Positioning Liminagraphy in Social Science Research

In the introduction to the inaugural book in the series New Directions in Theorizing Qualitative Research co-edited with Norman Denzin, James Salvo (2020) states that approaches to research based on a Western epistemology are at an impasse due to foundational presumptions pertaining to ontology – that is at the level of being. These presumptions are what Santiago Castro-Gómez calls zero-point epistemology, a position that is nowhere, unobservable and separate from everyday life (Vázquez 2020). Following Salvo’s (2020) definition of the ontological as those beings who question their very being, this individual untethered ontological position has wider reaching consequences for epistemology, particularly as the paradigm of western epistemology has come to dominate the social sciences. Put another way, under this dominant paradigm the individual ‘I’ as a product of the Cartesian split severs ontology from epistemology thereby foreclosing on the knowledge of being.

The Indigenous paradigm does not suffer this impasse, as according to Salvo (2020 np) “[i]ndigenous being is specifically the conjunction of both being-with and being-from” where the former relates to knowledge communicated through language with each other and the latter making clear the connection between identity and land. In other words, in the indigenous paradigm, onto-epistemology is conjoined, where the questioning of being can only be done with others and thus the study of knowledge is always co-created. We have much to learn from indigenous epistemologies, particularly in these times of crisis which bring to the fore our interconnectedness. Yet, Linda Tuhiwai-Smith’s (1999) words in the opening paragraph of Decolonizing Methodologies, “the term ‘research’, is probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world’s vocabulary” reminds us that we do not engage on a fair playing field when it comes to the exchange of ideas.

In seeking to avoid the impasse of western epistemology by reorientating towards indigenous epistemology, Salvo enters into a false binary, creating two intersecting pitfalls in our approach to research in the social sciences. The first has to do with violence, by absolving western epistemology of its complicity in colonialism, racism, sexism, slavery, imperialism, indenture, classism, epistemic violence (Spivak 1988) and epistemicide (Santos 2014), Salvo reinforces the prevailing reductionist claim in academia, that violence is antithetical to knowledge production and is seen,

…first, as something that occurs somewhere else (i.e., not in the Global North – and if so, it is understood to be the exception rather than the rule); second, as something that is perpetrated by somebody else (i.e., not by a rational political subject – and if so, it is done for the right reasons); and, third, violence is considered as genuinely something else (i.e., nonexistent in the academic realm – and if so, it is understood to be an unfortunate ideological aberration). (Brunner 2021: 193–4).

Thus, this impasse within western epistemology comes down to an inability to exercise “epistemic vulnerability” understood as “an openness to be affected and shaped by others” (Snyman 2015: 270). What this shows, is that knowledge produced through western epistemology lacks the ability to account for violence at the ontological level. This is reiterated by Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang (2014) who use Gaytri Spivak’s Can the Subaltern Speak in order to demonstrate that the other can speak but only if they speak of their pain and humiliation. In other words, through western epistemology we can only state the problems faced by our communities but we cannot bring about the other onto-epistemological worlds needed for our collective liberation.

This brings us to the second pitfall in Salvo’s argument, by positioning western epistemology and indigenous epistemology on either end of a binary, Salvo creates the impression that there is nothing in-between, thereby precluding other ways of being outside of modernity/coloniality, those that are non-indigenous and non-western, i.e., those in the borderlands. Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldúa (2007: 25) uses the U.S.–Mexico border to illustrate the conceptualization of ‘borderlands’ as “a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary”. It is the in-between, the liminal space, “the locus of resistance, of rupture, implosion and explosion, and of putting together the fragments and creating a new assemblage” (Anzaldúa 2009: 177). Borderlands is not constrained by physical space and whilst it emerges from the enfleshed experiences of being mestiza it reaches across time and space to all those who find themselves ‘in-between’ due to physical displacement, but also more subtle non-physical shifts such as across religions or tribal lines, between social classes or transitions in gender non-conformity (Chang et al. 2018). As such borderlands is “the one spot on earth which contains all other places within it” (Anzaldúa 2009: 180).

Our bodies
mausoleums for
an extinct home
yearn for her

sub-continent

Mama Afrika
fed us milk
made our bodies
whole

meta-morphosis
they tried but couldn’t
apartheid the sky
partition the sea
so now we pray at the shoreline
but still

neither land
nor us
is free

From the borderlands emerges a new paradigm, an un-bordered liminal onto-epistemology.³ This is where liminagraphy is positioned, emerging from encounters in the borderlands. In this new paradigm the onto-epistemological position is enfleshed⁴ in the mnemonic body (Copeland 2010; see also Hurtado 2019; Sheik 2021). Not the anatomical body of modernity, which is out of time and space, but the enfleshed body that holds memory – the one who remembers (Chávez & Vázquez 2017). These groundings mark coloniality and its effects on the body, as two interventions distinct from the established post-modern and more recent new materialist approaches presented by Anglo-American and French approaches to epistemology. Enfleshed knowing is that which lives in the pause between the breaths that give us life, the brief moment between an inhale and exhale where death and the dead are present. The enfleshed mnemonic body enunciates deep relation, evoking “that which has been stolen, the flesh off our bone which identified us as belonging to the earth and each other” (Sheik 2021). Whilst the liminal position overlaps with indigenous onto-epistemology in terms of connection to relations, it expands beyond the material relation to land⁵ in order to account for knowing emanating from plural lineages anchored in multiple lands held together in the flesh. In other words, liminagraphy is grounded in an approach to onto-epistemology that is positioned in the borderlands where knowing arises from the flesh.

Theoretical Groundings of Liminagraphy

The nature of liminagraphy is in-betweenness moving towards harmony, and as such it’s theoretical groundings can be found amid the anti-colonial common ground which roots decolonial feminism, black studies, chicana feminism, abolition studies, post-colonial studies and African philosophy. It brings into “question how the disciplines – psychology, education, history, anthropology, sociology, or science – through an ideology of Othering have described and theorized about the colonized Other, and refused to let the colonized Other name and know from their frame of reference” (Chilisa 2012: 14). In this way liminagraphy moves towards trans-, post- and anti- disciplinary ways of knowing which honour the re-traditioning of knowledge as a life-affirming practice (Sheik 2023a). In doing so it opens up space for “a parallel movement where a polarized us/them, insiders/outsiders culture clash is not the main struggle, where a refusal to be split will be [is] a given” (Anzaldúa 2009: 184). Given that liminagraphy draws from multiple theoretical groundings, each of which can contradict the other (e.g., post-colonial and decolonial), how then does liminagraphy reconcile these onto-epistemological differences?

Firstly, by decolonizing the self, liminagraphy creates the conditions for a decolonial re-existence where knowledge is cultivated rather than produced and consumed (Shilliam 2015), reorientating ourselves from “the age of representation to the age of reception” (Vázquez 2020: 17). Second, is by being aware that “the new paradigm must come from outside as well as within the system” (Anzaldúa 2015: 119). This calls for an honouring of anti-colonial knowledge ‘produced’ under duress,⁶ but always conspiring towards healing generational trauma. We acknowledge the limitations created by the oppressive and discriminatory academic environment of the time, but do not take these limitations as our own. To do so, would be to purposefully tear open scar-tissue around our colonial wounds, letting in the necrotising logics of individual self-gain, thereby dishonouring the spirit of collective liberatory praxis kept alive through this work. We receive the wisdom and give thanks for the path breaking knowledges offered to us, as ‘the beautyful ones not yet born’,⁷ with the hope that we live up to the task of tending to the flame which has with such painstaking care been handed to us.

Birthing Liminagraphy

Semelparous
The sun spins out of control
holding on to dusk’s last hope
the blanket of darkness comes
and it’s too late

Eight voracious tentacles
reach out
teeth bared
seeking out flesh

Four take over her limbs
sinking their mandibles deep

Two slither over
seal shut her eyes

One bites into her back
until it reaches bone
mimicking spine

Before her mouth
Whales out a NO!
the last tentacle
teeth on teeth
gags her scream

Immobilised
blood siphons black
black bleeds protest
of this
parasitic containment

As mantle crowns head’s
commandeered captive

entwined
ink spills
and heavy they sink

into kala pani’s⁸ arms
to the depths of the depths
where no light reaches

Kali⁹ calls out
surrender she says
the darkness serves you

for in its
Semelparous subversion
where
death anchors life

liberation awaits

Liminagraphy carries an intelligibility that is foreign to colonial logics. Foreign because we are no longer screaming the “no” of non-being and the negation of our racialized and feminized ways of knowing-being (Motta 2018: 23). We refuse. By making ourselves unintelligible to modernity/coloniality, we start making ourselves intelligible to each other. This voicing is then the expression of all those knowledges which colonialism-imperialism-patriarchy-white-supremacy (hooks 1984) attempts to eradicate, yet is kept alive in our flesh through our resistance and survival. As Wandile Xaba (2021) reminds us,

[o]ur archives cannot be killed or burnt to the ground. Even those archives at UCT [University of Cape Town] have not been destroyed. The ancestors who wrote them will communicate the knowledge to their children when they need the knowledge and in the various indigenous ways the archive has been kept alive outside academia.

As such it is a quietening with our rage, a friendship formed with our anger and a mentorship with our discomfort that allows us to listen for the knowledges from our ancestors, the wisdom of “holding space” (Cairo 2021), of sharing, offering, and receiving. This attentive awareness to stillness, as opposed to the ‘urgency’ of capitalism, is what allows us to hear the whispers of spirit between our inhales and exhales, the stories shared in our dreams, and the subtleties of life thriving all around us. It is the medicine for the ailments caused by rubbing against the borders.

Limin- / -a- / -graphy¹⁰

Emerging from the borderlands, from the state of nepantla seeking harmony, fragmentation is healed through the Coyolxauhqui imperative (Anzaldúa 2015), phases in Anzaldúa’s seven stages of conocimiento (knowledge/wisdom). Etymologically, we begin by splitting the word liminagraphy into three parts in order to make evident the significance of its plural meanings. Limin- is used to denote the state of nepantla, the ‘in-betweenness’ and existing in a space of transition and transformation that arises from the rubbing of borders. An associated root word limen- refers to a threshold, being at a place of entering or beginning. So here, the roots refer to the constant fluidity of movement as we come up against borders, they do not hinder us, nor obstruct our path, rather it allows us “to see double” as we dance the rhythm of re-existence (Anzaldúa 2015).

The root ending -graphy in its common use denotes writing, recording or description. However, its use in liminagraphy goes much deeper than its contemporary meaning. -graphy is derived from the Greek -graphia whose meaning changed over time as stone tablets were forsaken for paper, such that it moved away from its PIE (Proto-Indo-European) cognate *gerbh- which means to scrape, scratch or…

You want to just stay here, to keep writing, but interruption is the constant state of the immigrant, alien, refugee, asylum seeker. It’s an unusually warm day for September in The Hague, the sun warm on your face as the wind cools the sweat on your brow, you feel the tug of homesickness in your flesh. While cycling you look up, there atop a lamp post, sits a great crested grebe, bill to the sun, the wind ruffling its crest, you wonder if it feels this sensation of freedom the same as you do.

In the city centre, you see masks on chins, on elbows, under benches and on the ground, all but on the face of exception. You enter the white monolith of logisticality,¹¹floors and floors and floors of data, of certifying, of verifying, of tracking and tracing, of determining your ‘right’ to breathe on the earth we share. Your hips ache as the blood drips between your legs, a stain upon the bleached walls of empire. As a distraction from the pain you eavesdrop on the conversation the consultant has with the Spanish couple in front of you. You hear her say to them, but you don’t have that problem you can stay up to four months without registering for a BSN. When it’s your turn you hand over your passport, she verifies and hands you the card that temporarily allows you to breathe on this land for six months more. Suffocated by the sterile glint of windows that are too clean, you rush to get out. As you exit, something catches your eye, something familiar, a crest. This one has large golden wings outstretched, the rising sun above its head, supported by elephant tusks, ears of wheat, the king protea, a spear and knobkierie, and a shield with two figures in greeting, symbolising individual transformation into belonging to the nation and collective humanity; embossed below in bold letters, !ke e: lxarra llke – literally meaning people who are different meet, or more symbolically unity in diversity, in the now extinct language of the indigenous !Xam of southern Africa, a stabbing reminder that this monolith of logistically once had sails.

This national coat of arms, a symbol usually used to identify kin, sat on the corner of a stack of documents, held by a young woman with anxiety furrowed on her brow. Next to her stood a friend equally worried. “Are you South African?” you ask, “no, Namibian, but I lived in South Africa” she replies. You talk for 10 minutes, she tells you she just started studying at Leiden University, you tell her you are just finishing your studies at Erasmus University Rotterdam. She says she is having trouble getting her card, they will not accept her birth certificate because its laminated and doesn’t have an official stamp. You sense her desperation, it has been yours before, ours. Documentation, a stamp is missing, documentation, it needs an official signature, documentation, the date is incorrect, as if in a never-ending search for a log entry that marked you as theirs. This is our greatest fear, that they will do it again, that they will own our right to breathe on the earth we share. Documentation is the only way in, documentation is the only way out. The dompas did not burn, it multiplied.

You suggest going to the embassy, they don’t answer phones so just show up at their door. As you bid farewell and walk away, you wish you could do more, but this is her path to walk, as you did seven-years earlier – you pray she has it easier but deep down you know the crossing to the borderlands all too well.

…carve. As such, the -graphy used in liminagraphy, is used to show the motion of decolonizing the self, carving-cutting out those parts of the plural self that no longer serve us¹² (Lugones 2003; Icaza 2015), scratching at “the surface phenomena the meaning of deeper realities, [beginning to] ‘see through’ our own cultural conditioning and dysfunctional values” (Anzaldúa 2015: 83). This practice of shedding, of allowing the scabs to fall off on their own, allows for the generational healing of the colonial wound needed for collective liberation. Doing this remedial work allows us to write/create/draw/paint/scribble/graffiti the enfleshed knowing in ways that honour the relations that brought us here.

The bridge crossing from limin- to -graphy is the connective -a-. In forming compound words, it is common to use the connective -o- particularly for branches of knowledge, e.g., methodology, sociology, psychology, autobiography, ethnography. However, this -o- is meaningless holding no other function than to adhere to an etymological rule. Instead, opting to use the -a- connective, not only marks the absence of onto-epistemologies within these branches of knowledge, but also denotes our re-existence within the new paradigm through Liminagraphy. In addition, it is used to convey meaning in several ways which are key to knowledge cultivation in a liminagraphy approach. The first, is derived from its use as a neuter(al) plural ending (e.g., phenomena) used to convey the plurality of knowledges and the plurality of selves found in the horizon given to us by Maria Lugones (2016), through the ‘coloniality of gender’. Second, it’s use in feminizing certain names (e.g., Paula) is co-opted to commemorate a “shift to the feminization of knowledge, one beyond the subject-object divide, a way of knowing and acting” in coalition (Anzaldúa 2015: 119; see also Lugones 2003). Finally, subverting its use in the scientific naming of flora and fauna in biology (e.g., mammalia) to reinscribe our return to nature and similarly disrupting its use in geography, particularly in the naming of places: Africa, Americas, Asia, Arabia – honouring the knowledges from these places which survived epistemicide. Thus, limingraphy calls forth a decolonial re-existence which honours our relations to nature, our lineages and the plurality of knowing-being.

Liminagraphy as life-affirming research

Moochchinil irukkudhu yeii…
Ulagin mudhal mozi kadha.
Stories are the world’s first language…
it lives in our breaths
Arivu, in Namma Stories – The South Anthem, NJ, Arivu, SIRI, and Hanumankind (2021)¹³

Liminagraphy starts with a story,¹⁴ the story of how the “me in us/we became an ‘I’” (Sheik 2023) or how the me finds their way to us/we. In Research is Ceremony, Shawn Wilson (2008) notes the importance of building relations between the author and reader in the co-creation of knowledge; using a letter to his sons as a way of reaching out to us. In liminagraphy this act not only positions our theorizing in a way that is beyond representation and thus unintelligible to modernity/coloniality but also open space for reception, for offering and receiving.

Due to the constant motion of nepantla, liminagraphy is in an unchoreographed dance with temporality, as such whilst this article tells you about liminagraphy it is also doing liminagraphy – making explicit the relations that collectively birthed it into form whilst welcoming you, the reader into the dance of co-creation and cultivating knowledge. This is the welcoming of those on the outside in, whilst acknowledging there is no outside of the we/us in Ubuntu (see Sheik 2023). Put another way, liminagraphy starts with a crossing, as the me and you become a we.

When I think of borderlands, I think of the place I grew up in, Chatsworth, an Indian township offset from the Indian Ocean off the KwaZulu Natal coast. Like most artificially created peri-urban places created under Apartheid’s group areas act, it houses displaced peoples. Descendants of indentured labourers from Mother India, discarded once their labour got rights, they moved from the sugarcane fields to the magazine barracks of the Durban Corporation and the margins of the city where black and indian neighbours lived side by side, before being forcibly removed in the 1950s. Chatsworth is a place where the continuous violence of oppressive regimes ruptures in the flesh, tearing skin, ripping open old wounds, it bleeds and bleeds. Sub-divided into units, Unit 3 Westcliff is one of the worst and poorest. Westcliff is further divided into 3A and 3B, the former regarded as being better off for having semi-detached houses as opposed to the council allocated flats of the former. I grew up and have family in both. Growing up there violence is normalized, where bruises are visible on your teacher’s face, where the loud music from taxis is silenced by gunshots, where drug dealers buy vegetables from the same stall as you, where sugar boys¹⁵were once your classmates and alcohol is used to numb the pain. But as much as it’s a place where death lingers, it is also where life thrives.

1990s.

Friday’s in Chatsworth were my favourite, school let out early and Nani, my Hindu/Tamil maternal grandmother would be waiting for me at the school gate, as always dressed in a colourful sari. Her house was on Westcliff Drive, and the street would come alive on Friday afternoons with people and traffic heading to the open-air Bangladesh market. The wise woman that she was, she would have already been to the market in the morning, getting the freshest on offer. She would also hand us kids a little package of sweets wrapped in directory paper from Narsi’s. We would play in the yard by ourselves, or sometimes we would join some neighbourhood kids in the back open field near the reservoir, always careful to avoid the one huge madoni tree where someone hanged himself. I would pray with my grandmother, watch her clean and prepare the lamp, using cooking oil and cotton wool, say govinda-gooovinda with her as she lit camphor and placed the burning pieces around the corners of the house. If it was Karvady time, we would go to the temple at night, my cousin and I would listen to the devotional songs set to the tabla and indian harmonium; whilst Nani being fluent in Tamil could listen to all the neighbourhood gossip. The atmosphere at the temple was joyous, and food plenty with aunties bringing veddas and goolgoolas, and lengths of trestle tables set with paper plates and polystyrene cups for people to eat vegetable curries, dhal and rice. Though through all this bustle of activity you could sense an undercurrent of tension. Late into the night it would happen, “trance caught him”, you would hear people whisper, as a circle forms around the person in trance. My cousin and I would at first be scared, but our curiosity always got the better of us. I would watch in awe as the person surrendered themselves, losing control, their body taken over by spirit, seeing their mannerisms change, their bodies transform and speech alter in front of my eyes. Until my cousin beside me would tug on my shirt and we would try to guess which of the gods caught him, recalling the names of the gods we had seen in our grandfather’s comics which we were ‘not’ allowed to touch.

Saturday afternoons were usually spent going to a katham, an Islamic religious gathering, either hosted by my paternal grandmother or attending ones organised by other families. If we were hosting, preparations would start early in the morning, a marquee would be set up, my aunties would arrive and start peeling potatoes, grating carrots, and plucking the feathers off chickens or cutting the fat off mutton pieces. The smell of rose incense heavy in the air, used to keep away the flies. All my cousins would be around, mostly we would be told to stay out of the way, and when we inevitably didn’t, we were given odd jobs to keep us out of the way. My grandmother, Ma, as the elder would be seated at the entrance as guests arrived, she would greet them, dot their wrists with attar, give a blessing and enquire about their family members. The women would sit on one side and the men on the other, us kids usually sat with the women, though the boys could go with their Dad’s and uncles, but not the girls. The katham would start with a recitation of the Quran in Arabic, then Naat, praise poetry sung for Prophet Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, usually performed by a young do-gooder that the rest of us kids despised. The atmosphere would be sombre, no music, just the recitation in Urdu, a language most of us didn’t understand. The lecture by the Moulana that followed was also in Urdu and all the kids struggled to stay awake, still or quiet in our seats, often raising a shhhh from one of the kalas. I would often daydream during those nearly two-hours, occasionally jarred back to reality by bursts of shouting coming from the lecture. It would be a blessing when the do-gooder would be called to start the closing salaami, Mustafa Jaane Rehmat Pe Lakhon Salaam, followed by the Moulana closing with Fatiha in Arabic. The cacophony of voices, quiet for so long, would send shivers down my spine. One member of the family would walk around with smoky lobaan, whilst two others walked around with a gulabdhani in hand sprinkling rose water over the crowd, us kids shrieked but we secretly loved it. Separate tables covered with trestle paper were set up for men and women. While this was being arranged and chairs reshuffled, the kids had the job of serving sweat meats; burfi, gulab jamun, chana magaj, serv and boondi, jelebi, halwa and banana puri; licking our sticky fingers once the tray was empty. At the tables milky sweet kheer or soji, chicken kahliyah and roti, dhal gosht and rice, or breyani were served straight from the hot dekh, all cooked on an open woodfire flame. After eating we would eye the aunties rolling their paan in beetle leaf and sneaking it into the side of their mouths. As the guests started to leave, others from the community who needed a meal were given food, and only thereafter did the family sit down to eat. All sitting at the same table, it was loud, old stories were shared, jokes, teasing and raucous laughter, us kids loved it as we got to see our elders, parents, aunts and uncles in a different light, less serious – as if a heavy burden had been lifted off their shoulders.

Sunday we would leave the confines of Chatsworth in my dad’s old second-hand cream-coloured Mazda and head for the coast, with either Dire Straits or Carlos Santana blasted at full volume with the windows down. My sister, brother and I in the back seat singing along to lyrics we didn’t understand…the opening riff of Sultans of Swing still reminds me of clear blue skies and salty beach air. Here we would get take-aways, sometimes fish and chips, other times a bunny chow or pie and coke, eating in the car with all the doors open. Afterwards taking a walk on the beach we would see iZioni, in white clothing praying in a circle and traditional healers deep in African ancestral worship. A sacrificial chicken was usually close by and we would later find it washed up on the shore, much to the disgust of the sunbathing mlungus. We would also find oranges, apples, coconuts and saris on the shoreline, with my Mum quick to warn us not to touch any of it, as these were from Hindu/Tamil prayers done for Ganga Amman and the offerings belonged to her.

Monday was back to school. Standing in line at morning assembly with starched white collared shirts or dresses, a noose around our necks and bata toughees with white ribbed socks, we mindlessly repeated in a monotonous drone, the secular Universal Prayer.¹⁶

Father we thank thee

For the night and for the pleasant morning light

For rest and food and loving care

And all that makes the world so fair.

Help us to do the things we should

To be to others

Kind and good

In all we do and in all we say

To be more loving everyday.

Amen.

Standing in the blistering heat, we didn’t understand a word of what we were muttering and after the morning announcements we were sent off to class. In the classroom we sat in rows, at chipped wooden desks that once served our parents, watched over by a poster on the wall which showed the members of our newly elected democratic government. The teacher wrote notes in white chalk on a green board, just below it sat an innocuous duster and thick ruler, which were often used to keep us in line. We were taught, in English, that the Aztecs were all dead, that Christopher Columbus discovered the Americas and Vasco da Gama discovered us.

“The way we are taught our history is an endless repetition of the perpetrators story in which crusaders are shining knights, not massacring mercenaries, wars are glorious, conquers noble” (Morales 1998: 18). The violent stripping of our other ways of being which starts when we are children entering the classroom marks our separation from the ‘other’, the more classrooms we find ourselves in the deeper the chasm, creating an uprooting, the ascendence of zero-point which promises emancipation and freedom, but at a cost? (Icaza 2015). The realisation of what we have lost, hits and it hits hard! For as M. Jacqui Alexander (2005: 346) reminds us in Pedagogies of Crossing “there is a cost associated with taking refuge in the borrowed gifts of alienation that cultivate the practice of forgetting”. We may experience this weeding out of the false memories (Morales 1998) of self as violent, the ego of the “false self” (hooks 2001: 38) protests violently, we may become ill, have an accident, or experience this shift in a traumatic way, “[t]he first aftershock hits”, (Anzaldúa 2015: 121). It is here that the flesh starts to speak to us and the mnemonic body remembers. At first, we are unintelligible to each other and ourselves, each identity jostling for position, asking for attention, a triage of wounds all life-threatening.

Life-threatening because we have gotten used to being in a system directed at death. With regards to research, by internalizing the logics of extraction, consumption, expropriation and theft inherent in knowledge production, our false self comes to see itself as part of the academic machinery (see Solano 2019; Suarez-Krabbé 2015 and Rutazibwa 2019), viewing any act of dissent against the university as a personal attack. In an attempt at damage-control the false self seeks refuge in representation, leveraging identity to salvage vestiges of its crumbling facade. This is where we must be cautious, resisting the “impulse to take the beating in order to be worthy of holding the whip” (Harney & Moten 2021: 56). We can easily be led astray by the vain attempts of the false self to centre the ‘I’, becoming entrapped by the distraction of making ourselves intelligible to modernity/coloniality, a “self-imperialism” (Anzaldúa 2009) which in the end diverts us away from the very liberation we seek.

For this reason, liminagraphy delinks from knowledge production, rather situating itself and us in the fertile soil of knowledge cultivation (Shilliam 2015, see also Sheik 2022). This detaching from the zero-point, coupled with the decolonizing of the self and the emergence of the plural self, results in a rooting which makes liminagraphy incompatible with disciplinarity and methodology. With regards to the former, disciplines carry the codes of imperialism and colonialism whilst functioning as one of the ways in which its story is regulated and realised (Tuhiwai-Smith 1999). Relatedly, these codes are transferred into methodology, the framework of rules, analysis and processes which govern disciplines, and as such creates an ‘epistemic closure’ (Hlabangane 2018). “The very idea of ‘methods’ follows the imperial need for certainty and stability. It is antithetical to ambiguity and flux” (Hlabangane 2018: 670). Given the constant motion in liminagraphy, space is opened up for knowledges emerging from the flesh, which is not possible through traditional methodological approaches like autobiography, reflexivity, autoethnography and self-study which are situated within the epistemic closure. Emerging from the borderlands liminagraphy does not carry the codes of colonialism and imperialism, but rather the traces of its violence embedded in the flesh. The act of healing the colonial wound, its orientation towards reaching out for relations and its horizon of collective liberation, precludes any desire for predictability, control or stability.

I am not your data, nor am I your vote bank,

I am not your project, or any exotic museum object,

I am not the soul waiting to be harvested,

Nor am I the lab where your theories are tested,

I am not your cannon fodder, or the invisible worker,

or your entertainment at India habitat center,

I am not your field, your crowd, your history,

your help, your guilt, medallions of your victory.

I refuse, reject, resist your labels,

your judgments, documents, definitions,

your models, leaders and patrons,

because they deny me my existence, my vision, my space.

Your words, maps, figures, indicators,

they all create illusions and put you on pedestal,

from where you look down upon me.

So I draw my own picture, and invent my own grammar,

I make my own tools to fight my own battle,

For me, my people, my world, and my Adivasi self!

~ Abhay Xaxa (2020)

Liminagraphy has no data, no fieldwork, no triangulation nor validity, because we’ve tried that and invariably the “…zero-one, zero-one as it sorts thoughts, affects, flesh, information, nerves, in ever more precise and minute attributes of duplicate separation. In short, this rhythm becomes an algorithm. Everything it captures, everything it invades, everything it settles is set with a beat that is compelled to hear itself everywhere, feel itself everywhere” (Harney & Moten 2021: 56). Put another way, this “seemingly transparent data” in the form of policies, reports, white papers, etc., “prove that those communities living outside normalcy are verifiably outside normalcy” (McKittrick 2021: 4). The unsustainability of the zero-point.

Liminagraphy’s onto-epistemological anchor in the flesh and crossings in the borderlands is made intelligible through storytelling. Stories – knowledges and theorizing – emanating from the flesh cannot be coded or quantified, it is fugitive evading capture. In liminagraphy there are no research subjects nor participants, no subjects and objects, no ‘other’, only the relations which hold us accountable (Wilson 2008). The stories shared are not substitutions for data, case studies or analysis, “[t]he story has no answers” (McKittrick 2021: 6; see also Cairo 2021). The significance of storytelling in liminagraphy lies in its drawing from the deep well of oral tradition, which has always been our way of sharing knowledge, through lessons. This act of sharing wisdom requires and encourages listening, not the mere hearing¹⁷ of the false self, the ‘I’. Here Aminata Cairo’s (2021) guidance in the practice of listening is one of the seeds which cross pollinates liminagraphy. In the reaching out for relations, in the cultivation of knowledge listening is practiced by:

• Committing to engaging in a practice of listening to connect with and honour someone’s story, whilst acknowledging that the sharing does not take away from either story, but rather shows their connectedness.
• Listening in order not to retain information or extract, nor problem solve or interject.
• Witnessing and tuning in, giving the storyteller our full attention, being present, and non-judgemental.
• Being in the space of reception, breathing deeply, calming the mind and receiving, giving space for the story to sink in.
• Be willing to extend outside ourselves through compassion, sincerity and a willingness to connect.
• Listening with the intention of affirming.

This summary of the chapter ‘Listening and Connecting’ in Cairo’s (2021) Holding Space is the fleshy knowledge encased by the seed covering which cracks when shared, revealing the co-creation of knowledge, whilst honoring the relations that brought us here.

Liminal Hangouts: A Podcast

Listen: https://anchor.fm/zuleika-bibi-sheik/episodes/Introducing-Liminal-Hangouts-e175tq9

In honouring the relations that co-created liminagraphy, the following section takes the form of a podcast. The lessons presented below have no linearity, they are not steps for doing a liminagraphy. Each episode features one or more of the relations (but only some of the many) who have shared their wisdom with us. These are the relations that hold the ‘me’ in ‘we’ accountable, in a reaching out for us. These episodes are but a cross-section of conversations, whatsapp chats, zoom calls, and voice notes over the past seven years which led to the emerging of liminagraphy. It all started with the question: in what ways can we cultivate knowledge that is epistemically non-violent in the context of the racialised, gendered, colonial, neoliberal university?

Lesson: Who is learning from Whom with Rosalba Icaza

Listen: https://anchor.fm/zuleika-bibi-sheik/episodes/Who-is-learning-from-Whom-with-Rosalba-Icaza-e172grg

Tejiéndonos en – May we continue weaving an us

It is through our relations that we learn to “become in/with ideas rather than just learning about those ideas”¹⁸ (Sheik and Dupuis, forthcoming). In liminagraphy this cross-pollinating across difference does not lead to the death of knowledges (epistemicide) nor the enclosure of representation (knowledges as imitation) but rather leads to growth and the expansion of knowledge (Vázquez, 2020). Through practicing, radical questioning and learning to unlearn together we make those crossings to each other’s worlds where epistemic shifts are possible (Lugones, 2003). In liminagraphy we come to see difference as the fiction of domination, becoming aware that homogenization is the plot twist aimed at creating conflict in order to keep us separate. Re-orienting ourselves to ‘non-dominant difference’ we gain the courage to knock on the doors of our mirror-image (Lorde, 2017 [1979]; Lugones, 2003). We learn together how to become unafraid through affirmation and nurturing, such that our re-existence and coming to voice is held with a deep sense of responsibility. In so doing, we unravel the dominant story and its focus on death moving from ‘epistemic non-violence’ to ‘life-affirming practices’.

Lesson: Being Together with Erasmus School of Colour (ESOC)

Listen: https://anchor.fm/zuleika-bibi-sheik/episodes/Being-together-with-Erasmus-School-of-Colour-e166f44

Andihambi Ndondwa. I walk with many

Often times academia leaves us speechless. Between the silencing and censoring, when we do feel brave enough to open our mouths, the fear of saying the wrong thing, not using the correct terms or pronouns, being blamed for the discomfort our words raise, being publicly shamed, called out and berated, constricts our throats, steals the air out of our lungs, makes our palms sweat, causing our hearts to race and minds to blank out. The stress and anxiety shut down all potential for learning together, it pits us as opponents, denies our kinship and relation. So, to survive in this hostile environment we create a persona, a “false self” (hooks 2001: 38). A master at critiquing, finding gaps, demonstrating excellence and intelligence through the decimation of another, we are ruthless, cunning, competitive, over-confident and intimidating. We live in constant fear of being found wanting, afraid of the day when it will be us on the receiving end of the venom we so callously dish out.

It is by being together that we overcome the limitations of this false self. Through the individuation of the academic process we become separated, where any acts against the university’s monoculture is regarded as suspect. When in actuality it is the university that steals our ability to be together in ways that are not regulated, “the theft of assembly” (Harney & Moten 13). Yet, being together is the salve we need in order to heal from the violence. By being positioned in the borderlands, liminagraphy open ups space for the possibility of creating physical safe spaces together through loving and radical friendship. In these spaces we dialogue, create, write, unlearn and learn, ask questions and then more questions. We laugh, we rejoice, we reclaim the joy usurped by the university – the joy of learning together. By reclaiming space that is within and outside the university we begin to theorize our everyday, unleashing the creative potential of being together.

Lesson: Finding our Rhythm with Anima Jhagroe-Ruissen

Listen: https://anchor.fm/zuleika-bibi-sheik/episodes/Finding-our-Rhythm-with-Anima-Jhagroe-Ruissen-e173l2e

Yatho Hasta thatho Drishti, Yatho Dristi thatho Manah

Yatho Manah thatho Bhaava, Yatho Bhaava thatho Rasa

Where the hands go the eyes, where the eyes go the mind

Where the mind goes there is expression of inner feeling

Where there is inner feeling there is Rasa¹⁹

~ Natyashastra

There is a rhythm we have gotten used to, the “zero-one” the humdrum of modernity’s march towards death. “It is a rhythm of commodity production, internally disrupted at its origin. The first beat renders each commodity separate, bordered, isolated from the next. The second beat renders everything equal to every other thing. The first beat makes everything discrete. The second beat makes everything the same” (Harney & Moten 2021: 55). Yet, it is not the only rhythm as it would have you believe. There is a harmonious cacophony of rhythms emanating from the borderlands, unintelligible to colonial logics which perceives it as discord, as incongruous, as noise. The co-motion radiating from the borderlands as we move, dance, circulate, stamp out feet, beat our drums instead of each other, counters the silencing we have become accustomed to. In healing the separation, we escape the purity (Lugones 2003) of colonial aesthetics (Vázquez 2020), our plural selves start a raga,²⁰ beating the parai drum and ighubu, chumming the ghungroos, blowing the vuvuzela, strumming the sitar, clapping taal as together we enter rasa²¹ – that space of transformation. Following tala²² our hands guide us in cyclical harmony as we question our collective being.

Lesson: Listening as a Practice with Constance Dupuis and Nanna Kirstine Leets Hansen

Listen: https://anchor.fm/zuleika-bibi-sheik/episodes/Listening-with-Constance-Dupuis--Nanna-Kirstine-Leets-Hansen-e176ck6

Mujer que lucha por la vida – The women who fight for life

Who are the relations that hold us accountable? In liminagraphy ethics are collective and relational. We are allowed to falter, to make mistakes and missteps – these are the moments of unlearning which cause the most discomfort yet offers the greatest lessons. These moves are what shatter the ideas of perfection and purity (Lugones, 2003) inherent in colonialism-imperialism-patriarchy-white-supremacy (hooks 1984). We come to “hold space” (Cairo, 2021) honouring the journey of each other, knowing that in the co-motion in the borderlands we all are never at the same place at the same time. We hold space with compassion and care, resisting the urge to be quick to anger or snap judgments. In this space we unlearn the fears that kept us separate and, in the leaps, made in reaching out for relations we come to trust that someone will catch us, and over and over again in this act of receiving we come to see the myth of the individual. In this unravelling of the self our identities will start to jostle for position, the individual ‘I’ grabbing onto any one identity to barter with in order to ensure its survival, at this stage we will need our relations, these are the ones who hold us accountable. The emergence of the plural self is accompanied by a quietening that’s necessary for listening, here we exit the space of enunciation and the politics of representation and enter the “era of reception” a space of hosting, receiving difference, reciprocity and radical intimacy (Vázquez, 2020). It is from this space that we recognize how to position ourselves in order to practice research that is life-affirming.

Lesson: Being/Becoming with Luthando Ngema and Charmika Samaradiwakera Wijesundara

Listen: https://anchor.fm/zuleika-bibi-sheik/episodes/BeingBecoming-with-Luthando-Ngema--Charmika-Samaradiwakera-Wijesundara-e176ikc

Umuntu Ngumuntu Abantu – I am because we are

Who have we been made to become? In whose image? In Liminagraphy we start with this ‘being’, modernity’s “authoritative I” (Vázquez, 2020), the “imperial I” (Hlabangane 2018) the “propertied self” (Harney & Moten, 2021) by recognizing within ourselves the one who has come to internalise their oppression. From there we must shift,²³ return to the borderlands and enter the liminal space of nepantla,²⁴ the space of transformation (Anzaldúa 2015). During nepantla, our worldviews and self-identities, are shattered. Nepantla is painful, messy, confusing, and chaotic; it signals unexpected, uncontrollable shifts, transitions and changes. Nepantla hurts!!!!” (Keating 2006: 8–9). This, shifting and moving, carving, rubbing and scratching, the commotion we cause is life unfolding, is the spiritual work of wounds healing. It is the motion of Ubuntu/Botho which “is the principle characteristic of being; it is the essence of life. In this sense, life is a universal wholeness. We speak here of a wholeness rather than a whole in order to underline and preserve the ontological primacy of the principle of motion on the one hand, and, to stress its ubiquity, on the other. Indeed, motion cannot be divided into anything other than motion” (Ramose 2009: 72). This wholeness is not to be mistaken for the ‘unity’ of the nation state, which focusses on becoming a citizen or the ‘oneness’ of the New Age movement, which is preoccupied with personal development and well-being leaving social structures unquestioned (Keating 2006). In liminagraphy we start with our complicity, acknowledging without shame or judgement the ways in which we have participated in the erasure of other life worlds. This acceptance and choosing differently allows us to come to a “radical alternative complicity” (Moten & Harney 2020) where we resist the rigidity of identity through representation and return to motion that “serve[s] as reminders of each other’s search for wholeness of being” (Anzaldúa et al. 2003: 19).

This being together in motion is what allows us to avoid the pitfalls of appropriation in the reclaiming of knowledges. That we do not consume dominant versions of ‘pure cultures and traditions’ from sources which extracted and expropriated parts of those knowledges which served it’s regime. Using liminagraphy as an approach to research practice that is orientated towards life, we turn to the flesh, ours and that of others. We learn together those knowledges surviving in the flesh through generations, the knowledges that have moved and continue to move, that breathe life into us. In this way we come to “be in/with ideas rather than just learning about those ideas” (Sheik and Dupuis, forthcoming), whilst also attending to the ‘double erasure’ of modernity/coloniality. Limingraphy provides the fertile ground for the cross-pollination of knowledges which leads to growth across lineages and a strengthening of relationality. We honour and respect the lineage of each other’s knowledges, by accepting the limits of what is not for us, we show up for the struggles of the living descendants of those elders who were the knowledge keepers and start to build good relations with each other and all life on earth.

Lesson: Writing our Collective Liberation with Rosa Itandehui Olivera Chávez and Paulina Trejo Mendez

Listen: https://anchor.fm/zuleika-bibi-sheik/episodes/Writing-our-Collective-Liberation-with-Rosa-Itandehui-Olivera-Chvez-and-Paulina-Trejo-Mendez-e176kql

Aves que retornan – The birds who return

Aves que retornan²⁵ – In writing a liminagraphy we ask ourselves for whom are we writing? In writing together and writing for each other we reach out for relations across time and space. Invoking the deep wisdom of our ancestors (Xaba, 2021) we write for those silenced to death and through a “coalitional ancestry” (Garcia, 2020), we honour the gifts of wisdom left for us. From the flesh, word by word, line by line, page by page we connect their struggles to our own, acknowledging our debt to them for a burden less severe. We connect to the long tradition of resistance to being erased and separated, keeping the memories of injustices and oppression in ink and paper, rather than flesh and blood. There is work we don’t have to do because others have done this work for us, we must continue building upon the knowledges painstakingly drawn from their flesh, in order to honour their bravery and courage in the face of oppressive regimes. We are here because they did the healing work, now we must continue, for the violence is on-going and we must try to stop it before it reaches the next generation, and the next, and the next….

We write for each other, our relations far and near in order to bring about harmony. We write from the borderlands, from the space where soul and spirit speaks to us, through our dreams, through the animals who visit us, and those relations who suddenly come into our lives with valuable lessons. We write these encounters and how we are changed by them, how it directs our politics and actions towards collective liberation. For these acts are the drops in the ocean, which create the waves of change.

Asikishwe sibekwe e tala – The beginning

Asikishwe sibekwe e tala²⁶ – Knowledge and our approaches to it are inextricably linked to our lives and the life of the earth. Whilst western epistemology has given us the tools to diagnose the ailments which compromise life, it does not offer the medicine so we may heal. In order to do so, it would have to admit its complicity in our wounding and the destruction of life, opening up to epistemic vulnerability and the ability to be affected by the stories of our ailments. In this untenable situation that we currently find ourselves in, specifically in the university, though we do not see this as separate from everyday life, the dominant logics of knowledge production directed towards extraction, consumption and expropriation is not concerned with affirming life. This “has always been the danger of the colonial archive and knowledge institutions: when we internalize coloniality as our compass and model for knowledge production, we impoverish ourselves, marginalize indigenous knowledges and alienate our ancestors (which is also the alienation from self)” (Xaba, 2021).

Liminagraphy is an attempt at practicing research that is life affirming. It does this by honouring the rhythms and seasons of life, of earth. It begins in the dark rich soil of the borderlands, the soil that should have touched our feet the moment we were born. The fertile soil which enriches the food we eat, that holds the trees which give us the air we breathe and that support every step we take. As we start to be nourished by the relations surrounding us, affected by their movements we enter into nepantla, confusing, disorientating and painful, the individual seed cracks open, shedding its former self and life unfurls as it breaks through the surface to reach the light. In this reaching out, the unfolding of flesh, it meets yet more relations, buzzing bees, crawling insects, flapping birds and the splash of rain, all that nourished it as it grows. It bears fruit in season, and when it is time sheds what it no longer needs and rests.

Liminagraphy is the wind that carries a seed, you – not as an individual, but as an entity that carries plurality within it – it honours your journey as one only you are intimate with and in the sharing of those experiences, you acknowledge a ‘we’, that the experiences in the flesh of your singular form only makes sense once you hit the ground and are nurtured by the soil, the rain, the nutrients, the earthworms, sun, and each other. Liminagraphy, like the flesh that holds the knowledges it brings forth, is temporary. When reading a liminagraphy we honour the telling of the growing season, we don’t try to copy or, replicate or generalise, we listen to the story and we take those seeds that we need for our garden, nurture them and allow them to germinate…to come to light.