danSing for another world: Memory a/r/t/s work as creative response

Abstract

This onto-epistemic experimental essay is a modest attempt to imagine another world yet to come in a time of what David Theo Goldberg calls “dread.” To interrogate the unnamable feeling/texture the author’s body wants to be free from, memories of the author, an artist/researcher/teacher/student, are explored poetically and critically as a “creative response” called for by Alexander Means. Poems, photographs, and a student ID card are employed in this memory work, procreating an affective becoming space called danSing. This essay argues that things do not need to be this way, and things could be otherwise. What Hannah Tavares calls “experimental communities” of a graduate school in Hawai’i have made this creative response thinkable, desirable, imaginable, and possible.

Keywords:

• Embodiment
• desire
• hybridity
• multiplicity
• creativity
• experimental communities
• teaching

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I use scare quotes to bring attention to the I, which is made of fluidity, multiplicity, and hybridity but essentialized in authoritarian states. Scare quotes aim to unsettle the naturalness given to the use of ‘I.’ What is ‘I,’ how is it constructed, how is it used (by whom), and what does it do? Butler (2012) argues,“This ‘I’ may not be as knowing about itself as it claims, and it may well be true that the only terms by which this ‘I’ grasps itself are those that belong to a discourse that precedes and informs thought without any of us being able fully to grasp its working and its effect. And since values are defined and distributed through modes of power whose authority must be questioned, I am in a certain bind. Do I establish myself in the terms that would make my life valuable, or do I offer a critique of the reigning order of values?”. (p. 11)

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yuko Ida

Yuko Ida is a PhD student in the Department of Educational Foundations (EDEF) at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa (UHM). Yuko holds an ME.d. from EDEF at UHM and a B.A. from the University of the Ryukyus in Okinawa. While in college, she studied philosophy at ʻAtenisi Institute in the Kingodom of Tonga as an exchange student. Yuko was a public elementary school teacher in Okinawa and Nagoya, Japan prior to her graduate study in Hawaiʻi.