I can see the soft, mellow lights from here. The Salon is warm, inviting. I can see outlines of people in groups, standing, sitting, all talking. Groups of people clustered in various areas inside. They are laughing, drinking sparkling drinks from delicate glasses, eating tiny food you can pick up cleanly with your hands.
Even with the windows slightly closed, I can hear pieces of conversation. I catch words like epistemology, structure, power, ontology, signifier, semiotics, subaltern. I stand here. At The Curb. I recognize the words, the phrases. Collaboration. Critical social theory. Cultural hegemony.
Like all the other times I tried to join the conversations that happen in The Salon, I know I’ll need to wear an apron and carry the hors d’oeuvres or the Chardonnay in. Even then, I wouldn’t be allowed to speak. My role for entry had always been as service. The Help that just serves.
In 2016, my librarian colleague Linda Ueki Absher1 and I wrote an opinion piece in Collaborative Librarianship called “Collaborative Librarianship: A Minority Opinion.” In that piece, we argued that for many librarians of color, collaboration is not a matter of intellectual choice. It is a condition of survival. It is learned early, driven by necessity, lived before it is ever theorized. What I did not yet have language for then is how that survival is read by the profession. The linkage to theoretical authors like Marx and Foucault gets far more attention from The LIS Salon, more legitimacy than mundane lived experience from the margins. What we called collaboration from life in the periphery was already a form of knowledge. But it was received as service.
We granted that the critical turn in LIS thought, as represented by the #critlib movement inside The LIS Salon, was “laudable and overdue.” In many ways, this is true. But what remained hidden and unnamed was the structure that allowed that recognition to flow in only one direction.
The nodding to us who are living at The Curb from the comfort of The Salon needs to be remarked upon. The gulf of differences between our positions, our stances, our locations, all of these matter immensely. They are consequential. Fundamental among these differences is not just where we stand, but what our standing is made to mean.
I’ve often witnessed our differences framed as a one-direction flow of knowledge. The Salon as the source of intellectual life and all things refined and cultured. The Curb as the rightful receiver of The Salon’s good graces. The Curb as the source of good Help who serve drinks and dainty finger food at The Salon.
This description, I have to say, is a fabrication.
The inhabitants of The Curb may attend as The Help at The Salon, but we come in listening, hearing, and seeing everything, taking mental field notes. Examining the bookshelves, watching who sits where, studying the gestures, the smiles, the polite laughter.
What we called collaboration was never just cooperation. It was constant assessment. Translation. Calibration. It was the work of moving between worlds that were not built for us, yet making them inhabitable anyway. That is not service. That is analysis.
From The Curb came Ethnic Studies, Women’s & Gender Studies, Disability Studies, Cultural Studies—a host of theoretical perspectives and disciplines of intellectual inquiry that were born from survival. Ethnic Studies from the struggles at San Francisco State College in 1968. Women’s and Gender Studies from San Diego State College in 1970. Disability Studies from the simple fact that some bodies could not get up the stairs into The Salon.
These are not derivative intellectual projects. They are not downstream of theory. They are theory.
We sometimes forget that even critical social theory is based on living, breathing, and surviving. The density of lived experience produces a kind of knowledge that is substantially different from the abstract. The reading of critical social theory is only based on lived social life. It is a thin substitute. One cannot replicate the other. Yet one insists on the superiority and sophistication exhibited within its enclosed space, compared to the street.
The Salon does not simply ignore The Curb. It metabolizes it. Ideas forged in survival arrive inside as abstraction, detached from the conditions that produced them. Once inside, they are recognized as theory. Legitimated. Circulated. Cited. And in that movement, their origins are obscured.
Another fundamental relationship between The Salon and The Curb can be found in the question of who gets to do the describing, who gets treated as the subject versus the analyst. The Salon attendees seem to have an assumed answer here. They are untroubled by these questions. Of course, they get to do the describing. They are the analysts. After all, they have read the right books and published in the right journals and university presses.
And yet, here I am, among The Help from The Curb. Walking silently among the attendees of The Salon. Listening, watching. Scanning. Taking mental field notes. I’ve been doing this for years. Readings on power, knowledge, episteme, the field, and cultural hegemony did not teach me how to see this. They validated what I already knew. My life is the field notes. What we called collaboration was already method. I am the ethnographer, doing analysis. The subject is my own life.
The Salon didn’t teach me this. The Curb taught me to say, yes, the subaltern can speak. I’ve been speaking. They’re just not hearing. I can be generous and say that perhaps the distance between us is too far for my voice to carry. Or that The Salon’s windows are not open wide enough. Either way, the reception apparatus is the problem, not the articulation. I can be generous.
The Curb builds its own knowledge. The CSU is the People’s University. We educate the people of California. From the CSU came Ethnic Studies and Women’s & Gender Studies. I remember feeling the unshakable sense that our CSU education just wasn’t as good as the preparation from the University of California. That sense was not accidental. It was produced.
Especially when we see that The Salon just happened to take up many of the ideas we used to describe our lives to ourselves. Afterwards.
The Salon is not the origin of theory. It is the place where theory forgets where it came from. The Salon is downstream from The Curb.
We are still here. I learned about the students and instructors who made the Third World Liberation Front at San Francisco State in 1968. The students from that time became my professors in the 1990s. I was at SFSU when major construction began to support compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act. Only later did I see that this is what The Curb created.
At one point, I thought I wanted to leave The Curb behind. But now I see that The Curb is my home. It made me. I am still thinking, analyzing, and writing things down. And yet, I am done watching. And I am done serving The Salon ideas I know it will just sell back to me later, having forgotten where they came from. The Curb is not a waiting room. The Curb creates its own knowledge for its own people.