Think about A course that you are currently most excited about teaching. Why is this an important course?
I love teaching Villanova’s introduction to Africana studies course, “Constructs of Blackness.” All sorts of students enter the course, some seeking to deepen their knowledge about their own culture, others intrigued by Black music or literature, and still others committed to anti-racist struggles. During the course we discuss the varieties of ways that Blackness can be approached – through history, anthropology, music, literature, philosophy, and religion. We struggle with questions of definition (what is race? what is Blackness?), with new developments like genetic testing, and with our political context. I invite students to think through how grappling with slavery and its legacy can transform how we see the world. And I try to persuade students that Africana studies is different than other area studies: it is not just about one more region of the world but essentially about domination in its purest form, in slavery – and understanding domination is an essentially human problem, perhaps the essentially human problem.
What are the five most salient materials from your course, and why is each important?
We start with oral histories of Black student protests at Villanova during the late 1960s and early 1970s. For me, its important for students to understand from the first day of the class that it is only through political struggle, waged by students like themselves, that our course is possible. On the first day we also read together a few poems, including Langston Hughes’s “Theme for English B” and Audre Lorde’s “Black Woman Mother.” Hughes writes of the struggles he faces trying to convey his own knowledge and feelings in a predominantly white academic space. Lorde writes about the knowledge that we have contained in our bodies and families – crucial but often overlooked in the classroom. Midway through the semester we read Uri McMillan’s wonderful book Embodied Avatars. McMillan traces Black feminist performance from the time of slavery to the present, with concluding remarks on Nicki Minaj. The book is theoretically sophisticated, historically grounded, and clearly relevant in the contemporary moment, with many points of entry for students coming from different directions. We finish the course with Aime Cesaire’s Notebook of a Return to a Native Land, a breathtaking poem about Cesaire’s new perspective on his home, and his Blackness, after having studied in Paris. I hope Cesaire helps the students reflect on what the course has meant for them, and what it could mean for them in the future.
What is a dream course that you’d be interested in teaching in the future?
I am thinking a lot about Black feminism these days, and I would love to teach a course that mixes Black feminist history, literature, and theory.
What is a book that changed your life as a high schooler?
Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior was the first work of “multicultural” literature we read in high school and helpfully made me aware that there were so many experiences of people in the US and around the world that we were not engaging with in the curriculum.
What is one piece of advice that you would give to new teachers?
Avoid making yourself the center of the class; the job is to organize rather than to preach or control.