Being Black, Teaching Black: Politics and Pedagogy in Religious Studies

by Nancy Lynne Westfield

Overview

In this volume a group of eminent African American scholars of religious and theological studies examine the problems and prospects of black scholarship in the theological academy. They assess the role that prominent black scholars have played in transforming the study and teaching of religion and theology, the need for a more thorough-going incorporation of the fruits of black scholarship into the mainstream of the academic study of religion, and the challenges and opportunities of bringing black art, black intellectual thought, and black culture into predominantly white classrooms and institutions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781426731853
Publisher:	Abingdon Press
Publication date:	10/01/2010
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	593 KB

About the Author

N. Lynne Westfield is Assistant Professor of Religious Education at Drew University Theological School.

Read an Excerpt

Being Black Teaching Black

Politics and Pedagogy in Religious Studies

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By Nancy Lynne Westfield

Abingdon Press

Copyright © 2008 Abingdon Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4267-3185-3

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CHAPTER 1

Visible/Invisible

Teaching Popular Culture And The Vulgar Body In Black Religious Studies

Carol B. Duncan

In what ways can cultural texts which include aspects of the vulgar be incorporated into curricula which includes popular culture? How are Black women teachers' subjectivities and bodies implicated in the teaching of popular cultural texts, especially those which involve the vulgar, given racial and sexual hierarchies which position black women in popular cultures as mammies and jezebels?

The body is surrounded by an atmosphere of certain uncertainty.... And I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects ... I took myself far off from my own presence.... What else could it be for me but an amputation, an excision, a hemorrhage that spattered my whole body with Black blood?

Professor Duncan, what does motherfucker mean?" The question was asked of me, a few years ago, by a white male student, as I delivered a lecture on oral traditions of the African Diaspora to an undergraduate class. The question took me by surprise even though I had long ago, in my teaching practice, relinquished the notion of being able to predict what was going to happen on any given day in the classroom. As a university teacher, in fact, I have made it an established part of my teaching practice to invite students' questions and comments as an integral component of the classroom learning experience. This invitation to question, comment, and dialogue, however, is couched within a framework of relations in which mutual respect and responsibility are paramount. This particular question did not seem to be paying attention to these ground rules of classroom communication. I was taken aback by the question and the way in which it was asked: frank, bold, and with no warning or acknowledgment that a "curse word" was about to be uttered, thus taking the talk of the classroom outside of its usual context. The student had interrupted the lecture to ask the question. In posing it, he situated his curiosity about the term with his love of hip-hop culture and rap music in particular, noting that he had always wondered about the meaning of this particular term that proliferated in the recordings of rap artists whom he admired. In his iteration of the question, he used the word motherfucker several times, seeming to relish, from my standpoint as listener, the actual enunciation of the word, out in the open, out loud and in the classroom. The word seemed to hang in the air, defiantly proclaiming its arrival in the conversation of the class. With its utterance, the classroom dynamic suddenly shifted and changed as the other students watched and waited to see how I would respond. Ignoring the question and carrying on as if it had not entered the room was not an option.

In the room of nearly fifty students, the majority of whom were white, I felt as if I was suddenly positioned, by this question, as an expert on all things Black, an experience that I had encountered before as a student beginning high school. I anticipated from personal experience and anecdotal conversations with other persons of African descent that being asked to take on the role of the Black expert could mean being asked to expound on any number of topics from various African and African Diasporan cultural traditions and historical epochs. This occurs because the positioning as expert in this context presumes a sameness of Blackness and Black experience that is shared across linguistic, geographical, cultural, religious, and even temporal locations. The assumed expertise is not based on scholarly study or training but on life experience. Encountering it in the classroom, therefore, brings my location as a scholar, teacher, and expert by virtue of academic training and research into an uncomfortable juxtaposition with the underlying stereotypical assumption of Black expert knowledge based on a presumed shared cultural Blackness. My own experience in being positioned in this role, for example, had run the gamut from assumed expertise on playing basketball to southern African American cuisine, even though I, myself, am from a Caribbean background and have never played basketball or cooked southern African American foods. Black expertise, at that moment, did not involve the basketball court or the kitchen, however, but invoked another arena of Blackness: the mythical streets of urban America as the locale of hip-hop and rap cultures.

I decided that I would answer the question within the scholarly framework of the course by locating the term within the perfor-mative tradition of some genres of rap music, which used swearing and profanity for emphasis. I also noted that while the term could be used pejoratively, it could also be used affirmatively, depending on the context and the speaker and qualifying adjectives such as "bad" with an inverse meaning of "good" or "excellent." The strategy proved effective in bridging the gap between the student's question and the way in which it was posed, the apparent titillation in its utterance, and furthering the knowledge of the student, in particular, and the class as a whole.

And yet, I could not help wondering at the end of the class, as I have on other occasions when positioned as "Black expert," what was it about the course content, the classroom space, and, specifically, myself as a teacher, that occasioned the opening of the space to profane language, or imagery, in a way that clearly, in my mind, went against the grain of the established relations of communication within the classroom? Was the asking of the question rude and indirectly aimed at me? Was he calling me a motherfucker by asking the question, in public, in front of the rest of the class? In asking the question, was he assuming scholarly expertise or knowledge from a presumed experientially based, stereotypical, urban Black life represented through the lens of popular cultural images in film, music video, and television of U.S.-based inner-city, Black life lived away from the classroom? These questions, admittedly, are my own and reveal my anxieties and concerns about race, gender, and class relations in the classroom.

In teaching popular culture, including music, film, and fashion that emerge from Black cultural contexts, in religious studies courses in the Canadian and American academy, I have experienced interactions, such as the one described above, in which popular cultural texts, and expressions associated with them, their producers and consumers, and the very sociocultural and historical contexts in which they have emerged, are considered salacious and rude—in a word, vulgar. Their vulgarity, however, renders them both titillating and potential sites of sustained critical attention in the religious studies classroom. Similarly, my own embodiment and identity as a Black woman is implicated in the dynamic of teaching such material in classroom and larger university and community contexts that are predominantly "white." In this instance, the impact of the larger cultural reading of Black bodies as embodying or signifying rudeness, vulgarity, and transgression is implicated here. Addressing these issues of identity and social relations in the classroom is undoubtedly messy but also promises to open a space for discussion and learning that can be transformative for teachers and students.

This chapter will discuss the "the vulgar body" in the teaching of Black religious studies through examining its significance in both popular cultural texts in the classroom and the relationship of these texts to my own embodiment and identity as a Black woman teacher in the classroom. With reference to specific examples drawn from my teaching experiences, the essay problematizes the intersection of the vulgar body, in particular the vulgar body as Black and female, in the teaching of popular cultural texts suggesting that exploration of the tension between loving and desire for the vulgar Black body is a necessary part of critical pedagogy for teaching Black popular culture in a religious studies context. It is not without trepidation that I share these stories for they are not heroic teaching stories. These are stories in which my vulnerability in the classroom was made very apparent to me and probably, also, to my students, as well. Rather than having an authoritative teacherly presence, these experiences are ones in which the authenticity of my identity in the classroom was challenged in subtle and not so subtle ways. I am sharing these stories out of my love for teaching and working with students in the often challenging but extremely rewarding terrain of teaching Black popular culture in a religious studies context that is complicated by my embodiment as a Black woman.

In exploring this dynamic, this chapter discusses the problem of erasure and hypervisibility that I have experienced as a Black woman university teacher through using two "counterstories" from the classroom. Experiences of student-teacher interaction in the classroom, my office, and other university spaces in which I am either completely erased in my identity as teacher-scholar or my race and gender as a Black woman are made hypervisible in stereotypical ways. In many of these experiences, both my visibility as a radically racialized and sexed and gendered Other and invisibility as a teacher-scholar occur simultaneously. The result is that I am both erased as a teacher-scholar and made hypervisible as a Black woman through stereotypic lenses that make my presence in the university classroom incongruous, if not impossible, in the context of the student-teacher interaction. Theodorea Regina Berry refers to this problematic as one of multidimensionality:

It's always something (what the fuck?). As a woman of color, some facet of my multidimensional being is always a problem, a dilemma for someone. My social status in my personal, community, cultural, and professional spheres is causing fatigue to my fatigue to my psyche. But I can't change who I am. And I won't.

Like Berry, I am not prepared to relinquish my multidimensionality in the context of my work as a teacher and scholar in the academy. My analysis of the phenomenon of visibility/hypervisibility suggests that "returning of the gaze" is a necessary strategy for proclaiming a self-defined and multidimensional subjectivity and humanity in what are often highly depersonalized interactions.

THE VULGAR BODY

Literary studies scholar and cultural critic Carolyn Cooper, in her study Noises in the Blood, described what she called the "vulgar body" in Jamaican popular culture. Cooper focused, specifically, on the genre of popular music known as dancehall, which has become popularized in international contexts beyond Jamaica since the early 1980s. As conceptualized by Cooper, the "vulgar body" includes stylistic practices, representations as well as verbal utterances. "Vulgarity" in this sense is linked to representations of Black bodies that are overtly sexualized, associated with (illicit) pleasure, and resistant to status quo moral regulation. My discussion of the teaching of the vulgar in Black religious studies contexts draws on Cooper's conceptualization and discussion. While Cooper's discussion is concerned with Jamaican dancehall culture, in particular, my discussion extends her ideas to address the teaching of hip-hop culture in music, film, and video in the religious studies classroom. Important in this regard is that, coincidentally, these texts that include Caribbean and African American musical genres such as dancehall, rap, and hip-hop, and their related cultural practices in dance and fashion, are precisely the ones that have had a major impact on contemporary youth cultures and enjoy enormous popularity internationally.

In her discussion of the place of Black women in the academy, Baszile discusses the significance of Saartije Baartman's positioning as the Hottentot Venus. A Khoi Khoi woman who was born in what is now South Africa at the end of the eighteenth century, Baartman was dubbed the Hottentot Venus and exhibited naked to audiences in England and France in the early nineteenth century. The focus for the public was her buttocks and genitalia. These continued to be sites of fascination even after her death as her body was dissected and her pelvis was displayed in various exhibits as late as the latter part of the twentieth century in Paris. Her remains were returned to South Africa for burial only in 2002. Baszile notes that the violence visited on Baartman's body has "forever situated the Black woman's body as abnormal and problematic." She then further questions the ways in which Black women's academic work would be shaped by their embodiment by asking: "So what does it mean to live in this body, to be in the world and to conceive of the world through this body, to teach and write through this body, which without question situates Black women in academia as counterhegemonic texts?" Thus, Baszile suggests that Black women's experiences are fundamentally ones shaped by spaces in between categories:

As Black women, we live at the nexus of race and gender hierarchies; we be in the spaces in between not quite here and not quite there. We are/we be in between Black and White, male and female, and even race and gender as categories that contradict in the defining of Black women's identities.

For Baszile, this "ontoepistemological in-between" status allows Black women a perspective that challenges normative associations or "reifications of Blackness around maleness," gender around whiteness, and "intellectualism around white maleness." She notes that Black women in the academy who claim this in-between space from which they theorize and practice often do so in ways that run counter to the academic establishment, and the definition of knowledge is framed in racist and patriarchal ways. One of the ways in which Black women have engaged this ontoepistemological in-between perspective is through the use of "The Word." "The Word" here is understood as "a form of praxis in which pedagogy, scholarship, and struggle are intimately intertwined; a way of teaching and doing scholarship that embraces duality, subjectivity, and narrative in our attempts to authorize our voices." "Counterstories" are one of the practices in which "The Word" is employed. "Counterstories," as a form of "oppositional scholarship," are characterized by their complexity and embrace of multiple dimensions of Black women's experiences encompassing race, gender, class, and sexuality as social relations of power. In the following, I offer two examples of counterstories from the classroom in an effort to explore the dynamic of visibility and invisibility as a Black woman teacher in a religious studies classroom.

Counterstory 1: Making Breakfast

The first example concerns my interaction with a white male student early in my teaching career. This student insisted on eating, very conspicuously, in class during my first semester of teaching. Many students consume snacks and drink coffee during morning classes; however, the nature of this consumption—the quantity, loudness, along with the student's consistently late arrival for each class—marked his practice as qualitatively different. Always arriving five to ten minutes late for each class of the biweekly introductory course, this student habitually positioned himself near the front of the class and proceeded to eat. Loudly. At first it was crisp cookies removed one by one from their rustling, plastic wrapping as I lectured. At other times he ate crunchy apples throughout the lecture. Each class, I hoped that his seemingly endless hunger would be satiated and that the snacking would be, if not brief, at least soft-sounding. Maybe he could eat something such as yogurt, through which teeth would easily slide. But this was not to be. The snacks grew larger and larger and seemingly crispier and crunchier with each class. Finally, by the fourth week of the twelve-week term, he arrived with a huge rucksack on his back and, as usual, was ten minutes late for the class. He took his, by now, customary seat near the front of the class and proceeded to methodically remove a family-sized box of cereal, a quart of milk, a ceramic bowl, and a stainless steel spoon, clanking the latter, as he did so, against the side of the bowl.

I could no longer employ the strategy of ignoring this latest and more intense act of what I had considered, by now, disrespect or disregard for my teaching and for the learning process of the other students in the class. I stopped the lecture and directly addressed him, saying, "Come on, man, you can't do that." His response, pausing as he was about to pour his cereal, was "Do what?" He was disavowing that what was taking place was, in fact, taking place. I then continued, "Preparing breakfast and eating it while I teach. I'd like you to stop." I continued by noting that his breakfast preparation and eating was seriously disrupting my teaching. He stared back at me for a few moments and then nodded his head as he put away his cereal, milk, ceramic bowl, and stainless steel spoon. I then continued with my lecture. After the class, another white male student told me that he was glad that I had spoken up since, although he had noticed this student's disruptive behavior centered around eating throughout the previous three weeks of class, he had not known what to do about it.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Being Black Teaching Black by Nancy Lynne Westfield. Copyright © 2008 Abingdon Press. Excerpted by permission of Abingdon Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments,
Introduction Nancy Lynne Westfield,
VIEWS,
1. VISIBLE/INVISIBLE: Teaching Popular Culture and the Vulgar Body in Black Religious Studies Carol B. Duncan,
2. USING NOVELS OF RESISTANCE TO TEACH INTERCULTURALEMPATHY AND CULTURAL ANALYSIS Arthur L. Pressley,
3. E-RACING WHILE BLACK Stephen G. Ray Jr.,
4. CALLED OUT MY NAME, OR HAD I KNOWN YOU WERE SOMEBODY: The Pain of Fending Off Stereotypes Nancy Lynne Westfield .,
5. READING THE SIGNS: The Body as Non-Written Text Anthony B. Pinn,
6. EMANCIPATORY HISTORIOGRAPHY AS PEDAGOGICAL PRAXIS: The Blessing and the Curse of Theological Education for the Black Self and Subject Juan M. Floyd-Thomas and Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas,
7. BLACK RHYTHMS AND CONSCIOUSNESS: Authentic Being and Pedagogy Lincoln E. Galloway,
8. FROM EMBODIED THEODICY TO EMBODIED THEOS Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas,
9. TEACHING BLACK: God-Talk with Black Thinkers Arthur L. Pressley and Nany Lynne Westfield,
RESPONSES,
10. TEACHING BLACK, TALKING BACK Carolyn M. Jones,
11. TOGETHER IN SOLIDARITY: An Asian American Feminist's Response Boyung Lee,
12. INFLUENCES OF "BEING BLACK, TEACHING BLACK" ON THEOLOGICAL EDUCATION Charles R. Foster,
NOTES,
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY,
CONTRIBUTORS,