Keywords
Black Studies
blackness
weird play
teaching style
How to Cite
Abstract
This essay examines the expectations placed on black faculty to act as conduits of authentic blackness and black knowing even as they are undermined and undervalued in the classroom and other institutional settings. Paying special attention to the way that racial performance, engaged learning, and the role of the black instructor converge in the black studies classroom, I offer the black/weird as a framework (departure/positioning) from which students can engage in black/weird/play, a remedy that interrupts students’ desire for a particular hegemonic racial performance from black faculty while stimulating critical collective inquiry about black history, experience, culture, and the self. As black/weird/play engages possibility, pleasure, and play while taking cues from black nerd and black popular cultures, students learn to grapple with concepts, structures, subjecthood, and everything else, from the mundane to the fantastic, as they building knowledge and connections alongside and with black faculty who must constantly maneuver the already contested grounds of teaching while black.
References
Subversion in Jim Crow Mississippi.” Black Women, Gender & Families 3.1 (2009): 65-90.
Closson, Rosemary B., Lorenzo Bowman, and Lisa R. Merriweather. “Toward a Race Pedagogy
for Black Faculty.” Adult Learning 25.3 (2014): 82-88.
Day, Iyko. Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism.
Duke University Press, 2016.
hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge, 2014.
DeSoto, Aureliano Maria. “A Canvas of Desire: The Racialized and Sexualized Professor in the
Classroom.” Melus 30.2 (2005): 209-223.
Herrera, Cristina. “Soy Brown y Nerdy: The ChicaNerd in Chicana Young Adult (YA)
Literature.” The Lion and the Unicorn 41.3 (2017): 307-326.
Ito, Mizuko, et al. Hanging Out, Messing, Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning
with New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010.
Johnson, E. Patrick. Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity.
Duke University Press, 2003.
---. “The Pot Calling the Kettle ‘Black.’” Theatre Journal 57.4 (2005): 605-608.
Kelley, Robin D. G. “Black Study, Black Struggle.” Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies 40.2 (2018): 153-168.
Matthew, Patricia A. “What Is Faculty Diversity Worth to a University?” The Atlantic, 23 Nov.
2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/11/what-is-faculty-diversity-worth-to-a-university/508334. Accessed 22 July 2020.
McGee, Ebony O., and Lasana Kazembe. “Entertainers or Education Researchers? The
Challenges Associated with Presenting while Black.” Race Ethnicity and Education 19.1 (2016): 96-120.
Pabst, Naomi. “Blackness/Mixedness: Contestations over Crossing Signs.” Cultural Critique 54
(2003): 178-212.
Quail, Christine. “Nerds, Geeks, and the Hip/Square Dialectic in Contemporary
Television.” Television & New Media 12.5 (2011): 460-482.
Summers, Brandi Thompson. Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate
City. UNC Press Books, 2019.
Torok, Sarah E., Robert F. McMorris, and Wen-Chi Lin. “Is Humor an Appreciated Teaching
Tool? Perceptions of Professors’ Teaching Styles and Use of Humor.” College Teaching 52.1 (2004): 14-20.
Weheliye, Alexander G. “Post-Integration Blues: Black Geeks and Afro-Diasporic
Humanism.” Contemporary African American Literature: The Living Canon, edited by Lovalerie King, Shirley Moody-Turner, Indiana University Press, 2013, pp. 213-234.