Blackness and Sensuality in/as Educational Praxis

• In Event: Sensuous Curriculum: Of Politics and the Senses in Education

Abstract

“To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the making of bread” (Baldwin, 1962, p. 43)

“I am a stranger/learning to worship the strangers/around me/whoever you are/whoever I may become” (Jordan, 2005, p. 3)

According to writer James Baldwin (1962), the practice and act of sensuality—that is, to be truly sensual—is a commitment to being present in every aspect of life. It requires that we “respect” life just as much as we “rejoice” in it, that we are purposeful and caring, and that we love with presence. To be sensual, I believe, is to learn to “worship the strangers around” us, as poet June Jordan explains, through the effort of loving and with an awareness of who we are in relation to who others are in the world. We become more fully human, caring beings. We become whole. We become sensual.
What, then, does it mean to become sensual, especially in the presence of strangers? What are some of the ways Black people in the United States practice sensuality—what does it mean, how does it look, and what does it embody? Additionally, how can Black people “rejoice in the force of life, of life itself” inside educational spaces that regularly refuse to affirm their lives, literacies, and languages? In other words, what is the promise and potential of sensuality in/as educational praxis for Black people?
In this paper, I consider meanings of sensuality in/as educational praxis by paying attention to what sensuality is, could be/become, and could look like. I draw on the scholarship of William E.B. DuBois, James Baldwin, June Jordan, bell hooks, and Audre Lorde to question what it means to account for the sensual in theory and praxis. Their respective bodies of scholarship support a disruption of the standards of normalization (e.g., monolingualism, monoculturalism) that disadvantage Blackness, Black people, and Black cultural and intellectual ways of being, and that advantage discourses of whiteness. It is this disruption that I focus on in this chapter. I do so as a way of insisting on the important role sensuality plays in revolutionizing how Black people “act on what they know” (Baldwin, p. 9) as they continue to work for educational justice, equity, and freedom.
References
Baldwin, J. (1962). The fire next time. New York: Vintage International.
Jordan, J. (2005). These poems. In J. H. Levi & S. Miles (Eds.), Directed by desire: The
collected poems of June Jordan (p. 3). Port Townsend, WA: Cooper Canyon Press.

Authors

• Valerie Kinloch, University of Pittsburgh

• Carlotta Penn, The Ohio State University - Columbus