Reflections on Remixing New Romanticisms: A Plenary Workshop on Anti-Racist Teaching

ABSTRACT

This essay is a co-written reflection by two educators on a plenary workshop we led together called “Remixing New Romanticisms: A Workshop on Anti-racist Teaching” during the 2022 NASSR/BARS Conference. We presented on the teaching resource we developed as inaugural fellows of the 2021–2022 Keats-Shelley Association of America/Romantic Circles Anti-Racist Pedagogy Colloquium. First, we explain how we adapted Nicole N. Aljoe, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Benjamin J. Doyle, and Elizabeth Hopwood's theory of “remixing” to design constellations that re-envision Romantic concepts such as Revolution and Rebellion, Nature and Ecology, and Imagination through the curation of innovative archival materials. We then discuss a specific example of remixing that we covered in depth, our Q and A session with workshop participants, and an anti-racist teaching resource they created. In addition, we explore other anti-racist pedagogies mentioned during the workshop, among them teaching with tension, valuing student knowledge, and critical fabulation. We frame these concerns within a broader consideration of the need to reconstruct the traditional forms of knowledge that shape our disciplines so that they are more inclusive and accessible for everyone, especially students.

Notes

1 We want to recognize Erin Saladin’s important contributions to our teaching resource, conference workshop, and this article as a group member.

2 We had hoped to also take up the term Subject/Subjection, but were unable to do so. Throughout the first section of this essay, I use the term Romantic to refer to the historical period and romanticism to refer to aesthetic, philosophical, and political afterlives that exceed periodization.

3 For a far more detailed account than we can give of what it looks like to challenge the hegemony of such narratives and subjects in the context of slave narratives, see Salih.

4 By translatability, here we are thinking specifically of Walter Benjamin’s argument in favor of a certain opaqueness or even un-interpretability that emerges from the understanding that every language is the result of an amalgamation of “ways of meaning” rather than “meaning” as such. For an extensive account of “terms of order” as conceptual reinforcements of a Western conflation of authority and power, see Cedric Robinson Terms of Order.

5 The materials generated during the first and second fellowship years are forthcoming on the K-SAA website here: https://www.k-saa.org/projects.

6 In their introduction to their edited volume, Bolton et al. propose the questions: “How does tension shape our teaching? And how do we as educators take this dynamic and turn it into a productive force? To teach with tension is to move forward with students into discomfort, to arm them with strategies for understanding the world and the worlds of others” (12).

7 We want to acknowledge Smith’s major impact on our thinking for this project. She guest lectured us on anti-racist pedagogy in July 2021, collaboratively coined the term “teaching with tension,” and co-edited the special issue on Wheatley for Early American Literature cited in this section.

8 See Jeffers’s The Age of Phillis and Clarke’s Phillis: A Poetry Collection.

9 Gracia is well-known for her anti-racist advocacy and her account of the prejudice she experienced as a female scholar of color at the International Congress on Medieval Studies (ICMS). See Gracia “Lost in Our Field” and “Welcome to a New Reality!”

10 We would like to credit Aljoe for devising the practice of “remixing,” which we adapted to create our constellations on Revolution and Rebellion, Nature and Ecology, and Imagination. Aljoe, Bee, and Lindamood also co-wrote the article that we used as a model for collaboratively writing each of our sections of this essay in conversation with each other about the 2022 NASSR/BARS conference workshop.