Carmen Kynard is the Lillian Radford Chair in Rhetoric and Composition and Professor of English at Texas Christian University. Carmen traces her research and teaching at her website, “Education, Liberation, and Black Radical Traditions” (http://carmenkynard.org) which has garnered over 2 million hits since its 2012 inception. For more on her teaching, go here: https://www.blackfeministpedagogies.com/more-about-carmen-kynards-teaching--digital-spaces.html Phone: 212.621.4179 Address: John Jay College of Criminal Justice/CUNY
English Department, #7.65.27
524 West 59th Street
New York, NY 10019
At the heart of this essay is a soul-excavation of Black feminist pedagogy. This is not the kind ... more At the heart of this essay is a soul-excavation of Black feminist pedagogy. This is not the kind of digging through that steals from the earth in ways that might be reminiscent of white settlers’ obsession with archaeological hole-making. This soul-excavation is a site of storymaking where Black college students, classroom moments, and Black feminist educators have made specific interventions in the ways that I think, move, and understand reparative justice. My storying thus unfolds what I see as the materiality of Black feminist memory, rhetoric, and praxis in institutions and alternative ways we might imagine more critical pedagogical futures.
Racial violence is deeply entrenched and propagated by our colleges, the intellectual traditions and methods of the entire arc of English studies, and the processes and politics of college writing/college classrooms. Black feminist pedagogy promises instead an ideal of freedom, creative imagination, self-preservation, and self-determination for what a critical writing pedagogy must do in the face of racial violence.
I am a writing teacher because, like every Freireian and critical literacy scholar and radical te... more I am a writing teacher because, like every Freireian and critical literacy scholar and radical teacher I know, I believe in the power of writing, literacy, and classrooms to intervene in an oppressive world; I believe in young people’s race protests and radical interruptions of global white supremacy as its own literacy; and I believe in composing and curating whole different kinds of texts about BIPOC with and alongside young people who strike the empire back. As a Black feminist compositionist, I am enmeshed in neoliberal relationalities. Yes. But because of my Black feminist ancestors, I also belong to a lineage who knows that the praxis of Black pedagogy is an act of social protest (Cooper; Perkins). This ain’t a paycheck, and the composition classroom is not my bank account or lower-rung stepping stool.
Black visuality as a pedagogical commitment, especially in digitized communications, is easy enou... more Black visuality as a pedagogical commitment, especially in digitized communications, is easy enough to theoretically achieve. However, hitting this as an everyday classroom praxis has taken some real doing for me. I have to actively disrupt aesthetic whiteness, white alphabetic obsession, white affect, and institutional whiteness all at the same time. I try to use every visual moment to do so, even if I fail. In one fall semester where I brilliantly failed, I bought this really fly (or so I thought) basket with handles that was crafted by Ghanaian women. My students loved the woven designs as much as I did. However, they were just beside themselves when it came to the way I decided to use the basket: as a purse. I mean, why not? The colors were just EVERYTHING and were just my style. In all fairness, I didn’t use the basket simply as a purse. I used it as a schoolbag to carry supplies and such from home and to the classroom. Well, this was the final straw, literally. As a Black Diasporic community, my college students explained with a quickness that their grandmothers in Africa and the Caribbean used such baskets/bags in their rural communities across the world to carry fish, vegetables, and fruits from the market, not schoolwork. Apparently, classroom projects, fish, and vegetables should not cross-contaminate especially for someone in my age category. I ignored them and carried that bag until it came apart because I looked good carrying stuff like that no matter what they said. My point here is that I don’t direct Black students’ designs since they clearly do not need me for that or ever even agree with my self-proclaimed flyness. They don’t have to since they have their own ideas about how the Black visuality which nurtures them can be mobilized to reimagine their design, work, and lives. My job is to remind them that they have their own visual histories and traditions and to think with and through them as they compose every aspect of their college learning and life, especially online.
Purposeful Teaching and Learning in Diverse Contexts: Implications for Access, Equity and Achievement, edited by Darrell Hucks, Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, Victoria Showunmi, Suzanne C. Carothers, Chance W. Lewis , 2022
This essay merges narrative inquiry and practitioner research and examines a specific curricular ... more This essay merges narrative inquiry and practitioner research and examines a specific curricular intervention that I made using Black girlhood narratives as inspired by working class, first-generation Black women college students in their own rhetorical quest for full personhood. Narrative inquiry shapes how I represent and listen to the stories told by the students in my classrooms. I offer a contemplative analysis of a curricular change rooted in a desire to achieve what bell hooks has called "a radical Black subjectivity." I intend for the form and methodology of my Black-Feminist-vernacular-driven storytelling to also disrupt White logics inherent in what constitutes acceptable analysis and academic writing.
In this moment, we must never forget that our “new” political affordances in academia in relation... more In this moment, we must never forget that our “new” political affordances in academia in relation to Black Freedom were made possible by radical Black queer feminist activism outside of the academy, not within it (Cohen). As Saidiya Hartman warns us, there’s a wide disparity “between what’s being articulated by this radical feminist queer trans Black movement” and the language and practices of institutions and corporations.
At the heart of this essay is a series of narratives about classrooms and teaching in both underg... more At the heart of this essay is a series of narratives about classrooms and teaching in both undergraduate and graduate spaces. Classrooms represent geographies of Black Feminisms for me because, above all else, a critical/ intersectional/ anti-racist pedagogy in classrooms is the practice of a Black Feminist imaginative. I am not referencing "creativity, " multimodalities, or some other tenet of liberal/progressive education, however, when I think about the imaginative. I am also not looking to John Dewey canons, open access policies, writing process theory, or tomes of progressive pedagogy that have abstractly centered benevolent whiteness for schools and classrooms and missed the concretization of Black feminist practices. Instead, the Black feminist imaginative as I see it here means something completely different because only the most radical imaginations can conjure up alternative learning spaces that work towards new visions of a world that could be but has yet to be (Ohito). Teaching for and with the kind of freedom that upends white supremacy simply can't look like most of the paths that appear before us (Alexander).
In Spring of 2019, I was part of a committee who attempted to revise the undergraduate major in G... more In Spring of 2019, I was part of a committee who attempted to revise the undergraduate major in Gender Studies, particularly those parts that promoted horribly whitewashed and white colonized history content. In fact, the history curriculum in Gender Studies was more Eurocentric and racist than anything I had witnessed in DECADES. The response to our curricular revision was met with such hostility from white faculty and administration, all who celebrate the “diversity” of our campus ad nauseum, that I felt the need to address the issues in this letter to the dean. Though such labor is seldom counted as part of our research, this is the unrecognized knowledge-work that faculty of color must constantly do in universities that are hellbent on denying Black and Brown intellectual traditions in every aspect of college learning. This too is part of our scholarship and presence: endless emails, letters, and counter-arguments that dominate the time we could be spending on better things. Particularly at those moments when white dominant trends and patterns are challenged in the academy, especially as it relates to the study of race/gender/sexuality today, white backlash can be especially violent and unrelenting.
Black Perspectives in Writing Program Administration: From the Margins to the Center, edited by Staci M. Perryman-Clark and Collin Lamont Craig, 2019
Before I am a writing program administrator (WPA), I am a woman of African descent whose ontology... more Before I am a writing program administrator (WPA), I am a woman of African descent whose ontology can never be disentangled from a historical memory of racial violence and Black Radical Tradition. I was never a WPA who just happened to be Black. Because the everyday structuring of life in academia functions as a repressive act against Blackness, the premise of this chapter and, for that matter, this book, uses the Black body as a critical source of sociological imagination on what WPA work has looked like, what it could become, and how we could challenge and resist a neoliberalist higher education within its terms.
In this chapter, I hope to explicitly bind Black women’s bodies in the academy and WPA to the specific sociohistorical contexts in which those bodies are understood and taken up. With AfroPessimism as my narrative lens and intellectual foundation, I take up a series of significant memories that have shaped my own racialized experiences of management and organization in higher education. I deliberately compose my memories against a white, linear logic that suggests I can achieve linguistic coherence in a semantic world that expels Black thought. In many ways, my memories might arguably be incomplete in recognition of what Afro-Pessimism cautions about the necessarily political nature of Black creative, intellectual energies: I offer a “meta-commentary” rather than the usual tale of the lone superman-researcher’s heroism who arrogantly presumes his WPA work can offer a prima facie critical intervention in centuries of institutional racism.
This piece is part of a larger literacies symposium in the February 2018 journal, _College Compos... more This piece is part of a larger literacies symposium in the February 2018 journal, _College Composition and Communication_. My essay is inspired by Payton Head, the former student body president and central activist in the University of Missouri's (Mizzou's) 2015 protests against campus racism and white violence. I delineate what I am calling race-radical literacies and a queering/que(e)r-ying of academic spaces, particularly our field's (comp-rhet studies) relationship to a racially hostile academy. I gravitate to Guinier's critiques of the racial liberalism surrounding Brown v. Board of Education that have sustained structural racism. Because Brown protected the interests of white property (Harris; Holmes), Guinier calls for a racial literacy that can work against such "racializing assemblages" (Weheliye). Alongside Guinier's notion of racial literacy and scholars like Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz who do activist work in this area, I want to engage both (1) black feminist critical cartographers who pattern the way that Head offers a re-spatializing of his black queer (im)mobility on and off college campuses, and (2) contemporary black scholars who set black student agitations against higher education as a central foundation of institutional change and pedagogical challenge.
In March 2015, the State University of New York Press published the fourth edition of _This Bridg... more In March 2015, the State University of New York Press published the fourth edition of _This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color_, one of the most cited books in feminist theorizing that arguably turned the tide into what we today call intersectional feminism. Fall 2015 was the first school semester where the book was back in press again, and so it took a prominent, foundational role in my courses for both content and philosophical disposition. In those classes where I actually assigned the text, I was curious to see how students would respond to this canonical book that had never been assigned in my own college coursework, though a large part of that work centered on WGS. Here I was, at this auspicious occasion, teaching as a Black-FeministCompositionist within university knowledge systems that have denied the intellectual presence of the life-sustaining women thinkers/activists for my life as both teacher and student. From the vantage point of race-radical black feminist teaching that honors legacies like _This Bridge_, two goals for my teaching seemed obvious: 1) the need to vigilantly recognize and critique the modes of racial violence that structure learning today and 2) the need to pedagogically intervene in the neoliberalist logics that govern the way language and writing are treated as white discursive processes. As a compositionist- rhetorician, my pedagogical theories focus sharply on language and writing, the place and space where we most often impose the most violence and social control in higher education. As a black feminist, however, my politicization of language and writing under the institutional domain of white (university) supremacy takes on significant new identities and passions. Inspired by one particular student’s text, experiences, and particular reactions of college literacy/learning in my first semester using the latest edition of _This Bridge Called My Back_, I interrogate colonial and imperial ideologies (Paperson 2010) shaping schooling/literacy for racially/economically subjugated youth of color and the ways race-radical black feminist thought offers an alternative praxis for teaching and learning.
This article seeks to introduce and situate a seldom-explored subject: the role and contribution ... more This article seeks to introduce and situate a seldom-explored subject: the role and contribution of women hip-hop deejays. Grounding the analysis in the interviews of six women deejays – Spinderella, Kuttin Kandi, Pam the Funkstress, Reborn, Shorty Wop and Natasha Diggs – ‘Sista Girl Rock’ works to privilege the words and ideas of these visionary cultural practitioners, sponsors, sound theorists and rhetorical innovators as foundational knowledge, the primary text; the knowledge these women (re)present becomes paramount in (re)envisioning the ways we view participants of hip-hop culture as the purveyors of knowledge. From this source, we connect various locations of scholarship that can be related to the way(s) these women operate, flourish, and maintain as twenty-first-century multimodal thinkers and scholars.
The late Critical Race Theorist, Derrick Bell, argued that we must see racial progress as cyclica... more The late Critical Race Theorist, Derrick Bell, argued that we must see racial progress as cyclical, sometimes regressing in catastrophic ways and, at other times, incrementally moving forward (Bell, Delgado). He called this position Racial Realism and saw it as the most hopeful and pragmatic theoretical lens and praxis to do anti-racist work. His reminder of the importance of Racial Realism seems all the more portent today given the brutal murder of Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis, the treatment of Rachel Jeantel’s court testimony about Trayvon’s murder, the nationwide protests that have animated young activists, the discursive somersaults that law enforcement and state institutions continually maneuver to justify racial profiling, and the obvious and constant reminder that to be black in the United States is to be the target of a ruthless racial violence.
Most days, it feels like I am still an undergraduate during the 1992 rebellions in South Central Los Angeles when the acquittal of the police officers who beat Rodney King got us to our feet. Sylvia Wynter reminded us, as best captured in her writing called “‘No Humans Involved’: An Open Letter to My Colleagues,” as we protested on our campuses, that we be sure to keep the epistemological frameworks and knowledge systems of our disciplines in focus. She passionately urged us to decode the symbolic violence that was encoded into our disciplinary sense-making that was ideologically wedded to the very same violence waged against Rodney King and South Central Los Angeles. I propose to take up Wynter’s charge here: 1) that, we begin to notice the violence in the classrooms and research that we sustain, and; 2) that, we question the disciplinary apparatus that makes it possible that racially subordinated students of color will experience racial violence at the site where they are supposed to be democratically educated: the composition classroom. I’m talking about the kind of social and political processes that we need in order to prevent racist logics as viable membership in this community that we call composition-rhetoric and I am calling these racist logics of the same order of violence as the murder of Trayvon Martin and dismissal of Rachel Jeantel. Wynter was always sure that undoing racial violence is an intellectual and epistemological task, but only if we see the work in front of us.
I am not interested here in general discussions about moral and philosophical principles of equity, equality, or diversity. I am offering my own personal experiences and stance of bearing-witness as more than just one individual’s observations but an indication of the levels of systemic racism that we do not address. I take up the tools that Allan Luke privileges: the tools of “story, metaphor, history, and philosophy, leavened with empirical claims,” all of which Luke argues are as integral to truth-telling and policymaking as field experiments and meta-analyses (368). I take up these tools in the context of myself as a writer and researcher of black language, education, and literacies as well as an educator of future compositionists. I use two main-frame narratives to offer stories of institutional racism that compositionists--- and thereby, our field--- have maintained. These frames offer a place to decode the symbolic violence that is encoded into our disciplinary sense-making and move towards what a theory of Racial Realism might entail for our classrooms and discipline.
ConscienceRebels are women of African descent who align themselves with the struggles of working ... more ConscienceRebels are women of African descent who align themselves with the struggles of working class/working poor black communities and intentionally counter and re-script exclusive, dominant discourses. Any self-identified black female college student who focuses on the black poor or working class in their writing forms the basis of this study which attempts to provide a heuristic for educating black female undergraduate writers. The overarching goal is to high- light purpose and form in the writing of ConscienceRebels in order to wed three discursive and political movements for their writing instruction and education: class solidarity, cultural capital, and discourse as activism.
This is an essay written by me, a first year-college student, Ericka, and me, as professor, Carme... more This is an essay written by me, a first year-college student, Ericka, and me, as professor, Carmen, in a first semester college composition class. The theme for the course was “Community Cultural Wealth and the Written Word,” with community cultural wealth serving as a link to work in educational studies related to Critical Race Theory (CRT). In CRT in educational studies, a central argument is that all discourses, activities, placements, and assignments related to schooling as an institution are inherently racialized constructs. Community cultural wealth is a notion that asserts that communities of color have forms of cultural capital that have been calculatingly and consciously discarded in order to racialize school and its processes as white. The goal of this composition class, then, was to (re)read others’ narratives and (re)write one’s own narrative with an eye toward recovering those forms of cultural capital that can turn the hegemonic whiteness of schooling on its head. One such assignment in this course was to write a collaborative narrative with a partner from the class whose capital you felt you shared: the goal of the assignment was simply to respond to any two texts read in the course of the semester together by analyzing the forms of cultural capital presented and collaboratively locate contemporary and popular connections. Ericka chose Carmen.
In this article, Carmen Kynard provides a window into a present-day "hush harbor," a site where a... more In this article, Carmen Kynard provides a window into a present-day "hush harbor," a site where a group of black women build generative virtual spaces for counterstories that fight institutional racism. Hidden in plain view, these intentional communities have historically allowed African American participants to share and create knowledge and find their voices in hostile environments, which, in the case of this study, involve an academic institution. Kynard also discusses the need for critical scholar/student alliances that interrogate taken-for-granted institutional practices that invalidate out-of-school literacies. The article parallels the instructional practices that disenfranchise black students with research agendas that claim to alleviate inequity while really perpetuating it.
With the “counterhegemonic figured communities” of HBCUs as our lens, our idea(l)s are shaped wit... more With the “counterhegemonic figured communities” of HBCUs as our lens, our idea(l)s are shaped within specific rewritings of race, access, and education that move us toward a new framework. Alongside teaching narratives, we foreground collaborative revisions of identity, critical mentoring, and coalition-work as an alternative theory of pedagogy and composition.
Building on scholarship in African American rhetorics and African American language, an analysis ... more Building on scholarship in African American rhetorics and African American language, an analysis of Walter Dean Myers's (2000) "The Blues of Flats Brown" is presented as a methodology for (re)imagining educational issues and research related to voice, agency, reading, and literacy in the face of racial oppression and subjugation. In the analysis, blues music is viewed as an articulation of the reciprocal relationship between the political, economic, historical, and social struggles of African American masses and a unique cultural expression. The analysis also foregrounds the constructs of crossroads theory (Meacham, 2000, 2001a, 2001b) and code meshing (Canagarajah, 2006) as heuristics for understanding how literacy and language function in multiracial contexts for people who confront discrimination and subjugation. Several discourse strategies are highlighted in the analysis of the text: the use of the Great Migration and fugitive slave narratives, the use of linguistic markings to represent 20th-century white supremacy and the maintenance of southern and northern Jim Crow policies, the use of the South as a literary symbol of black home/motherland, the use of the blues and spirituals as a lyrical blueprint for narrative writing, and the use of the psychic and historical politics of the trickster as central to textual organization and characterization. The analysis of "The Blues of Flats Brown" is used to argue for an approach to reading in classrooms that centers students' cultural rhetorics.
Student essays for a college-level, department-wide final examination will be scrutinized to repr... more Student essays for a college-level, department-wide final examination will be scrutinized to represent the ways that students who consciously employ rhetorical and intellectual traditions of Black discourses get penalized according to limited notions of academic writing. A dynamic intersection will be examined to show
how this particular group of students are understood and discarded via: 1) the larger arena of race and literacy/education in elementary and secondary settings; 2) the history and institutionalization of freshman composition in college English departments; and 3) the racialised, punitive, anti-literacy nature of institutional writing assessment and programming.
At the heart of this essay is a soul-excavation of Black feminist pedagogy. This is not the kind ... more At the heart of this essay is a soul-excavation of Black feminist pedagogy. This is not the kind of digging through that steals from the earth in ways that might be reminiscent of white settlers’ obsession with archaeological hole-making. This soul-excavation is a site of storymaking where Black college students, classroom moments, and Black feminist educators have made specific interventions in the ways that I think, move, and understand reparative justice. My storying thus unfolds what I see as the materiality of Black feminist memory, rhetoric, and praxis in institutions and alternative ways we might imagine more critical pedagogical futures.
Racial violence is deeply entrenched and propagated by our colleges, the intellectual traditions and methods of the entire arc of English studies, and the processes and politics of college writing/college classrooms. Black feminist pedagogy promises instead an ideal of freedom, creative imagination, self-preservation, and self-determination for what a critical writing pedagogy must do in the face of racial violence.
I am a writing teacher because, like every Freireian and critical literacy scholar and radical te... more I am a writing teacher because, like every Freireian and critical literacy scholar and radical teacher I know, I believe in the power of writing, literacy, and classrooms to intervene in an oppressive world; I believe in young people’s race protests and radical interruptions of global white supremacy as its own literacy; and I believe in composing and curating whole different kinds of texts about BIPOC with and alongside young people who strike the empire back. As a Black feminist compositionist, I am enmeshed in neoliberal relationalities. Yes. But because of my Black feminist ancestors, I also belong to a lineage who knows that the praxis of Black pedagogy is an act of social protest (Cooper; Perkins). This ain’t a paycheck, and the composition classroom is not my bank account or lower-rung stepping stool.
Black visuality as a pedagogical commitment, especially in digitized communications, is easy enou... more Black visuality as a pedagogical commitment, especially in digitized communications, is easy enough to theoretically achieve. However, hitting this as an everyday classroom praxis has taken some real doing for me. I have to actively disrupt aesthetic whiteness, white alphabetic obsession, white affect, and institutional whiteness all at the same time. I try to use every visual moment to do so, even if I fail. In one fall semester where I brilliantly failed, I bought this really fly (or so I thought) basket with handles that was crafted by Ghanaian women. My students loved the woven designs as much as I did. However, they were just beside themselves when it came to the way I decided to use the basket: as a purse. I mean, why not? The colors were just EVERYTHING and were just my style. In all fairness, I didn’t use the basket simply as a purse. I used it as a schoolbag to carry supplies and such from home and to the classroom. Well, this was the final straw, literally. As a Black Diasporic community, my college students explained with a quickness that their grandmothers in Africa and the Caribbean used such baskets/bags in their rural communities across the world to carry fish, vegetables, and fruits from the market, not schoolwork. Apparently, classroom projects, fish, and vegetables should not cross-contaminate especially for someone in my age category. I ignored them and carried that bag until it came apart because I looked good carrying stuff like that no matter what they said. My point here is that I don’t direct Black students’ designs since they clearly do not need me for that or ever even agree with my self-proclaimed flyness. They don’t have to since they have their own ideas about how the Black visuality which nurtures them can be mobilized to reimagine their design, work, and lives. My job is to remind them that they have their own visual histories and traditions and to think with and through them as they compose every aspect of their college learning and life, especially online.
Purposeful Teaching and Learning in Diverse Contexts: Implications for Access, Equity and Achievement, edited by Darrell Hucks, Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, Victoria Showunmi, Suzanne C. Carothers, Chance W. Lewis , 2022
This essay merges narrative inquiry and practitioner research and examines a specific curricular ... more This essay merges narrative inquiry and practitioner research and examines a specific curricular intervention that I made using Black girlhood narratives as inspired by working class, first-generation Black women college students in their own rhetorical quest for full personhood. Narrative inquiry shapes how I represent and listen to the stories told by the students in my classrooms. I offer a contemplative analysis of a curricular change rooted in a desire to achieve what bell hooks has called "a radical Black subjectivity." I intend for the form and methodology of my Black-Feminist-vernacular-driven storytelling to also disrupt White logics inherent in what constitutes acceptable analysis and academic writing.
In this moment, we must never forget that our “new” political affordances in academia in relation... more In this moment, we must never forget that our “new” political affordances in academia in relation to Black Freedom were made possible by radical Black queer feminist activism outside of the academy, not within it (Cohen). As Saidiya Hartman warns us, there’s a wide disparity “between what’s being articulated by this radical feminist queer trans Black movement” and the language and practices of institutions and corporations.
At the heart of this essay is a series of narratives about classrooms and teaching in both underg... more At the heart of this essay is a series of narratives about classrooms and teaching in both undergraduate and graduate spaces. Classrooms represent geographies of Black Feminisms for me because, above all else, a critical/ intersectional/ anti-racist pedagogy in classrooms is the practice of a Black Feminist imaginative. I am not referencing "creativity, " multimodalities, or some other tenet of liberal/progressive education, however, when I think about the imaginative. I am also not looking to John Dewey canons, open access policies, writing process theory, or tomes of progressive pedagogy that have abstractly centered benevolent whiteness for schools and classrooms and missed the concretization of Black feminist practices. Instead, the Black feminist imaginative as I see it here means something completely different because only the most radical imaginations can conjure up alternative learning spaces that work towards new visions of a world that could be but has yet to be (Ohito). Teaching for and with the kind of freedom that upends white supremacy simply can't look like most of the paths that appear before us (Alexander).
In Spring of 2019, I was part of a committee who attempted to revise the undergraduate major in G... more In Spring of 2019, I was part of a committee who attempted to revise the undergraduate major in Gender Studies, particularly those parts that promoted horribly whitewashed and white colonized history content. In fact, the history curriculum in Gender Studies was more Eurocentric and racist than anything I had witnessed in DECADES. The response to our curricular revision was met with such hostility from white faculty and administration, all who celebrate the “diversity” of our campus ad nauseum, that I felt the need to address the issues in this letter to the dean. Though such labor is seldom counted as part of our research, this is the unrecognized knowledge-work that faculty of color must constantly do in universities that are hellbent on denying Black and Brown intellectual traditions in every aspect of college learning. This too is part of our scholarship and presence: endless emails, letters, and counter-arguments that dominate the time we could be spending on better things. Particularly at those moments when white dominant trends and patterns are challenged in the academy, especially as it relates to the study of race/gender/sexuality today, white backlash can be especially violent and unrelenting.
Black Perspectives in Writing Program Administration: From the Margins to the Center, edited by Staci M. Perryman-Clark and Collin Lamont Craig, 2019
Before I am a writing program administrator (WPA), I am a woman of African descent whose ontology... more Before I am a writing program administrator (WPA), I am a woman of African descent whose ontology can never be disentangled from a historical memory of racial violence and Black Radical Tradition. I was never a WPA who just happened to be Black. Because the everyday structuring of life in academia functions as a repressive act against Blackness, the premise of this chapter and, for that matter, this book, uses the Black body as a critical source of sociological imagination on what WPA work has looked like, what it could become, and how we could challenge and resist a neoliberalist higher education within its terms.
In this chapter, I hope to explicitly bind Black women’s bodies in the academy and WPA to the specific sociohistorical contexts in which those bodies are understood and taken up. With AfroPessimism as my narrative lens and intellectual foundation, I take up a series of significant memories that have shaped my own racialized experiences of management and organization in higher education. I deliberately compose my memories against a white, linear logic that suggests I can achieve linguistic coherence in a semantic world that expels Black thought. In many ways, my memories might arguably be incomplete in recognition of what Afro-Pessimism cautions about the necessarily political nature of Black creative, intellectual energies: I offer a “meta-commentary” rather than the usual tale of the lone superman-researcher’s heroism who arrogantly presumes his WPA work can offer a prima facie critical intervention in centuries of institutional racism.
This piece is part of a larger literacies symposium in the February 2018 journal, _College Compos... more This piece is part of a larger literacies symposium in the February 2018 journal, _College Composition and Communication_. My essay is inspired by Payton Head, the former student body president and central activist in the University of Missouri's (Mizzou's) 2015 protests against campus racism and white violence. I delineate what I am calling race-radical literacies and a queering/que(e)r-ying of academic spaces, particularly our field's (comp-rhet studies) relationship to a racially hostile academy. I gravitate to Guinier's critiques of the racial liberalism surrounding Brown v. Board of Education that have sustained structural racism. Because Brown protected the interests of white property (Harris; Holmes), Guinier calls for a racial literacy that can work against such "racializing assemblages" (Weheliye). Alongside Guinier's notion of racial literacy and scholars like Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz who do activist work in this area, I want to engage both (1) black feminist critical cartographers who pattern the way that Head offers a re-spatializing of his black queer (im)mobility on and off college campuses, and (2) contemporary black scholars who set black student agitations against higher education as a central foundation of institutional change and pedagogical challenge.
In March 2015, the State University of New York Press published the fourth edition of _This Bridg... more In March 2015, the State University of New York Press published the fourth edition of _This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color_, one of the most cited books in feminist theorizing that arguably turned the tide into what we today call intersectional feminism. Fall 2015 was the first school semester where the book was back in press again, and so it took a prominent, foundational role in my courses for both content and philosophical disposition. In those classes where I actually assigned the text, I was curious to see how students would respond to this canonical book that had never been assigned in my own college coursework, though a large part of that work centered on WGS. Here I was, at this auspicious occasion, teaching as a Black-FeministCompositionist within university knowledge systems that have denied the intellectual presence of the life-sustaining women thinkers/activists for my life as both teacher and student. From the vantage point of race-radical black feminist teaching that honors legacies like _This Bridge_, two goals for my teaching seemed obvious: 1) the need to vigilantly recognize and critique the modes of racial violence that structure learning today and 2) the need to pedagogically intervene in the neoliberalist logics that govern the way language and writing are treated as white discursive processes. As a compositionist- rhetorician, my pedagogical theories focus sharply on language and writing, the place and space where we most often impose the most violence and social control in higher education. As a black feminist, however, my politicization of language and writing under the institutional domain of white (university) supremacy takes on significant new identities and passions. Inspired by one particular student’s text, experiences, and particular reactions of college literacy/learning in my first semester using the latest edition of _This Bridge Called My Back_, I interrogate colonial and imperial ideologies (Paperson 2010) shaping schooling/literacy for racially/economically subjugated youth of color and the ways race-radical black feminist thought offers an alternative praxis for teaching and learning.
This article seeks to introduce and situate a seldom-explored subject: the role and contribution ... more This article seeks to introduce and situate a seldom-explored subject: the role and contribution of women hip-hop deejays. Grounding the analysis in the interviews of six women deejays – Spinderella, Kuttin Kandi, Pam the Funkstress, Reborn, Shorty Wop and Natasha Diggs – ‘Sista Girl Rock’ works to privilege the words and ideas of these visionary cultural practitioners, sponsors, sound theorists and rhetorical innovators as foundational knowledge, the primary text; the knowledge these women (re)present becomes paramount in (re)envisioning the ways we view participants of hip-hop culture as the purveyors of knowledge. From this source, we connect various locations of scholarship that can be related to the way(s) these women operate, flourish, and maintain as twenty-first-century multimodal thinkers and scholars.
The late Critical Race Theorist, Derrick Bell, argued that we must see racial progress as cyclica... more The late Critical Race Theorist, Derrick Bell, argued that we must see racial progress as cyclical, sometimes regressing in catastrophic ways and, at other times, incrementally moving forward (Bell, Delgado). He called this position Racial Realism and saw it as the most hopeful and pragmatic theoretical lens and praxis to do anti-racist work. His reminder of the importance of Racial Realism seems all the more portent today given the brutal murder of Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis, the treatment of Rachel Jeantel’s court testimony about Trayvon’s murder, the nationwide protests that have animated young activists, the discursive somersaults that law enforcement and state institutions continually maneuver to justify racial profiling, and the obvious and constant reminder that to be black in the United States is to be the target of a ruthless racial violence.
Most days, it feels like I am still an undergraduate during the 1992 rebellions in South Central Los Angeles when the acquittal of the police officers who beat Rodney King got us to our feet. Sylvia Wynter reminded us, as best captured in her writing called “‘No Humans Involved’: An Open Letter to My Colleagues,” as we protested on our campuses, that we be sure to keep the epistemological frameworks and knowledge systems of our disciplines in focus. She passionately urged us to decode the symbolic violence that was encoded into our disciplinary sense-making that was ideologically wedded to the very same violence waged against Rodney King and South Central Los Angeles. I propose to take up Wynter’s charge here: 1) that, we begin to notice the violence in the classrooms and research that we sustain, and; 2) that, we question the disciplinary apparatus that makes it possible that racially subordinated students of color will experience racial violence at the site where they are supposed to be democratically educated: the composition classroom. I’m talking about the kind of social and political processes that we need in order to prevent racist logics as viable membership in this community that we call composition-rhetoric and I am calling these racist logics of the same order of violence as the murder of Trayvon Martin and dismissal of Rachel Jeantel. Wynter was always sure that undoing racial violence is an intellectual and epistemological task, but only if we see the work in front of us.
I am not interested here in general discussions about moral and philosophical principles of equity, equality, or diversity. I am offering my own personal experiences and stance of bearing-witness as more than just one individual’s observations but an indication of the levels of systemic racism that we do not address. I take up the tools that Allan Luke privileges: the tools of “story, metaphor, history, and philosophy, leavened with empirical claims,” all of which Luke argues are as integral to truth-telling and policymaking as field experiments and meta-analyses (368). I take up these tools in the context of myself as a writer and researcher of black language, education, and literacies as well as an educator of future compositionists. I use two main-frame narratives to offer stories of institutional racism that compositionists--- and thereby, our field--- have maintained. These frames offer a place to decode the symbolic violence that is encoded into our disciplinary sense-making and move towards what a theory of Racial Realism might entail for our classrooms and discipline.
ConscienceRebels are women of African descent who align themselves with the struggles of working ... more ConscienceRebels are women of African descent who align themselves with the struggles of working class/working poor black communities and intentionally counter and re-script exclusive, dominant discourses. Any self-identified black female college student who focuses on the black poor or working class in their writing forms the basis of this study which attempts to provide a heuristic for educating black female undergraduate writers. The overarching goal is to high- light purpose and form in the writing of ConscienceRebels in order to wed three discursive and political movements for their writing instruction and education: class solidarity, cultural capital, and discourse as activism.
This is an essay written by me, a first year-college student, Ericka, and me, as professor, Carme... more This is an essay written by me, a first year-college student, Ericka, and me, as professor, Carmen, in a first semester college composition class. The theme for the course was “Community Cultural Wealth and the Written Word,” with community cultural wealth serving as a link to work in educational studies related to Critical Race Theory (CRT). In CRT in educational studies, a central argument is that all discourses, activities, placements, and assignments related to schooling as an institution are inherently racialized constructs. Community cultural wealth is a notion that asserts that communities of color have forms of cultural capital that have been calculatingly and consciously discarded in order to racialize school and its processes as white. The goal of this composition class, then, was to (re)read others’ narratives and (re)write one’s own narrative with an eye toward recovering those forms of cultural capital that can turn the hegemonic whiteness of schooling on its head. One such assignment in this course was to write a collaborative narrative with a partner from the class whose capital you felt you shared: the goal of the assignment was simply to respond to any two texts read in the course of the semester together by analyzing the forms of cultural capital presented and collaboratively locate contemporary and popular connections. Ericka chose Carmen.
In this article, Carmen Kynard provides a window into a present-day "hush harbor," a site where a... more In this article, Carmen Kynard provides a window into a present-day "hush harbor," a site where a group of black women build generative virtual spaces for counterstories that fight institutional racism. Hidden in plain view, these intentional communities have historically allowed African American participants to share and create knowledge and find their voices in hostile environments, which, in the case of this study, involve an academic institution. Kynard also discusses the need for critical scholar/student alliances that interrogate taken-for-granted institutional practices that invalidate out-of-school literacies. The article parallels the instructional practices that disenfranchise black students with research agendas that claim to alleviate inequity while really perpetuating it.
With the “counterhegemonic figured communities” of HBCUs as our lens, our idea(l)s are shaped wit... more With the “counterhegemonic figured communities” of HBCUs as our lens, our idea(l)s are shaped within specific rewritings of race, access, and education that move us toward a new framework. Alongside teaching narratives, we foreground collaborative revisions of identity, critical mentoring, and coalition-work as an alternative theory of pedagogy and composition.
Building on scholarship in African American rhetorics and African American language, an analysis ... more Building on scholarship in African American rhetorics and African American language, an analysis of Walter Dean Myers's (2000) "The Blues of Flats Brown" is presented as a methodology for (re)imagining educational issues and research related to voice, agency, reading, and literacy in the face of racial oppression and subjugation. In the analysis, blues music is viewed as an articulation of the reciprocal relationship between the political, economic, historical, and social struggles of African American masses and a unique cultural expression. The analysis also foregrounds the constructs of crossroads theory (Meacham, 2000, 2001a, 2001b) and code meshing (Canagarajah, 2006) as heuristics for understanding how literacy and language function in multiracial contexts for people who confront discrimination and subjugation. Several discourse strategies are highlighted in the analysis of the text: the use of the Great Migration and fugitive slave narratives, the use of linguistic markings to represent 20th-century white supremacy and the maintenance of southern and northern Jim Crow policies, the use of the South as a literary symbol of black home/motherland, the use of the blues and spirituals as a lyrical blueprint for narrative writing, and the use of the psychic and historical politics of the trickster as central to textual organization and characterization. The analysis of "The Blues of Flats Brown" is used to argue for an approach to reading in classrooms that centers students' cultural rhetorics.
Student essays for a college-level, department-wide final examination will be scrutinized to repr... more Student essays for a college-level, department-wide final examination will be scrutinized to represent the ways that students who consciously employ rhetorical and intellectual traditions of Black discourses get penalized according to limited notions of academic writing. A dynamic intersection will be examined to show
how this particular group of students are understood and discarded via: 1) the larger arena of race and literacy/education in elementary and secondary settings; 2) the history and institutionalization of freshman composition in college English departments; and 3) the racialised, punitive, anti-literacy nature of institutional writing assessment and programming.
Welcome to the Fall 2022 Graduate Seminar and Syllabus Zine for "Tracing the Stream"--- The Geogr... more Welcome to the Fall 2022 Graduate Seminar and Syllabus Zine for "Tracing the Stream"--- The Geographies of Black Feminist Literacies, Rhetorics, and Pedagogies!
In this course, we will ask ourselves what it means to intervene in and/or interrupt pedagogies, ... more In this course, we will ask ourselves what it means to intervene in and/or interrupt pedagogies, methodologies of classroom research, and white institutional affect towards anti-racist goals. We will draw heavily from: educational sites committed to decolonization, curriculum and instruction from the lens of contemporary Black Studies, theories centered on the eradication of anti-blackness in schooling, and political trajectories in literacy/education that embrace intersectionality, QTPOC critique, and the legacies of feminisms of color. We will especially spend time early in the semester with the work of La Paperson whose 2019 book insists that a Third University is Possible, now the namesake of the course.
The course contextualizes pedagogy as a deeply intellectual and theoretical project (as opposed to a set of standards, learning outcomes, or classroom lesson plans) where we can intervene in college classroom spaces--- which we will treat as geographies that do the day-to-day/minute-to-minute work of maintaining institutional oppressions. Though this class is taught from and inspired by the methodologies and disciplinary ideologies of composition-rhetoric studies, we will not confine ourselves therein since rhetoric-composition has not centered a far-reaching range of politics and activisms towards anti-racism (and when it does, rarely does it push beyond assessment regimes in order to center activism and organizing). We will therefore engage urban education, literacy studies, communication studies, and critical theory in order to explore central themes in anti-racist pedagogies that will include (but are not limited to): critical race English education/composition-rhetoric studies, BlackCrit, raciolinguistics, decolonization, decolonial refusal, and abolitionist university studies. These are some of the questions that will direct our reading, writing, collaborating, and designing: 1) What alternative critiques of the university (and by which bodies) might structure new possibilities and imaginations therein? 2) How are policies and practices related to plagiarism, standardized English, and assessment legacies of imperial (language) doctrine? 3) How do we question and re-tool university policies that currently manage bodies, genders, sexualities, and affect towards racist goals? 4) How do we challenge whiteness, heteronormativity, colonization, and ableism as co-terminously functioning?
The course does not assume that there are any ready-made answers to these questions or that composition-rhetoric studies should be the locus of such polemics. However, the historical entry of composition studies in the academy and its nesting with literacy in higher education mean that it can never hide from racial-pedagogical truths in ways that other disciplinary categories have seemingly mastered.
Please Note: This course is intended EXPLICITLY for aspiring researchers, teachers, scholars, and writers who fundamentally believe that structural racism is endemic to the institutions in which think and live, especially the academy. It will not focus on persuading you or comforting you about race’s materiality. It will not pursue the liberalist project of helping you to become a better person/teacher. This course is for folk interested in consciousness and professional activism/organizing as central to a critical pedagogical praxis.
Professors are usually required to submit their syllabi to their departments for review. Unfortu... more Professors are usually required to submit their syllabi to their departments for review. Unfortunately, most departments still want paper vs. something more appropriate for the 21st century. Old skool technologies like paper still offer us many creative opportunities though and so this syllabus tries to hack back. This syllabus was designed as an old skool Hip Hop zine where we have limited printing/production resources but UNlimited imaginations. I hope that this zine inspires my students to turn own boring paper requirements in college into something with some real flava and actual human interest rather than just another meaningless, bureaucratic form.
As a zine, rather than a syllabus loaded with the usual, tired ol pages of rules, rules, and more rules, this syllabus is all about the look, sound, and politics of gender studies in the 21st century. I take a lot of time to explain what we need to do for each day of class, how, why, and what we are studying.
First coined as “Black Girls are Magic,” the slogan #BlackGirlMagic emerged on the scene less tha... more First coined as “Black Girls are Magic,” the slogan #BlackGirlMagic emerged on the scene less than a year after Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi created #BlackLivesMatter. In this course, we will treat #BlackGirlMagic as a very specific temporal relationship to Black feminisms, digital Blackness, Black freedom movements, and 21st century (re)iterations of white supremacist and imperialist narratives. We will challenge and move beyond the simplistic frames that have positioned (and thereby dismissed) #BlackGirlMagic (BGM) as merely a kind of beauty and visibility politics that must ultimately fail for only imaging “magical interventions” against racialized/sexualized violence. Instead, we will closely examine contemporary political and aesthetic movements in Black feminisms that have made BGM possible/legible: • Activism and policy campaigns that challenge Black girls’ criminalization via schooling and policing regimes, like the notable work of Kimberlé Crenshaw’s #SayHerName and Monique Morris’s Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools • The increased attention to Hip Hop feminism and its ongoing challenges to traditionalist notions of Black feminisms and third wave feminisms • Black girlhood studies and its new archival research of the past and present in relation to migration, justice, and work • Research on Black girl literacies and Black feminist pedagogies as new categories of analysis for the meaning of reading, writing, and performance in and out of schools • Current critiques of Black women scholars rooted in Black feminist and intersectional thought against the de-racializing/de-Black-womanizing impulses of scholarly work that rejects intersectionality for assemblage theory • Black feminist digital vernaculars--- seen in projects like Kimberly Bryant’s “Black Girls Code,” Yaba Blay’s “Professional Black Girl” series, or Pauline Alexis Gumbs’s “Eternal Summer”--- that innovates on the most available technologies in order to push alternative sites of knowledge, cultural rhetorics, authoring, and textual production. We will treat our class as a new kind of maker-space where we will strategically position what Alexander Weheliye calls “racializing assemblages” alongside Black feminism’s “disavowed” yet stand-alone sustained reinvigoration of African American cultural theory as we follow “black cultural archives that typify different manifestations of enfleshment” (118). Since the “sexualized ungendering of the Black subject” (Weheliye 108) has played a pivotal role in the making of modernity, we will reject any notion that our keen focus on Black women is unrelatable or irrelevant to any western geography and thereby ask new questions of whitestream classrooms, literacies, digital theories, and rhetorical histories.
This is the syllabus zine for my 2018 graduate course in Urban Education: Intersectionality and A... more This is the syllabus zine for my 2018 graduate course in Urban Education: Intersectionality and Activist Research in the M4BL. This class is a mixture of many things: part writing workshop, part graduate seminar, part listening session, part qualitative inquiry. We look closely at qualitative research--- especially as it relates to the education of Brown and Black youth--- and the critical methods, politics, and dispositions that speak back to structured racism and power today. We set the historical urgency and social context of our work in the Movement for Black Lives and its Black/Feminist/Queer frameworks. We begin our semester interrogating knowledge, race, and the academy with scholars like Sylvia Wynter, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and Robin Kelley in the hopes that we can question and deepen our own methodologies from the place of that interrogation. We look at a canon of Black and Brown qualitative researchers, from Zora Neale Hurston to John Langston Gwaltney to critical race theorists, who have questioned the role of university research in maintaining racist hierarchies and exploiting marginalized communities. In sum, we treat the Movement for Black Lives as a fundamental, methodological challenge for how we, as activists/ teachers/ scholars live and understand the work that we do/want to do.
#MeToo. #TimesUp. #UnapologeticallyBrown. #WithDACA. #ConDACAlogré. #HereToStay. #BlackLivesM... more #MeToo. #TimesUp. #UnapologeticallyBrown. #WithDACA. #ConDACAlogré. #HereToStay. #BlackLivesMatter. #BlackTransLivesMatter. #BlackGirlMagic. #ICantBreathe. #SayHerName. #NoDAPL. #IStandWithAhmed. #CrimingWhileWhite. #OscarsSoWhite. And (in the words of Erykah Badu) “it goes on and on and on.” You could trace any one of these hashtags and uncover a range of social protests and everyday folk doing all that they can to disrupt the oppressions surrounding their lived realities. These hashtags represent more than just social media trends or a fleeting moment. These are social movements that frame the time and space in which we live. All the resistance around us (when it has an intersectional focus) feels like it could rock to a Cardi B hook: “came thru drippin” (and hence, that is the title of the class).
This class is a mixture of many things: part writing workshop, part seminar, part laboratory, part online social group, part social justice inquiry… but it will be up you to style that alllll the way DOPE. You are taking this class because you are a gender studies minor or major and an advocate for gender justice. You might even be taking this class simply because you like Gender Studies 101 and want to continue in those conversations. In Gender Studies 101, you learned the central issues, themes, histories, and polemics of gender studies today. This class asks you to take those things one step further from learning about a body of critical ideas. This class asks you to LIVE those ideas. This class sits at the crux of gender studies: you can’t just talk about it. You. GOTTA. BE. ABOUT. IT.
“Machines are an extension of their inventor-creators…”
... more “Machines are an extension of their inventor-creators…”
~Amiri Baraka
In this class, we will be moving away from “writing a paper” TO “designing pages.” For many of you, this move away from “the paper” is work that you regularly do anyway: you maintain a tumblr page, you are on facebook, you tweet, you post to instagram or pinterest, you post to your blog. You are already a digital writer with an audience; you are already a designer. The focus on digital rhetorics in this class means that we will interrogate that kind of writing and designing and ask how it works to persuade in 21st century public spheres. We will continually ask ourselves: How do digital technologies affect the ways we write, conceptualize, and disseminate ideas? How are audiences impacted and to what ends? What are the identities, practices, and strategies of persuasive techniques in digital contexts? These are questions that you will answer based on the writing/designing that you do in this class, not abstract feelings and opinions about the internet and technology. It’s like Janie tells her best friend in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God: “you got tuh go there tuh know there.”
In December 2013, J. Elizabeth Clark, a fellow CUNYite, gave a wonderful presentation called “Digital Todays, Digital Tomorrows” at John Jay College. She shared her avid pursuit of scuba diving and then made a bold comparison to schooling, particularly criticizing the ways that writing is currently taught. Clark began by showing images of scuba diving equipment from previous decades, highlighting the ways that new technologies have transformed the experiences of and possibilities for diving. By the 1970s, the buoyancy control devices, pressure gauges, and single hose regulators performed very differently and became the norm, alongside dive computers in the 1980s. While, of course, diving gear from the early 1900s would certainly still work, Clark insisted, rightly so, that she is not inclined to use that gear for diving. In fact, scuba diving has a fascinating history and with each technological advancement, its training has also changed This is not to say that diving is a totally altered experiences from its centuries-old beginnings. However, its contemporary technological changes and new iterations have changed what divers do today. It’s unthinkable to imagine otherwise. Clark asked us why so many writing teachers and writing classrooms insist on discarding new technologies in ways that divers, for instance, never would. It would be like diving into a reef in 2014 with 1914 equipment. It’s a compelling argument, one that we will take seriously in this class.
"DIGITAL SPECTRUM: Multimedia Essays & Projects from the First Year" was created in fall 2013 at ... more "DIGITAL SPECTRUM: Multimedia Essays & Projects from the First Year" was created in fall 2013 at John Jay College of Criminal Justice/CUNY by my second-semester freshman composition class. The goal was to collect the digital writings and projects of first year college students. In Spring 2014, the journal expanded with a group of founding editors, all of whom were students who completed their first year of college at John Jay.
The first year of college often overflows (as it should) with new ideas and new ways of thinking about writing. In the 21st century, digital composing is a vital part of that conversation if not the most vital part. The digital stories and projects collected in this journal are meant to serve as models and points of discussion in first year writing classes to help writers think more deeply about digital writing in our current context.
We publish in January and June of each year and accept submissions on a rolling basis. We are a peer-reviewed journal which means that multiple readers from the editorial staff look at and work with a submission. At the end of a fall and spring semester, new works appear at the site. We continually evolve and span the whole digital spectrum as we archive ourselves as digital writers and thinkers.
Imagine… it is 1968 and you could be the first black woman who has ever been elected to congress.... more Imagine… it is 1968 and you could be the first black woman who has ever been elected to congress. What would your campaign entail? What would you promise? How would you convince people to believe in your capacity to make changes in their lives? A black woman doing something they had never seen a black woman do? In 1968, the Brooklyn-native and daughter of Barbadian parents, Shirley Chisholm, did indeed become the first black woman elected to the U.S. Congress. Her campaign was organized around her now famous slogan: “Fighting Shirley Chisholm--- Unbought and Unbossed.” That slogan will be used as a kind of map for our seminar that will guide our study of how Black women have used rhetorical means in their unique struggle to encounter, re-imagine, and transform their worlds. In other words, what has it looked like, sounded like, and felt like to be “Unbought and Unbossed” for black female poets, essayists, orators, comedians, activists, MCs, b-girls, DJs, musicians, designers, and artists?
The course examines the multiple rhetorics--- written, aural, and visual--- of black women in the United States who define themselves as women of African descent and who self-consciously direct their experiences, claims, and persuasive styles from and/or toward black communities. The course will specifically draw from scholarship on African American rhetoric that focuses on the ways that African American orators, essayists, and researchers discern across many political and social situations the available means of persuasion for the time and place in which they live. We will begin by looking at the work of two prominent scholars (who are themselves black female rhetors) in African American rhetoric: Jacqueline Jones Royster and Shirley Wilson Logan.
We will then look at the rhetorics of black women in many different arenas: anti-slavery speeches of women like Sojourner Truth and Jarena Lee; the anti-lynching campaign of Ida B. Wells; the public works of black female congresswomen like Barbara Jordan; education activism of teachers like Anna Julia Cooper and Gloria Ladson-Billings; “Blueswomen”---from Bessie Smith to Erykah Badu; Civil Right activists like Fannie Lou Hamer and Ella Baker; Black Power/Black Nationalist activists like Angela Davis and Queen Mother Moore; contemporary Black female ministers, gospel music ministers, and “empowerment specialists”---spanning Mary Mary and Reverend Prathia Hall to Iyanla Vanzant; spoken word artists from Sonia Sanchez to Sunni Patterson; and last but not least, the power of Hip Hop as persuasion with rappers like Monie Love holdin’ the mic. Even then, that will just be a kind of survey and introduction, not even giving us enough time to consider folklorists like Zora Neale Hurston and Rebecca Cox Jackson or comedians like Moms Mabley and Wanda Sykes. Knowledge of rhetoric or the rhetors listed is NOT required, only a willingness to look deeply at language and share with colleagues. The class itself will be designed like a multimedia, inquiry-based seminar where we will continually work to trace, understand, and reflect on the multiple sites of activism and battles for equality waged by black female rhetors in the United States.
We will push ourselves to define rhetoric as more than the mere art of persuasion as used in everyday life and in collective freedom struggles. And we must remember that, on the one hand, there is no ONE kind of black woman’s rhetoric because there is no one way that all black women talk, read, write, and move across all times and places. To say such a thing would be a gross stereotype that misrepresents the intellectual histories and activism of women who call themselves black. But, on the other hand, identities and political situations for black women have certainly created communal aims and contexts. To act like there are no continuities or connections would erase black women from history and act like their struggles---past and present---have been the same as everyone else’s. Royster and Logan will give us the tools to complicate what we mean when we talk about black women and rhetoric so keep your mind open to the fact that this is not one singular thing. Also keep in mind that grasping the entire script of black women’s rhetoric will also not be achieved: that is as complicated as knowing the entire history of back women’s history. The work of this class will be small in scope but BIG in impact: we will constantly (re)define and chart black women’s literate paths, recurrences, and patterns in the political, psychic, and social contexts in which they occur.
This website offers the syllabus for first year composition classes that focus on six, central is... more This website offers the syllabus for first year composition classes that focus on six, central issues related to public writing and rhetoric in the 21st century: 1) Digital Empire, 2) Hyper-Standardization of Schools & Minds, 3) Neoliberalism and Globalization, 4) Racism in a Post-Katrina Era, 5) Patriarchy and (Hetero)Sexism, 6) Monolingual Dominance. When the semester begins, we read and write about a variety of short, online essays and watch various lectures and performances online. As we move into the second half of the semester, we begin research projects of our own design. All along that path, we constantly talk about the public nature of writing. As college students, my students are engaging what is often called academic writing which, in the 21st century, is as publicly shared, open, and accessible as facebook. There is never any writing that they do for a course blackboard, email, or ePortfolio, etc that is private. This does not mean that they have to hide who they are because writing now is more public. It just means that we all need to be CLEAR on who we are. This class tries to teach what writing as engaged 21st century intellectuals can mean and do!
Uploads
Racial violence is deeply entrenched and propagated by our colleges, the intellectual traditions and methods of the entire arc of English studies, and the processes and politics of college writing/college classrooms. Black feminist pedagogy promises instead an ideal of freedom, creative imagination, self-preservation, and self-determination for what a critical writing pedagogy must do in the face of racial violence.
In this chapter, I hope to explicitly bind Black women’s bodies in the academy and WPA to the specific sociohistorical contexts in which those bodies are understood and taken up. With AfroPessimism as my narrative lens and intellectual foundation, I take up a series of significant memories that have shaped my own racialized experiences of management and organization in higher education. I deliberately compose my memories against a white, linear logic that suggests I can achieve linguistic coherence in a semantic world that expels Black thought. In many ways, my memories might arguably be incomplete in recognition of what Afro-Pessimism cautions about the necessarily political nature of Black creative, intellectual energies: I offer a “meta-commentary” rather than the usual tale of the lone superman-researcher’s heroism who arrogantly presumes his WPA work can offer a prima facie critical intervention in centuries of institutional racism.
Fall 2015 was the first school semester where the book was back in press again, and so it took a prominent, foundational role in my courses for both content and philosophical disposition. In those classes where I actually assigned the text, I was curious to see how students would respond to this canonical book that had never been assigned in my own college coursework, though a large part of that work centered on WGS. Here I was, at this auspicious occasion, teaching as a Black-FeministCompositionist within university knowledge systems that have denied the intellectual presence of the life-sustaining women thinkers/activists for my life as both teacher and student. From the vantage point of race-radical black feminist teaching that honors legacies like _This Bridge_, two goals for my teaching seemed obvious: 1) the need to vigilantly recognize and critique the modes of racial violence that structure learning today and 2) the need to pedagogically intervene in the neoliberalist logics that govern the way language and writing are treated as white discursive processes. As a compositionist- rhetorician, my pedagogical theories focus sharply on language and writing, the place and space where we most often impose the most violence and social control in higher education. As a black feminist, however, my politicization of language and writing under the institutional domain of white (university) supremacy takes on significant new identities and passions. Inspired by one particular student’s text, experiences, and particular reactions of college literacy/learning in my first semester using the latest edition of _This Bridge Called My Back_, I interrogate colonial and imperial ideologies (Paperson 2010) shaping schooling/literacy for racially/economically subjugated youth of color and the ways race-radical black feminist thought offers an alternative praxis for teaching and learning.
Most days, it feels like I am still an undergraduate during the 1992 rebellions in South Central Los Angeles when the acquittal of the police officers who beat Rodney King got us to our feet. Sylvia Wynter reminded us, as best captured in her writing called “‘No Humans Involved’: An Open Letter to My Colleagues,” as we protested on our campuses, that we be sure to keep the epistemological frameworks and knowledge systems of our disciplines in focus. She passionately urged us to decode the symbolic violence that was encoded into our disciplinary sense-making that was ideologically wedded to the very same violence waged against Rodney King and South Central Los Angeles. I propose to take up Wynter’s charge here: 1) that, we begin to notice the violence in the classrooms and research that we sustain, and; 2) that, we question the disciplinary apparatus that makes it possible that racially subordinated students of color will experience racial violence at the site where they are supposed to be democratically educated: the composition classroom. I’m talking about the kind of social and political processes that we need in order to prevent racist logics as viable membership in this community that we call composition-rhetoric and I am calling these racist logics of the same order of violence as the murder of Trayvon Martin and dismissal of Rachel Jeantel. Wynter was always sure that undoing racial violence is an intellectual and epistemological task, but only if we see the work in front of us.
I am not interested here in general discussions about moral and philosophical principles of equity, equality, or diversity. I am offering my own personal experiences and stance of bearing-witness as more than just one individual’s observations but an indication of the levels of systemic racism that we do not address. I take up the tools that Allan Luke privileges: the tools of “story, metaphor, history, and philosophy, leavened with empirical claims,” all of which Luke argues are as integral to truth-telling and policymaking as field experiments and meta-analyses (368). I take up these tools in the context of myself as a writer and researcher of black language, education, and literacies as well as an educator of future compositionists. I use two main-frame narratives to offer stories of institutional racism that compositionists--- and thereby, our field--- have maintained. These frames offer a place to decode the symbolic violence that is encoded into our disciplinary sense-making and move towards what a theory of Racial Realism might entail for our classrooms and discipline.
how this particular group of students are understood and discarded via: 1) the larger arena of race and literacy/education in elementary and secondary settings; 2) the history and institutionalization of freshman composition in college English departments; and 3) the racialised, punitive, anti-literacy nature of institutional writing assessment and programming.
Racial violence is deeply entrenched and propagated by our colleges, the intellectual traditions and methods of the entire arc of English studies, and the processes and politics of college writing/college classrooms. Black feminist pedagogy promises instead an ideal of freedom, creative imagination, self-preservation, and self-determination for what a critical writing pedagogy must do in the face of racial violence.
In this chapter, I hope to explicitly bind Black women’s bodies in the academy and WPA to the specific sociohistorical contexts in which those bodies are understood and taken up. With AfroPessimism as my narrative lens and intellectual foundation, I take up a series of significant memories that have shaped my own racialized experiences of management and organization in higher education. I deliberately compose my memories against a white, linear logic that suggests I can achieve linguistic coherence in a semantic world that expels Black thought. In many ways, my memories might arguably be incomplete in recognition of what Afro-Pessimism cautions about the necessarily political nature of Black creative, intellectual energies: I offer a “meta-commentary” rather than the usual tale of the lone superman-researcher’s heroism who arrogantly presumes his WPA work can offer a prima facie critical intervention in centuries of institutional racism.
Fall 2015 was the first school semester where the book was back in press again, and so it took a prominent, foundational role in my courses for both content and philosophical disposition. In those classes where I actually assigned the text, I was curious to see how students would respond to this canonical book that had never been assigned in my own college coursework, though a large part of that work centered on WGS. Here I was, at this auspicious occasion, teaching as a Black-FeministCompositionist within university knowledge systems that have denied the intellectual presence of the life-sustaining women thinkers/activists for my life as both teacher and student. From the vantage point of race-radical black feminist teaching that honors legacies like _This Bridge_, two goals for my teaching seemed obvious: 1) the need to vigilantly recognize and critique the modes of racial violence that structure learning today and 2) the need to pedagogically intervene in the neoliberalist logics that govern the way language and writing are treated as white discursive processes. As a compositionist- rhetorician, my pedagogical theories focus sharply on language and writing, the place and space where we most often impose the most violence and social control in higher education. As a black feminist, however, my politicization of language and writing under the institutional domain of white (university) supremacy takes on significant new identities and passions. Inspired by one particular student’s text, experiences, and particular reactions of college literacy/learning in my first semester using the latest edition of _This Bridge Called My Back_, I interrogate colonial and imperial ideologies (Paperson 2010) shaping schooling/literacy for racially/economically subjugated youth of color and the ways race-radical black feminist thought offers an alternative praxis for teaching and learning.
Most days, it feels like I am still an undergraduate during the 1992 rebellions in South Central Los Angeles when the acquittal of the police officers who beat Rodney King got us to our feet. Sylvia Wynter reminded us, as best captured in her writing called “‘No Humans Involved’: An Open Letter to My Colleagues,” as we protested on our campuses, that we be sure to keep the epistemological frameworks and knowledge systems of our disciplines in focus. She passionately urged us to decode the symbolic violence that was encoded into our disciplinary sense-making that was ideologically wedded to the very same violence waged against Rodney King and South Central Los Angeles. I propose to take up Wynter’s charge here: 1) that, we begin to notice the violence in the classrooms and research that we sustain, and; 2) that, we question the disciplinary apparatus that makes it possible that racially subordinated students of color will experience racial violence at the site where they are supposed to be democratically educated: the composition classroom. I’m talking about the kind of social and political processes that we need in order to prevent racist logics as viable membership in this community that we call composition-rhetoric and I am calling these racist logics of the same order of violence as the murder of Trayvon Martin and dismissal of Rachel Jeantel. Wynter was always sure that undoing racial violence is an intellectual and epistemological task, but only if we see the work in front of us.
I am not interested here in general discussions about moral and philosophical principles of equity, equality, or diversity. I am offering my own personal experiences and stance of bearing-witness as more than just one individual’s observations but an indication of the levels of systemic racism that we do not address. I take up the tools that Allan Luke privileges: the tools of “story, metaphor, history, and philosophy, leavened with empirical claims,” all of which Luke argues are as integral to truth-telling and policymaking as field experiments and meta-analyses (368). I take up these tools in the context of myself as a writer and researcher of black language, education, and literacies as well as an educator of future compositionists. I use two main-frame narratives to offer stories of institutional racism that compositionists--- and thereby, our field--- have maintained. These frames offer a place to decode the symbolic violence that is encoded into our disciplinary sense-making and move towards what a theory of Racial Realism might entail for our classrooms and discipline.
how this particular group of students are understood and discarded via: 1) the larger arena of race and literacy/education in elementary and secondary settings; 2) the history and institutionalization of freshman composition in college English departments; and 3) the racialised, punitive, anti-literacy nature of institutional writing assessment and programming.
The course contextualizes pedagogy as a deeply intellectual and theoretical project (as opposed to a set of standards, learning outcomes, or classroom lesson plans) where we can intervene in college classroom spaces--- which we will treat as geographies that do the day-to-day/minute-to-minute work of maintaining institutional oppressions. Though this class is taught from and inspired by the methodologies and disciplinary ideologies of composition-rhetoric studies, we will not confine ourselves therein since rhetoric-composition has not centered a far-reaching range of politics and activisms towards anti-racism (and when it does, rarely does it push beyond assessment regimes in order to center activism and organizing). We will therefore engage urban education, literacy studies, communication studies, and critical theory in order to explore central themes in anti-racist pedagogies that will include (but are not limited to): critical race English education/composition-rhetoric studies, BlackCrit, raciolinguistics, decolonization, decolonial refusal, and abolitionist university studies. These are some of the questions that will direct our reading, writing, collaborating, and designing:
1) What alternative critiques of the university (and by which bodies) might structure new possibilities and imaginations therein?
2) How are policies and practices related to plagiarism, standardized English, and assessment legacies of imperial (language) doctrine?
3) How do we question and re-tool university policies that currently manage bodies, genders, sexualities, and affect towards racist goals?
4) How do we challenge whiteness, heteronormativity, colonization, and ableism as co-terminously functioning?
The course does not assume that there are any ready-made answers to these questions or that composition-rhetoric studies should be the locus of such polemics. However, the historical entry of composition studies in the academy and its nesting with literacy in higher education mean that it can never hide from racial-pedagogical truths in ways that other disciplinary categories have seemingly mastered.
Please Note: This course is intended EXPLICITLY for aspiring researchers, teachers, scholars, and writers who fundamentally believe that structural racism is endemic to the institutions in which think and live, especially the academy. It will not focus on persuading you or comforting you about race’s materiality. It will not pursue the liberalist project of helping you to become a better person/teacher. This course is for folk interested in consciousness and professional activism/organizing as central to a critical pedagogical praxis.
As a zine, rather than a syllabus loaded with the usual, tired ol pages of rules, rules, and more rules, this syllabus is all about the look, sound, and politics of gender studies in the 21st century. I take a lot of time to explain what we need to do for each day of class, how, why, and what we are studying.
• Activism and policy campaigns that challenge Black girls’ criminalization via schooling and policing regimes, like the notable work of Kimberlé Crenshaw’s #SayHerName and Monique Morris’s Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools
• The increased attention to Hip Hop feminism and its ongoing challenges to traditionalist notions of Black feminisms and third wave feminisms
• Black girlhood studies and its new archival research of the past and present in relation to migration, justice, and work
• Research on Black girl literacies and Black feminist pedagogies as new categories of analysis for the meaning of reading, writing, and performance in and out of schools
• Current critiques of Black women scholars rooted in Black feminist and intersectional thought against the de-racializing/de-Black-womanizing impulses of scholarly work that rejects intersectionality for assemblage theory
• Black feminist digital vernaculars--- seen in projects like Kimberly Bryant’s “Black Girls Code,” Yaba Blay’s “Professional Black Girl” series, or Pauline Alexis Gumbs’s “Eternal Summer”--- that innovates on the most available technologies in order to push alternative sites of knowledge, cultural rhetorics, authoring, and textual production.
We will treat our class as a new kind of maker-space where we will strategically position what Alexander Weheliye calls “racializing assemblages” alongside Black feminism’s “disavowed” yet stand-alone sustained reinvigoration of African American cultural theory as we follow “black cultural archives that typify different manifestations of enfleshment” (118). Since the “sexualized ungendering of the Black subject” (Weheliye 108) has played a pivotal role in the making of modernity, we will reject any notion that our keen focus on Black women is unrelatable or irrelevant to any western geography and thereby ask new questions of whitestream classrooms, literacies, digital theories, and rhetorical histories.
This class is a mixture of many things: part writing workshop, part seminar, part laboratory, part online social group, part social justice inquiry… but it will be up you to style that alllll the way DOPE. You are taking this class because you are a gender studies minor or major and an advocate for gender justice. You might even be taking this class simply because you like Gender Studies 101 and want to continue in those conversations. In Gender Studies 101, you learned the central issues, themes, histories, and polemics of gender studies today. This class asks you to take those things one step further from learning about a body of critical ideas. This class asks you to LIVE those ideas. This class sits at the crux of gender studies: you can’t just talk about it. You. GOTTA. BE. ABOUT. IT.
~Amiri Baraka
In this class, we will be moving away from “writing a paper” TO “designing pages.” For many of you, this move away from “the paper” is work that you regularly do anyway: you maintain a tumblr page, you are on facebook, you tweet, you post to instagram or pinterest, you post to your blog. You are already a digital writer with an audience; you are already a designer. The focus on digital rhetorics in this class means that we will interrogate that kind of writing and designing and ask how it works to persuade in 21st century public spheres. We will continually ask ourselves: How do digital technologies affect the ways we write, conceptualize, and disseminate ideas? How are audiences impacted and to what ends? What are the identities, practices, and strategies of persuasive techniques in digital contexts? These are questions that you will answer based on the writing/designing that you do in this class, not abstract feelings and opinions about the internet and technology. It’s like Janie tells her best friend in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God: “you got tuh go there tuh know there.”
In December 2013, J. Elizabeth Clark, a fellow CUNYite, gave a wonderful presentation called “Digital Todays, Digital Tomorrows” at John Jay College. She shared her avid pursuit of scuba diving and then made a bold comparison to schooling, particularly criticizing the ways that writing is currently taught. Clark began by showing images of scuba diving equipment from previous decades, highlighting the ways that new technologies have transformed the experiences of and possibilities for diving. By the 1970s, the buoyancy control devices, pressure gauges, and single hose regulators performed very differently and became the norm, alongside dive computers in the 1980s. While, of course, diving gear from the early 1900s would certainly still work, Clark insisted, rightly so, that she is not inclined to use that gear for diving. In fact, scuba diving has a fascinating history and with each technological advancement, its training has also changed This is not to say that diving is a totally altered experiences from its centuries-old beginnings. However, its contemporary technological changes and new iterations have changed what divers do today. It’s unthinkable to imagine otherwise. Clark asked us why so many writing teachers and writing classrooms insist on discarding new technologies in ways that divers, for instance, never would. It would be like diving into a reef in 2014 with 1914 equipment. It’s a compelling argument, one that we will take seriously in this class.
The first year of college often overflows (as it should) with new ideas and new ways of thinking about writing. In the 21st century, digital composing is a vital part of that conversation if not the most vital part. The digital stories and projects collected in this journal are meant to serve as models and points of discussion in first year writing classes to help writers think more deeply about digital writing in our current context.
We publish in January and June of each year and accept submissions on a rolling basis. We are a peer-reviewed journal which means that multiple readers from the editorial staff look at and work with a submission. At the end of a fall and spring semester, new works appear at the site. We continually evolve and span the whole digital spectrum as we archive ourselves as digital writers and thinkers.
The course examines the multiple rhetorics--- written, aural, and visual--- of black women in the United States who define themselves as women of African descent and who self-consciously direct their experiences, claims, and persuasive styles from and/or toward black communities. The course will specifically draw from scholarship on African American rhetoric that focuses on the ways that African American orators, essayists, and researchers discern across many political and social situations the available means of persuasion for the time and place in which they live. We will begin by looking at the work of two prominent scholars (who are themselves black female rhetors) in African American rhetoric: Jacqueline Jones Royster and Shirley Wilson Logan.
We will then look at the rhetorics of black women in many different arenas: anti-slavery speeches of women like Sojourner Truth and Jarena Lee; the anti-lynching campaign of Ida B. Wells; the public works of black female congresswomen like Barbara Jordan; education activism of teachers like Anna Julia Cooper and Gloria Ladson-Billings; “Blueswomen”---from Bessie Smith to Erykah Badu; Civil Right activists like Fannie Lou Hamer and Ella Baker; Black Power/Black Nationalist activists like Angela Davis and Queen Mother Moore; contemporary Black female ministers, gospel music ministers, and “empowerment specialists”---spanning Mary Mary and Reverend Prathia Hall to Iyanla Vanzant; spoken word artists from Sonia Sanchez to Sunni Patterson; and last but not least, the power of Hip Hop as persuasion with rappers like Monie Love holdin’ the mic. Even then, that will just be a kind of survey and introduction, not even giving us enough time to consider folklorists like Zora Neale Hurston and Rebecca Cox Jackson or comedians like Moms Mabley and Wanda Sykes. Knowledge of rhetoric or the rhetors listed is NOT required, only a willingness to look deeply at language and share with colleagues. The class itself will be designed like a multimedia, inquiry-based seminar where we will continually work to trace, understand, and reflect on the multiple sites of activism and battles for equality waged by black female rhetors in the United States.
We will push ourselves to define rhetoric as more than the mere art of persuasion as used in everyday life and in collective freedom struggles. And we must remember that, on the one hand, there is no ONE kind of black woman’s rhetoric because there is no one way that all black women talk, read, write, and move across all times and places. To say such a thing would be a gross stereotype that misrepresents the intellectual histories and activism of women who call themselves black. But, on the other hand, identities and political situations for black women have certainly created communal aims and contexts. To act like there are no continuities or connections would erase black women from history and act like their struggles---past and present---have been the same as everyone else’s. Royster and Logan will give us the tools to complicate what we mean when we talk about black women and rhetoric so keep your mind open to the fact that this is not one singular thing. Also keep in mind that grasping the entire script of black women’s rhetoric will also not be achieved: that is as complicated as knowing the entire history of back women’s history. The work of this class will be small in scope but BIG in impact: we will constantly (re)define and chart black women’s literate paths, recurrences, and patterns in the political, psychic, and social contexts in which they occur.