Refusing curriculum as a space of death for Black female subjects: A Black feminist reparative reading of Jamaica Kincaid's “Girl”

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe currents of elitism surging through curriculum studies in the United States have long been of chief concern to critical scholars in the field. Elements of this elitism running along racialized, gendered, classed and other such lines elide to marginalize knowledge generated by and about the “other.” For this racialized, gendered, classed and otherwise marked “other,” curriculum can be conceptualized as an unwelcoming and uninhabitable space. In this article, I focus on how Black feminist theorizing refuses the “othering” of Black girls and women in curriculum. I re-search the curricular space through a Black feminist framework, and discover the hopeful existence of Black social life, as opposed to social death, in its charred soils. My application of this lens to a reparative reading of Jamaica Kincaid's “Girl” finds that the author subversively disrupts the status quo by de-centering the Western world – in which whiteness is inherently deified – while simultaneously re-presenting Black girls and women as agentic, textured subjects, rather than passive, one-dimensional objects. These findings magnify the radical affordances of Black feminist theorizing for critical curriculum studies by illustrating the promise of this framework for propelling the field beyond deconstruction and toward re-imaginings of the human, as well as engagements with diverse versions and visions of the human unhinged from the White, Western man as the quintessential human being.