From the River
Vani Kannan, Emory University
The first time I attended the Conference on College Composition and Communication, the keynote speaker was Angela Davis. It was the year before Operation Protective Edge, and eight years after Palestinian civil society’s call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS). When she made the call for a Free Palestine and endorsed BDS, a number of attendees got up and walked out of the room.
This year’s Rhetoric and Composition for Palestine petition marked an important shift, in a discipline that has largely been silent on Palestinian liberation (Rhetoric, 2024). Petitions in and of themselves are not enough, but they help us find each other. There is no perfect thing to say, no one word-weapon to counteract the brutal flashpoint moments or everyday mundane violence of decades of settler colonialism and occupation. There are only the concrete mobilizations that make sense in our own discrete contexts.
Ten years later, on the other side of graduate school and in the midst of faculty/staff pro-Palestine organizing, we needed moments to gather and reflect and relationship-build in the months before protests on our campuses were broken up by State Troopers armed with chemical weapons. Outside of meetings, I started to host collage nights. As a collage-collaborator-turned-comrade puts it, collage offers a “potent metaphor” for pro-Palestine faculty/staff organizing with a wide-ranging “patchwork of people.” “That's what collage is all about,” she says: “letting contradiction be" (Magloire, 2024).
The contradictions are real. I did not make this collage to uphold the liberal defense of “free speech,” or as conscious commentary on the irresponsible accusations of anti-semitism leveled at campus protest chants that made links between the Cop City project in Atlanta and the occupation of Palestine. And while I stand by it, I am not here to reiterate the chant “hands off our students!” that framed our first faculty/staff protest/walkout/speakout, which we chose while holding the painful knowledge that this level of faculty mobilization does not happen when it is the unhoused people of Atlanta who are under attack, and that this level of public outrage does not happen when the students attend less-“prestigious” universities (Faculty, 2024). And I do not share this written reflection to clutch pearls that the violence of the state came to our campus–our prestigious, protected campus. But these are the contradictions of campus organizing.
I am loathe to over-theorize or over-think a practice that has helped to hold these contradictions and create spaces to deepen political collaborations. There are histories to tap into; a quick Internet search reveals collage’s ancient histories in China and Japan; cubism; surrealism; assemblage theory; palimpsest; Afrofuturism; and queer world-building. At the same time, the practice of cutting and tearing and pasting and taping has offered creative company throughout my life that I haven’t really taken seriously until I considered its community-building power. I know it more as a girlhood literacy. I spent hours collaging in my childhood bedroom, and later with friends who became family; it is a method through which I connected with grassroots artists in a new city, and a last day of class activity with K-12 teachers that allowed us to articulate and visualize our pedagogical struggles and commitments. And the people I collaged with during the 2023-24 school year ended up becoming those with whom I was able to work with most closely in the rapid-response moment of April/May 2024.
For all the desire not to overthink or over-theorize collage, it is a practice–noun and verb–with undeniable power. The collages that emerge from art nights are a relational (Licona & Chávez, 2015) byproduct of conversations among people on the way to becoming friends and/or comrades, reflecting on what is around us and in us in a moment; getting frustrated and tearing up/reconstituting drafts; learning each other as we create alongside each other and weaving the social fabric that will sustain us in the struggle. Making art together is not the only way to weave this fabric, but it is one way. It is a form of multimodal reflection; through layering and cutting and piecing, we reveal what’s already there, the lessons we’ve internalized or are still struggling through. And it is a multimodal literacy–one that requires decisiveness and material grounding. We can only make with what we have, and the pieces always add up to something more, often something surprising. In this case, a primary material was the alumni magazine from my undergraduate institution, which many of us watched on the news as it brutally cracked down on and suspended pro-Palestine activists with an IDF-trained police force that has been referred to as an army. I have learned that collage offers an embodied method to give subconscious shape to a moment, and insists on our capacity and power to put grief into motion and transform scraps into art. I have also learned that it is better to collage with comrades than alone. Making art is not enough, but it can help us find each other.
References
Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine. (2024, 8 May). Statements from the April 2024, "Hands off our students!," Emory faculty and staff solidarity gathering. Atlanta Studies. https://atlantastudies.org/2024/05/08/statements-from-the-april-2024-hands-off-our-students-emory-faculty-and-staff-solidarity-gathering/
Licona, A. & Chávez, K. (2015). Relational literacies and their coalitional possibilities. Peitho, 18(1), 96-107. https://cfshrc.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/18.1LiconaChavez.pdf
Magloire, M. (2024, 7 August). Personal correspondence.
Rhetoric and composition scholars/teachers/administrators/students for Palestine. (2023, November 13). https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfGMt9H-8HMpmeEmA-H7FMdqnyVsq7-YcGTe46jyIq3q6aeUQ/viewform
Vani Kannan is an associate teaching professor in the Emory University Writing Program.
