of Shuri, the young princess and accomplished scientist
in the Black Panther series is but one example of imagining blackness (and more
specifically black feminisms through Afrofuturistc images) that are positive for stu-
dents and communities of color.
In addition to an emphasis on science fiction as an expression of social imagin-
ings, Afrofuturistic art often recounts tales of diasporic pasts as a historical reminder
that envisions the future. Carrie Mae Weems’ Ebo Landing, Ellen Gallagher’s Pre-
serve, and the murals of Joshua Mays are but a few examples visual art that pulls
the observer into future realms through past and present contexts. In schools, there
is an all-too-familiar absence of art that focuses on diasporic narratives and value
black aesthetics and histories, a point raised by DuBois (1926) and continued by
scholars like Gordon (1993) and Ladson-Billings (2009). Attending to Afrofuturistic
arts again resists white curricula that is an erasure of black cultures, aesthetics, and
histories. In short, Afrofuturism art expresses blackness as normal. As it has been
historically argued, it is difficult to value blackness if it is absent from schools and
other social contexts (e.g., Bethune 1938; Douglass 1855; hooks 1994; Lorde 1984;
Woodson 1933). The African American intellectual tradition imaged “blackness as
usual” in schools. Afrofuturisms picks up on this notion and reclaims schooling as a
site of possibilities born from diasporic histories and narratives.

3
  Although the focus of this paper is on the contribution of Afrofuturisms to sociocultural norms and
values, “people of color” is still used broadly as the contribution of all groups of color to several fields
has been historically marginalized in the United States.

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Conclusion: Cyborgs and Classrooms

When Haraway (1985) and Puar (2013), argue for the inclusion of cyborgs as an
image that reimagines the possibilities of being through human and non-human
parts, they presciently articulated a moment where the complexities of being call
for a multiplicity of intersections and assemblages. Similarly, the everyday of
schooling for students of color exists in a moment that is an assemblage of its
sociopolitical and historical parts. This assemblage of violence is not new, nor
is the consistently wielded capital of shame that opens up spaces and places for
its existence. Speaking broadly about culture in the United States, assemblages
of violence have historically had both physical and emotional manifestations on
black and brown individuals and groups. To the point of scholars within African
American intellectual traditions, and as these points have been continued by criti-
cal contemporary scholars, assemblages of violence start in the school room and
continue with deadly resonances in the daily lives of marginalized peoples.
Afrofuturisms, as it can be imagined in the classroom, picks up and maintains
both the counternarratives about race and education and the incarnations of a class-
room that attends to such narratives. Afrofuturistic dialogues in education are at
once grounded in black feminist ideals while attending to contemporary conversa-
tions of reimagining what schooling can be from its historical roots. This is sig-
nificant because, just as Woodson worked to write a curriculum that was centered
on black intellectual achievements and Bethune argued for black epistemologies to
undergird schooling, Afrofuturisms can take up a path set by these scholars that has
been obstructed by the violent assemblages that pervade whiteness in schools.
To these ends, I have intentionally not articulated what a utopian educational
paradigm might be in this article as I feel it has already been well-articulated
through African American intellectual traditions. From the curriculum theoriz-
ing to the formal curriculum to be enacted in schools, the work has already been
done. Although this work can be easily (re)imagined through Afrofuturisms,
attention to the carefully articulated historical scholarship from the “mothership”
of men and women of color is important. Arguing for educational utopias without
such attention unintentionally marginalizes over 110  years of black voices who
have already articulated utopian schooling and society that is centered on the his-
tories and narratives of people of color.
If, to return to the question that started this article, we were to ask what school-
ing would be if educators and politicians alike truly believed and acted like black
and brown lives mattered, how might the field be different? Could assemblages
of violence be transgressed or would they still exist in other forms in schools?
Transgressing assemblages of violence means an attention to the imbricated parts
that are nested in the assemblage. In schools, these parts are historical, socio-
cultural and always deeply political. They are a product of their human and non-
human parts and therefore students’ ways of being are wrapped up in the assem-
blages, the cyborgs that exist with/in classrooms and corridors. Perhaps the more
appropriate question might be: When black lives matter, what will be the assem-
blages, the cyborgs, of schooling?

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