Learning to (Re)member the Things We’ve Learned to Forget: Endarkened Feminisms, Spirituality, and the Sacred Nature of Research and Teaching

by Cynthia B. Dillard

Feminist research has both held and contested experience as a category of epistemological importance, often as a secular notion. However, spirituality and sacred knowing are also fundamental to a Black/endarkened feminist epistemology in teaching and research, given the historical and cultural experiences of African ascendant women worldwide. How can (re)membering bear witness to our individual and collective spiritual consciousness and generate new questions that inform feminist theory and practice? Learning to (Re)member the Things We’ve Learned to Forget explores that question. Theorizing through sites and journeys across the globe and particularly in Ghana, West Africa, this book explores how spirituality, location, experience, and cultural memory engage and create an endarkened feminist subjectivity that can (re)member, opening possibilities for research and teaching that honors the wisdom, history, and cultural productions of African diasporic women particularly and persons of African heritage generally.

Genres: Nonfiction, School

120 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2012

Reviews

[Jenell · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Everyone theorizes. It’s how human beings makes sense of our lives and work. Some of us just theorize as our vocation. But the seduction of theory also refers to the ways that research texts considered scholarly (read ‘good,’ legitimate, or worthy) are also held in high esteem or privileged by predominately patriarchal, racist, xenophobic, often classist and homophobic hegemony.”

[Polly Callahan]

recommended by author of Troublemakers