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Towards love as life praxis: A Black queer and feminist pedagogical orientation
... We have intentionally planned to come together for purposes of collaboratively probing the je ne sais quoi of our iteration of love and its pedagogical affordances. Our topic of conversation connects to an emergent line of scholarly inquiry on "pedagogical practices that are inspired by Black feminist approaches that aim to promote solidarity, love and care in either virtual or in-person classrooms" (Rifino & Sugarman, 2022, p. 90; see also Hall, 2021). At Esther's suggestion, we prepared by reading two articles: "Afrodiasporic Feminist Conspiracy: Motivations and Paths Forward From the First International Seminar" (Vergara Figueroa & Hurtado, 2016) and "Critical Geographies of Love as Spatial, Relational and Political" (Morrison et al., 2013). ...
In this multimodal article, we respond to the pervasive erasure of Black women’s knowledge-making practices and pedagogies in academic literature writ large while illustrating the use of creative methods for making meaning of community, connection, sociality, and solidarity, in virtual or online adult learner education spaces. We begin by narrating how our collective of U.S.-based Black women comparative and international education scholar-practitioners lovingly banded together for a Study Abroad Program. We theorize the diasporic Blackness undergirding our womanist love of one another as a spatial, relational, corporeal, and political force helpful for cultivating critical community and affective solidarity in our virtual geographic context. Then, using kitchen-table talk as a reflexive method of inquiry, we probe the particularities of that Afrodiasporic womanist love—the energy cohering our collective in an online environment—as noun and verb: a source of sustenance, a reprieve from loneliness during the COVID-19 pandemic, and a care-full comforting and healing practice. We locate our theorizing in the genealogy of Black feminist thought, and to interrogate how Afrodiasporic womanist love is shaped by and situated in time, space, and body(ies), we explore our geohistories and legacies. We conclude by reflecting on how, in addition to building solidarity, Afrodiasporic womanist love helped us form a supportive critical community online that provided sanctuary as we (re)conceptualized justice, freedom, and humanity in our individual and collective praxis vis-à-vis the intimacy, authenticity, and vulnerability demanded by this type of Black love.
... 4). As a result, a pedagogy that acknowledges and values the intersectional experiences of historically underrepresented students is warranted (Bell & Jackson, 2021;Hall, 2021;Ladson-Billings, 2021). Therefore, we incorporate the concept of culturally relevant pedagogy (Bell & Jackson, 2021;hooks, 1994J. ...
The 2020 quote defining the pandemic era was “The New Normal,” which, for Black women, implies a need for structural and personal transformation. In this essay, we incorporate the concepts of culturally relevant pedagogy and critical autoethnography to amplify a Black feminist ethos of self-care as an embodied praxis. Reflecting on the embodied experiences of two Black women professors, we advance a crucial notion of self-care as a pedagogy of renewal to reclaim joy through generative and transformative modes, methods, and meanings.
... "In fact," Darren Webb insists, "the undercommons is best described as a way of being: a way of being within and against one's institution and a way of being with and for the community of outcasts." 160 This all resonates with Noor Ghazal Aswad's insistence on attending to the "radical rhetoric" of activists and revolutionaries in Syria and across the Global South with a "telos of solidarity"; 161 Michael Lechuga's demand for "reassembling the way we do rhetoric" with attention to settler colonialism and anti-colonial movements; 162 Ashley Hall's embrace of love as a Black and queer feminist liberatory pedagogy and life praxis; 163 Cisneros's call for an abolitionist border studies; and others who have called for engaged scholarship. The Prison Communication, Activism, Research, and Education working group has also advanced several abolitionist perspectives and orientations, 164 calling on communication and critical scholars to pursue radical action, reorient the discipline, and listen to voices from below. ...
This essay advances racial respiratory philosophy and calls for an abolitionist rhetorical studies as a response to Ersula Ore and my call for “cultivating otherwise worlds and breathable futures” in the Aftertimes. I draw from respiratory philosophy and communication and transdisciplinary scholarship on the constitutive nature of white violence, cruelty, and antiblackness, their relation to breathing/suffocation, and how the university is implicated therein. I then offer a cross-institutional analysis of the state’s dismissive, violent response to Eric Garner’s cry of “I can’t breathe” and the social atmospheres of antiblackness that saturate the university. I read these institutions through a racial respiratory lens to demonstrate how what I call technologies of suffocation work through similar logics and parallel effects in different settings to loot Black breath and sustain white supremacy. Following this analysis, I discuss abolition as a productive force of societal transformation that also demands an embodied, world-breaking/making praxis grounded in an ethical, affective, and collective reorientation around the living and breathing relations at the core of the modern world, a thorough ontic-epistemic dismantling that could create space-times for imagining a new society and new forms of relationality. I conclude by thinking toward abolitionist futures, radical humanism, and disciplinary transformation.
Drawing from theories of race and time, this article examines how
discourse policing the continuities of lynching’s past and present
manifests temporally to construct the hegemony of white national
time. This dominant temporal formation materializes in the law and
public memory as an institutionalized common sense (of legal time
and memorial time) to create “times of suffocation” for Black lives
and which perpetuate end-of-lynching sentiments in contingent
projects to maintain the racial status quo (Ore). We explore how
countertemporal rhetorics of racialized violence manifest both in
Black women’s responses to the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights
Crimes Act and the Equal Justice Institute’s National Memorial for
Peace and Justice to confront the suffocating hegemony of white
national time, enabling a space and time to breathe and articulate
different conceptions of justice, memory, and healing. By centering
on the time of racialized violence, we argue that narrow definitions
of racism, justice, and memories of racism’s “past” are impoverished,
as they cannot account for the fundamental temporal relationship
between lynchings past and present. We introduce a spatiotemporal
politics of breathing as a framework through which “racial rhetorical
criticism” (Flores, Towards) can better account for ongoing legacies
of anti-Black violence and the possible futures enabled by recognizing
nonlinear temporalities.
This article explores left critiques of neoliberalism in light of the Black Lives Matter movement’s (BLM) recourse to the notion of ‘racial capitalism’ in their analyses of anti-Black oppression. Taking a cue from BLM, I argue for a critical theory of racial capitalism that historicizes neoliberalism within a longue durée framework, surfacing racialized continuities in capitalism’s violence. I begin by revealing how neo-Marxist and neo-Foucaultian approaches to neoliberalism, particularly that of David Harvey and Wendy Brown, respectively, partition race from the workings of contemporary capitalism. Such analyses obscure neoliberalism’s differential impact on non-white racialized populations, while simultaneously casting anti-racist struggles as divisive. In contrast, I then trace how the Movement for Black Lives policy platform invokes Cedric Robinson’s work on racial capitalism, investigating the utility of this framework for the movement’s demands. Building on BLM’s turn to the concept of racial capitalism, I finally offer an outline of a critical theory of racial capitalism to better theorize neoliberalism. By historicizing neoliberalism within racial capitalism’s historical arc, such a theory unravels the qualitatively different mechanisms through which racialized populations are pressed into circuits of capital accumulation. It also paves the way to move past the entrenched class-versus-identity debate on the American left.
Those who survived in the underbellies of boats, under each other under unbreathable circumstances, are the undrowned. Their breathing did not make them individual survivors. It made a context of undrowning. Breathing in unbreathable circumstances is what we still do every day in the chokehold of racial gendered ableist capitalism. We are still undrowning. And this 'we' doesn't only mean people whose ancestors survived the middle passage, because the scale of our breathing is planetary. These meditations inspired by encounters with marine mammals are an offering towards the possibility that instead of continuing the trajectory of slavery, entrapment, separation and domination, and making our atmosphere unbreathable, we might instead practise another way to breathe. And because our marine mammal kindred are amazing at not drowning, they are called on as teachers, mentors, guides: the task of a marine mammal apprentice is to open up space for wondering together, and identifying with. The first meditation explores how we can listen across species, across extinction, across the harm that humans have inflicted on other mammals as well as each other. The second explores how we can learn different ways to breathe. The third considers what we remember and what we forget, how we name and categorise what we can barely observe, how we cage, categorise and destroy marine mammals, and what we can learn from the lives of those that have survived.
Caitlin O’Neill explores how engaging black future texts is both significant and necessary to the survival of African descended people, and for the ability of black women and girls to thrive in the twenty-first century. In this chapter, O’Neill explores creative, affirmative answers to Mark Dery’s question: “Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures?” O’Neill highlights the long history of work that black women have contributed to the black speculative fiction tradition. They also work to establish an Afrofuturistic feminist genealogy, investigating works from Octavia Butler to Janelle Monáe while privileging the speculative fiction, fantasy, and other creative production of black women.
Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World demonstrates that the history of racialized gender and maternity, specifically antiblackness, is indispensable to future thought on matter, materiality, animality, and posthumanism. Rather than applying a pre-given philosophical framework to literature and visual culture, Becoming Human provides a model for reading African diasporic literature and visual art for the philosophical premises, interventions, and implications of these forms and traditions. Becoming Human argues that African diasporic cultural production does not coalesce into a unified tradition that merely seeks inclusion into the dominant conception of “the human” but, rather, frequently alters the meaning and significance of being (human) and engages in imaginative practices of worlding from the perspective of a history of blackness’s bestialization and thingification: the process of imagining a black person as an empty vessel, a nonbeing, a nothing, an ontological zero, coupled with the violent imposition of colonial myths and racial hierarchy. In complementary but highly distinct ways, the literary and visual texts in Becoming Human articulate being (human) in a manner that neither relies on animal denigration nor reestablishes liberal humanism as the authority on being (human). What emerges from this questioning is a radically unruly sense of being/knowing/feeling existence, one that necessarily ruptures the foundations of the current hegemonic mode of “the human.”
Heeding Karma Chavez’s (2015) call to imagine rhetoric as “something entirely different,” I introduce what I call an Afrafuturist Feminist (AFF) rhetorical approach with the aim of offering one means by which rhetorical studies can move beyond normative white constructions of citizenship. In this piece, I flesh out a theoretical framework that explores the ways Black women’s truthtelling engineers rival conceptions of Blackness, creating spaces for us to reimagine what citizenship can look like in the lived experiences of Black Americans. I invoke the phrase, “in and out of frame,” to preliminarily consider how Black women like Assata Shakur and Cardi B employ rhetoric as threat to negotiate citizenship in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Following the innovative collection Spill, Alexis Pauline Gumbs's M Archive—the second book in a planned experimental triptych—is a series of poetic artifacts that speculatively documents the persistence of Black life following a worldwide cataclysm. Engaging with the work of the foundational Black feminist theorist M. Jacqui Alexander, and following the trajectory of Gumbs's acclaimed visionary fiction short story “Evidence,” M Archive is told from the perspective of a future researcher who uncovers evidence of the conditions of late capitalism, antiblackness, and environmental crisis while examining possibilities of being that exceed the human. By exploring how Black feminist theory is already after the end of the world, Gumbs reinscribes the possibilities and potentials of scholarship while demonstrating the impossibility of demarcating the lines between art, science, spirit, scholarship, and politics.
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