Resignifying Self: On the Mattering of Black and Blue Lives in the Work of Maxine Greene

• In Event: 47.015 - Biographical and Documentary Research SIG Business Meeting: Imagining an Activist Future for a Blue Guitar

Abstract

How do you know that some things have changed? How do you know that you have changed? Just re-read a book at age 48 that you first read when you were 20 something and ponder it’s meaning in and for your life then and now. Or revisit an essay or a journal ___ wrote almost 20 years ago and try to consider what it means now, at an utterly different but profoundly connected moment in time. This is the challenge I engage here. I revisit “Signifying Self: Re-presentations of the Double-consciousness in the Work of Maxine Greene,” an essay ____ wrote nearly 20 years ago for William F. Pinar’s The Passionate Mind of Maxine Greene. In it ___ tried to capture how the gift of second sight (Dubois, 1903) is indicative of the inter-subjectivity that Greene (1988) says is critical to our quest for true freedom. As I re-read it, I am compelled to ponder its meaning in this current moment of cascading crises, where Black lives and Blues lives are in clear and present danger and where grief and fear and flickers of hope intermingle and cling to the air. What is freedom now? Who can access it and who cannot? How do we share in both the pleasure and the responsibility for it? In this essay, I revisit these questions, in the heaviness of the current moment, where the mattering of certain lives are in question, and as a way to speak to the continued significance of the wisdom of Maxine Greene.

Author

• Denise M. Taliaferro Baszile, Miami University