Race & Pedagogy
Excerpt: In a world where the government breeds dragons to eat people of color, Black women freedom fighters called "Sapphires" cultivate the ultimate survival strategy: they train the dragons. Sapphires strategically satisfy the dragons' hunger for "dark meat" by feeding them soul food.1 Once the unnamed narrator is able to "si[t] astride" the "huge" "beautiful" leader of the dragons named "Queen," the Black women's revolution can begin.
N. K. Jemisin's short story "Give Me Cornbread or Give Me Death" (2019) uses [End Page 298] nonrealist devices to diagnose long-standing structural violences while gesturing toward alternative worlds. In this way, the story enacts Octavia Butler's statement on the imaginative work of speculative fiction: "There's nothing new / under the sun, / but there are new suns."3 There is "nothing new" about the U.S. state systematically stereotyping and killing Black people. Dragons might as well take their place among linked anti-Black, misogynist, and heterosexist tools of state violence. Just as the story's narrator trains and "si[ts] astride" the very creature designed to kill her, Jemisin also reharnesses discursive violences that mark Black women in particular as angry and expendable.4 Dragons emerge as a nonrealist vehicle asserting the necessity and immanence of "new suns."5 Ending on the cusp of a Black women's revolution, Jemisin's story points to possible worlds that are free of police murders, housing segregation, mass incarceration, and the relentless scapegoating of Black womanhood.
Here I make a brief case for teaching U.S. women's studies with an emphasis on Black feminist speculative fiction—a genre of writing by Black women, cis and trans, that uses nonrealist world-building to do the political work of valuing Black genders and sexualities.6 Nonrealist narrative choices in this context do not signify the unreal but rather illuminate multiple layers of Black life in a real world structured by white supremacy. My texts of focus are Black feminist because they interrogate dominant assumptions at the intersections of race, sex, sexuality, and gender in the interests of Black women's freedom.7
The pedagogical reflections I offer stem from my experience teaching women's studies during the coronavirus pandemic and abolitionist uprisings since spring 2020.8 Like Farah Jasmine Griffin, I have been struck by how Black speculative texts can model "community-building" for students "in the midst of economic, social, political, and ecological catastrophe."9 Griffin ultimately emphasizes how the genre can help students imagine different worlds—"new suns," in Butler's formulation. Yet the white supremacist storming of the Capitol together with the murders of Breonna Taylor, Riah Milton, George Floyd, and too many others have since compelled me to sit longer with the first part of Butler's formulation: "There's nothing new / under the sun." As Saidiya Hartman writes, Black Americans have long "been allowed to die in great numbers without a crisis ever being declared."10 Pandemics past and present only accelerate and expose the realities of institutionalized vulnerability to death.
Gay, Geneva. Culturally responsive teaching: Theory, research, and practice. teachers college press, 2018.
Geneva Gay is renowned for her contributions to multicultural education, particularly as it relates to curriculum design, professional learning, and classroom instruction. Gay has made many important revisions to keep her foundational, award-winning text relevant for today's diverse student population, including: new research on culturally responsive teaching, a focus on a broader range of racial and ethnic groups, and consideration of additional issues related to early childhood education. Combining insights from multicultural education theory with real-life classroom stories, this book demonstrates that "all" students will perform better on multiple measures of achievement when teaching is filtered through students' own cultural experiences. This perennial bestseller continues to be the go-to resource for teacher professional learning and preservice courses. While retaining its basic organization and structure, the Third Edition features: (1) New research that validates the positive effects of culturally responsive teaching. Examples that broaden the racial and ethnic groups that can benefit from culturally responsive teaching; (2) More information on the needs and benefits of culturally responsive teaching with young children; (3) More attention to the quality of life for students of color in colleges and universities; and (4) The addition of Practice Possibilities at the end of chapters that describe how culturally responsive teaching can be implemented. [For the first edition of this book, see ED441932; for the second edition, see ED510010.]
hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York, NY, and London: Routledge. 1994.
In Teaching to Transgress,bell hooks--writer, teacher, and insurgent black intellectual--writes about a new kind of education, education as the practice of freedom. Teaching students to "transgress" against racial, sexual, and class boundaries in order to achieve the gift of freedom is, for hooks, the teacher's most important goal. bell hooks speaks to the heart of education today: how can we rethink teaching practices in the age of multiculturalism? What do we do about teachers who do not want to teach, and students who do not want to learn? How should we deal with racism and sexism in the classroom? Full of passion and politics, Teaching to Transgress combines a practical knowledge of the classroom with a deeply felt connection to the world of emotions and feelings. This is the rare book about teachers and students that dares to raise questions about eros and rage, grief and reconciliation, and the future of teaching itself. "To educate is the practice of freedom," writes bell hooks, "is a way of teaching anyone can learn." Teaching to Transgress is the record of one gifted teacher's struggle to make classrooms work.
Chatterjee, Piya, and Sunaina Maira, eds. The imperial university: Academic repression and scholarly dissent. U of Minnesota Press, 2014.