Tag: joy

Syllabus for Subversive Joy

My second semester as a Part-Time faculty person at The New School in the First Year Writing Program has officially started! I was tweeting about this course – the second I’ve designed — and there was a request to share it, so I thought I’d put it here and share with other scholars curious about pleasure politics and the overlaps/layers with regards to intersectional feminism. I can also post the Writing Toward Inclusion syllabus if that’s something of interest to y’all; let me know in the comments.

The essays/articles and scholarship that isn’t hyperlinked I accessed through the New York Public Library; I’m sure you can find copies through your local superheroes at your academic or public library institution as well. In future classes, I look forward to teaching adrienne maree brown’s Pleasure Activism which I just pre-ordered, and you should too!

I’ve adapted and erased some stuff below in order to streamline access to the best parts. Enjoy!

Course Description:

Subversive Joy: Writing the Senses As Resistance –In this first-year research seminar, we will examine literary works, theories and perspectives on the ways traditionally marginalized and/or oppressed communities have used humor, joy, spirituality and creativity to assert their humanity beyond constructs that only see some bodies as sites of trauma or for the uses of exploitation. After all, who doesn’t love an underdog, someone with so much faith and hope that they will make a way from no way? What does dedication to creating beauty and a legacy of art in a community that is rarely viewed in its full complexity truly mean, particularly for literature? Where and when has this resistance art flourished? Who has sought to de-legitimize it and have those efforts been successful? Is this simply an idealistic concept or is there scientific evidence that bears it out as necessary for survival? What is the impact on canon and individual work when trauma, pain and struggle are metabolized on the page into healing, connection and reconciliation? Readings may include Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, David Mura, Tommy Pico, Ross Gay, adrienne maree brown, Lucille Clifton, Gloria Anzaldua, bell hooks, Brittney Cooper and others.

 

Course Learning Objectives & Outcomes: Students who successfully complete this course will be able to conduct basic research and analyze text in order to write more comprehensive, relevant essays with inclusive audiences in mind. By the successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

 

  • Read texts critically for intersectional and inclusionary language and context
  • Contextualize feminist contemporary writing
  • Draft Annotated Bibliographies
  • Write effective and comprehensive narrative responses, analyses and critiques of work from a range of perspectives — especially intersectional feminist praxis –from an informed, historical perspective
  • Develop processes and strategies for identifying diverse and expansive primary and secondary sources of groundbreaking, visionary scholarship.

 

Required Texts

Most of the reading assignments are available online for free and will be posted to Canvas with the exception of

Rules for Writers by Diana Hacker and Nancy Sommers

Sister Outsider: Essays & Speeches, Audre Lorde

WEEK 1 Jan. 22

Jan. 24

  

Introduction & Overview of the Course

 

 January 22: Introduction, Walk-Through of Syllabus, Course Policies & Procedures.

The Global Center for Advanced Studies: “The Subversive Act of Joy”

Reading Assignment for Next Class: David Mura, “On Race and Craft: Tradition and the Individual Talent Revisited” from David Mura’s book, A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity and Narrative Craft in Writing

January 24: Workshop with David Mura, author of A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity and Narrative Craft in Writing
WEEK 2 Jan. 29

Jan. 31

 Research Methods for Writing Reading for January 29th: Rules for Writers, Chapter 50: Thinking like a researcher; gathering sources

Reading for January 31st: Sister Outsider, Audre Lorde: “Poetry is Not A Luxury”

 
WEEK 3 Feb. 5th

Feb. 7th

 On Feelings, Power & Resistance Reading for February 5th: Sister Outsider, Audre Lorde: “Uses of the Erotic.”

Reading for February 7th: Rules for Writers, Chapter 51, Managing Information, Taking Notes Responsibly

 
WEEK 4 Feb. 12th

Feb. 14th

 

 Preparing for Essay I

 

 Introduction to Workshopping & Preparation for Essay I due February 28th

Reading for February 12th: Sister Outsider, Audre Lorde: “An Interview: Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich.”

Reading for February 14th: “The History of Emotions: An Interview with William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein, and Peter Stearns,” from History and Theory 49 (May 2010), 237-265

 
WEEK 5 Feb. 19th

Feb. 21

 Drafting, Researching and Workshopping Reading for February 19th class: “The Meaning of Pleasure & The Pleasure of Meaning: Towards A Definition of Pleasure in ‘Reception Analysis,”” by Elisabeth Klaus & Barbara O’Connor 

 
WEEK 6 Feb. 26th

Feb. 28th

 

 Writers on Joy and Happiness Reading for February 26th: Mary Pipher, January 2018, New York Times Op-Ed: The Joy of Being A Woman in Her 70s

Reading for February 28th : Zadie Smith on Joy

Essay I is DUE
WEEK 7 Mar. 5th

Mar. 7th

 Joy & Struggle Outside of the U.S. Reading for March 5th: “The Joy of the Militancy: Happiness and the Pursuit of Revolutionary Struggle” by Yoana Fernanda Nieto-Valdivieso

Reading for March 7th: “‘I love myself when I am dancing and carrying on’: refiguring the agency of black women’s creative expression in Jamaican Dancehall culture,” by Bibi Bakare-Yusuf

 

 
WEEK 8  

Mar. 12th

Mar. 14th

 

 Black Feminist Visions of a Politics of Pleasure  

Reading for March 12th: “Why We Get Off: Moving Towards a Black Feminist Politics of Pleasure,” by Joan Morgan, Winter 2015

Reading for March 14th: The Joys of Being A Black Woman, Crunk Feminist Collective 2011

Optional Revision of Essay I due (Part of In-Class/Online percentage)

NO CLASSES NEXT WEEK – HAVE A GREAT SPRING BREAK!

WEEK 9  

Mar. 26

Mar. 28

 Rest & Resistance Reading for March 26th: “Resting in Gardens, Battling in Deserts: Black Women’s Activism” by Joy James, The Black Scholar, 1999

Reading for March 28th: Resistance as Happiness: David Blumenthal, CrossCurrents, March 2014

 
 

WEEK 10

  

 

Apr. 2nd

Apr. 4th

 

 Drafting Essay 2 No Reading for April 2nd.

In-Class Writing: Draft Annotated Bibliography

Draft Thesis Statements and Outlines for Essay 2

Reading for April 4th: “Happiness (or not) after rape: hysterics and harpies in the media versus killjoys in black women’s fiction” by Zoë Brigley Thompson

 
WEEK 11  

Apr. 9th

Apr. 11th

 

 Workshopping Essay 2 Drafts  

Reading for April 11th: Amber Rose & Black Women’s Sexuality, Bitch Magazine

 
WEEK 12  

Apr. 16th

Apr. 18th

 

 Revolutionary Visions of Joy Reading for April 16th: “‘Learning to be Zen’: women travelers and the imperative to Happy” by Emily Falconer, Journal of Gender Studies, 2017

Reading for April 18th: Alice Walker, “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: The Creativity of Black Women in the South. (1974)” from In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens

 

 
WEEK 13  

Apr.23rd

Apr. 25th

 

 Pleasure & Bliss in Writing & Activism Reading for April 23rd: Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of The Text

Reading for April 25th: “Five Tangible Tools of the Pleasure Activist” by adrienne maree brown  

 
WEEK 14  

 

Apr. 30th

May 2nd

 

 

 Creative Resistance & Revision Draft Thesis Statements, Outlines & Workshopping

Reading for April 30th: “Tryin’ to Scrub that ‘Death Pussy’ Clean Again: The Pleasures of Domesticating HIV/AIDS in Pearl Cleage’s Fiction” by Timothy S. Lyle, African American Review, Summer 2017

Reading for May 2nd: Ross Gay on the connections between gardening and poetry, Wild Love.

 
WEEK 15  

May 7th

May 9th

 

   No Reading for May 7th, Final Workshop, Course Evaluations

 May 9th: ESSAY 3 DUE, Final Class

 

 

 

 

A Letter to my Nieces & Nephews on Ella Baker’s Birthday

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Photo Credit:  NAACP Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

My loves,

One of the greatest Black women poets of our time, Lucille Clifton, is not frequently taught in schools — or at least not taught enough. Her poem, song at midnight, contains a line you may have seen on the internet, in part. We like to circulate it among ourselves as a clarion call, a prayer, a balm & mantra, especially the last lines, but here is the second part of it, from The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010, edited by Kevin Young and Michael S. Glaser:

born into babylon

both nonwhite and woman

what did i see to be except myself?

i made it up

here on this bridge between

starshine and clay,

my one hand holding tight

my other hand; come celebrate

with me that everyday

something has tried to kill me

and has failed.

The epigraph to this poem is from a Sonia Sanchez poem: “…do not send me out among strangers.”

Black women’s lives, for so long, were shaped around survival, and it had always been so, it’s true. In The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales told by Virginia Hamilton, in the introduction, though, I was reminded of something else.

“It is amazing,” she writes, “that the former Africans could ever smile and laugh, let alone make up riddles and songs and jokes and tell tales. As slaves, they were forced to live without citizenship, without rights, as property – like horses and cows – belonging to someone else. But no amount of hard labor and suffering could suppress their powers of imagination.”

 

Continue reading “A Letter to my Nieces & Nephews on Ella Baker’s Birthday” →

Writing Yourself Well

It makes sense to me that writers don’t agree on whether writing is therapeutic.

For me, it always has been, but for some, writing is just hard and grueling. Writing  has always been a site of pleasure even when I was writing about pain. It has offered me sanctuary and escape, transformation and beauty, solace, comfort and more.

As I’ve gotten older and grown in confidence and experience, writing has started to also offer me joy.

For Black women, especially, who are expected to do so much emotional labor and work in different contexts in this country, joy is a revolution. It is an act of resistance to decide to be well, and to choose joy.

This was hard to do this week, especially. I argued with myself about it, somewhat publicly on Twitter, briefly. I wrestled, privately, with whether I should be sharing. I have been writing, in no particular order, about the historical trauma and chronic stresses that Black women hold in our bodies due to racism; the long and ignored history of Black women’s political participation in this country since before the Nineteenth Amendment; fiction and poetry at the intersection of police violence, mental health, and Black Christian resistance to the full range and humanity of queer identities that literally kill Black women with silence — directly or indirectly.

When I finally stopped; when I realized I was triggered and needed to step away, there was more to be done but there was also a historic spectacle centered on the devaluation of women and patriarchal resentment — where a respectable woman was speaking bravely and an angry, livid, entitled white man was lashing out angrily and I just could not be a witness. I could not do the work of being a witness because I was tired.

I say this not because I want anyone to play any tiny violins for me — my life is wonderful and full and I have privileges that I have been both blessed with and I have worked my ass off for. I say this because I wish when I was younger I would have read, seen and heard more Black women say and model for me what to do when you are depleted.

We have seen with the very public suicides of celebrities what happens when people suffer privately with their demons; but there’s another choice to overwhelm. There’s a proactive answer to overwhelm, to fatigue, to the stress of burnout: Go some place quiet. Fill yourself up. Do what you want to do, for as long as you can, for as long as you can afford to. Do not die, literally or figuratively, at the mercy of what you think other people expect you to perform of your pain.

I’m thankful to have friends and loved ones to affirm me and to affirm this. They save my life. Every day. Every hour. Every moment — often without realizing it. They are constant reminders that I don’t have to expose myself constantly to things that are triggering and nor do you.

That is a long, precious set up for this essay about pigeons, which I know will seem so random and is a bit different for me. I wanted to laugh and humor myself after exposure to hard things and a ton of hard work, so there you have it.

Yes, hard things are happening, and there is work to be done. But I can still claim joy in some of these moments to write myself well. And you can, too.