Performing Collisional Ethnic Studies: an (un)expected and (im)possible archive

Abstract

This is an effort to create a continuous collective exchange in a rhetorical, trans-temporal, trans-spatial set of imaginations. It is also an effort to not compare one to one groups and extend the work across a multiplicity of communities. Throughout the essay, some unpredictable and what some would say impractical and even impossible questions become possible. The questions that arise are the originary coordinates of how a collisional ethnic studies is a project rooted in the meditative space of the unpredictable, the non-linear, and the unexpected. The questions are a place for these ideas to meet. Jasbir Puar calls this an ethics of conviviality; it is an ethics to create a place for the (im)materiality of bodies to meet, as well as a site for them to self-annihilate, leading to new questions and inquiries based on the previously impossible.