The Filipino Primitive. Sarita Echavez See

writing precisely at a time when such work is seen as frivolous and extravagant play, a nonproductive, morally questionable activity not unlike gambling, which moreover dissolves the boundary between leisure and toil.

      What is at stake in taking up this all too rare opportunity to pause, to think, and to play with words is the possibility of imagining a nonpropertied space of decolonial knowledge production. We study, teach, write, and organize in order to train ourselves to study not only the objects of analysis we have in view. We prepare ourselves in anticipation of objects of analysis that we can barely imagine let alone grasp today. Fred Moten asks (of) us, “Is there knowledge in the service of not knowing, study as unowning knowledge?”49 Cedric Robinson asks (of) us, Where is a university that we can imagine, let alone build, in the West that would foster the “preservation of the ontological totality granted by a metaphysical system that had never allowed for property in either the physical, philosophical, temporal, legal, social, or psychic sense”?50

      Let me step back for a minute. What is involved in word play? What are the stakes of gambling with words? Discussing the “infinite postponement of meaning” associated with Derrida’s theory of différance in his 1990 article “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” Stuart Hall usefully warns us that Derrida’s disciples have transformed the French critic’s insights about the play of words into a “celebration of formal ‘playfulness,’ which evacuates them of their political meaning.”51 Hall goes on to contend that “if signification depends upon the endless repositioning of its differential terms, meaning, in any specific instance, depends upon the contingent and arbitrary stop—the necessary and temporary ‘break’ in the infinite semiosis of language” even as meaning “continues to unfold, so to speak, beyond the arbitrary closure which makes it, at any moment, possible.”52 At issue in the neoliberal austerity regime’s assault on the university is how we grasp and apply the idea of that temporary break and that contingent stop as a means of rethinking the intellectual and institutional syntax of our work in the academy. Here is another way to put this in the form of questions: How might we contend with the tension between, on the one hand, the intransigent insistence on impermanence and fluidity that characterizes the fields of cultural studies, ethnic studies, feminist studies, and decolonizing studies and, on the other hand, the university’s emphasis on monumentality and permanence in the very process of institutionalizing emergent fields, a process that both calcifies and conserves these new fields of knowledge production? In the face of this new cycle of defunding, theft, and privatization, how might we continue to insist—ethically, politically, and intellectually—on the urgency of opening up rather than shutting down the spaces for nonrationalized forms of knowledge production, even and especially for those forms that thrive under conditions of impermanence and ephemerality rather than (institutionalized) permanence? How might we abide by the precepts outlined in the “Guide to Samoan Studies,” published in 2005 in the first issue of the Journal of Samoan Studies, which include tenets like the following:

      1 Keep the topics open and flexible

      2 Don’t be afraid to do it your way and avoid addiction to any one approach to research or publication

      3 Study what and publish what you in and of Samoa need to publish, not what someone else might consider appropriate

      4 Results get resources rather than the other way around53

      In thinking about the de-propertied, decolonial university from my vantage as a scholar affiliated with cultural studies, ethnic studies, and postcolonial and empire studies, I keep returning to three sentences that allow me to think about the possibilities of an unpropertied, anti-accumulative relation to words, ideas, and knowledge.

      SENTENCE NUMBER 1: “We are here to write the sentences that have never been written and that will never be written again.” Ruminating and riffing on Frederick Douglass and the “unmeaning jargon” of slave songs at the 2008 conference “Campus Lockdown: Women of Color Negotiating the Academic Industrial Complex,” Fred Moten reminded us of our obligation and pleasure as scholars of color to forge new sentences as part of the longer traditions of meaning making within our various communities, even as those syntactical structures and forms of improvisation are dismissed and pathologized as so much nonmeaning and nonsense.54 In other words, we must write words that run amuck/amok.55

      SENTENCE NUMBER 2: “Everything I am about to say in this essay has already been said.”56 In his 2005 Social Text essay “You Can Have My Brown Body and Eat It, Too!” Hiram Pérez takes on the “queer illuminati”—establishmentarian, elite, white queer studies scholars—in the wake of the 2003 “Gay Shame” conference (or “fiasco”) that he attended, the sole scholar of color asked to speak at the conference. Pérez’s focus on repetition and the oldness of what he says calls into question the academy’s focus on critique’s “originality”: “The professional pressure to produce ‘originality’ is really a call to make property claims demarcating intellectual territory and thus an appeal to privatism and individualism.” Instead Pérez calls for queer studies to “interrogat[e] its capacity to listen imaginatively.”57

      SENTENCE NUMBER 3: “Such a practice … might turn up new soil on old ground.”58 At a 2005 American Studies Association panel on the work of Hortense Spillers, Nahum Chandler delivered a paper on Spillers vis-à-vis Du Bois, published three years later in Criticism as an essay titled “Of Exorbitance: The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought.” And again, this question of the relation between the old and the new emerges.

      Especially in my analyses of the writer Carlos Bulosan (chapter 3) and the artist Stephanie Syjuco (chapter 4), this book seeks to explore the productive tension—the syncopated rhythm, perhaps—between Pérez’s trenchant critique of (propertied) originality and Moten’s embrace of (nonpropertied) singularity. Drawing from the experience I have had to garner as an organizer for social change within the imperial American academy, I am interested in the tension between deep listening and the composition of “unmeaning jargon.” Indeed, I would suggest that that tension might constitute the praxis of knowledge production in a de-propertied, decolonial university—of “turn[ing] up new soil on old ground.”

      But how and why did knowledge get commodified? I turn to the law and the law school by way of an answer. I began to think about the commodification of words—and, from there, the commodification of knowledge and education—while taking a seminar as a graduate student with Patricia Williams when we all were excited about this new phenomenon of critical race theory. While Williams is now widely known as a columnist for the Nation as well as a law professor, it is crucial to remember that Williams is a contracts scholar, thus or thence her influential 1988 essay in Signs titled “On Being the Object of Property.”59 I remember grappling with what was to me the new knowledge that the structure—not merely the content—of case law itself reproduces the enslaveability of personhood. We read all these cases testing the legal and ethical repercussions of new (at the time) reproductive technologies such as surrogacy, and we learned that the contracts governing surrogate motherhood drew upon precedents in the laws governing the trade in cattle and then the purchase and sale of human chattel. But it was not only the content of slavery in the law that I understood to be the problem. As I began to read Williams’s groundbreaking work—new soil on old ground—I paid attention to its storytelling style of anecdote upon anecdote upon anecdote, the meshed complexity of its chain of signification. I was struck by its rhetorical resistance to citation. In other words, it is very hard to quote Williams. It is difficult to lift a passage from Williams’s work and quote it in your own work because, out of its own context, the quotation loses its meaning so quickly and begins to approximate nonsense or “unmeaning jargon.” And I think that the politics of her style has everything to do with her ruminations on “being the object of property.”

      Indeed, as a number of critical race scholars have pointed out, the ethical subject of Western thought, the subject that forms the epistemological ground for the imperial university, in fact turns out to be an economic subject. In the 1991 essay “Race under Representation,” David Lloyd characterizes the innately racialized nature of the universality—that is to say, the transcendence of particularity—attached to the