Reparations are our duty and obligation- key to divesting from capitalist thinking about race.
Usha Iyer 1-8-2022, Iyer's research lie at the intersection of performance, and gender and sexuality studies, with a specific focus on film and performance histories, body cultures, and Global South cultural traffic along the vectors of race, gender, caste, and religion, “A Pedagogy of Reparations”, University of California Press, https://online.ucpress.edu/fmh/article/8/1/181/120178/A-Pedagogy-of-ReparationsNotes-toward-Repairing // VDR
Reparations demand clear-eyed accountability for acts in the past and our role in them so we may be able to envision other futures. Academic reparations call for community accountability from all of us. Collaboratively conceptualizing a pedagogy of reparations fosters the possibility of a genuinely intersectional, decolonial, global imagination for film and media studies. Reparations are not about benevolence or charity. Reparations are our duty and obligation. I don’t like the word fix, it makes me uncomfortable. ...there is no once and for all fix for anything. The word I like is “ repair”: more tentative, more humble. ... The marines go in there to fix things, they don’t go in there to repair things. Repair can always be undone. —Teju Cole20 Institutions like to forget. A reparative pedagogy is committed to remembering, to witnessing, to repairing. A reparative pedagogy commits to curricula that critique hegemonic colonial, settler, cisheteropatriarchal, ethnocentrist, casteist epistemologies. A reparative pedagogy demands that we recognize and situate our own positionality. A reparative pedagogy asks, what will our classrooms look like when we move from stories of innocence to admissions of complicity? Rather than be defensive, when we start with complicity, we recognize our “proximity to the problems we are addressing.”21 A reparative pedagogy covers a wide range of histories, genres, and media traditions. A reparative pedagogy resists minor curricular reform, the hush money, the reluctant bribe of the one Black or one queer or one non-Western text in the syllabus (e.g., “the infamous “race week” in any Intro to Film/Media course”).22 A reparative pedagogy thinks through the relationship between epistemic violence and state violence. Iyer | A Pedagogy of Reparations 185 Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/fmh/article-pdf/8/1/181/495522/fmh.2022.8.1.181.pdf by Dartmouth College user on 15 July 2023 A reparative pedagogy divests from binaries of form and content, theory and history, aesthetics and political economy, art and geopolitics. A reparative pedagogy recognizes “film’s rootedness in politics, imperialism, and capital” and interrogates purely formal, aesthetic appraisals of media forms.23 A reparative pedagogy divests from the dichotomous, hierarchical logics central to modern, colonial, capitalist thinking about race, gender, and sexuality.24 A reparative pedagogy invests in multidirectional visions, granular and textured histories, global media circulations, labor practices, underrepresented epistemologies.