This Bridge: The BlackFeministCompositionist's Guide to the Colonial and Imperial Violence of Schooling Today

In March 2015, the State University of New York Press published the fourth edition of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, one of the most cited books in feminist theorizing that arguably turned the tide into what we today call intersectional feminism. This Bridge is an anthology edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa first published in 1981 by Persephone Press and then published again in 1983 by Kitchen Table (Women of Color Press). The third edition, published by Third Woman Press, was in print until 2008. For seven years, new reprints were virtually unavailable. Reissued nearly thirty-five years after its birth, the current fourth edition contains an extensive new introduction by poet/playwright/cultural activist Cherríe Moraga, along with a previously unpublished statement by Gloria Anzaldúa. Hailed as a crucial space for offering a serious and collectively articulated challenge to white feminists by women of color and to the very notion that "woman" could ever be a stable, monolithic category outside of specific constructions of race, sexuality, culture, and history, This Bridge fundamentally reconceptualized what we do in women's and gender studies (Alarcon; Sandoval; Barbara Smith; Anzaldúa and Keating).

Fall 2015 was the first school semester where the book was back in press again, and so it took a prominent, foundational role in my courses for both content and philosophical disposition. In those classes where I actually assigned the text, I was curious to see how students would respond to this canonical book that had never been assigned in my own college coursework, though a large part of that work centered on WGS. The conceptual frameworks of even the WGS courses that mark my own education have seldom included black bodies, notwithstanding the obligatory curricular add-ons where theory and critical discourse often seemed to disappear since neither the syllabus, classroom of students, or professors' backgrounds offered any deep engagement with or rigorous knowledge of the materials. In fact, I have never had sustained or critical discussions in any of my college courses—from undergraduate to PhD—about contributors to This Bridge like Cherríe Moraga, Nellie Wong, Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, Cheryl Clarke, or the Combahee River Collective. Those names have only been part of what educational scholars might call my "out-of-school literacies" (Bruna; Hull and Schultz; Kynard, "Candy Girls"; Moench). And though Anzaldúa gets regular rotation on the various playlists of my field (I am a compositionist-rhetorician who works in English and/or writing studies departments) via textbooks and collections of feminist studies of rhetoric, Anzaldúa is most often inserted as just another "multicultural" voice in an obligatory nod to linguistic diversity in the post–Civil Rights era (Martinez). She is seldom situated as: 1) a fundamental shape-shifter in what counts as language within neoliberalist goals of a consumable/multilingual diversity; 2) a Chicana lesbian feminist who bends genres related to language and form as concomitant with destabilizing Western constructs of sexuality and compulsory white femininity; 3) a borderlands theorist who did not need the Western academy's privileged approval as a poststructuralist elite in the academic metropole to challenge nation, empire, and capitalism; and 4) a critical rhetor whose word-work always merged all of her life-forces (Cantú 2011). Here I was, at this auspicious occasion, teaching as a Black-FeministCompositionist within university knowledge systems that have denied the intellectual presence of the life-sustaining women thinkers/activists for my life as both teacher and student. From the vantage point of race-radical black feminist teaching that honors legacies like This Bridge, two goals for my teaching seemed obvious: 1) the need to vigilantly recognize and critique the modes of racial violence that structure learning today; and 2) the need to pedagogically intervene in the neoliberalist logics that govern the way language and writing are treated as white discursive processes. As a compositionistrhetorician, my pedagogical theories focus sharply on language and writing, the place and space where we most often impose the most violence and...