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40 - Spectatorship, Black Bodies, and Urban Education

Womanist Excavations of Binding Inner Visions

from Part III - Emerging Ethical Pathways and Frameworks

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 March 2024

Sheron Fraser-Burgess
Affiliation:
Ball State University, Indiana
Jessica Heybach
Affiliation:
Florida International University
Dini Metro-Roland
Affiliation:
Western Michigan University
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Summary

African American teachers are in high demand in urban schools. Presupposing these spaces as operating within a matrix of domination for African Americans in the United States, in this chapter, two African American scholars of differing genders model womanist thinking as politic educational ethics and praxis. hooks, Fanon, and Lorde elucidate the Black subject’s ontological condition as a problem of spectatorship. Womanist theory responds to sociopolitical forces devaluing the self as minoritized subject. Through critical self-reflexivity that acknowledges the debilitating white normative gaze and the inner turmoil of its subjugation, womanist thinking offers a normative syntax of freedom. A womanist praxis of radical subjectivity and a pedagogy of love excavates one’s inner visions for oneself and for one’s students that engenders self-authorship.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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