Finding My Place in/Against a Peculiar Institution

• In Event: With, in, and Beyond: Curriculum Studies of Southern Place Outside the Boundaries of Region

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine the lingering effects of the cultural construction of mammy on black women’s positioning in predominantly white institutions in the South. The author wrestles with the constant tentativeness of identity within/against the academy and within/against the context of the South.

The paper is grounded in theory by hooks (1981), Collins (2000), and Kupenda (2012), black women scholars who problematize and contemporize cultural representations of mammy. hooks (1981) maintains that mammy epitomized the “sexist-racist vision of ideal black womanhood” and was a product of the “servant-served relationship” in the South (p. 84). Collins (2000) explains the lingering legacy of the ghost of mammy, maintaining that still today “mammy is the public face that Whites expect Black women to assume for them” (p. 73). Kupenda (2012) situates her discussion in the context of academia, where she says black women academics are required to “present a comforting appearance for whites who miss the blacks of the ole South, those whites who dreamily sing, ‘I wish I were in Dixie’” (p. 23).

The autobiographical inquiry method of currere (Pinar, 2004) is used to analyze the author’s past and present lived experiences as data sources in teaching, research, and service in the Southern academy. In addition, the author draws on more traditional forms of data to analyze anonymous student evaluations and reflective journal entries documenting work experiences with white women students and colleagues. Conceptualized as “a complicated conversation with oneself (as a ‘private’ intellectual)” and an “ongoing project of self-understanding in which one becomes mobilized for engaged pedagogical action” (Pinar, 2004, p. 37), currere is the process utilized to examine past and present as well as conceptualize possible futures for theorizing identities of black women scholars in institutions in the South.

Analysis of the author’s lived experiences in the Southern academy reveals that they are reflective of the old South’s race and gender politics. Themes discussed include 1) policing of the black woman’s body, 2) holding on to the myth of mammy, and 3) servicing the institution in the field.

The paper’s findings are significant because they give “collective witness” (Boler, 1999, p. 178) to what many other black women scholars experience in the academy and because they complicate our understandings of a curriculum of Southern place (Pinar & Kincheloe, 1991).

References

Boler, M. (1999). Feeling power: Emotions and education. New York: Routledge.

Collins, P.H. (2000). Black feminist thought. New York: Routledge.

hooks, b. (1981). Ain’t I a woman: Black women and feminism. Boston: South End Press.

Kupenda, A.M. (2012). Facing down the spooks. In In G. Muhs, Y. Niemann, C. Gonzalez, and A.

Harris (Eds.) Presumed incompetent: The intersections of race and class for women in academia (pp. 20-28)). Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado.

Pinar, W.F. (2004). What is curriculum theory? Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Pinar, W. F. & Kincheloe, J. (Eds.) (1991). The significance of place: Curriculum as social psychoanalysis. Buffalo, N.Y.: State University of New York Press.

Author

• Nichole A. Guillory, Kennesaw State University