viii. Offering Justice Is Dangerous

“I struggle with the outcome of this citation project” is what Katherine McKittrick shares about Sara Ahmed’s often cited, and thus circulated, feminist citational project of not citing white men. 

In McKittrick’s footnotes science story, she offers instructional questions about what this citational endeavor forecloses, encloses, and teaches, and that in the end–even through and especially with the aforementioned struggle–Ahmed’s project (or its overarching, driving idea) is significant for her because it stories “think[ing] about the epistemological grounds through which we theorize and imagine and name liberation in our referencing practices.”

Thinking with McKittrick (who is thinking about black studies) by way of Ahmed (who is thinking about feminism) and with Leigh Patel (who is thinking about education) I want to think fleetingly but seriously about the above lesson which is to say the instruction, the teaching and learning in our relationship to citationality (as Derrida's ghost would say) and justice. 

As someone who traffics in justice discourse and citation politics, I want to linger on this project of citational justice.  

I wonder about a project that offers justice within a colonial imperial antiblack apparatus of knowledge power that is, at its violent core and root, unjust and unauthorized, and how that in turn further invests in, restabilizes, and extends the apparatus. 

I am curious about a justice lesson that does not precisely identify and analyze its definition of justice, roots of injustice, and what constitutes justice. And in that imprecision the lesson rotates as an inclusionary aspiration of representation or recognition or repair. I am curious about what Leigh Patel teaches about justice being populated by injustice and what that means for this learning, that in marking the importance of citational justice, injustice is evaded, disguised, and absent in the very delivery of its objective. I am curious about an investment and commitment to justice that seems to be grounded on one receiving justice and what kind of investment and commitment that really is and where it goes. 

I am concerned about structures of citation and the practices and theories that sustain and substantiate them. I share some of the concern Jennifer Nash shares about critical citational movements that feed current structures rather than the construction of entirely new systems. I am more interested in a citational project that is not about filling in gaps or balancing out an unauthorized field or discipline or profession. 

I’m still visiting with this project, thinking through and rethinking its terms, instruction, conditions, and order.