Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

Vol. 5, No. 9 (Summer 2024)

Brian Hotson, Editor, CWCR/RCCR

Neo-colonialism, and the US leadership of it, do not evoke the same sense of horror as the old colonialism and the oppressor nations of Europe used to evoke in the general imagination and in political practice. In some quarters the USA is not even seen as an imperialist power.

— Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedom

This May, the French government sent a force of 3,000 police and military personnel to New Caledonia (Lukiv, 2024), an archipelago in the Pacific Ocean and a territory of France, to put down a protest by the Indigenous Kanak people. Their protests are for voting to be representative of the people of their islands; France recently changed the rules of who can vote, allowing “more recent arrivals to vote in provincial elections” (Macron heading to New Caledonia…, 2024, May 21). In a Guardian article, a member of the Indigenous Kanak people of the island chain, said, “I don’t know why our fate is being discussed by people who don’t even live here.” The official language of the islands is French, even though the peoples of New Caledonia speak “28 indigenous languages” (Bissoonauth & Parish, 2017, p. 39), and New Caledonia 17,000 kilometres from France. Continue reading “Writing centre industrial complex” →

Vol. 3, No. 5 (Spring 2022)
Brian Hotson,
Editor, CWCR/RCCR

I recently interviewed with Casey Wong who is the keynote speaker for the 2022 CWCA/ACCR conference. Wong (he/him) is currently an Assistant Professor of Social Foundations of Education in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at Georgia State University. He is co-editing a forthcoming book, Freedom Moves: Hip Hop Knowledges, Pedagogies, and Futures?, with H. Samy Alim and Jeff Chang.

Thank you for taking the time for to speak with me.

Wong: Thank you! I’m excited about entering into community with you and the CWCA/ACCR attendees.

First off, I’m interested in how you got to where you are now. What was your path to your PhD and UCLA?

Wong: I love this question, and I imagine I could begin academically, but I might start with my upbringing. When I’m thinking about the power of language and rhetorics, I think about all I witnessed growing up in communities in Southern California that were some of the poorest by size in the country. I saw a variety of literacies spraypainted across train cars that actively passed through one of my central places of upbringing, Colton, California. I consider how I grew up among interconnected and overlapping peoples from the African/Black, Latinx, Asian, and Pacific Islander diasporas. I consider how local Native peoples were actively involved in my elementary school in San Bernardino, California. I think about how White supremacy often found its way into the voices and lives of my poor and working-class White peers, but how often there were deep co-conspiracies and solidarities that went unnoticed. With so many peoples, from so many places, it made having access to multiple varieties of language a deep advantage, and their value, and beauty–even as Dominant American English was widely seen as the ideological norm in very oppressive ways. I saw this personally as my Cantonese father secretly refused to let us know he spoke Cantonese, nor let us learn–something myself, my brother and sister would not find out until he passed away while we were in high school. Continue reading “Colonial outposts in the 36th chamber: Hip hop pedagogies and writing centres” →