Preface by the 2021–22 Anti-Racist Pedagogy Fellows

Making Inclusion Intentional: Teaching Romanticism through an Anti-Racist Lens

In 2021, Romantic Circles and the Keats-Shelley Association of America selected the first cohort of Pedagogy Fellows to create a “permanent yet expanding set of anti-racist pedagogy web links and resources,” initiated in the work of a colloquium held during July–August of that year (“Romantic Circles/K-SAA Anti-Racist Pedagogies Colloquium Fellowship: Call for Participants”). We located helpful contextual sources, syllabi, articles, and techniques for anti-racist pedagogy in the Romantic period, as they are essential to our work as scholars and teachers. In the process, we gained “the opportunity to build a cohort and a virtual space for discussion of anti-racist pedagogy and its intellectual work” (“Romantic Circles/K-SAA Anti-Racist Pedagogies Colloquium Fellowship: Call for Participants”). Through the fellowship, we attempted to widen the professional network of Romantic scholars, digital humanists, and teachers, especially in our unique relationship to Romantic Studies. 

The first colloquium took place virtually from Summer 2021–Spring 2022, and it consisted of a cohort of six Romantic literature scholars of all ranks and career stages. We participated in four summer workshops and formed two smaller groups focusing on gathering materials related to previous scholarship and pedagogy. The pedagogy group met monthly throughout the 2021–2022 academic year. Ultimately, we produced a digital teaching and learning resource to aid scholars of Romanticism in viewing the field through an anti-racist lens in their research and teaching.

Our guiding principle as collaborators and editors in creating self-reflective content, classifying content, and recruiting and choosing contributors was to make inclusion intentional. Since systemic racism has long affected not only what texts are considered canonical, but also how, where, and to whom Romantic-era materials are taught, we followed the Keats-Shelley Association of America’s and Romantic Circles’s guidelines to provide support for scholars in expanding access to Romantic-era pedagogy, including resources for teaching in underserved communities and facilities. When we called for submissions, we kept in mind that such an undertaking must be a collaborative, sustained, and rigorous research project. We aimed to include bibliographies of available material, articles discussing best classroom practices, contextual materials, and syllabi, compiled into a readily usable/accessible set of pages to be maintained over time. 

We reached out to scholars and teachers who do anti-racist work in the eighteenth and/or nineteenth centuries to solicit syllabi, assignments, and lesson plans for this forum. Along with the valuable anti-racist materials that we received from eighteenth-and nineteenth-century scholars, our repository includes anti-racist materials from the internet, sources available through Open Access, and our own teaching and pedagogy documents. 

We organized the contributions we received into the following sections: “Sample Assignments,” “How-To and Guides,” “Suggested Pedagogy Readings,” and “Sample Course Readings: 18th- and 19th-Century BIPOC Writers.”

In participating in this program, we gained rich insights as teachers and scholars of Romanticism through the colloquium readings, discussions, and workshops as well as through experiences of using the sample lesson plans and assignments from the resource. Additionally, we gained professional skills acquired from collaborating on a year-long project with the facilitator, cohort, contributors, and technical editor. In the process, we learned about the capaciousness of the field of Romanticism for anti-racist work, the enormous value of expanding the jurisdiction of Romanticism, and the high level of consciousness among instructors. 

We hope that this initial collection of materials will encourage scholars to broaden our conception of Romanticism to be more diverse and inclusive and to have this reflected in more equitable practices in scholarship, pedagogy, and the profession itself.

Thinking and Teaching: Remixing Approaches to Romanticism

Our project began as a list of foundational scholarship in and around anti-racist pedagogy. It became a set of models for “remixing” approaches to teaching and thinking about several keywords in Romanticism. Nicole Aljoe and her colleagues at the Early Caribbean Digital Archive (ECDA) note that “an archive is a knowledge event” that, far from being objective, reflects and reproduces the ways of knowing that went into its creation” (259). Rather than try to find out the truth beneath all of the subjective documents, they propose that responsible archival work might involve “remixing” archival materials and approaches to restage the knowledge event from as many perspectives as we can imagine. We are indebted to bell hooks, Sara Ahmed, Rachel Sagner Buurma, Laura Heffernan, and many others whose work has helped us to think about teaching and research as mutually constitutive practices (see the “Acknowledgements” section). Thinking and Teaching: Remixing Approaches to Romanticism presents syllabus creation not as the realm where we must put an anti-racist spin on something called “Romanticism,” but, rather, as a place for “remixing” the ways in which we understand our field and its central materials. 

Although the materials appear as textual bibliographies, we break and rearrange each bibliography in several ways. This approach both models remixing and makes an argument for the bibliography and canon as artifacts that can be reshaped without losing their depth. Our cohort was lucky to hear from Cassander Smith, who argues that anti-racist teaching can neither consist of adding more material to our syllabi to account for the rich variety of human experiences, nor should it intend to make a new canon of “overlooked” material to replace the old canon. The first alternative model, the additive, is impractical and raises the barrier to entry for all students because there is too little curation of material by instructors. The second alternative model, the “shadow canon,” eventually replicates the original problem of the canon by overemphasizing certain material and underemphasizing everything else, and, as Sara Salih has argued, replicates literary models based on nation-states and their subjects rather than allowing for “shifting, unstable, and complex” voices to speak (125). 

While we invite users to draw from any and all of the resources we have included, we imagine these lists, which we call “constellations,”as incomplete models of a practice that we propose for the curation of more anti-racist syllabi. We know that the so-called “canon” of virtually every period, and even periodization itself, has worked to create and consolidate whiteness. Here, we experiment with sample “constellations” of major keywords in Romantic Studies, including “Revolution and Rebellion,” “Imagination,” and “Nature and Ecology.” We received inspiration from the recent “Keywords” issue (2018) of Victorian Literature and Culture and its unique format: scholars wrote 100 mini-essays about prominent keywords in Victorian Studies in order to capture the current state of the field (Ablow and Hack 547). Our group has taken three well-known concepts that define Romanticism and re-imagined them through the anti-racist relations of heterogeneity, recombination, and knowledge ecologies. Our research on anti-racist primary texts, images, and scholarship related to indigenous populations, the slave trade, global anglophone authors, and rebellions against imperialism has shaped our entire project. We hope these materials will provide useful ingredients for further improvisations with Romanticism.

The image that emerges in any given classroom depends on which archival material instructors present as well as the scholarly tools they offer students to connect the archival dots. Explicitly shifting the “constellation” a course on Romanticism presents from term to term might involve, for example, changing the geographic center of attention, or the temporal boundaries, or the central idea the course traces, or the kinds of texts in the syllabus. Frequently shifting how a course presents knowledge to students requires ongoing work. This workload might be lightened through more collaboration and sharing of resources, such as our cohort aims to do with the pedagogical materials we have gathered, designed, and curated together. Ultimately, it will also entail the de-privatization or “commoning” of resources, work which we have not been able to do here. We think that the work we do is worthwhile because it might enact a more anti-racist pedagogy in several ways. Instructors who engage in remixing will be challenged to think about their course content from a new angle with each syllabus update, which will prepare them to introduce students to a broader range of ideas and methodologies. Students presented with course descriptions that emphasize topics and deemphasize canonicity and periodization may be better able to choose courses that will serve them. If instructors make it transparent that a course is a focalized work of interpretation, students could also be more empowered to bring their own knowledge to bear on the subject.

We invite users to explore some of the ways our curated materials could be remixed by looking at our three constellations: “Nature and Ecology,” “Revolution and Rebellion,” and “Imagination.” Although each constellation is organized slightly differently, they all begin with a short introduction explaining how the creator reimagined a key Romantic concept and selected relevant materials. Afterwards, a brief list of keywords associated with the Romantic concept follows. Below that, viewers will find a full list of texts, scholarship, and images that the creator has assembled, which are categorized according to “Primary Sources,” “Secondary Sources,” and “Images.” The main body of each constellation offers a series of “remixes” of materials that address, revise, or challenge each keyword and/or perceptions of certain geographic regions (see “Revolution and Rebellion”).