Class Day(s):
M
Class Time: 1:00 pm
Course Description
One of the most pressing issues in Rhetoric, Composition, and Writing Studies is the current reckoning with the discipline’s complicity (among many others) in sustaining white supremacy and anti-Blackness. In English 7040, we will join in that reckoning by reading foundational scholarship in critical race theory alongside contemporary scholarship devoted to antiracist praxis, dismantling white supremacy, and imagining otherwise worlds and liberatory futures (Houdeck and Ore). Students interested in cultural rhetorics, critical race theory, antiracism, social justice, racial justice, decolonization, storying, counterstory, activism, interdisciplinarity, and/or non-Western approaches can expect to learn a great deal in this course.
“A place to breathe—and breathe together”: This course centers non-Western ways of being, knowing, and living as approaches to the many disciplines within English Studies, with a focus on Rhetoric, Composition, and Writing Studies. These ways include story (King; Powell; Riley-Mukavetz; Villanueva; Wilson), counterstory (Martinez), antenarrative (Jones), and other methodologies for cultural preservation, survivance (survival + resistance), and liberation. Because wrestling with white supremacy, anti-Blackness, and decolonization is difficult emotional work, we will also examine how emotions such as fear and guilt uphold these sociocultural constructs and how other emotions such as love and anger can be used to dismantle them (Ahmed; Bonilla-Silva; Corrigan; DiAngelo). We will consider not only what might be added to a discipline’s canon but also what might be cut (Law and Corrigan). Ultimately, we will ask alongside communication scholars Matthew Houdek and Ersula J. Ore: “What might it mean to reclaim the air from the suffocating forces of whiteness? What might it mean to embrace conspiratorial acts against a world that denies far too many the right and capacity to breathe, and what is the role of white folks therein? What might it mean to unmake the world in the Aftertimes and inaugurate an Age of Breath suited to Black and Indigenous survival and liberation?” (2021, 85). Just as Houdek and Ore imagine that an academic journal “could engage these and many other world-making/-breaking questions, serving as a space to imagine the world anew,” so too will we strive to make this course “a place to breathe—and breathe together” (85).
Requirements
Each week I’ll ask you to bring quotations and questions from the readings to class so that your interests guide our discussions. I’ll also ask you to develop a final project in consultation with me, which you’ll define at the midterm. You can situate your final project in your home discipline. Your creativity in the final project is not only welcome but celebrated because creativity is central to the project of imagining otherwise worlds and liberatory futures in which we can breathe together.
For the final project, you can choose to write a traditional seminar paper, to story your experiences and cultural traditions, to counterstory against mainstream tropes and stereotypes, to compose in other genres, to mix modalities, to create a digital project, to create a public-facing project, or to do something else that grows you as a scholar and a human.
If you have any questions or want to talk about the course, please contact me at lcw0045@auburn.edu.
Readings
Most of the course readings will be available online. We will likely read all of Aja Y. Martinez’s Counterstory: The Rhetoric and Writing of Critical Race Theory (NCTE: 2020), but my goal is to keep costs low by assigning articles and book excerpts rather than whole books.