“The Oppressed Never Revere Their Oppressors”: Womanist Diasporic Pedagogy in the Archives of Claudia Jones

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Sunday 9:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Curriculum, Identity, and Resistance: Navigating Gender in Archives and Classrooms

Abstract

My study positions Claudia Jones as a diasporic womanist pedagogue whose journalism, community organizing, and poetry functioned as alternative curricula during Cold War censorship. Focusing on an unlabeled archive source, a Monroe Defense Committee memo for Mae Mallory, I trace Jones’s transnational networks of Black women’s labor and solidarity. Situated through Black feminist thought, archival studies, and Angela Davis as a student of Jones, I argue that Jones’s print and cultural work enacted radical othermothering as collective resistance. Excavating her archive as a living syllabus, this paper offers a model for transforming curriculum studies and for otherworld building future pedagogies rooted in anticolonial solidarity and intersectional justice. It invites curriculum scholars to reimagine pedagogy as radical, communal, and archival practice.

Author

• Cortnie Belser, Graduate Center - CUNY