When the Lights Go Out: A Discussion with David Theo Goldberg

[David Theo Goldberg. Image via the author.] [David Theo Goldberg. Image via the author.]

When the Lights Go Out: A Discussion with David Theo Goldberg

By : Muriam Haleh Davis

David Theo Goldberg is the Director of the University of California Humanities Research Institute, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, and one of the world’s leading figures in Critical Race Theory. Ten years ago he started SECT (the summer Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory). From 29 July - 9 August, the eighth session of SECT was held in Beirut, Lebanon on the theme of “Spaces of Resistance.” What follows is a conversation I conducted with David Theo Goldberg during the Seminar, intercut with my reflections as a participant in SECT VIII.

Ten days discussing critical theory were punctuated by a series of moments when the lights went out. Of course, this is not surprising, but this time I couldn’t help but attend to the different reactions these dark moments provoked: from mild discomfort (the air conditioning goes off), to awkwardness (a professional dinner is suddenly taking place by candle light), to outright bizarre (the replicability of spaces of global capital thrown into question when the music and lights go off at H&M). And then there were the electrical wires: the web of strands—spliced, and re-spliced—that ran through Shatilla and became deadly in the winter due to the combination of ice and kilowatts. During this workshop in Beirut, I started thinking of time, space, and politics in terms of power.

DTG: The post-colonial global south (and I need to stress these are broad generalizations) has been living in a critical condition pretty much since independence. [The condition] is critical in the sense that it faces not having resources, living close to the limit if not at the limit. All of these things—the lack of electricity, the lack of running water, things that people in the global north have taken for granted—have provided dispositions of working around, of resourcefulness in the face of the lack of resources, of being able to figure out how to get along, from one crisis moment to the next, from one critical moment to the next. The other sense of critical is of critical theorizing and trying to get at the roots of things, not to take things at face value and for granted. Of trying to think from these moments of real suffering and challenge [and] to pose questions from those sets of conditions regarding the issues that have an immediate purchase on the lived condition. [This is] what Achille Mbembe has called the necropolitical—the question of what becomes of resistance when war and the distinct possibility of violent, premature death become a matter of daily life. These are the questions one has to face up to when one rises up—if one even has a place to rise from.

The notions of precarity and necropolitics were not new to me. I had spent two years as a PhD student at UC Irvine discussing them (often with David Theo Goldberg himself), so the question remained: Why should forty-odd academics discuss these questions from Beirut? 

During the “walking graffiti” tour some of the workshop participants decided to “tag” the walls themselves—writing things that ranged from the silly (a diamond next to the name of a rapper) to the hilarious (“don’t feed fat cats” on a wall near AUB) to the political (“Syria wants freedom”). The next day, as we convened for a discussion feeling the first signs of theory fatigue, someone posed a question that jolted us to political attention: what right did we have to be tagging those walls—which most of us were viewing as tourists rather than inhabitants? What was our claim on that city and those spaces, which categorically weren’t ours? We were suddenly forced to discuss our own positionality as scholars largely based in the global North, and the relationship between identity, place, and activism. It was a moment that touched many of us who had done activism in circles that we were not born into and who were forced to define a conception of political solidarity that was not derived from ethnic belonging. Still, the notions of theoretical and political responsibility weighed heavily over the next week.

Doing graffiti, in any case, is different than organizing for BDS in that it stakes a material claim. It is often fraught with danger, done clandestinely, in conversation with other artists. Or is it? The political possibilities of graffiti can be located in its very transience, erased, re-inscribed, authorless. Still, we had marked a set of walls which, in a fundamental sense, weren’t ours. The discussion was charged—and raw—unlike those I have participated in as a doctoral student, where there is often a predictability to graduate seminars and a staging that I knew almost by heart (and relished in performing, to a certain extent). In southern California, politically charged emotions certainly were never visibly in play (perhaps even—or especially—when one was discussing affect theory).

DTG: It is clear that critical theory has…become repetitive, and where it’s not repetitive it has become episodic. [We have started these workshops] not with a view towards reviving critical theory, but to think about how you do critical theory differently, which is not by dismissing the tradition of critical theory but by drawing on it as one among other resources in facing up to the questions of our times. By not being bound by the boundaries of that critical canon and by…drawing on the fragments of insight…that provide a kind of starting point or an intervention point [in order] to think about the conditions we face today. This is what some of us have started to call poor theory. [The idea is to] draw on whatever is at hand that enables one to move the insight in critically engaging and productive ways. And that could be something from the critical theory canon—insights from Benjamin or Adorno or others—or it could be any other equally compelling and insightful, incisive text or cultural insight or fragmentary concern that teases out what the driving issues are…for thinking about the sets of problematics that we face today.

The “critical canon” animated many of our discussions, but they were often framed by more imminent problematics. Who was uncomfortable taking pictures in a refugee camp? What was our role in being there (“they are very happy to see you,” our guide kept repeating, even as a gang of laughing youth joked about taking one of us hostage)? Who should (or shouldn’t) agree to speak on al-Manar TV after a guided tour of the Dahia (the Beirut suburb destroyed by Israeli bombing in 2006 and reconstructed by Hizbollah)? Despite many of our activist backgrounds, why did some of us feel uncomfortable throwing a rock into Israeli territory? One colleague insisted, “If we don’t do something concrete here we’ll just have been another set of theorists talking about things no one cares about,” echoing the frustration that many of us had felt as we moved through the physical spaces of Lebanon. We were aware of our position of privilege as we moved through these spaces protected by our structural position as members of the academy largely from the global North. And while our stories were inevitably more complicated than that, we seemed to occupy a position of structural whiteness, even as we approached places for which many us had mobilized, organized, boycotted. The strangest thing about the occupied border with Palestine was that Palestine was just right there—just a patch of land that looked like all the other patches.

DTG: Race shapes the way people think and their dispositions in relation to power and to each other through power as a consequence of the forming and fashioning and fabrication of the racial—both in the sense of creating the social fabric through race and the fabrication that it is always a make-up, putting on the cosmetic, but also making people believe the fabricated projection, a kind of compulsion, a set of convictions.

Why the racial in relationship to Palestine rather than ethnic considerations or other ways of configuring power is precisely because the articulation of a Jewish homeland, from the very beginning, as a geographically identified fathering site with boundaries and borders, was articulated very explicitly in racial terms. Now people have argued that in the nineteenth century everyone was talking in racial terms. Well, fine. But those who came to understand critically that this was a crucial project of the nineteenth century and that it bore with it enormous death-producing baggage also came to rethink the insertion of the homogenous into the heterogeneous. Israel’s project seemed constitutively and conceptually predicated on the fashioning of a homogenizing condition that was necessarily exclusive of anyone not seen to belong to that homogenizing project. Even as it seems to recognize heterogeneity in that homogeneity, it is still ultimately homogenizing. Who can return? Who belongs here? Who exists here? How do we sweep out that which is taken to be constitutively different? And it is explicit in Theodor Herzl and Moses Hess, even as [the discourse] became more sophisticated post 1948. People say there is no racial language here—maybe and maybe not—but even if not, explicitly (it is explicit in Herzl and Hess, actually), racial language is not just about the explicit use of race, it is also the use in the name of race not expressed explicitly for the conditions for which race has always stood. In that sense, Israel remains a racial project. As Saree Makdissi has shown, the legal structures of apartheid and Israel map on to each other in very disturbing ways for anyone who would be disturbed by such things and…the fact that it is denied is to say that people are disturbed by these things even when they’re in defense of things they are disturbed by….It is not just a denial, it is a denial of the denial of that possibility, which is revealing of the fact that something else is also going on—not just in the denial but in the denial of the denial. A recognition too sensitive to touch, an acknowledgment that itself cannot be acknowledged.

I am “legally” Jewish. With my name and heritage, if Hitler were around he’d be offing me. And yet I don’t feel I need to be in Israel or that Israel represents me. If that is the project you want, well and good, be there, embrace it. But then you have to be open to the critiques we are making of your project as a homogenizing project and be serious about those critiques….In a way I respect Benny Morris because he’s so honest—even as I’m horrified at the positions he is taking but there is something I can say to him. You can scream at each other but at least you are engaged. The accusation of preclusion is a product of this project of deep homogenization at the boundaries and that is pernicious. That is a project that’s destined ultimately to fail, as projects of repression in the end almost invariably do. Post-apartheid [and] the Arab Spring raise in their own respective ways the complexities of the afterlife, the legacies these repressions leave in their wake.

It is true that there is something awkward but refreshing about actual conflict in academic circles; The texture of intellectual life often feels predictable, and there are critical questions that require more than a citation of Agamben or a mention of Foucault to address. In Beirut, there was an often destabilizing sense that the boundaries of discussion were flung open and that the walls of the question and response format of MESA was being disturbed in fundamental ways. How could we talk about Hizbollah without theorizing neo-liberalism? How could we not reflect on the fact that terms we had been trained to use and the authors we knew how to cite seemed increasingly flat—failing to capture the historical and political reality, the complexities, that we confront. I thought of my years of proposing badly-worded and uninspired (but ultimately “successful”) MESA panels. The modalities of our intellectual and political life have perhaps also become episodic and predictable and the nature of the afterlife of Middle Eastern Studies is still uncertain.

DTG: Globalizing forces and flows have placed the notion of region or area in question. Modes of established—“given”—comprehension are being undone in favor of emergent ones. It is no longer merely a question of mapping or remapping already bounded geographies—that’s too static, too bounded. [The question should be] how are the networks of relation reconstituting and what networks are in play [in order to try] to get at the suppleness, re-alignments, the uncontainable forces in play. This is exactly what is proving to be deeply unsettling for people. Part of critical theory’s challenge and part of our challenge is to find the terms that enable us to translate ourselves to ourselves in the face of these relational shifts—which after all has always been the challenge of the humanities. It is the project of translation of what it means to be human, in especially critical and shifting conditions.

The academy is completely at a loss today. It always comes to things after the fact, particularly in the global north. There is a challenge from my own campus by the dean of business, who has just co-published a book arguing that the humanities and qualitative social sciences are irrelevant to students’ interests today in seeking marketable skills. [He claims we should] just get rid of them if they are incapable of paying their own way. It is staggering that someone in a full service university would be so bluntly and brutally honest.

So one has to ask, what is the role of the academy and what kind of comprehensions are left in place in the absence of the academy. Are there critical ways of engaging these questions that are nevertheless supple [and] subtle but also strong enough to be able to reinvent themselves?

It is fair enough to claim that area studies and the US academy are subpar institutions. But many of us (the author included) were looking for a job involving both. And to strip the workshop of its purely intellectual engagements, many of us wanted to know how our projects could benefit from thinking about questions from a different geographical and analytical place. As someone who has been trained in Middle Eastern studies as well as critical theory, I felt particularly invested in the possibilities for intellectual and professional engagement between the two. I have submitted articles to the MESA bulletin that subsequently attacked me for being overly “self-conscious” (a pathologizing of the tendency to theorize?) and I fought with theorists about historical specificity. This is a tale of two trainings, perhaps, but life many of my colleagues, I wanted to know how to resolve a resulting disciplinary identity crisis.

DTG: Comparison is about comparing discrete identity formations and looking at their likenesses and differences. You are holding them apart and are failing to understand a very different world which [exists] in the relations that shift and order and reorder and constrain and unsettle…these different sites. And you can only do that when you give up boundedness as a primary social determinant. The relations themselves have become more complex and less bounded. Area studies missed [the so-called “Arab Spring”] precisely because in predicating itself on static boundaries it was blind to the complex range of relational forces in play.

It was difficult not to think of boundedness without thinking of walls—which had been a major part of our discussions and explorations. There were walls we tagged (in Beirut), walls we photographed (the Lebanese-Israeli border), walls between which we felt both entrapped and touched (the narrow passages in Shatilla), walls where we were asked to account for our presence (the gates of AUB), walls we read and re-read (quotes written at Mlita—the Hezbollah liberation museum in the South). One presenter later noted that walls—like phenomenology—are defined by the gaps. I wondered where we repeatedly found gaps in our collective academic life? Why do many of us repeatedly come up against a frustration at being unable to make ourselves translatable for a non-academic (or activist) audience? Why did I feel that, as the archival material for my dissertation piled up and my theoretical background grew, I found it was increasingly difficult to find the right kinds of questions to ask?

David Theo Goldberg started his presentation to the group in Beirut with Anais Mitchel’s “Why We Build the Wall.” He continued:

The wall is built to keep out the plunderer, the stranger, the threat of the unknown. Its construction and sustenance always requires militarization and it always requires supplementation, more wall. No matter how high or long or how thick the wall, it needs to be expanded. The wall fixes in place, or attempts to fix in place. It might start as a fence; though a fence invariably turns out to be not enough so we will try to keep them out by building a wall. A watchtower, for example, is not just an addition but becomes a constitutive part of the wall. The wall always needs other supplemental technologies that are interwoven with each other…. Walls invariably cut through lived space and try to order socialities. They shape the flows of people, commerce, products. They order the social…and empty out the heterogeneous, in the name of a monumentalization to the projection of homegenization. As such, walls are the end of politics, they are a way to fix in place the contestable—to remove from the landscape the possibility of contestation. [This section is based on the author’s notes rather than direct quotations.]

In Beirut itself, the walls were less neat than in Irvine, which is one of the largest private development projects anywhere, almost fifty years in the making, where it is reputed that the planners refused to include sidewalks to preclude the possibility of walking and thus unpredictable public gatherings. The threat of chaos was everywhere in Beirut, from crossing the street to Hezbollah’s use of private property to consolidate party rule. This city, after all, had witnessed a protracted civil war and Lebanon is a country for which there is no official historical narrative after 1946. Both places have guarded against the threat of chaos in their own way, the difference being that Irvine managed to erase all but the softest echoes. Yet moments of darkness often reintroduce a bit of chaos, sometimes with incredibly generative (if not definitive) results. As David reminded me, “I’m not a fan of conceptual promiscuity, but theoretical promiscuity I’ll own up to—that’s poor theory in play, after all.” After the “passing” of the Foucaultian, Derridian, and Post-Colonial moments, there was something humble about this articulation of poor theory. It was chaotic, frustrating, and at times disorienting—elements from which area studies has long protected itself. Poor theory might not make for a successful MESA panel proposal, but it may offer a generative darkness from which to rethink the trajectory of Middle Eastern studies as well as critical theory.

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Inhabiting the Possible: Pedagogy and Solidarity at Camp Ayandeh

“A decent education cannot be limited to tolerating youth accessing their ethnic and cultural history but must be about facilitating their right to do so.” — Cornel West

Globally and nationally, young people are garnering attention as historical actors and agents of social change. At the same time, federal, state, and local politicians are making drastic cuts to primary and secondary schooling, community services supportive of youth development, and higher education. These cuts coincide with a rise in anti-immigrant sentiment and continued demonization of Muslim and Middle Eastern communities. They also intersect with attempts to restrict or dismantle hard-fought ethnic studies programs. These attempts reflect a movement towards narrow, test-based curricula that are more informed by what is good for private business than what is good for students.  

Such conditions threaten the existence and continued development of educational spaces that meaningfully serve young people from immigrant and diasporic backgrounds. In this piece, I describe one such program: Camp Ayandeh (ayandeh means “future” in Persian). This program seeks to realize students’ rights to access and participate in their own histories. These reflections offer pedagogical insights, explore relationships between education and social change, and argue for programs that recognize difference and hybridity as profound resources for learning. [1]

Organized by Iranian Alliances Across Borders. Camp Ayandeh provides a positive, inclusive environment where Iranian American high school students learn about their shared histories and build solidarity across differences. Through cultural, historical, and artistic workshops, as well as community-building activities and critical dialogue, Camp Ayandeh helps students identify and respond to issues they see affecting young people in the Iranian diaspora. This includes working together to deconstruct negative images, and develop more humanizing and complex narratives about their communities, families, and themselves.

Now in its seventh year, Camp Ayandeh has become a unique sociocultural experience organized by young Iranian American adults for Iranian American youth. For one week during the summer, eighty-five high school students and thirty-five collegiate staff build what many participants refer to as a family. Together, they generate the trust necessary to grapple with questions of history and identity, and thereby grow as leaders and human beings.

As the current Camp Ayandeh Director, my perspective is inevitably partial. Part of my role, then, is to seek out tensions and areas for continued growth. As with any narrative, my account is one of many possible views on the camp’s significance.

A Window into Camp Ayandeh

People, what they say and do, and how they treat one another during pedagogical activities are what make up educational environments. Given the opportunity to visit and observe interactions at Camp Ayandeh, you would likely notice the mixing of seemingly dissonant languages, genres, and cultural forms: English and Persian, affectionately referred to as “Penglish” or “Fargilisi”; popular Iranian, Middle Eastern, global, and American music and dance; traditional poetry and hip hop; vasati (Iranian dodgeball), and even spontaneous water balloon fights.

You might also sense the organic rhythm of everyday life at the camp, a marker of the community ethos that deepens as the week unfolds. Waiting for the start of morning activities transforms into an occasion for collective singing and dancing. A question about the meaning of the word “cipher” in a writing workshop that draws on Jay Z’s Decoded leads to its own cipher later that day, with a staff member free-styling over a camper’s beat box. 

A community organizing workshop that teaches campers how to strategize around an issue of concern leads one group to conduct a camp survey on the need for Middle Eastern and Global Studies at the high school level. Another group drafts and later presents a “Campers’ Bill of Rights,” including well thought-out demands, such as thirty minutes of informal time before lights out, and signatures from all fellow campers. Camp organizers publicly amend and sign the document, participating in an impromptu democratic process initiated by the campers. An evening jam session inspires a thirteen-year-old and eighteen-year-old to play guitar together for the entire camp, a performance they had humbly shied away from earlier that day. 

The following video, filmed and edited by Sophomore Leila Sadri, conveys the atmosphere created at Ayandeh.

Above all, you might notice relationships—across age, gender, language, region, first and second-generation immigrants, as well as administrators, counselors, and campers. Traversing difference, such friendships make the cliques and hierarchies of high school seem strange. Older students intentionally reach out to younger participants, sitting together during breaks or chanting one of their names at dinner. Counselors stay up late into the night to brainstorm new ways of encouraging their group members to bond, making sure no one feels left out.

Many identify these “familial” relationships as the most meaningful part of their camp experience. Sophomore Arman Sharif comments, “I literally did not dislike anyone at camp. These are all awesome people. After discussions, being together, and just hanging out, they became my family for life.” Senior Anahita Asefirad echoes, “I can’t believe I could become such good friends with people in seven days.” These comments stand in stark contrast to what many campers share as their initial reaction and hesitancy towards the idea of an Iranian American summer program; it would likely be “extremely lame” to join a camp for “a bunch of Iranian kids.” 

Seen in this light, Camp Ayandeh is an attempt by young people with shared histories and experiences of exclusion to create a space of radical inclusion. Together, they seek to resist the demonization of Iran and the Middle East and interrupt the processes of racialization that often turn inwards, compelling us to reject parts of ourselves in order to belong. To heal these splits—Iranian versus American, East versus West—camp participants call into question colonial ideologies that premise inclusion on assimilation. They imagine and inhabit alternative models of inclusion, learning to assert linguistic and cultural hybridity as a strength rather than a deficit. This, I suspect, leads to much of the joy at camp: a social and educational experience where membership is not premised on checking parts of one’s identity at the door. Camp participants are encouraged to know and be their full selves, and to try out possible selves.

At their best, spaces like Ayandeh make it safe to engage in the vulnerability necessary for any kind of real learning. Speaking beautifully-accented Persian or English becomes comfortable despite past experiences of shame or ridicule. Raising a genuine but potentially controversial question or reading a poem’s rough draft to over one hundred people becomes a daily possibility. Such risks may seem small. But in the history of American education, which often explicitly or implicitly demeans students who do not fit dominant cultural norms, they are important markers of educational dignity and change.

Pedagogical Principles

Though many of us refer to the Ayandeh experience as a “magical” one, such contexts do not emerge magically. They are intentionally organized around a number of key principles and grounded in a history and institutional memory that directly inform how participants move in the present.

First, Camp Ayandeh is organized to be a community of learners where all participants are encouraged to take on the dual roles of teacher and student. This approach is distinct from “adult-centered” or “banking” models that treat students as empty receptacles of knowledge. But it is also critical of “student-centered” models that conflate democratic pedagogy with teacher passivity. In a community of learners, all participants are active. Young professionals and graduate and undergraduate students break down interpretations of the Iranian Revolution or model how to read a Hafez poem, making their knowledge public and available for younger members to engage. At the same time, older community members recognize the depth of experience and understanding younger participants have to offer, seeking out opportunities to share responsibility (as in the case of the “Campers Bill of Rights”) and acknowledge countless lessons learned from one another.  

Learning is understood as a deeply social process that comes alive in the context of inter-generational collaboration and mentorship. In contrast to emphasizing “independent learning,” Camp Ayandeh’s approach seeks to generate a culture of assistance, trust, and community— valuable goals in and of themselves that also amplify what is pedagogically possible. Educators must therefore set the collective tone and model careful ways of being and interacting. When moments of disrespect or potential exclusion do arise, staff members are responsible for firmly but lovingly reminding participants of the community rules.  

Listen closely during camp discussions and you might notice the collective hush when each person speaks. The hush is of often a bit quieter when the speaker is a younger camper or someone who has not spoken up before among the whole group. You will hear finger snaps ripple out across the audience when a speaker strikes a collective chord or says something that resonates with an individual camper’s experience. I personally noticed few if any student comments ending without snaps of praise and support. Such moves index the trust that is continuously established, a working faith in others to responsibly hold each person’s contribution from solid assertions to tentative wonderings or doubts. They also give experiential meaning to terms like “solidarity” and “leadership development.”

Second, Camp Ayandeh situates learning in a context of play, creativity, and imagination. Music, poetry, dance, theater, hip hop, and writing provide affective and creative resources for young people to reflect on their lives and participate in cultural production. These crafts also open up new aesthetic forms that affirm the range of our bi-cultural experiences. While many participants describe the pressures they feel to be “fully” Iranian or American, art redefines the cultural borderlands as a reservoir of creativity, inviting students to render their experiences with honesty and specificity.

Drawing on the work of Brazilian educator Augosto Boal [2], Camp Ayandeh uses theater as a form of dramatic play that allows participants to take on and explore different characters, including the protagonists and antagonists of everyday life. This summer, older and younger campers worked together to develop scenes that addressed racial profiling, patriarchy, bullying, and family conflicts. Given such heavy topics, play and imagination provided spiritual nourishment and helped maintain a focus on the hopeful and possible, blending humor with social analysis and creative, non-violent resistance. As Senior Sheerin Tehrani comments, “I liked teatro because it taught us how to act in case someone was using common prejudices against us in any scenario and how to react and educate others about our culture and heritage."

One could argue that a summer camp is more conducive to such playful artistry. However, primary, secondary, and university classrooms can enable intellectual experimentation by privileging the subjunctive—what if, perhaps, could be, let’s try it out—valuing well-crafted questions over quick or easy answers. Humor and creativity can help teachers provoke genuine engagement and resist various forms of ideological rigidity.

Play is also about mastering and bending rules, offering a way to think about expanding students’ access to dominant cultural tools without promoting assimilation. Young people are often the most skilled at this type of ingenuity and more likely to learn instructions only to invent their own versions and purposes. Yet, in times of forced austerity, art, music, and even writing are the first to be pushed out the school door. Educators can help stymie the deeply troubling effects of such decisions by sneaking them back in through the window, finding opportunities to infuse traditional subjects with the artistic and creative.

Finally, learning about oneself and one’s history is fundamentally connected to building solidarity with others. At Camp Ayandeh, we emphasize the world of diversity within the terms “Iranian” and “American,” making explicit reference to the rich histories of communities of color in the United States. Many camp organizers are students of Ethnic and Women’s Studies, borrowing and refashioning tools to make sense of our experiences as Iranian Americans.

During the camp’s American history workshop, we listened to Billy Holiday’s Strange Fruit and Woody Guthrie’s Deportee, treating songwriters as historians that can help us view the past through the eyes of those pushed to society’s margins. Camp participants are often eager to talk about race and racism. Many students express frustration at the negative portrayal of Muslim and Middle Eastern communities in the media. Almost all can relay a personal experience of discrimination, from teachers mockingly mispronouncing their names to being attacked and labeled as a “terrorist.” Camp Ayandeh seeks to provide a safe space for critically analyzing and healing from these experiences.

In the process, campers often grapple with their own stereotypes and assumptions. Echoing the cultural exceptionalism espoused by some members of the older generation, students have suggested that Iranians ought to be recognized as uniquely high-achieving and successful, or as distinct from other groups in the region. In one theater scene, campers portrayed two passengers harassing an Iranian family at the airport. One actor countered the antagonists’ stereotypical generalizations by insisting: “We are Iranian, not Arab.”

In response, camp organizers urge students to consider how cultural and community pride can be developed without creating new hierarchies. This includes naming the divisive nature of “model minority” myths and working with students to recognize the complex intersections of race, class, gender, and educational access. It also means explaining how phrases such as “Persian pride”—though meant to combat discrimination—reflect a kind of ethnic chauvinism. Without opportunities to develop nuanced understandings at a younger age, unexamined reactions to discrimination can erase the ethnic and religious diversity among Iranians and contribute to divisions with other communities of color.  

Thus, a key strand of this year’s curriculum was solidarity across Iranian American and Arab American communities. Through a number of special guests and activities, we sought to highlight our shared regional histories and experiences as Middle Eastern Americans. Yousef Baker, an Iranian Iraqi sociologist, recounted his family’s migration story and posed the question “Where is home?” For those displaced by war, political and economic upheaval, Baker suggested, “Home is building a home for those who do not have a home.” Egyptian American writer and professor Moustafa Bayoumi offered narratives and reflections from his book, How Does It Feel to be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America, explicating the post-September 11 context defining much of campers’ lives. [3]

Syrian American hip-hop artist, Omar Offendum, shared his experiences, music, and poetry, affirming the power of bi-cultural artists to construct bridges across borders.  

As captured in the back and forth between Offendum and the audience, solidarity lives in the establishment of a meaningful human connection, one that gives life to, as college freshman Rameen Vafa put it: “having each other’s back.” Such moments not only suggest that we are able to unlearn assumptions and connect across difference, but that we have a deep desire to do so.

Social and Educational Dreams

In the United States, education is organized such that students, if given access, must often wait until college to take courses in Ethnic Studies or Middle Eastern history and literature. This fits with assimilationist trends in American schooling that require young people to access the other from the standpoint of the dominant group, rather than from a conscious position of solidarity and identification. But it may also be premised on another set of assumptions: that immigrant students do not want to learn about their homelands and connect with their parents’ and grandparents’ experiences. Or, young people are presumably not yet capable of thinking in mature ways about the social and historical forces that shape their lives. Spaces like Camp Ayandeh directly challenge these assumptions and urge teachers, academics, artists, journalists, community leaders, and elders to continue making their insights available to youth by engaging their questions and listening to what they have to say.

Manuel Espinoza refers to programs like Camp Ayandeh as “educational sanctuaries,” local attempts, either inside or outside school, to provide the “artistic and intellectual freedom, social equity, and access to educational resources typically not enjoyed in everyday institutional settings.” [4] Such contexts stand as lived arguments for the kind of schools and social experiences we would like to bring into being. But sanctuaries, by definition, provide refuge from harm. Their existence is also a testament to the epistemic and cultural violence many immigrant and diasporic youth continue to experience. 

This reality underscores a central tension within such educational efforts; students are offered a powerful but limited encounter with a uniquely supportive, culturally relevant pedagogical setting. Such an experience can embolden participants to stand up for themselves and others, while being confident in who they are. But it can sometimes also make the relative absence of cultural recognition or community that much more pronounced. Camp staff has sought to address this tension by staying connected throughout the year and helping campers join or develop similar spaces back home. Though many successfully do so, they also frequently express the desire for an “Ayandeh High School.”

In a workshop on educational equity, Ayandeh counselor Sara Mokhtari-Fox asked participants to imagine and illustrate their ideal school. Alongside the waterslides and tree-houses, campers’ final designs included clean buildings and healthy cafeteria food, smaller classes, teachers that “promote rather than punish students,” courses on Iran and the Middle East, and a focus on learning over testing. Their basic demands echoed those of students and educators around the country and world, many of whom connect the right to a quality public education with broader struggles for economic and social change. As we support these struggles, let us also join young people in dreaming up and practicing alternatives—educational models fit for a more just and democratic future.                                                                                                                         

[1] Kris D. Gutiérrez, Patricia Baquedano-López, and Carlos Tejeda, “ Rethinking Diversity: Hybridity and Hybrid Language Practices in the Third Space,” Mind, Culture, and Activity: An International Journal 6, no. 4 (1999), 286-304.

[2] Augosto Boal, The Rainbow of Desire: The Boal Method of Theatre and Therapy (New York: Routledge Press, 1995).

[3] Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America (New York: Penguin Press, 2008).

[4] Manuel Espinoza, “A Case Study of the Production of Educational Sanctuary in one Migrant Classroom,” Pedagogies: An International Journal 4, no. 1 (2009), 44-62.