2009 ASTR Conference

by Ric Knowles, University of Guelph

I’ve been asked to speak from a Canadian position, so I’ll start, as an epigraph, with a line by that great Canadian Neil Young sung on a recent album in his archetypally Canadian high-pitched whine: “there’s a bailout comin’ but it’s not for me.”

I want to be clear about what I understand “the current climate” in our title to be: it’s a social and economic crisis precipitated by the collapse under its own weight of rampant capitalism and consolidated as a crisis by our collective failure to take the opportunity provided by that collapse to abolish a system that has despoiled most of the population of the world, human and non-human, and by our decision, rather, to prop up its corpse through an enormous investment of funds that have never been available for social programs, child poverty, or AIDS in Africa, and by further attacks on the workforce and its unions.

That said, I would like to address some of the questions about the “current climate” and its applications from where I sit within the Canadian academy, and I will do so more anecdotally than have my some of my colleagues on the panel—in part because I sometimes wonder whether the rush to acquire empirical evidence in the current “knowledge economy” might be part of the problem around the increasing corporatization of the University. This type of statistical empiricism and knowledge management has long been suspect in the arts and humanities, and in relation to questions of cultural difference, in particular, it raises many red flags for me at a time when many are attempting to decolonize methodologies. In any case, I have some stories that I think may be representative:

1. In the immediate wake of the economic downturn, my home university almost immediately dropped our Women’s Studies program, in spite of the fact that the savings realized in doing so were minimal: there were no faculty directly appointed to the program, its offerings being dependent upon faculty from other programs within the university. One secretary’s salary was saved, but the university was able to appear to be acting with “fiscal responsibility” while excising a politically troublesome program. The last time there was a financial crisis, it was our (politicized) Centre for Cultural Studies that was cut—in spite of the fact that the Centre actually brought more money in to the university in the form of grants than it cost the institution in office space or administrative support. No business or professional programs have ever been trimmed. These stories form part of a larger pattern in which crises are used, or manufactured, in order to discipline the institution into an acceptable corporate model of governance and compliance—to make infrastructural change, ideologically motivated, while evading charges of ideological pressure or the infringement of so-called academic freedom.

2. Also at my home institution we are losing the only faculty member of colour in our Theatre Studies program to another university. He is leaving in part because of the weight and unfair responsibility involved in being the only faculty member of colour, and in part because he wants to live and teach in a place where he has a community. This means that we will have even more trouble than we already have in attracting and retaining students who do not see themselves reflected at the front of the classroom, we will continue to draw suburban white students whose parents want them to be somewhere “safe” (ie, white)—and the cycle will continue. There is no money in this “climate” to replace this departing faculty member, so we will lose the position; but even if the funds were there, it is always a huge battle against the hegemonic, reproductive economy of hiring, promotion and tenure to attract, hire, and retain faculty of colour, and to allow them the privilege the rest of us have, once hired, to teach and research in whatever area they wish rather than in their own ghettoized corner of the the curriculum.

3. I was thrilled this year when an extraordinary Afro-Jamaican-Canadian dub poet, dub-theatre practitioner, playwright and performer came to Guelph to work with me as a graduate student on the history and practice of dub theatre. She is an outstanding intellect, a gifted practitioner, and a wonderful addition to any classroom or program lucky enough to have her. In recent weeks, however, she has been considering leaving the program (and the academy more generally), because of the fundamentally reproductive, capitalist economy of admission, tuition, evaluation, graduation, promotion and tenure that obtains within the academy. She is reluctant to endorse such a system through her participation, reluctant to submit herself as a docile subject of its performative disciplinarity, and understandably reluctant to bear the weight of the responsibility of trying to change such a system from within as one of its few rebellious subjects of colour who is unfairly charged, as a student, with teaching the rest of us.

4. I was discussing this student’s situation recently with Honor Ford Smith, founder of Jamaica’s Sistren theatre (and former teacher, in Jamaica, of the student’s mother), whose own doctoral dissertation at the University of Toronto I had been privileged to co-supervize. Honor is, as many of you will know, a genius. We talked about the student’s situation, and Honor spoke frankly about the ways in which gaining academic accreditation (which she herself did late in her career) was enabling, but also about the ways in which it inevitably involved unutterable loss, including a kind of loss of self. As she said, “it changes you.”

5. I have been in rehearsal recently with Floyd Favel, an accomplished Plains Cree theatre director from the Poundmaker reserve in Saskatchewan who is also an accomplished playwright and actor, whose voice and video image welcome visitors to the American Indian Museum on the mall in Washington DC. Floyd told me in a break in rehearsals that he had no faith in the formal education system, for anyone, but especially for his people, and that he favoured self-education and study with elders. He did not say, but I assumed that he was referring to the inevitability of the education system as it now stands to function in relation to Native peoples, at least, as an ongoing and powerful technology of colonization and continuing cultural genocide. Why do those of us who teach Native theatre in the academy—myself included—need to have PhDs and other insignia of colonial authority? Why aren’t we hiring elders to do this, folks who have not succumbed to the disciplinary rigours of the system? Elders don’t rely on charts, graphs, stats, and other technologies of the knowledge economy. They tell stories.

Taken together, these anecdotes have huge implications for what we teach, who chooses what we teach, who teaches it, how it is taught, who is in the classroom, and where “authority” rests. Some of these questions may seem familiar or theoretically old-fashioned—not on the cutting edge of scholarly or pedagogical concern. But I would argue that the current economic so-called “climate” has made them increasingly urgent because of the very retrenchments and exclusionary practices that crisis enables. And I would argue that these questions have everything to do with what we and our students are teaching, reading, and practicing. You can’t use the tools, voices, methodologies, authorities, and practices of the master to dismantle the master’s house; you can’t allow the methods, epistemologies, protocols and standards of the master to screen access to and success within an educational system that is fundamentally culturally reproductive, and then expect it to change. And as a white man disciplined in the colonizing knowledge economy I can’t without great difficulty teach an increasing body of work to which the settler-invader is simply irrelevant: it’s not simply about resistance or subversion any more; it’s not about “us.” What the “current climate” does, however, is place in stark relief—as did the near collapse of capitalism—the priorities, protectionisms, and power plays that are more veiled in more “liberal” moments of relative financial ease. That’s the best that can be said for it, and it is perhaps a place to start.

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