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The Sacred, the Transnational and the Pedagogical Self:

Reading Pedagogies of Crossing

Liz Philipose, Department of Women’s Studies, California State University Long Beach
Email: ephilipo@csulb.edu

Presentation to the National Women’s Studies Association Annual Conference

St Charles, Illinois June 28-July 1 2007
Women’s Studies and Interdisciplinarity in Jacqui Alexander’s Pedagogies of Crossing June 30
2007

Out of the Closet

Feminism, and by corollary, women’s studies, are at crucial crossroads wrought by this

current moment of US-led violent imperialism and in defense of Euro-descended world

domination. From North America to east and west Europe, from Central America, the Caribbean,

to South and East Asia and beyond, transnational, black, anti-imperial, migrant and women of

color feminists have drawn our attention to the incommensurability of achieving women’s

equality whilst maintaining imperial formations, of achieving freedom for some at the expense of

the enslavement of others, and the contradiction of “being ‘democratic’ at home and nobly

interventionist abroad” (115). This “round of empire consolidation and state restructuring” shows

us that imperialism, once hidden in plain sight, is simultaneously then and there, here and now

and here and there, and in the US in particular, no longer can the “the practices of imperialism…

be hidden in an analytic closet” (215).

While women’s studies programs have gestured toward the significance of imperialism

by having courses and faculty hires that reflect these preoccupations, it is not the case that

women’s studies as a discipline has mainstreamed these insights, preferring instead to have a few

faculty members who cover such topics while maintaining what remains to be the core of

women’s studies in the US that primarily focuses on nationally bound and domestic

preoccupations. The domination of an identity-based fragmentation where women of color pursue

studies of their people, and global feminists pursue studies of their global people, where queer
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faculty pursue studies of their people, means that those who are not women of color or global or

queer occupy the space of the silently signified universal. It also means that fragmented feminists

do not engage the terrain of each others’ peoples, this aided and abetted by the academy’s

demand for specialization in disciplined areas of study. Pedagogies of Crossing provides a

number of insights about unfragmenting the fragmented and producing feminist methodologies

that simultaneously unravel imperialism and construct positive political communities, particularly

through the cultivation of a woman of color consciousness. As Alexander states:

“In order to become women of color, we would need to become fluent in each others’
histories, to resist and unlearn an impulse to claim first oppression, most-devastating
oppression, one-of-a-kind oppression, defying-comparison oppression. We would have to
unlearn an impulse that allows mythologies about each other to replace knowing about
one another. We would need to cultivate a way of knowing in which we direct our social,
cultural, psychic, and spiritually marked attention on each other” (269).

Feminism and women’s studies are at a crucial crossroads, where the need for feminist

insight is perhaps greater than it has ever been while the way forward, outward, and into the

world seems murkier and more daunting than ever. What does it mean to be a feminist in this

imperial moment? How do we actualize a set of feminist practices that challenge, at its root, the

violences of contemporary neoliberalism and militarism? Where do we take the insights of

decades of feminist theorizing? On whose doors do we bang for acknowledgement compensation

and justice? Where is the center of imperial power, and how do we unravel its pernicious and

dehumanizing effects?

Alexander suggests that a crucial center of imperial power, and the place from which

feminists might begin to unravel the dehumanization of both bequeathed and contemporaneous

structures of domination, is within ourselves. As individuals who have come to be through the

long histories of colonization and western imperialism, as subjects of capital and corporatization

and the academy, we are the micro-embodiments of the palimpsest of here and now and then and

there; with “psychic residues of the imperial project” (115); subjectivities forged in circumstances

that imply that divisions and hierarchies and exploitation are just the way things are, and the way
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things have always been; and that embody the cultural knowledges that have us separating

emotions from politics, Spirit from activism, and self from Other and community. As such, a

woman of color consciousness is not restricted to those with the appropriate ascriptive

characteristics. Instead, it is a consciousness to be cultivated through our commitment to living in

concert with others: “We cannot afford to cease yearning for each others’ company” (269).

Jacqui Alexander, Way-Shower

In Pedagogies of Crossing, Jacqui Alexander appears as the way-shower, following in the

trail of her way-showers – Audre Lord, Lata Mani, Leela Fernandes, Gloria Anzaldua and Thich

Nhât H’ahn, to name a few. She shares her insights and analyses and formidable theoretical

talents to explain the complications of contemporary/historical social and political relationships

within the structural power of capitalism, colonialism, heteropatriarchy, neoliberalism and

empire.

What Alexander does in this book is share herself, her Spirit, her humanity and her

fundamental sense that contrary to structural truths that pervade our psyches, the world is a place

of abundance, human life has purpose, and meaning is to be made at every turn. Rather than

describe classroom techniques or productive assignments, Alexander models a pedagogic

disposition, suggesting instead that we approach the classroom as a Sacred space, in which a

number of Souls are entrusted to our care, to which they come as openly and transparently as

possible (8). Adapting this concept from Thich Nhât H’ahn’s text Our Appointment with Life,

Alexander suggests that earthly existence itself is a series of moments of pedagogical spaces and

opportunities. This pedagogic disposition, derived from the Middle Passage “the perilous

boundary keeping” between the sacred/secular, the embodied/disembodied (7), suggests that the

personal is not only political but also spiritual (7). Further, every moment is a pedagogical

moment that offers the opportunity to simply teach in order to teach, that is, teach that which I

most need to learn (8), and to reveal, transgress, break through or overturn, inherited concepts and
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practices, so that I might contribute to making different and new conversations possible (7), both

within my own psyche and in concert with others.

This is not a fanciful adoration of all things spiritual, but a careful and troubled

recognition that the last 500 years, “at least in this hemisphere”, have been predicated on “the

division of things that belong together” (283), on alterity and difference and fragmentation and

comparison; on lack and scarcity and competition and exploitation; on concepts of humanness

that disconnect from Spirit, not only excising certain populations from the category of humanity

but alienating all from being human. With an emptied out and cheapened concept of humanness,

meaning is ascribed to commodities and exchange but not to engagement and mutual care. As she

states: “We simply cannot continue to substitute owning for being, privacy for intimacy, or

substitute monogamies of the mind for the expansiveness of the Soul” (112).

What is it about transnational feminism that warrants a turn to Spirit? Where some

readers might assume that Alexander is importing spirituality into feminism and melding

trajectories that aren’t already connected, in fact, there is a kind of spiritualism or spiritual

longing within feminism that is being called out and evoked, brought to the fore of her analysis as

the crux of her argument about neoliberal subjectivities. The desire to be self-defining, to be

released from social restrictions that choke our gifts and talents, to be free from categorization

and institutional denigration, to be seen and acknowledged as individual personalities, and the

desire to create communities that enable our flourishing, are elements of feminism that reflect

spiritual longing. As she states: “All of the elements with which feminism has been preoccupied –

including transnationalism, gender and sexuality, experience, history, memory, subjectivity, and

justice – are contained within this metaphysic that uses Spirit knowing as the mechanism of

making the world intelligible” (15). Further, the spiritual longing within much feminist

theorizing is parallel to the spiritual longings of enlightenment political theory, itself a field of

study said to be decidedly secular and removed from questions of Spirit. In secular ways,

however, enlightenment theory is preoccupied with the simultaneous gesture of rendering the
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ideal of human existence as autonomous and monadic while evoking the intrinsic longing for

reconciliation of individual with community, of human with her humanity, of individual with his

oceanic collective.

In Alexander’s sense of the spiritual, drawing on African cosmologies, Buddhist

teachings and her Catholic upbringing, there is ultimately no tie to specific religious doctrine or

church edifice. Rather, stating that it is not the case that “the precinct of the Sacred is any way

partial” (322), she evokes the spirituality intrinsic to humanness, the essential qualities of being,

not only as material, physical and intellectual beings, but also social, emotive, existential, and

Sacred beings. In this way, Alexander is not only asking questions about the purpose of feminism

or women’s studies or pedagogy; she’s also asking us to revisit the larger questions about the

purpose of human existence within neoliberal imperialism, that is, to attend to “the epistemic and

ontological project tied to beingness” (7) itself.

The conundrum we face as we think through the reinvention of what it means to be

human are the wholly contradictory impulses of neoliberalism that empty out all content that is

recognizably human - to be social, to be in community, to have concern for how we treat others,

to be in touch with others as emotional spiritual beings, to see and acknowledge personality.

Feminists are feeling the emptying out too, the increasing difficulty of imagining what activism

looks like when we are produced as neoliberal subjects; and thinking about who counts as human

is a preoccupation of transnational feminism (who eats, who wears shoes, who bears the burden

of production) and women of colour feminism – that ask us to consider both the spiritual and the

poetic. A transnational feminism needs the pedagogies of the Sacred for a number of reasons,

because the majority of people in the world – that is, “the majority of women in the world –

cannot make sense of themselves without it” (15). Further, “critiques of the shifting faces of

hegemony do not automatically provide the maps for an inner life, for redefining the grammar of

the mind, for adjusting the climate of the Soul…Those maps have to be drawn” (325). Thus, a
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pedagogy of the Sacred offers an immediate and transnational way through the “neoliberal

present” instead of worrying about it and succumbing to its empty(ing) seductions (Osuri, 2007).

Neoliberal Rationality

Neoliberalism is usually characterized as a particular phase of capitalism, the latest phase,

led by US-dominated agendas and institutions that have been globalized through the operations of

agencies such as the IMF and the World Bank, and adopted by various states as part of acquiring

or maintaining a competitive edge in global finance. Structural adjustment policies, profit-

seeking development projects, downsizing government, privatizing social services, shifting

accountability and repudiating Keynsian social welfare economics are some of the elements of

neoliberalist rationality. Primarily understood as market rationality, neoliberalism is seen to be a

departure from classical liberal economics that had at its core some sense of a public good and

government accountability to the people.

Authors whose work is influenced by Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben focus on

the relations of governance and the ethos of governmentality, a form of disciplinary rule that is

distinctly modern and attached to liberal democracies. Governmentality captures the idea of a

form of governance and modern power that rules over bodies and individuals through the

processes of discipline, normalization and remote surveillance. In other words, governmentality is

a system of wielding power, and specifically bio-power, over individuals and bodies whilst hiding

the operations of power itself from those who are subject to it.

As a mechanism of modern forms of power, governmentality contains within it a concept

of the human, one that is replayed and nurtured within neoliberalism, itself a rationality that

transcends particular issues and administrations, and one which shapes and constructs out of our

psyches disciplined subjectivities. Once subjectivities are shaped in neoliberal ways, it no longer

is necessary to directly control or intervene or manipulate individuals. We have, as Foucault

suggests, interiorized the gaze and have become self-policing subjects that includes the
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interiorization of the illusion of being freely choosing individuals. Feminism knows about this

modern trick very well, in pointing out the ways that women in particular are not freely choosing

in their adoption of gendered codes, but rather, are shaped by power to understand themselves to

be gendered social beings who choose within limitations. Women act, but not within the

conditions of their choosing. Marx understood modern forms of power very well too.

As Wendy Brown points out, neoliberal rationality is not only restricted to the market; it

becomes the very political rationality of the polity, the reigning expression of political and ethical

community. Neoliberalism is a social analysis that reaches from citizen-subjects to education

policy to practices of empire. While foregrounding the market, it involves extending and

disseminating market values to all institutions and social action. “Thus: the political sphere,

along with every other dimension of contemporary existence, is subjected to economic

rationality, and all dimensions of human life are cast in terms of market rationality; every action

and policy is evaluated in relation to profitability, and all human and institutional action is

produced as rational entrepreneurial action, with a calculus of utility, benefit, satisfaction in a grid

of scarcity, supply and demand, and moral value-neutrality; develops institutional practices which

reward this vision; produces rational actors, market rationale for decision-making; takes as its

task the development, dissemination, institutionalization of such a rationality, thus, neo-liberalism

does not take for granted the existence of market rationality” (Brown, 2003)

Our sense of self, then, is also our sense of what we believe to be true about being human. In

neoliberalism, then, we are not only concerned with the vagaries of late capitalism and its

institutions; we are also concerned with the ways that neoliberalism shapes our sense of self and

of others, and our sense of what it means to be human. This is a bleak landscape indeed, of

competitive entrepreneurial actors in conditions of scarcity, fully and solely responsible for our

own success failures and mediocrities, reliant on no one and no state, where justice is understood

as maximizing individual wealth and rights, where morality is understood as rational calculation

and where civil society is merely the domain for entrepreneurial action (Brown, 2003). Within
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this configuration, the task of forging collectivities of resistance is enormous, drawing us back to

the pedagogic disposition of teaching what I most need to learn and demanding that we “rewire

the senses” (308). Neoliberalism constructs the spiritual deficit that engenders the simultaneous

spiritual longing that Alexander evokes throughout this text, and gratefully, “even the most

egregious signatures of new empire are not the sole organizing nexus of subjectivity…”(328).

The Palimpsest of Imperialism

Alexander uses the concept of the palimpsest to capture a sense of imperialism that has

both a present and a long history to uncover, suggesting that now that we in the US can no longer

deny the imperialist pretensions of the state, the opportunity arises to revisit the longer histories

of imperialism that many feminists have engaged for some time. “Palimpsest “, in its Greek

roots, meaning “again-scraped”, refers to the practice of scraping text from parchment to

overwrite it with new text. Done to parchments that had faded or contained text that was

considered to no longer be useful, it was common for the underwriting to still be visible through

the new text, and old parchments are legible with the use of ultraviolet lights. Thus, a palimpsest

is a multi-layered and simultaneous text requiring extraordinary measures to discern its depth,

history and embedded memory.

Imperialism is a palimpsest in the sense that the hegemonic practices of a hyper-

militarized US state of today is engaged in conflict with those whose histories are of Euro-

colonization and racialization. The US has been involved in at least 50 separate bombing

campaigns since WWII, if not more. The previously colonized peoples of the world under

European/British and later, US rule, are still those most subject to the vagaries of late capitalism

and economic globalization. As Alexander states, through one set of lenses, the US is a neo-

imperial state, promoting “a form of globalization whose internal character reproduces a set of

colonial relations with regard to indigenous peoples, immigrant peoples, people of color, and

working class white communities within the geographic borders of the US” (233), plus a set of

related external colonial relationships with Puerto Rico, Hawaii, the US Virgin Islands and
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Guam. These are both historic and contemporary sets of relationships that overlap and converge

to create a peculiar configuration of imperialism that is parallel to and intertwined with

neoliberalism, that is, “hyperconcentrated capital that is diffused in local/globalized economies

with unequal gendered and class consequences” (234).

This round of empire consolidation and state restructuring means that we must again

confront the questions posed of internal colonization and land struggles; claims of Puerto Rican

feminists from 30 years ago about sterilization and militarization; from Hawaiian feminists on

imperialism via tourism; the mobilization of Pacific women against US military maneuvers that

resulted in environmental and birth defects; Masai women from Kenya who have brought rape

charges against the British militia stationed in their country; the violation of fundamental human

dignity and cultural identities; the ongoing US intervention in other countries since WWII; the

Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory; and finally, the continued absence of the study of

empire in US culture that is complicitous with cultures of imperialism (251).

In this way, not only are the immediate circumstances of war and occupation in Iraq and

Afghanistan, the concomitant surveillance of migrants and borders, the creation of a permanent

war economy and domestic militarization, on the agenda of transnational feminism. Rather, what

we have access to, by way of making the world intelligible to ourselves and others, is the

palimpsest of imperial design and desire that has marked the US since its inception and that has

confounded attempts to create equitable and socially just relationships between peoples within the

US and around the world. It is what escapes our attention when we become fixated on ‘restoring’

social welfare, or ‘returning to a gentler time’, or evoking the social engagement of the 1960s, or

imagining that the violences committed in our name today are anomalous and extraordinary. It is

what evades our collective analytical attention if we fail to note the embeddedness of history,

power, racialization, nationalism, militarism and gendered social practices. The palimpsest of

imperialism alerts us to the “process of fragmentation we gave the name colonization” (281), that

engendered “divisions among mind, body, spirit; between sacred and secular, male and female,
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heterosexual and homosexual; in class divisions; and in divisions between the erotic and the

Divine” (281). The work of decolonization, then, “no matter our country of origin” (272) is the

work of all, that “make[s] room for the deep yearning for wholeness” that accompanies

fragmentation and neoliberal empire (281).

With the concept of the palimpsest, we begin to layer the pedagogic disposition to

include not only layers of simultaneous histories, but also layers of simultaneous geographies; as

both the spatial and the temporal are central to conceptualizing “collectivities that can thrive

outside of hegemony’s death-grip” (8). As Alexander notes: “time becomes a moment, an instant,

experienced in the now, but also a space crammed with moments of wisdom about an event or

series of events already having inhabited different moments, or with the intention of inhabiting

them, while all occurring simultaneously in this instant, in this space, as well as in other instants

and spaces of which we are not immediately aware” (309).

The Practice of Social Justice

Neoliberal and imperial domination comes to be through countless actions taken by countless

people acting within some shared conscious and unconscious precepts about what it means to be

human. We construct these worlds of domination in our everyday existences; the facts of systems

of power graft themselves into our daily lives, and as such, even radical spaces are not immune

from the interiorization of systems of domination. Ultimately, the coming to be of the worlds we

inhabit is through our daily practices; the embodied memories, violences, and violations; our

complicities and vigilance and visions of who we are and who we wish to become.

Neoliberalism, empire and structures of domination are embodied and lived; hence the site where

we unravel them is within us as social, embodied beings.

The practice of justice is central to the idea of a spiritual life and to Alexander’s argument for

creating collectivities based on justice. As she states, the “far more difficult question” is of “the

political positions [ ] that we come to practice, not merely espouse” (272). The making of
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Sacred feminist subjectivity and the conjuring of future collectivities free from hegemony’s death

grip is actualized through living Sacred values and ideals in the present moment, wherever we

are. Justice, then, is brought into the present by practicing it in the here and now. Alexander

states that we need to make conscious the desire to be well, to be healed, and to envision a

“revolution capable of healing our wounds” (277). Vision helps us to remember why we do what

we do; but “vision can only be as effective and as sturdy as our determination to practice” (279).

It is in the practice of social justice that Mexican factory workers seeking dignified working

conditions engage a pedagogical disposition, giving “voice to a deeper existential yearning”; that

is, “the desire to make themselves intelligible to themselves and to each other, to make

domination transparent, and to practice new and different ways of being” (105). “Practice is the

how; it makes the change and grounds the work” (279); “it is through practice that we come to

envision new modes of living and new modes of being that support these visions” (93); and as

engaged action, practice lets us engage “at the deepest, most spiritual level of meaning in our

lives. It is how we constitute our humanity” (279). Finally, a conscious practice is necessary to

achieve alignment with spiritual principles ”… because the spiritual is lived in the same locale in

which hierarchies are socially invented and maintained” (310).

Spiritual practice aims to actualize a transcendent vision in which individuals are “in concert

with the Sacred” (307) reconciled with the Divine and the Universal. Unity is not in the future,

and neither is it outside of earthly social life. It is in the present moment of its making, as spiritual

practitioners in community actualize the Divine by touching moments of their own Buddha-

nature, God-consciousness or Sacred subjectivity. The cosmologies of the Orisha and the Lwa,

for instance, are made manifest in the material, embodied, “daily living of the Sacred idea” (307),

because it is the “dailiness that instigates the necessary shifts in consciousness, which are

produced because each act, and each moment of reflection of that act” (307) rewires the senses

and a sense of self in concert with the Divine. Responding to the argument that experience is

purely secular, and that the Sacred removes us from the social, Alexander argues that the spiritual
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is “very much lived in a domain that is social in the sense that it provides knowledge whose

distillation is indispensable to daily living” (295-96); the spiritual is as social as the political and

the personal. In the making of Sacred subjectivity, through material and embodied practice, in

conjunction with a vision of justice, individuals are drawn toward the “living matter that links us

to each other, making that which is individual simultaneously collective” (326). It is here that

Alexander attends to the presence of justice in neoliberal imperialism – the moment that we touch

the essence or core of our own humanity, which is also our own divinity, is the moment that we

unfragment the fragmented and dispense with alterity and foreignness. We are One, born of One.

In the eminently groovy words of Michael Franti: “I don’t need a passport to walk on this earth;

Anywhere I go cause I was made of this earth; I was born of this earth, I breathe of this earth, and

even with the pain I believe in this earth; Cause every bit of land is a holy land, and every drop of

water is a holy water, and every single child is son or the daughter of the one earth mama and the

one earth papa…” (Hello, Yell Fire).

“We are all inhabitants of this world” (107), and as such, we all have a stake in the

project of making the world intelligible to ourselves and to others. Further, as Alexander says,

“there is no other work but the work of creating and recreating ourselves within the context of

community. Simply put, there is no other work”…it need not take another five hundred years to

move ourselves out of this existential impasse. Spirit work does not conform to the dictates of

human time, but it needs our courage, revolutionary patience, and intentional shifts in

consciousness…” (283).