“What are you pretending not to know?”: Un/doing internalized carcerality through pedagogies of the flesh

Abstract

Carcerality is more than a physical occurrence, but a lasting psychological, spiritual, and emotional state of being that gets in the body and directs how one may move in and through the world. As a contour of whiteness, carcerality normalizes ways of being that are consistent with rationality and reason privileging mind over body; intellectual over experiential ways of knowing; and mental abstractions over passions, bodily sensations, and tactile understandings. Employing poetics, reflexivity, and Black letters, Black feminist narrative methods steer these analyses to explore how whiteness, as carcerality, is germane to Black being in a western, United States context. To pursue this inquiry, I juxtapose storytelling analysis with a Black feminist literary analysis of Toni Cade Bambara’s "The Education of the Storyteller,” asking, how might educators name, critique, and pedagogically extract whiteness (carcerality) and its pervasive curriculum from the bodies of Black subjects by keying into histories of Blackness, rationality, and the body? Ultimately, I am interested in what the historical and racialized politics of the body demand with regard to pedagogy. Three themes emerged as considerations for a pedagogy of the flesh: epistemic confrontation, corporeal visibility, and legitimizing affect. Findings advance scholarship on how educators might engage Black students in ways that honour the full Black body-mind as a living, moving entity deserving of humanity, in a western, United States context that expects Black stillness.

Keywords:

• Blackness
• embodiment
• carcerality
• pedagogy
• whiteness
• narrative methods

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Pedagogy of the Oppressed is a 1970 text written by Paulo Freire.

2 I follow Matias and Mackey (2016) in my capitalization of Black and White, and lowercase for whiteness. Black and White represent racialized groups, whereas “whiteness is a state of being that goes beyond individual’s identity” (p. xvii). Where white is lowercase, it is intended to reflect the larger system of whiteness.

3 In this article, I understand carcerality as a technology of white supremacy and use it interchangeably with rationality and whiteness.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Wilson Kwamogi Okello

Dr. Wilson K. Okello (he/him) is an interdisciplinary scholar who draws on theories of Blackness and Black feminist theories to think about knowledge production and student/early adult development, particularly, the relationship between history, the body, and epistemology in and beyond educational spaces. He is also concerned with how theories of Blackness and Black feminist theories might reconfigure understandings of racialized stress and trauma, qualitative inquiry, critical masculinities, and curriculum and pedagogy.