Urgent, belated, imperiled, demanding, dangerous, transgressive, transformative, impossible, imperative: A Report on Anti-Racist Pedagogies for 18th- and 19th-Century Studies: A Teach-In

Written By Anchorlight Creative

In our “Rethinking Romanticism” series, we ask leading scholars to propose new directions toward building inclusive and anti-racist fields of study. In today’s post, J. Ereck Jarvis  (Northwestern State University) reflects on a May 26th, 2021 anti-racist pedagogies colloquium organized by Kerry Sinanan (UTSA), and featuring speakers Joycelyn Moody (UTSA), Nicole N. Aljoe (Northeastern U) and Cassander L. Smith (U of Alabama. To write for this series, contact us. 

by J. Ereck Jarvis

The Teach-In discussed below was held via Zoom on May 26, 2021.

Organizer: Kerry Sinanan (UT San Antonio)

Sponsors: Kirsten T. Saxton and Mills College Center for Faculty Excellence; Department of English, UT San Antonio; Early Caribbean Society

Speakers:  Joycelyn Moody (UT San Antonio), Nicole Aljoe (Northeastern U), Kerry Sinanan, Cassander Smith (U of Alabama)

Online support by Lyndsey Lepovitz (UT San Antonio) and administrative support from J. Ereck Jarvis (Northwestern State University) 

Workshops and leaders:

Nicole Aljoe – Teaching Digital Caribbean Archives in 18th- and 19th-century Studies

Joycelyn Moody – Teaching Black Autobiography

Kerry Sinanan – Teaching Intersectionality in 18th and 19th-century Studies

Shelby Johnson (Florida Atlantic U/Oklahoma State U-Stillwater) – Teaching Native American Literature in 18th- and 19th-century Studies

Alexandra Milsom (Hostos Community College) – Anti-Racist Pedagogy 1

Cassander Smith – Teaching The Woman of Colour (1808)

Kate Ozment (Cal Poly Pomona) – Designing Anti-racist Curricula

Mariam Wassif (University of Paris 1/Carnegie Mellon University) – Empire and Identity

Misty Kruger (U of Maine at Farmington),  – Anti-Racist Pedagogy 2

A recording of the speakers’ presentations with closed captions is available here 

The May 2021 Anti-Racist Pedagogies for 18th- and 19th-Century Studies: A Teach-In extended discussions and efforts initiated in the 2020 Race, Pedagogy, and Whiteness in the Long 18thc: A Teach-In which Mariam Wassif summarizes here .The 2021 teach-in likewise built upon ongoing conversations within the Woman of Colour Facebook group established by Kerry Sinanan in 2019 to support responsible teaching of the novel; the group facilitated especially active conversation around anti-racist teaching in the years immediately following the COVID-19 pandemic’s initial impact on higher education in March 2020 and the co-incidence of BLM 2020. Comprised of a series of talks, plenaries, discussions, and small-group workshops, the 2021 teach-in promoted movement beyond adding texts like The Woman of Colourto syllabuses and into reformative teaching that engages complexly with intersectionality and confronts systemic whiteness. The event addressed the ways in which structures of racialized violence and oppression operating in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries persist within contemporary higher education as well as society more generally. In so doing, it encouraged participants to replace nominal inclusion of Black and brown peoples on syllabuses with sustained anticolonial and antiracist pedagogical practice.

In what follows, I summarize the comments of the 2021 teach-in’s four speakers and then share the pledge of actions I generated following my participation in the day-long series of events. The latter captures some of the discussion and workshop content otherwise not summarized here. It is important to note my own involvement in the 2021 teach-in. In 2020, the Race, Pedagogy, and Whiteness in the Long 18c teach-in and the Woman of Colour Facebook group granted me immensely constructive opportunities for thinking through and revising anti-racist pedagogy for teaching in and around eighteenth-century literature. They were also noteworthy spaces in my academic experience because they actively and collectively conceptualized not-knowing as a site for learning, growth, and reform. Following Sinanan’s announcement of the 2021 event, I volunteered support that might assist in the administration of the teach-in. I was eager to contribute to the collective work of the Woman of Colour Facebook group and the teach-in’s organizers, particularly following my awareness that white cis-men are often, um, underrepresented in academic administrative grunt work and work related to pedagogy outside conventional institutions and contracts. As such, I coordinated registration for the 2021 teach-in.

Joycelyn Moody on her Path as Educator

Joycelyn Moody shared reflections on her path as an educator, employing Angela Davis’ “model of beneficial shared self-reflection in the context of collaborative action.” Between the ages of eight and eighteen, she volunteered at one of Mobile, Alabama’s two Black libraries. There, librarians Virginia Smith and Tilly Earl taught Moody to value African-American and transnational literatures. As an undergraduate at a “virtually all-white small Jesuit college” in the 1970s, Moody may have read Langston Hughes as the lone Black writer assigned in her courses. She therefore sought “a professor’s permission to write about an African-American author every time [she] was given freedom to choose [her] own topics.” Her initiative exemplifies the ongoing influence of Smith and Earl whose mentorship expanded for her the transformative potential of reading. Moody’s initiative, however, also evidences the often isolating work of challenging white hegemony in the academy, the solitary effort of claiming authority withinBlack studies, as well as establishing the authority of Black studies, when cut off from essential community by educational structures. Indeed, through positions at a diverse variety of institutions in higher education, Moody was almost always the only Black faculty member and only person teaching Black literature. In When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Memoir, Moody encountered the story of a twelve-year-old Patrisse Khan-Cullors receiving Mildred D. Taylor’s The Gold Cadillac from her teacher and subsequently requesting the chance to teach her classmates about the dreadful embattlement Black people faced in the US prior to the Civil Rights Movement. Moody as an adolescent likewise sought to share her reading with her classmates, and a contemporary Moody realized through Khan-Cullors that she was ”one of many a colored girl who has seized or begged for such teaching opportunities.” Moody called for Black literatures and histories in the classroom taught not by solitary adolescents desperate to communicate their “terror and pride” but expert educators who both establish “ethical and responsible contexts” for study and build solidarity in oppositional thinking.

The National African-American Archives and Museum, formerly the Black-serving Davis branch in segregated Mobile, Alabama

Nicole Aljoe on Embedded Slave Narratives

Nicole Aljoe expanded and further decolonized the archive of African Atlantic slavery through her introduction of the “embedded slave narrative”: a genre comprised of short “attenuated” accounts originally published in “container texts,” whose authority has obscured access to this information about enslaved people within the colonial archive. Aljoe centered her remarks on the narrative of an enslaved Jamaican woman named Clara who is interviewed by Bryan Edwards, her enslaver. Clara’s account first appeared as a footnote in Edwards’ 1793 History Civil and Commercial of the British Colonies in the West Indies, and Edwards uses Clara’s narrative as evidence of the “barbarity” of her Black African people in Assiantee (Ghana), particularly their inoculation of infants with yaws. Contrary to Edwards’ intent, Clara attests to Indigenous medicine unknown to her British enslaver. Removed from its container text, the story is freed to operate on its own terms, thereby divulging “the redemptive and generative memorial possibilities of Clara’s recollections of her prior life in Africa.” Aljoe drew on the work of Christina Sharpe to mark the ways embedded slave narratives as “textual splinters or scraps” manifest the “pain of and in the archive.” She also positioned the release of these narratives from their container texts in relation to 18th– and 19th– century practices of remixing (“clipping” and republishing) narratives of enslaved and formerly enslaved people; each iteration “necessarily focuses our attention in new ways,” as is the case when recognizing an embedded narrative. Acknowledged as resistant texts unto themselves, embedded narratives receive their own metadata, increasing access to the accounts and information they relate and repositioning embedded narratives within the archive “through methods of arrangement and description that resist objectification and instead actively empower the records.” Aljoe’s critical work on the Early Caribbean Digital Archive  grants open public access to 17 embedded narratives at present as well as numerous resources for students and teachers to support use of the archive in the classroom.

Kerry Sinanan on Anti-Racist Re-form

Kerry Sinanan opened with the admission: “I don’t think… I have ever questioned quite so deeply what I am doing as an educator in the university as I have in the last year.” Sinanan formulated her subsequent comments through and around deep questioning. She voiced the need of support for antiracist work “from the top down” and from white colleagues and institutions, and she questioned what this might mean or what it means “to acknowledge academia as a white space” in its establishment and formation “not meant for” Black and brown people “whose literatures and cultures everyone suddenly wants to include on their syllabi.” Sinanan urged resisting academic structures, such as boundaried “disciplines”, which seek to block collective thinking. Relatedly, she insisted that antiracist work is not about gathering Black- and brown-authored texts for study but “part of a wider abolitionist commitment in the academy,” relating the abolitionist movements of the 18th and 19th centuries to “today’s broader global abolition movement.” In pedagogical practice, such commitment requires questioning disciplinary structures and conventions that constrain rather than empower thought. Sinanan pressed for new forms of articulation that support students in conveying and mobilizing their knowledge. She shared her implementation of labor-based grading which applies ideas from  Asao B. Inoue, her efforts to grant students “repossession… in terms of recognition,” and her shift “to reward students for response and insight because that is what will create new forms and new worlds as we move forward.” She closed with a stanza from Phillis Wheatley Peters’ “On Imagination,” a poem that, she reported, numerous students in a variety of her courses singled out as vital in the 2020-21 academic year. She proposed a link between the poem’s pursuit of emancipations and the imperative to question academic structures: both demand “navigation with form to express one’s thoughts through oppression.”

Cassander L. Smith on Political Stakes and Personal Review

Cassie Smith marked the “Herculean task” of political navigation that antiracist pedagogy entails, and she acknowledged the internal work necessary to it.  Smith “emphasize[d] the politics and stakes” of antiracist education in relation to proposed legislation across the US (in twelve states at that time) to ban Critical Race Theory. Such efforts are not new. Smith traced precedents in the recent 1776 Commission, bans on Ethnic Studies in the early 2000s, and the culture wars of the 1990s. She asked, as a key question: How does the present account for and grapple with the past without being immobilized by it? Smith then shared a student’s evaluation of her graduate course “Acting Race, Writing Race in an Anglo-Atlantic World.” The student rated all aspects “below average.” The evaluation also declared class discussion of contemporary events “inappropriate and unhelpful,” despite Smith’s consistent work to situate their study historically and theoretically and to clarify that the “current moment matters in how and why we study the 18th and 19th centuries.” One student’s response cannot be ignored because of its potential to affect employment, particularly that of contingent faculty, junior faculty, and graduate-student teachers. Smith foregrounded the risk that resisting white hegemony requires within higher education’s institutional structures, even when this resistance is articulated in the syllabus as well as class meetings, even when it is carefully supported by assigned scholarship. Frank about the dangers of anti-racist pedagogy, she also insisted on the contemporary need to “challenge histories and systems of white supremacy.”  Attentive to “creating learning spaces [my emphasis]… that … encourage diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice,” Smith identified the following as essential to antiracist teaching: course design, syllabus content, and “how we as teachers move” in the classroom to ensure equity. Smith shared her own error in misquoting Martin Luther King Jr. in a lecture and responding defensively and dismissively when a Black student— “his voice… gentle and slow, but full of dismay”— addressed the fault after class. Smith dispelled the notion that antiracist teaching can be perfect; “The idea, though, is never teach to avoid mistakes or tension.” Honest reflective self-evaluation facilitates knowledge and growth through imperfect pedagogical practice.

My Pledge of Actions following the 2021 Pedagogies Teach-In

Note that the following represents my experience of the teach-in and therefore refers only to workshops I attended; hopefully, it also conveys the benefits of the event’s collectivity by noting the influence of participants as well as presenters and facilitators and by including actions that emerged from the day’s multiple opportunities for discussion.

  1. Following Cassie Smith, Joycelyn Moody, Shelby Johnson, and all who shared failures of antiracist teaching, be (be always becoming) stalwart in reflective practice. I left the teach-in realizing anew my recent and long-term failures and conceptualizing (or at least working to conceptualize) these as energizing opportunities for change.

  2. Following Cassie Smith’s suggestion, include anti-racism explicitly in all course objectives/goals on syllabuses, with the terms of this articulated specifically to each course.

    • (a) Following Smith’s comment, connect explicitly the antiracist objectives to the department’s mission, the university’s policies, and, as possible, the Student Learning Outcomes (administrative readership of syllabuses is likewise important) assigned to the course

  3. Acknowledge and plan for the time necessary to enact antiracist pedagogies in the classroom, which means other content will not be covered.

  4. Following Joycelyn Moody’s comments, include more cross-disciplinary reading and discussion of constructions of race. I’m starting with “Social and Psychological Perspectives on Ethnic and Racial Identity” by Trimble, Helms, and Root; “Constructing Race and Deconstructing Racism: Cultural Psychology Approach” by James M. Jones; and Janet Helms’s A Race is a Nice Thing to Have.

    • (a) Following Joycelyn Moody’s imperative, be undisciplined as necessary, as appropriate.

      • (i) In line with ideas from Joycelyn Moody and Shelby Johnson, bring in later texts by BIPOC writers* as theory or as pairings to assist us in reading earlier texts by BIPOC writers*. (See #9a below regarding “writers*.”)

      • (ii) Cross national borders within the discipline and curricula of literature, being explicit about both the colonizing logics of those borders and the problems of situating BIPOC writers* in nationalist frames.

  5. In line with #4 and #4a— but so significant that I articulate it separately—and following comments by Tré Ventour and Kerry Sinanan, address fully the constructions of whiteness and the ways in which all literary works engage race (at least in the periods I teach). “Fully” means better preparing students to discuss whiteness through cross-disciplinary reading and contextualization. I’m starting with Richard Dyer in White: Essays on Race and Culture, Cheryl Harris’s “Whiteness as Property,” Anoop Nayak’s “Critical Whiteness Studies,” Cynthia Levine-Rasky’s “Critical/Relational/Contextual: Toward a Model for Studying Whiteness,” and Steve Garner’s Whiteness.

    • (a) Following Sinanan’s use of the term “white lies,” acknowledge the deceptions integral to whiteness as it persists in its current operations. This follows my ongoing teaching of works by Buchi Emecheta, Sam Selvon, Olaudah Equiano, Mary Prince, and many others who demonstrate the ways in which “white lies” enable whiteness to center itself and occasion racist colonial gaslighting.

    • (b) Be stalwart in preventing all of #5 above from re-centering whiteness or allowing whiteness— its propensity for social control— to overtake BIPOC liberation.

  6. Following Sam Plasencia’s discussion of identity in Mariam Wassif’s workshop—set up by Mariam Wassif’s pairing of Urmi Bhowmik and Eugenia Zuroski and also in line with the Stuart Hall’s “Cultural Identity and Diaspora”— work to develop identity as a term of discussion—or, again in line with Hall, a term of becoming (within discussion)— that evades both dissolution into individuality and solidification into seemingly monolithic unities.

  7. Continue to abolish my policing in the classroom, specifically in graduate courses where I have been more resolute in adhering to discipline, disciplinary standards of thinking and writing.

    • (a) Extend the pedagogy of love, based on bell hooks’ terms of love in All about Love: New Visions, which I implemented last year, to graduate course syllabuses.

    • (b) Integrate explicit opportunities for students to resist the current conventional values of academic communities—to undiscipline and revise these communities (which should occur as new members join the academic communities—thereby qualitatively altering the membership, etc.—but which is not standard because of the formal conservatism, hierarchy, and highly competitive conditions which have been internalized and falsely integralized within academic non-communities).

      • (i) Following discussion with Mariam Wassif and others, tailor Eugenia Zuroski’s “Where Do You Know From?” as a means for students to articulate their own bases, values, and goals regarding knowledge, reflect on those, and implement those to reform and re-envision scholarship, its writing, its communities.

        • (1) In this course and others where I use it or versions of it, practice “Where Do You Know From?” not only as introduction but as ongoing lesson integral to course content, following discussion from Mariam Wassif’s workshop.

      • (ii) Following comments from Kerry Sinanan among several others, be honest and explicit with graduate students about the challenges and difficulties of undisciplining scholarship, of enacting #7b above beyond the current class’s context. Embolden emergent scholars to resist and re-envision while also being explicit about the pushback and damage they can face in doing this work. Foreground the need to protect and care for yourself in this work. Offer, per the teach-in as a whole, community—sub-communities, outside and overlapping communities— as a means of persisting amid this.

  • (iii) Check again the extent to which course’s materials prioritize the work of BIPOC scholars. See also #4bi above and #9 below.

  1. Following Nicole Aljoe’s discussion, unshackle Black voices from the white supremacist frames: teach Mary Prince without Pringle, integrate narratives from the Early Caribbean Digital Archive .

    • (a) Acknowledge the many ways such approaches are already standard—in our practices of quotation, anthologizing, editing critically.

    • (b) Acknowledge the differences—ways such approaches are very much non-standard—when done to facilitate decolonization and Black liberation.

  2. Following Nicole Aljoe, Shelby Johnson, and Kerry Sinanan, question actively and repeatedly what constitutes literature and a legitimate-literary text and assumptions about these and how these constitutions are tied to non-neutral disciplinary ideologies and to epistemologies “grounded” in white supremacy and colonialism which prioritize some ways of knowing and undermine some ways of knowing.

    • (a) In 4bi & ii above, “writers*” refers to people who produce texts not necessarily written—recorded oral accounts, baskets, wampum belts, among others, all complicating what constitutes a text to be read, what constitutes legitimate forms of and presentation/publication of (literary) knowledge.

      • (i) Following Shelby Johnson and Kelly Wisecup, embrace the challenges and necessary work of responsibly decolonizing knowledge. You will have to give up things as part of this— first and perhaps foremost, time you would apply otherwise.

  3. Following ideas from, if I remember correctly, Alex Mazzaferro in Shelby Johnson’s workshop, apply “un-“ to the categories of all the projects I assign to consider how I might question the foundations and assumptions of those project categories and to develop new approaches, assignments that unsettle knowledge and its conventions particularly to increase opportunities for resistance, for students to, in Kerry Sinanan’s words, “to release their words,” to convey and extend what they know. Mazzaferro, I believe, proposed the astonishing idea of assigning an un-bibliography.

  4. Work slowly and responsibly (yet practically, urgently) on and in the above.

    • (a) Ask Misty Krueger’s questions of intention to clarify and access further means of enacting the above.

    • (b) Apply Kerry Sinanan’s imperative that the above require re-forming and un-forming.

    • (c) Remember Joycelyn Moody’s declaration that Black liberation, decolonization (that which the above nurture) will not happen in my lifetime. Foster imagination of future liberations because of this.

    • (d) See #1 above.

Resources

Primary Sources

 

Pedagogy

 

Criticism

 

About the author, J. Ereck Jarvis: I am an assistant professor and coordinator of graduate studies in the Department of English, Languages, and Cultural Studies at Northwestern State University of Louisiana. I teach courses primarily in British and Anglophone transatlantic literatures. My research focuses on interactions between literature and social systems in the long eighteenth century and includes work on Sprat’s The History of the Royal Society, Samuel Butler’s “The Elephant in the Moon,” and The Woman of Colour.

Edited by Mariam Wassif

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