Removal, Refusal, Rehearsal: 15 Fridays | Jennifer Hayashida
Sewing, under Alina’s direction: Linda, Sally, Alex, Rachel, and Alina. Image courtesy of the artist.
I lived as a fired person for a year. I lived as a non-reappointed person. I had lost my appointment, and the line was no longer mine. The institution let me go, swiftly, and I spent a year enduring the small humiliations of living in its explicit peripheries. In fact, I had lived in those peripheries during my entire time at the university, but had had so much responsibility that I passed for tenured. With my very public non-reappointment, I could no longer pass as someone settled within the institution.
My removal signaled institutional force against a group of Asian American students who had made public their dissatisfaction with the college administration, who had demanded greater stability for me and greater resources for the Asian American studies program I had directed for nearly a decade. My non-reappointment followed an institutional logic that predated me, a logic which sought to injure and remove anyone who had become a problem, and to “unmark and reabsorb difference” vis-à-vis its management of the Asian American studies program (Ferguson 2008, 162).
I am glad the administration saw me as a problem, and I am glad to have been the right kind of problem. Performing the function of a problem—and then especially an Asian American problem—was probably the best job I have ever had. A critical aspect of my status as a problem, however, stemmed from the solidarity and friendship I felt with students, and I have spent a great deal of time reflecting on how those friendships sustained and changed me even when the institution sought to erase those of us who, to invoke Kandice Chuh, performed Asian American-ness otherwise. I have also ruminated on how my contingent difference—an unmarked fact which quickly became marked—ultimately made it impossible for me to turn toward tenured faculty friends in order to survive the worst professional experience of my life.
It is surreal to be an unspeakable problem in a professional friendship, or to be a problem about which many academics feel licensed to speak because its roots grow out of institutional contingency and precarity, terms everyone knows but not all tenured bodies have known. Or, if they have lived through those words as conditions, they rarely speak of the time and feelings attached to them since they are so glad to have made it out. So I was an unspeakable and at the same time speakable problem.
While many of my faculty colleagues were good friends, are smart and critical people, in the end those friendships held a different kind of harm than university leadership’s fist to my face. My inability to orient myself in a simultaneous sense of loss and relief only increased in the face of the outrage, mournful sadness, or peculiar chagrin that came to animate those friends whenever I entered a conversation.
The machine of faculty concern—truly academic outrage—which churned around me yielded letters drafted and sent as attachments, all those drafts, the drafting of carefully articulated indignation because the letters were meant to express anger but to not set it off. Full-time faculty stated that they supported student protesters who, meanwhile, were forced to march the periphery of college property, pushed by campus security to the precarious edges of a New York City sidewalk.
But there was little space to mourn.
To be an unspeakable problem in a faculty friendship means that you cannot talk about status or the fact that one person is forever reappointed and one person is not, one person has a line while the other’s line is severed. “Where is your line housed?” I would get asked, or, “Who will get your line?” or, “Can’t they move your line?” I would walk into meetings and people would say, as if it was a kindness, “I thought you were tenure-track.”
I was on the receiving end of these words, which frequently stated that I deserved better, which I can only take to mean that I deserved—what, exactly? Tenure, I presume, which, at least at that particular institution, was erroneously imagined to mean less chronic humiliation. That I deserved to not be a ghost, but should instead be a zombie, living off contingent bodies teaching introductory composition courses? At one critical juncture, when the prospect of tenure shimmered before me, one of my closest colleagues said, “Then you could be one of us,” and the zombie scenario came to life.
Embedded in a truly neocolonial university regime, I held the title of “Distinguished Lecturer,” which meant that I was paid a tenured person’s salary but was annually reap-pointed at the administration’s discretion, in spite of a collective bargaining agreement which dictated otherwise. I was hired to in turn hire others who were explicitly “adjunct”: graduate students, artists, and community activists who dedicated themselves to each and every young person in their classes for somewhere around three-thousand dollars per course, before taxes, not including office hours. Within this schema, I was “us” with the adjunct faculty in a way I could never be with my tenured colleagues, yet my position meant that our mutual solidarities came up against the hard edge of CUNY adjunct wages, wages I proferred with the same chagrin and mournful sadness which later radiated from my tenured colleagues.
If, as Vivian and Summer so beautifully describe in their introduction to this special issue, “We therefore understand contingency to name not only a passive position under the weight of ‘imposed consensus,’ but also the insistent act of reaching out toward another for survival and more,” then to whom did I reach out toward for survival?
During the nearly fifteen years I have spent teaching in public higher education, I have come to feel that Asian American students are contingently located along a different but nonetheless fractured axis. To me, to be contingently located within an institutional structure means that you are deployed for ends which are scripted as felicitous when they are in fact exploitative, where you are made to feel fortunate in the pit of your abjection.
From that vantage point, Asian American students can perform the right kind of racialized labor within the institution, much like contingent faculty can perform the right kind of neoliberal labor, helping to sustain the story of the university as a place for democratic learning while being prohibited from demanding anything resembling justice from its plot. Robert Teranishi (2010) and Oiyan Poon (2011), among others, have illustrated how Asian American student bodies—cast as institutionally “high-achieving” and assumed to contain minimal political grievance—play vital supporting parts in the multicultural drama of the contemporary corporative university.
Thanks to contingent faculty and Asian American students, the parallel neoliberal fictions of educational affordability and institutional diversity can remain in place and become what Ahmed terms “automatic” in their orientation toward the corporate university’s management-centered horizon (Ahmed 2012, 71). But what happens when Asian American bodies begin to make demands, if what is automatic to faculty and management becomes named by students, when the visible is made visible, the unspeakable is spoken, and mutual contingencies are laid bare?
When I obtained nearly two-million dollars in federal funding for a five-year grant program for low-income Asian American students who were also English language learners, it was an attempt to revise automatic assumptions so that the institutional script regard-ing “high-achieving” Asian American students could be unraveled. I hoped that our grant project would serve as a modest but necessary check on the neocolonial story about achieving the American Dream at CUNY, and that it would expose our APA students to as much Asian American studies and mental health education as possible—tools they needed to articulate and act upon personal and collective grief and grievance.
I was notified of my non-reappointment two days after being awarded that grant, also two days after Asian American student activists publicly confronted our college President to demand more for me, more for the Asian American studies program. During my subsequent year of small humiliations, I had to hire and plan for how to execute grant programs which were to run well after I had left the institution. I was a ghost of the past orchestrating the future and, overnight, I became my own neoliberal avatar, directing a show where my character was scripted to drive over the edge of a cliff.
I had no teaching responsibilities in the spring following my non-reappointment, but instinctively knew that working with students would be the only way for me to pivot away from the institution. My hold on academic life has always hinged on the conversations I have had in the classroom. And so, I invited a small group of students, all of whom had worked with me before, to enroll in an Independent Study under my supervision—the only way for me to assemble a seminar-sized group—and as our topic we chose Asian American artistic research.
During that spring, the six of us met for three hours every Friday morning in the Women and Gender Studies department’s library, and together we explored a collectively generated archive of research-based Asian American art, producing our own art projects as extensions of that research. We read, we sewed, we sketched, we watched video art, we talked, we sat in silence, we cried, and we laughed. We challenged each other to not distinguish between thinking and feeling. It was a chance for all of us to sit in the light of Asian American studies, to remain visible to each other in the face of institutional erasure.
Which is why this is actually a letter to Rachel and Alex and Sally and Alina and Linda. For me, and I hope for the five of them, the critical friction was about how to reach out toward each other and do Asian American studies, enact it as a method for artistic research, as a mode of collectivity, and as a place: when we gathered, Asian American studies became more than a book or a classroom, but a vantage point, a perch from which we could be retrospective and forward-looking all at once.
Graduating, facing increased professional precarity, or simply remaining at an institution where an intellectual home was being “restructured,” we were all moving toward unknown futures, in various states of ambivalent waiting masked as doing, or ambivalent doing masked as waiting. We cooked oatmeal and drank coffee and attempted to bring together Asian American epistemologies with artistic practice. We all did Asian American studies, enacted its complex ethics in our engagements with each other, with the institutional work we were otherwise committed to, and with the artistic research we drafted, critiqued, and finalized in each others’ company. And, in that room, I got to enjoy being the right kind of problem, together with other glorious problems, and I was at the same time allowed to mourn, to slowly turn away from a space I worked with others to build, a conversation I worked with others to sustain.
To be with Linda, Sally, Rachel, Alina, and Alex on those Friday mornings meant that we could be a fact, a fact in opposition to our respective fates. Our meetings were an effort to refuse erasure, not by insisting on legibility, but by reaching out toward each other with no institutionally sanctioned errand. In the eyes of the college, we had performed “Asian American” incorrectly, and the school’s recourse was to attempt to erase and silence.
During those Friday mornings, we were all able to remind ourselves of how we instead needed to—and could, via artistic practice—work toward rupture-as-representation.
Our purpose within the institution, the task we had set ourselves with—to attempt to undo, expand, complicate—meant that each of us refused to conform to certain normative assumptions around race, class, and gender in particular. During our Fridays together, we could deploy Asian American studies as a method for refusing the institutionally sanctioned Asian-ness being enforced—the same Asian-ness we saw trafficked not only by university administration, but also by colleagues who advocated an either personal or professional orientation away from contingency and toward institutionality at any cost—personal, political, or scholarly.
Our Friday morning meetings were a rejection of the institution’s automatic tendencies, an imagining of how it could operate otherwise, what it could afford to do but did not grant, that is, an anti-hierarchical relational space of rigorous investigative play, a room where teachers and students thought and made together, where knowledge was passed around, not down. In our being-with each other, we sought to become aware of how we had contorted ourselves in order to enact the institution’s corporate diorama of “teacher” and “student,” as well as familial or broader social scripts concerning Asian America. As a result, much of our work became critically autoethnographic, resulting in moving image- and text-based works looking at immigrant self-care, queer performances against the nation-state, and small abstract clay figures which crumbled by the time I had to evacuate my office.
I did not turn to those students—and they did not turn to me—because we were crumbling, but because we, from that first morning immediately felt the effects of being together in excess of the roles we had been assigned, the parts for which we had been cast. In that room, we did not have to temper our sorrows or vulnerabilities in order to sustain hierarchical scripts that conditioned our interactions. My hope is that our Friday mornings together allowed us all to be changed for the better in spite of sustained acts of institutional violence, large and small efforts to erase what we had accomplished, together, through investments and alignments which breached the institution’s will concerning what “Asian American” should be.
Those Fridays were a space where, together, we could orient ourselves away from institutionality and instead turn toward each other, in intellectual and political friendships which violated the managerial assertion of how we should sustain the school’s racial capitalist order. Those Fridays meant that, together, we could rehearse refusal—refusal of our proscribed model minoritarian status, of the neoliberal rhetorics of student “excellence,” of pedagogical regimes which continuously disqualified contingent epistemologies. And, even though those Friday mornings were not designed for my personal recuperation, the contingent insurgencies they offered made it possible for me to walk away from an experience which made every cell in my body burn with rage, shame, and grief.
Thank you, always, to Sally Chen, Rachel Friedland, Linda Luu, Alexander Robateau, and Alina Shen.
Notes on contributor
Jennifer Hayashida is a poet, translator, and visual artist based in New York and Gothenburg. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in artistic research at Valand Academy at the University of Gothenburg.
References
Ahmed, S. 2012. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Ferguson, Roderick A. 2008. “Administering Sexuality; or, the Will to Institutionality.” Radical History Review 100: 162.
Poon, OiYan A. 2011. “Ching Chongs and Tiger Moms: The ‘Asian Invasion’ in U.S. High Education.” Amerasia Journal 37 (2): 144-150. doi:10.17953/amer.37.2.m58rh1u4321310j4
Teranishi, R. T. 2010. Asians in the Ivory Tower: Dilemmas of Racial Inequality in American Higher Education. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.