Conor Tomás Reed | Graduate Center of the City University of New York (original) (raw)
Papers by Conor Tomás Reed
In my dissertation, CUNY Will Be Free!: Black, Puerto Rican, and Women’s Compositions, Literature... more In my dissertation, CUNY Will Be Free!: Black, Puerto Rican, and Women’s Compositions, Literatures, and Studies at the City College of New York and in New York City, 1960-1980, I argue that the writings, political actions, and relationships of City College students and teachers underwent a collective decolonial metamorphosis that transformed the landscapes of United States higher education, as public universities like the City University of New York and the University of Puerto Rico became key sites of counterinsurgency to suppress Third World coalitional projects. In doing so, I situate New York City as an epicenter of Black, Puerto Rican, and women’s liberation work, and underscore the conditions in which these participants’ legacies emerged in their poetry, fiction, journalism, and communiqués that continue to animate struggles today both inside and outside of classrooms. I recover the roles of Toni Cade Bambara, David Henderson, and June Jordan as community-grounding scholars who intervened in the formation of Black and Women’s Studies. I also re-interpret Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich\u27s poetry as texts that illuminate their experiences in CUNY classrooms, and confront the limits of masculinist revolutionary ideologies and studies of the time. Finally, I trace the student compositional records of Samuel Delany’s early sexual and intellectual explorations, Louis Reyes Rivera and Sekou Sundiata’s Third World journalism in Tech News/The Paper, and Guillermo Morales and Assata Shakur’s clandestine organizing back to their City College foundations, as I recover the archival records of the University of Puerto Rico’s student mobilizations against the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) and conscription into the war in Vietnam. Altogether, this document chronicles the entwined “freedom schools” movement pedagogies and creative arts in New York City and Puerto Rico that transformed U.S. higher education in the 1960s and 1970s, preceding a transitional period of U.S. imperialism that would restructure and rebrand itself through neoliberal diversity claims that masked a counterinsurgency campaign upon public higher education
Liverpool University Press eBooks, Jun 1, 2013
This chapter examines the politics of the photograph in Three Guineas in relation to contemporary... more This chapter examines the politics of the photograph in Three Guineas in relation to contemporary representational strategies for political protest. The image of the body heap in wartime—the gruesomely iconic pile of dead, frequently unarmed civilians—is thoroughly embedded in modern social consciousness, returning again and again as a kind of chorus to history's cacophonies. In Three Guineas, her 1938 work of radical feminist pacifism, Virginia Woolf describes the experience of receiving photographs from the embattled Spanish Republic during its revolution and civil war, which “the Government sends with patient pertinacity about twice a week.” The chapter considers Woolf's construction of a recognition of horrors into a verbal narrative so as to stop the cycle of visual trauma, which can in turn rupture the expectation of endless war and mass death from which we both distance and shackle our sense of selves.
In my dissertation, CUNY Will Be Free!: Black, Puerto Rican, and Women’s Compositions, Literature... more In my dissertation, CUNY Will Be Free!: Black, Puerto Rican, and Women’s Compositions, Literatures, and Studies at the City College of New York and in New York City, 1960-1980, I argue that the writings, political actions, and relationships of City College students and teachers underwent a collective decolonial metamorphosis that transformed the landscapes of United States higher education, as public universities like the City University of New York and the University of Puerto Rico became key sites of counterinsurgency to suppress Third World coalitional projects. In doing so, I situate New York City as an epicenter of Black, Puerto Rican, and women’s liberation work, and underscore the conditions in which these participants’ legacies emerged in their poetry, fiction, journalism, and communiqués that continue to animate struggles today both inside and outside of classrooms. I recover the roles of Toni Cade Bambara, David Henderson, and June Jordan as community-grounding scholars who intervened in the formation of Black and Women’s Studies. I also re-interpret Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich\u27s poetry as texts that illuminate their experiences in CUNY classrooms, and confront the limits of masculinist revolutionary ideologies and studies of the time. Finally, I trace the student compositional records of Samuel Delany’s early sexual and intellectual explorations, Louis Reyes Rivera and Sekou Sundiata’s Third World journalism in Tech News/The Paper, and Guillermo Morales and Assata Shakur’s clandestine organizing back to their City College foundations, as I recover the archival records of the University of Puerto Rico’s student mobilizations against the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) and conscription into the war in Vietnam. Altogether, this document chronicles the entwined “freedom schools” movement pedagogies and creative arts in New York City and Puerto Rico that transformed U.S. higher education in the 1960s and 1970s, preceding a transitional period of U.S. imperialism that would restructure and rebrand itself through neoliberal diversity claims that masked a counterinsurgency campaign upon public higher education
Interdisciplinary/Multidisciplinary Woolf, 2013
Viewpoint Magazine, 2015
This roundtable on housing struggles is Viewpoint’s inaugural “movement inquiry” feature, in whic... more This roundtable on housing struggles is Viewpoint’s inaugural “movement inquiry” feature, in which we ask people across the United States to share organizing experiences so that local lessons can be bridged towards more regional, national, and international strategies. With this resource, we encourage radicals to make time to reflect, regroup, and more widely circulate our work. We hope that as these stories are shared, new connections will be made, and that a larger struggle for our cities’ futures can be waged.
Anuario de la Escuela de Historia, 2018
This article explores the pedagogical foundations of three U.S. Black women writers—Toni Cade Bam... more This article explores the pedagogical foundations of three U.S. Black women writers—Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, and Audre Lorde—widely recognized as among the most influential and prolific writers of 20th century cultures of emancipation. Their distinct yet entwined legacies—as socialist feminists, people’s poets and novelists, community organizers, and innovative educators—altered the landscapes of multiple liberation movements from the late 1960s to the present, and offer a striking example of the possibilities of radical women’s intellectual friendships. The internationalist reverberations of Bambara, Jordan, and Lorde are alive and ubiquitous, even if to some readers today in the Caribbean and Latin America, their names may be unfamiliar.[Bambara’s fiction centered Black and Third World women and children absorbing vibrant life lessons within societies structured to harm them. Her 1980 novel, The Salt Eaters, posed the question - “are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to b...
At the turn of the twentieth century, the founders of the progressive public school movement envi... more At the turn of the twentieth century, the founders of the progressive public school movement envisioned a public education system that recognizes the humanity of each student, prepares them for democratic participation in life, and advocates their fullest potential for the greater good. Education was to be by the people and for the people. Today, democratic participation is nearly absent in the pedagogy, policy, and practices of public education, including here in the City University of New York and the Graduate Center. Neoliberal pressure to transform public education into a corporate model for maximum over decades of research, activism, and public outcry for a more democratic education.
Rachel J. Chapman and Conor Tomás Reed FEATURES
Traducciones by Conor Tomás Reed
Los primeros desarrollos de los Estudios Sobre Mujeres Negras en las vidas de Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan y Audre Lorde. , 2019
Traducción del artículo The Early Formations of Black Women’s Studies in the Lives of Toni Cade B... more Traducción del artículo The Early Formations of Black Women’s Studies
in the Lives of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, and Audre Lorde por
Conor Tomás Reed, 2018
In my dissertation, CUNY Will Be Free!: Black, Puerto Rican, and Women’s Compositions, Literature... more In my dissertation, CUNY Will Be Free!: Black, Puerto Rican, and Women’s Compositions, Literatures, and Studies at the City College of New York and in New York City, 1960-1980, I argue that the writings, political actions, and relationships of City College students and teachers underwent a collective decolonial metamorphosis that transformed the landscapes of United States higher education, as public universities like the City University of New York and the University of Puerto Rico became key sites of counterinsurgency to suppress Third World coalitional projects. In doing so, I situate New York City as an epicenter of Black, Puerto Rican, and women’s liberation work, and underscore the conditions in which these participants’ legacies emerged in their poetry, fiction, journalism, and communiqués that continue to animate struggles today both inside and outside of classrooms. I recover the roles of Toni Cade Bambara, David Henderson, and June Jordan as community-grounding scholars who intervened in the formation of Black and Women’s Studies. I also re-interpret Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich\u27s poetry as texts that illuminate their experiences in CUNY classrooms, and confront the limits of masculinist revolutionary ideologies and studies of the time. Finally, I trace the student compositional records of Samuel Delany’s early sexual and intellectual explorations, Louis Reyes Rivera and Sekou Sundiata’s Third World journalism in Tech News/The Paper, and Guillermo Morales and Assata Shakur’s clandestine organizing back to their City College foundations, as I recover the archival records of the University of Puerto Rico’s student mobilizations against the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) and conscription into the war in Vietnam. Altogether, this document chronicles the entwined “freedom schools” movement pedagogies and creative arts in New York City and Puerto Rico that transformed U.S. higher education in the 1960s and 1970s, preceding a transitional period of U.S. imperialism that would restructure and rebrand itself through neoliberal diversity claims that masked a counterinsurgency campaign upon public higher education
Liverpool University Press eBooks, Jun 1, 2013
This chapter examines the politics of the photograph in Three Guineas in relation to contemporary... more This chapter examines the politics of the photograph in Three Guineas in relation to contemporary representational strategies for political protest. The image of the body heap in wartime—the gruesomely iconic pile of dead, frequently unarmed civilians—is thoroughly embedded in modern social consciousness, returning again and again as a kind of chorus to history's cacophonies. In Three Guineas, her 1938 work of radical feminist pacifism, Virginia Woolf describes the experience of receiving photographs from the embattled Spanish Republic during its revolution and civil war, which “the Government sends with patient pertinacity about twice a week.” The chapter considers Woolf's construction of a recognition of horrors into a verbal narrative so as to stop the cycle of visual trauma, which can in turn rupture the expectation of endless war and mass death from which we both distance and shackle our sense of selves.
In my dissertation, CUNY Will Be Free!: Black, Puerto Rican, and Women’s Compositions, Literature... more In my dissertation, CUNY Will Be Free!: Black, Puerto Rican, and Women’s Compositions, Literatures, and Studies at the City College of New York and in New York City, 1960-1980, I argue that the writings, political actions, and relationships of City College students and teachers underwent a collective decolonial metamorphosis that transformed the landscapes of United States higher education, as public universities like the City University of New York and the University of Puerto Rico became key sites of counterinsurgency to suppress Third World coalitional projects. In doing so, I situate New York City as an epicenter of Black, Puerto Rican, and women’s liberation work, and underscore the conditions in which these participants’ legacies emerged in their poetry, fiction, journalism, and communiqués that continue to animate struggles today both inside and outside of classrooms. I recover the roles of Toni Cade Bambara, David Henderson, and June Jordan as community-grounding scholars who intervened in the formation of Black and Women’s Studies. I also re-interpret Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich\u27s poetry as texts that illuminate their experiences in CUNY classrooms, and confront the limits of masculinist revolutionary ideologies and studies of the time. Finally, I trace the student compositional records of Samuel Delany’s early sexual and intellectual explorations, Louis Reyes Rivera and Sekou Sundiata’s Third World journalism in Tech News/The Paper, and Guillermo Morales and Assata Shakur’s clandestine organizing back to their City College foundations, as I recover the archival records of the University of Puerto Rico’s student mobilizations against the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) and conscription into the war in Vietnam. Altogether, this document chronicles the entwined “freedom schools” movement pedagogies and creative arts in New York City and Puerto Rico that transformed U.S. higher education in the 1960s and 1970s, preceding a transitional period of U.S. imperialism that would restructure and rebrand itself through neoliberal diversity claims that masked a counterinsurgency campaign upon public higher education
Interdisciplinary/Multidisciplinary Woolf, 2013
Viewpoint Magazine, 2015
This roundtable on housing struggles is Viewpoint’s inaugural “movement inquiry” feature, in whic... more This roundtable on housing struggles is Viewpoint’s inaugural “movement inquiry” feature, in which we ask people across the United States to share organizing experiences so that local lessons can be bridged towards more regional, national, and international strategies. With this resource, we encourage radicals to make time to reflect, regroup, and more widely circulate our work. We hope that as these stories are shared, new connections will be made, and that a larger struggle for our cities’ futures can be waged.
Anuario de la Escuela de Historia, 2018
This article explores the pedagogical foundations of three U.S. Black women writers—Toni Cade Bam... more This article explores the pedagogical foundations of three U.S. Black women writers—Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, and Audre Lorde—widely recognized as among the most influential and prolific writers of 20th century cultures of emancipation. Their distinct yet entwined legacies—as socialist feminists, people’s poets and novelists, community organizers, and innovative educators—altered the landscapes of multiple liberation movements from the late 1960s to the present, and offer a striking example of the possibilities of radical women’s intellectual friendships. The internationalist reverberations of Bambara, Jordan, and Lorde are alive and ubiquitous, even if to some readers today in the Caribbean and Latin America, their names may be unfamiliar.[Bambara’s fiction centered Black and Third World women and children absorbing vibrant life lessons within societies structured to harm them. Her 1980 novel, The Salt Eaters, posed the question - “are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to b...
At the turn of the twentieth century, the founders of the progressive public school movement envi... more At the turn of the twentieth century, the founders of the progressive public school movement envisioned a public education system that recognizes the humanity of each student, prepares them for democratic participation in life, and advocates their fullest potential for the greater good. Education was to be by the people and for the people. Today, democratic participation is nearly absent in the pedagogy, policy, and practices of public education, including here in the City University of New York and the Graduate Center. Neoliberal pressure to transform public education into a corporate model for maximum over decades of research, activism, and public outcry for a more democratic education.
Rachel J. Chapman and Conor Tomás Reed FEATURES
Los primeros desarrollos de los Estudios Sobre Mujeres Negras en las vidas de Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan y Audre Lorde. , 2019
Traducción del artículo The Early Formations of Black Women’s Studies in the Lives of Toni Cade B... more Traducción del artículo The Early Formations of Black Women’s Studies
in the Lives of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, and Audre Lorde por
Conor Tomás Reed, 2018