Introduction to "Becoming Undisciplined"

Introduction to "Becoming Undisciplined" Heather Houser (bio) and Stephanie LeMenager (bio) This Forum on "Becoming Undisciplined" inquires into a process. True to "becoming" rather than "being," the works in print and online at ASAP/J (https://asapjournal.com/) express ongoingness, incompleteness, even uncertainty. Taking the form of essays, interviews, self-writing, letters, maps, film, and visual and performance art, this Forum wonders what it means to veer from disciplinary strictures while thinking, creating, and envisioning change. "Discipline," as refracted through the contributors' lenses, comes to mean not only academic departments and fields but also genres, borders, judgment, policing, and categories and classifications, most importantly of race, gender, ability, sexuality, and professional status. Despite this variation and our refusal to situate this cluster in one field or even in more capacious rubrics of specific "studies" or "humanities," common threads emerge. Perhaps none is more dominant than a sense of imperilment or loss that calls in turn for disassembling the entrenched institutions and values that have created those conditions. This ensemble recognizes that, as ELAINE GAN remarks in her essay, "loss is differential, uneven." The pieces here tacitly offer diverse responses to GAN'S query, "With whose loss should I engage, and for whom would it matter?" Collecting these voices, this Forum continues a conversation that has specific origins for us as guest editors but that exceeds any single source. One origin point is heralded by our title: Christina Sharpe's stunning In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016), which demands of Black scholars and creatives, "We must become undisciplined." Sharpe asserts [End Page 21] Despite knowing otherwise, [Black academics] are often disciplined into thinking through and along lines that reinscribe our own annihilation, reinforcing and reproducing what Sylvia Wynter has called our "narratively condemned status." We must become undisciplined. The work we do requires new modes and methods of research and teaching; new ways of entering and leaving the archives of slavery.1 Dominant modes and methods emerge from antiblackness and contribute to what Sharpe refers to as "the Weather" of racial hatred and violence that persists two and a half centuries after Emancipation. Undisciplining feels this "Weather" and defies it, in the university and beyond.2 Sharpe's project is rooted in ongoing antiblackness. It finds good company with other scholars working in and against the enduring racism that structures knowledge production, just as it structures life and death. Two works that have inspired us extend the scope of undisciplining. Mel Chen's "'feral' approach to disciplinarity … changes the identity of what might be the proper archives for one's scholarship," and Tiffany Lethabo King's "shoaling effect" disrupts "the movement and flow—of time and space reflected in and narrated by Western disciplinary formations and their seminal texts."3 A politicized undisciplining emerges powerfully from Black, Indigenous, and queer thought. Yet another point of origin for this Forum stands at the intersection of art and science. Susan Merrill Squier's Epigenetic Landscapes: Drawings as Metaphor (2017) defies categorization as it performs what it commends: "[I]t is brave indeed to wander across disciplines looking for that educational tiers-instruit, that undisciplined third space where one can think strange thoughts and even make mistakes."4 Sharpe, Chen, King, and Squier, all writing in the 2010s, mark our current intellectual and activist moment as one of undisciplining. Well-worn terms like "interdisciplinary" and "transdisciplinary" began a movement that has evolved beyond them. "Becoming Undisciplined" adds tentacles to an already intricate network of scholars, activists, and artists who refuse the binding that disciplines impose yet retain deep commitments to learning, teaching, researching, creating, and doing cultural politics. While situated in "the present," the contributors here travel with likeminded thinkers immersed in earlier periods of cultural inquiry. Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Alicia Mireles Christoff, and Amy Wong push fellow [End Page 22] Victorianists to engage with the racism found in their dominant archives and curricula, to "forage" beyond the bounds of the Victorian field.5 Even those who, like Katherine McKittrick, reject the term "undisciplined" because it "can perhaps undermine the intellectual labor of black people who rigorously and generously share and build and remember stories and lessons that we collectively utilize as we...