Claudio Moreira

Resisting (Resistance) Stories A Tri-autoethnographic Exploration of Father Narratives Across Shades of Difference

This is a triple autoethnographic text written by three men of differing racial and cultural backgrounds with the purpose of exploring the nature of their relationships with their fathers. The authors reflect on experiences with their fathers seeking to find answers that might help them resist the replication of pain in their own parenting as well as (in one instance) the resistance to parenting altogether. In each intersecting movement the voices are both singular and plural, featuring experiences that press against each other in ways that are simultaneously familiar and strange, building a case study of how the critical practice of autoethnography provides an opportunity for a personal scrutiny that is both private and public, and individual and communal.

Life in So Many Acts

In this piece, drawing from performance autoethnography, third world feminism, and postcolonial/cultural studies, the author interrogates “how do I play scholar?” The author uses Judith Butlers question “how do I play gender?” and her notions of performativity to dance around, using the voices of the “Thug” and the “Scholar,” in a quest for a performative scholarship that honors the authors commitment with social justice and at the same time, does not make his life unlivable. The author argues for the need for a decolonizing form of inquiry that includes not only the stories but also the bodies and visceral knowledge of the oppressed in the academic production of knowledge. From the borders the author have lived, labored, and crossed, he presents his life in acts, fighting for a better and just world.

Tales of Conde Autoethnography and the Body Politics of Performative Writing

In this performance autoethnography I am talking about the “new writing” that is everywhere, but still, it is also nowhere. This is also about Conde, a poor Black Brazilian soccer fan. Mixing together stories I wrote for my master thesis, memories, notes, and ‘leftovers’ of my field work, my lived experiences, plus six years of my life as grad student at the University of Illinois, I am looking for ways to decolonize inquiry; to decolonize academia. This performance discusses and interrogates forms of representation, knowledge production and experience, method and theory, about the other. All of these issues are pertinent to any field of knowledge which deals with issues of social justice in the lives of human beings.

Unspeakable Transgressions: Indigenous Epistemologies, Ethics, and Decolonizing Academy/Inquiry

What does happen, when “history” and “heritage” is nowhere to be found or claimed and granted? Drawing in his own mestiço heritage, the author tells the story of Geraldo in relation to his own one. Who was Geraldo? The intention is to challenge categories of knowledge that also relay in “knowledges” and social constructions, created by mechanisms of colonization even when they are created for the empowerment of the oppressed in many circumstances. The author offers visceral knowledge of growing up as and working with the poor in Brazil, to advance decolonizing discourse that may lead to more inclusive notions of social justice questioning the uncontrolled desire to categorize and control the Other. Through a layered text with a blurred aesthetic format, which mixes life stories and academic scholarship, the author asks: Can these borders, legacies, and injustices be transgressed? Can my body be transgressive as a form of scholarship?

Mother is Not Brown The “Unmarked” Performance of Keeping the Hair Straight or the Unpolitical Racial Performance of Mother’s Hair

In this performance autoethnography the author explores the simultaneity of telling and resisting stories of lived experience. In the process the author constructs the notion of “resisting stories” as autoethnographic performance narratives that both resist and demand telling in the process of making themselves public. Through his memories, the author tries to show the in-possible performance of brown-bodied, curlier hair woman, his Mother, in her yearning to Whiteness. However, the author too, cannot escape the stories his own hair tells. Please, keep your “hair straight.”

Decolonizing constructions of childhood and history: interrupting narratives of avoidance to children’s questions about social injustice

Together, we the authors, wonder, write, imagine, suffer, and criticize the support of the Belo Monte Monster Dam in the Rio Xingu, in the heart of the Amazon, by two of our personal heroes and fellow Brazilians: Lula, former president and iconic founder of the Workers’ Party, and, Dilma Rousseff, our presidenta guerilheira. Using our autoethnographic reflections, memories, street poetry, and decolonizing wanderings, we try to make sense of this persistent disconnect between the “discovery” of Brazil by the Portuguese in 1500 and the brutal social injustices of our everyday life. And we bring constructions of childhood and history right into the center of this critique. Throughout, we invite the reader to imagine new ways of seeing and teaching children, and thus ourselves as educators and parents, to interrupt the avoidance approach to questions of inequalities in favor of decolonizing versions of history.

The Coin Will Continue to Fly Dismantling the Myth of the Lone Expert

In this performance-theoretical text, we attempt to advance collaborative writing as decolonizing inquiry. Western inquiry has been dominated by the solitary writing of lone rangers of expertise, who are granted disproportionate narrative space to discourse about the Other. We think this exclusionary way of knowing keeps historically marginalized peoples from occupying Western academia as knowledge makers. Building on our collaborative writing experiences, Paulo Freire’s dialogical philosophy, and Della Pollock’s performative writing, we discuss how our collaborations with students and ethnographic partners have allowed us to break away from the expert isolationist writing standpoint and expand our own imaginations of and possibilities for inquiry—one that is more concerned with advancing collaborative ways of knowing and representation than with individual expertise and recognition, with advancing a more serious invitation for those with visceral experience of oppression to collaborate with the learned and cultured in the creation of knowledge that heals.

I hate chicken breast: a tale of resisting stories and disembodied knowledge construction

In this performance autoethnography, the author explores the simultaneity of telling and resisting stories of lived experience. In the process, the author constructs the notion of “resisting stories” as autoethnographic narratives that both resist and demand telling in the process of making themselves public. In the process the author engages in a dialog with Della Pollock’s article “The Performative I.” He tries to re-present accounts of growing up poor through his experiences of class, race, and gender. From an eating/not eating moment he tries to create resisting stories; resisting alcoholism, resisting patriarchal structures with love and anger, resisting disembodied knowledge construction that still tends to reproduce the very oppression it intends to challenge, and resisting narrative that defies the “existence” of a broken family living in a vacuum.

Performing Betweener Autoethnographies Against Persistent Us/Them Essentializing Leaning on a Freirean Pedagogy of Hope

How to write our history interlaced with the history of so many oppressed humans from so many singularities and shared universalities? We search for an autoethnography that is performative and transgressive in face of brutal inequalities, obvious injustice, and lame justifications by those with more privilege and power “to name the world.” We search for a form of being and writing that goes, without apologies, after the structures of power that shape and maintain such systems of oppression. We search in our autoethnography an alternative model of writing that exposes the breaks and cracks of our existence in neo-colonial times. We see betweener autoethnography as a way of being and writing ourselves into the history of resistance against oppression, injustice, and exclusion, one that starts from our common humanity in betweener identities. We write, here, a joint betweener autoethnography against essentialist representations in name of justice.

(Un)Safe! Fighting the Po-lice in Quasi-educational Spaces of Bathrooms: A Betweener’s Reflection on the Researcher’s Body in Three Intercalated Acts

Who gives ethnographers the authority to do research? Whose bodies are in and/or out of researchers’ practices or roles? In this performance autoethnography, I explore the (im)possibilities of these questions, pressing concerns that remain interconnected with discussions of ethnographic reflexivity. I convey how, despite the rise of conscientization resulting from the Crisis of Representation in the 1980s, knowledge production about the Other still tends to reify the very oppression it intends to challenge. Can a janitor become an ethnographer without having to bury experiences under layers of theory and other technologies of justification? Or are marginalized humans still relegated to a subordinate position of “research subject” in this process? I attempt to further promote narrative space about the struggles to move from researched to researcher, from honorable subject to street knowledge producer. Inspired by Dwight Conquergood’s suggestion that we do not write about them—the Others—but with and for them, I perform to better understand and explore issues of reflexivity in terms of privilege and authority, as they still dwell in current ethnographic research.