Unpacking Black Feminist Pedagogy in Ethiopia

The typical visiting U.S. professor in Africa is expected to be male or, at least, White. I am neither. As an African American radical feminist who enjoys traveling alone, I challenge the assumptions that people within and outside the United States make about nationality, race, gender, class, and sexuality. A Black feminist colleague of mine once declared, “I teach what I am, I am what I teach: an intersectionality, an interdisciplinarity, a complex epistemology, and a pedagogical location” (M. Lewis 49). When I landed in Ethiopia, I was obliged to unpack both my bags and my Black feminist pedagogy.

Black Feminist Pedagogy: Crossing Personal and Political Borders

My teaching philosophy includes major principles of feminist pedagogy such as participatory learning and the validation of students’ personal experiences, as well as the importance of activism, critical thinking skills, and open-mindedness (Cohee et al.; Hoffman and Stake). I also incorporate principles from Black feminist pedagogy that derive from “intersectionality, identity, and integrity” (Lemons and White 5). Together, these principles help me to cross personal and political borders with my students.

Intersectionality takes into account how inequalities of race, gender, class, and sexuality “intersect,” or work in combined ways, in the lives of Black women and other women of color (Crenshaw; Vargas; Vaz and Lemons). As a holistic teaching approach, it also has relevance for all people, male and female, straight and gay, rich and poor, and along the various continuums between those poles (Lemons and White). The challenge, when incorporating Black feminist pedagogy into teaching, is to center Black women’s experiences while simultaneously demonstrating their humanistic relevance to other women and men.

Black feminist pedagogical practices also require their proponents to engage in honest interrogation of their own identities—who the instructor is has as much to do with how that instructor represents feminism (Lemons and White). As Black women, our identities and physical bodies shape students’ interpretations of course materials because of stereotypes about our race, gender, class, and sexuality that students often believe. Those stereotypes can undermine our authority and negatively affect the power dynamics in our classes (Banks; Johnson-Bailey and Lee; Kishimoto and Mwangi). Our authority and expertise are frequently challenged in ways that provoke social change dynamics in our classrooms. Thus, the interrelationship of our identities with course topics calls for exceptional vulnerability in the classroom as we disclose personal life experiences in order to demonstrate how the personal is both political and theoretical (Bridgewater; Lemons and White).

This level of openness with our students also requires that we bring integrity to our teaching. Integrity implies consistency of actions, values, methods, principles, expectations, and outcomes. How we as instructors live and practice Black feminist theory outside the classroom, as well as what we say about it in the classroom, affects our credibility; we cannot expect students to be open to our ideas and to take risks in their personal and professional lives if we ourselves do not (Bridgewater; Lemons and White). As we challenge students to transform their thinking, we evoke passions and emotions during class discussions that stretch us as well as them (Banks; Bridgewater; Brown).

Below, I describe the classroom dynamics that developed when I integrated Black feminist pedagogical principles into my feminist theory course in Ethiopia, an African nation in which ancient and modern cultures meet but do not always converge. Black feminist pedagogy in an African context required me constantly to link the local and the global—as well as the personal and the political—to the theoretical.

African Gender Studies in Ethiopia: Crossing Local and Global Borders

Since the 1980s, women’s and gender studies programs have grown across the African continent (Adomako Ampofo et al.; D. Lewis, “African”; Mama). However, the particular circumstances under which African feminist scholarship developed limit the usefulness of Western feminist theories and related textbooks in the African context. African feminist scholarship and activism have emerged as a result of women’s involvement with African liberation struggles, civil wars, democratization, and neoliberal economic reforms (Adomako Ampofo et al.; D. Lewis, “African”; Mama). Today, African gender studies programs remain intertwined with ongoing...