A Hijab, A Dog, and Many Histories: Wonders of Intersectional Assemblage in Memphis

  • Wesam M. Salem University of Memphis
  • Leslee Bailey-Tarbett University of Memphis
  • Susan Naomi Nordstrom University of Memphis
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15209/jpp.1195

Abstract

As part of a larger interdisciplinary arts-based research course, we engaged in walking as a material and relational inquiry in order to disrupt privileged and normalized understandings of class, race, settler colonization, and narratives of othering (Springgay & Truman, 2018). Borrowing Jasbir Puar’s (2012) frictional analysis, that brings together intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991) with Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) assemblage, each of the walks sought to “foreground the mutually co-constitutive forces of race, class, sex, gender, and nation” (Puar, 2012, p. 49). As we walked Memphis’ historic neighborhoods, we experienced varying states of wonder as intersecting identities shifted with each step in and out of centers and margins or what Min-Ha (1991) terms as “horizontal vertigos” (p. 15). In this paper, we share two of our “horizontal vertigos” that shaped our experiences walking Memphis neighborhoods and that informed our understandings of the frictional movements in the assemblage and the event-ness of identities.

Published
2019-11-14
How to Cite
Salem W. M., Bailey-Tarbett L., & Nordstrom S. N. (2019). A Hijab, A Dog, and Many Histories: Wonders of Intersectional Assemblage in Memphis. Journal of Public Pedagogies, (4). https://doi.org/10.15209/jpp.1195
Issue
No 4 (2019)
Section
Articles
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