The Feminist Art of Radical Learning

This essay explores the method of close reading as a critical strategy for feminist classrooms, especially when focused on the foundational violence of anti-Blackness and coloniality. Through a personal reflection on my own efforts to break away from my formal education in “the Western canon” (sic.), I argue that radical learning requires vulnerability and an attentiveness to unconscious habits, motivations, and defenses. I focus on the method of close reading as a pedagogical strategy that cultivates these kinds of sensibilities, while also undercutting the informatics-diversity machine of the neoliberal university. I describe my experiences with this radical learning through three meditations that build upon one another: the methodology of close reading; the effects of reading Black feminists as canonical texts; and the strategic, limited use of canonical European theories as methods for the construction of syllabi, rather than objects of analysis. The essay concludes with an examination of a recent course I designed and taught with psychoanalytic heuristic devices. Throughout the essay, I argue for grounding our feminist classrooms in prolonged discussions of the ongoing impact of the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism, in all its forms.