Pearl Mosely Sadler

The first collage I made was of my great grandmother (my maternal grandfather and Aunt Pat’s mother), Pearl Mosely Sadler.

My great grandmother was a school teacher in her early adulthood and a homemaker beginning in her mid-twenties after meeting my great-grandfather, Philip Sadler III. She valued education, as her mother was college-educated despite being the daughter of two enslaved Black Americans. She loved her family fiercely and had a hard time keeping up with my grandfather who was very chaotic as a child. He found ways to make trouble by doing things like hitching his sled to the back of a postal truck in a snowstorm and swimming out to an electric pole in the middle of the Christiana river to use it as a diving board. But in hearing about her (not always traditional) relationship with my great-grandfather, whereas she often “wore the pants,” and a brief stint she had in New York City as a teenager (which, in the 1920’s, was “no place for a lady” according to her uncle and father), I suspect that my grandfather’s rebellious spirit actually came from her. 

While thinking about my rebellious great-grandmother, we also read “Cooking a pot of beef stew: Navigating through difficult times through slow philosophy,” where Behrisch (2021) discusses slowness as rebelling against “pervasive neoliberal demands: productivity, performativity, and accountability” (p. 671). She discusses her refusal to work on the weekend, and instead cooking her elders a pot of beef stew, as an “embodied political act” (p. 671). As with any professionalized work in a capitalist system, rebellion in the academy simply looks like caring for oneself and others, even if that comes at the expense of work. Taking this “slow time” (Behrisch, 2021; Solnit, 2007) is a reclamation of our humanity, providing us with the space to feel “subtleties—epiphanies, alliances, associations, meanings, purposes, pleasures—that engineers cannot design, factories cannot build, computers cannot measure, and marketers will not sell” (Solnit, 2007). 

In addition to rethinking and reconfiguring the ways in which I work within the academy, I also think our scholarship itself can be rebellious. Methodologically, I see multimodal scholarship and performative methods (which are fundamentally multimodal in that they conduct research through embodied practice) as a rebellion against traditional logocentric scholarship. The idea that truth can only be conveyed textually is a fundamentally Eurocentric conception of knowledge. To rebel against this paradigm and create visual art, performance art, and media within our scholarly practices is to reclaim indigenous ways of knowing.