For us, for my colleagues who are also black feminist theorists, I do want to ask about what it would mean for us to write with black feminist theory. Every footnote in Spill goes back to Spillers and the 'bibliography' does not cite one white person or one man. Not one. It is a challenge to my colleagues, to those of us who claim that our primary accountability is to black women. What if we created forms that prioritized being with each other, being with the work, being with the possibilities, more than they prioritize the gymnastics of trying to get it right in a structure built on our wrongness?
How do you begin a syllabus on Black Feminist Literacies, Rhetorics, and Pedagogies? And in institutions that have historically valorized quite the opposite? The answer is this: VERY intentionally, even at the risk of gettin' it all wrong.
Let’s be deliberate about our first minutes, hours, and assignments together. Let's take this moment to really think about how classes often start. In K-16 classes across the country, what do many teachers do on the first day? Do you remember? Have you been “orientationed” or prescribed this particular strategy yourself? What are we referencing here? THE DIAGNOSTIC assignment (which is especially prevalent for college composition and English courses sometimes more fancifully called formative assessment). It doesn’t seem to matter if the administrators or teachers call themselves anti-racist, progressive, or critical, this is still what most programs think they should do in the first hours of teaching. A focus on Black feminist literacies, rhetorics, and pedagogies will ask you to unthink, rethink, and redo these everyday sites of pedagogical, rhetorical violence. For some, this is not always easy, because getting here required that you become successful with such colonial educational practices. In that case, decolonization will begin with yourself and require that you not remake the world/classroom in your own image according to white standards that were never meant to include everyone.
Let’s be deliberate about our first minutes, hours, and assignments together. Let's take this moment to really think about how classes often start. In K-16 classes across the country, what do many teachers do on the first day? Do you remember? Have you been “orientationed” or prescribed this particular strategy yourself? What are we referencing here? THE DIAGNOSTIC assignment (which is especially prevalent for college composition and English courses sometimes more fancifully called formative assessment). It doesn’t seem to matter if the administrators or teachers call themselves anti-racist, progressive, or critical, this is still what most programs think they should do in the first hours of teaching. A focus on Black feminist literacies, rhetorics, and pedagogies will ask you to unthink, rethink, and redo these everyday sites of pedagogical, rhetorical violence. For some, this is not always easy, because getting here required that you become successful with such colonial educational practices. In that case, decolonization will begin with yourself and require that you not remake the world/classroom in your own image according to white standards that were never meant to include everyone.
Let’s go back real quick to the foolishness of the DIAGNOSTIC assignment in classrooms. The assumption is that one, singular assignment from a student who you do not know and who does not know you will provide you with an adequate, early lens into their “abilities” and struggles. You do not know if they ate that day, if they are safe, if they have housing security, if your “assignment’s topic” offends or relates to them, if their accommodation needs have been met, if their financial aid came through, if they just came from work, if they are on their way to work, if their loved ones are safe, if they slept that night, if they are under emotional duress. You know nothing about them and yet you assume that an isolated, test-like moment with its logic rooted in Eugenicist-typa testing can tell you something about a whole ass human being for a whole group of people who you’ve never met before. It’s rather absurd and, ironically, teachers often wonder why their students turn around and do not trust them enough to experiment more in later assignments, disengage, distrust, behave so antagonistically about final grades, and/or focus solely on getting A's at the expense of real learning. The fact of the matter is when your very first interaction and literacy assignment with students is a diagnostic test, no one should ever trust your pedagogy as anything but harmful to most and privileging to a small few. It ain’t the students. It’s YOU… specifically, the colonial apparatus of schooling that you are now automating. Black feminisms will ask you to make these kinds of critiques related to literacy, rhetoric, and pedagogy everywhere AND all of the time. Furthermore, classrooms and learning include spaces far outside of schools and represent political processes in the world that are much bigger than we often assume. Black feminisms will require that you create alternatives to the worlds in which we live and imagine different kinds of futures. Alexis Pauline Gumbs's Undrowned will take us there.
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Our first reading is: Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. It is a deliberate choice in an attempt to connect us deeply to an activist/educator/ artist rooted in all of the esoteric, difficult theory of the academy while also doing something very different with Black feminist freedom dreams. As Gumbs argues in Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around”: Fifty Years of Movement Building with Barbara Smith:
Instead of a book on Black feminism tied to a specific Western discipline, we begin with Gumbs’s special and unique way of showing us how Black feminism gives her and us life, what Audre Lorde called a “litany for survival.” |
Meet Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs below !
For more about dr. gumbs, click here. |
To Cite This Page:
Kynard, Carmen and Eric Darnell Pritchard. "'Undrowned': An Introduction to Core Black Feminist Practices." Tracing the Stream, August 2022, https://www.tracingthestream.com/undrowned-an-introduction-to-core-black-feminist-practices.html.
Kynard, Carmen and Eric Darnell Pritchard. "'Undrowned': An Introduction to Core Black Feminist Practices." Tracing the Stream, August 2022, https://www.tracingthestream.com/undrowned-an-introduction-to-core-black-feminist-practices.html.
