Session 6: Hope, Self and Community

Session 6: Hope, Self and Community
Chair: Paul Salvatori

Hoping For and Against Hope: Lived Experiences of Hyphenated Dis-located Identities
Veena Balsawer & Rebecca Feng
Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa, Canada

“One always has to live with hope. Without it, how can one carry on any kind of struggle?” (Trinh, M. 1999).

It is the notion of hope for a brighter future that makes people all around the world go in search of the ‘promised Paradise’ on earth. People find themselves in in-between or hybridspaces where identity is no longer tied as it once was to stable patterns of status such as class.The fact of the matter is that men, women, and children have to come to terms with “otherness” and the accompanying diverse values and moral perspectives that exist in the contemporary world (Ryan, 1999). There is an increasing demand for recognition in today’s politics, on behalf of minority or “subaltern” groups in what is called the politics of “identity” and “multiculturalism” (Taylor, 1994). From a minority perspective, the social articulation of difference is a complex, on-going negotiation that seeks to authorize cultural hybridities (Bhabha, 1989). Personal narratives function to help individuals and groups identify themselves and create identifications with others. According to Gloria Anzaldúa (1987), a mestiza consciousness, a consciousness of the borderlands, a (re)construction, emerges out of this “cultural collision”. These encounters with diversity result in clashes and contradictions located within and outside of the Self. The reality of being the “other” or marginalized within society, educational and/or workplace community, undermines the sense of hope to some degree – at times turning it into a sense of hopeless struggle. The objective of this paper will be to discuss how stereotyped (mis)representation by mainstream society complicates the experience of migration for immigrants or hyphenated identities by intensifying their struggle between the positions “for” and “against” hope – between hope and hopelessness. Hope and faith help people to move towards new possibilities amidst the struggles and complexities of migration.

Download Conference Paper –

This paper discusses the radical resignification of hope found in the discourse of the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico. For the Zapatistas, “hope is a word spoken collectively” that “organizes and walks in the world.” As such, the Zapatista mode of hope breaks with the traditional Western understanding of hope as a passive, individual emotion to reveal an interpersonal, political dimension. The Zapatistas do not hope for any specific utopian content, power or objective. Rather, hope belongs to the democratic practice of living alternatively in the present to make possible another, not-yet conceivable future. Rather than look beyond the present to wishful images, hope “opens windows” in the hegemonic walls to affirm both potentials and actualities that current lenses of power obfuscate. Hope reaches beyond the known and established to the lives and ways of living denied existence in the dominant order. For the Zapatistas, hope also becomes the connective energy that draws global ‘others’ together into an “International of Hope” where the space of alternative possibility opens through dialogues across differences.
By the end of this paper, we will be able to distinguish the affective politics of the insurgent mode from those implied by George Bush when he seeks to “spread to hopeless lands.” The insurgent mode is radically immanent and drives the opening of spaces within the present where differences communicate and create new worlds. The dominant mode, on the other hand, moves toward objectives already articulated within the world as-is and attempts to perpetuate, without fundamentally changing, a given status quo. The Zapatista understanding of hope, thus, allows us to sharpen Ernst Bloch’s distinction of true hope from its fraudulent, bourgeois imitation. In the darkening shadows of global war, understanding this distinction is critical for the re-occupation of hope as an insurgent, political force.

“Our courage rests on a deep democratic vision of a better world that lures us
and a blood-drenched hope that sustains us.”
–Cornel West, Restoring Hope: Conversations on the Future of Black America

Across time and across cultures, one of the dominant themes of prison writing is hope.  From Bobby Sands to Ngugi wa Thiong’o, from Ruth First to Jimmy Santiago Baca, prisoners have consistently recorded the crucial place of hope in the experience of incarceration: the difficulty of finding and maintaining hope, and its central role in the preservation of dignity, sanity, even life itself.  In parallel with its function in progressive political movements, hope works for prisoners of “criminal justice” systems designed for the preservation of wealth and power in the hands of a few, to sustain, animate, and give courage for the struggle.  And, crucially for my purposes here, hope leads prisoners to read, in search of beauty, clarity, support and affirmation, and to write, in search of all those same qualities and one more—visibility, in resistance to a form of punishment that works specifically to erase, to depersonalize, to “disappear” the incarcerated.  Baca speaks for many when he writes:
“Writing bridged my divided life of prisoner and free man.  I wrote of the emotional butchery of prisons, and my acute gratitude for poetry.  Where my blind doubt and spontaneous trust in life met, I discovered empathy and compassion.  The power to express myself was a welcome storm rasping at tendril roots, flooding my soul’s cracked dirt.  Writing was water that cleansed the wound and fed the parched root of my heart.”  (“Coming into Language,” in Doing Time, ed. Bell Gale Chevigny, Arcade, 1999)
When I first designed the “Jail Project,” an ongoing service-learning project that brings together Nazareth College students in an introductory literature class with Monroe Correctional Facility inmates who have been provided with the books for that class, for a series of meetings in a jail classroom to discuss literature and its relation to our lives, I was well aware of the crucial principle of reciprocity that governs the best student civic engagement work.  And over the past five years of doing this work, I have encouraged each small group of students and inmates gathered around the table to regard each other as resources, with varying backgrounds, knowledge, talents, and beliefs.  Since the theme of the course is “Crime and Punishment in the USA,” even when the inmates, as the demographics of US incarceration would predict, bring weaker educational backgrounds to the discussion, they often bring real-life experience of the criminal justice system that the college students do not have (though it’s interesting how often the converse is true, and well-educated inmates meet students who have “done time”).  However, for all my careful preparation and thinking about reciprocity in this collaboration among peers, insofar as I thought about hope at all, I assumed that the college students would be bringing it to the inmates.  Although this does happen, especially through the process of reading and writing together on which the “Jail Project” is based, a surprising counter-narrative has emerged in the journals that the students and inmates keep during the project.  For all their privilege, my students, the majority of whom are white and middle class, often harbor a profound cynicism about themselves, each other, and the world.  How remarkable, then, that they find in a group of people for many of whom the “American Dream” of opportunity and equality has been so relentlessly foreclosed a spirit of hope that far exceeds their own!  Vaclav Havel reflects that hope, “especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as a prison,” is above all “an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart.”  My paper will work to show the truth of Havel’s comments, and how, as he would predict, the experience of reading and writing together can cultivate that “orientation” to hope.