Commemoration, Pedagogy, and Action

Abstract

Commemoration, Pedagogy, and Action Charlene A. Carruthers (bio) On April 2, 2022, nearly four hundred people gathered to commemorate the life of Black feminist scholar, activist, and educator bell hooks (née Gloria Jean Watkins) in her hometown of Hopkinsville, Kentucky. hooks died at the age of sixty-nine of renal failure in her home on December 15, 2021. She was a prolific writer and incisive cultural critic. The commemoration generated a space for collective mourning and celebration of a poet who published more than forty books. Commemorators shared memories about their experiences and remarked on her cultural and intellectual legacy. Images of hooks alongside quotes from her works, interviews, and speeches spread widely across social media channels. I joined the chorus as a mourner whose own thinking is shaped by her calls for love, communion, and radicalism in education. The duality of celebration and mourning is characteristic of feminist pedagogy that draws from archives of struggles for liberation throughout the modern era. Archives are geographies of the past, the ongoing, and the future. They exist withing many places, including formal academic and government institutions, community centers, churches, civic organizations, and our homes. Scholars, artists, and movement workers pull from archives to make sense of their own experiences and ideas. Drawing from these archives as a feminist Black studies scholar and educator means that I traverse various histories of enslavement, genocide, and war. It also means that I cross through insurrection, mass mobilization, and institution-building amid white supremacist and patriarchal terror. This crossing back and forth, in between, and through is not linear. One song, class session, or text can cover the events and emotional toll of several hours or several hundreds of years. [End Page 19] The impetus for WSQ’s creation, the journal’s contributions to intellectual thought and political action and future, is undeniably dependent on its contributors and editorial team’s commitment to transgressive education. hooks makes this charge clear in Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. For hooks, transgressive education calls educators to do even more than what is often considered critical or feminist pedagogy. Unlike critical and feminist pedagogies, well-being matters in transgressive pedagogy. This approach to education can and should be pleasurable. hooks explains that “the pleasure of teaching is an act of resistance” (1994, 10). This resistance counters “the overwhelming boredom, uninterest, and apathy that so often characterize the way professors and students feel about teaching” (10). What becomes possible if everyone who is committed to feminist education organizes collectively to change how education is shaped and experienced? There is much to be learned from many sites of education, be it inside of an academic institution or in a community organizing setting. hooks urges us to connect the ideas learned in the academy with those learned outside of the academy. Doing so inevitably leaves educators who are also committed to anticolonial, feminist, and anticapitalist praxis vulnerable. Consequently, committing to transgressive education is a choice one has to make repeatedly, all the while weighing the risks and rewards of doing so. The emotional journey as an educator can contribute to our collective freedom. hooks writes that “to educate as a practice of freedom is a way of teaching that anyone can learn” (1994, 13). It is not limited to people who are primarily trained and located in the academy. However, the opportunity to learn how to educate as a practice of freedom is not readily available to everyone. As laws are introduced and passed in state legislatures to restrict the use of materials and ideas that examine racism, white supremacy, and the mere presence of LGBTQIA+ people in the United States, access to the archives or content needed to engage students is increasingly threatened and restricted. Still, as Black educators have consistently engaged, under the threat of criminalization and violence, in what education historian Jarvis Givens (2021) calls fugitive pedagogies, I am confident that transgressive pedagogy will survive this current historical conjuncture. It will survive through storytelling, shared experiences, and curious researchers who ask questions and consult archives. Commemoration does not require a special journal issue—it can happen in our everyday lives. Commemoration allows us to connect...