ABSTRACT
Identity politics, hooks argues, “… emerges out of the struggles of oppressed or exploited groups to have a standpoint on which to critique dominant structures, a position that gives purpose and meaning to struggle” (p. 88). In her American university context, “… [c]ritical pedagogies of liberation respond to these concerns and necessarily embrace experience, confessions and testimony as relevant ways of knowing, as important, vital dimensions of any learning process” (p. 89). Responding to Diana Fuss’s critique of essentializing experience, especially in the classroom as a potentially silencing agency, hooks posits that “the authority of experience” is a privileged standpoint already utilized, perhaps unknowingly, by traditionally dominant groups, only now reenacted by marginalized students. In her feminist theory classes, hooks observes students expressing rage against work that is not supported by concrete experience: “Frustration is directed against the inability of methodology, analysis, and abstract writing … to make the work connect to [students’] eff orts to live more fully, to transform society, to live a politics of feminism” (p. 88). As a response, she “circumvent[s] [the] possible misuse of power [the authority of experience] by bringing to the classroom pedagogical strategies that affi rm their presence, their right to speak, in multiple ways on diverse topics”; she adds, experiential knowledge will “enhance” learning experience (p. 84). As a black woman professor, bell hooks is not unaware of her own body/
mind split, and her own negotiation has led to what is now familiarly known as an “engaged pedagogy” through self-actualization. If hooks’s students in her feminist theory class desperately needed to “live” a politics of feminism, might faculty of color develop, grow, or even prosper with a politics unique to their location, as an identity construct to be articulated by the faculty her/himself? If ostensibly, how might a professor’s experiential knowledge enhance her or his teaching experience, especially, at the specifi c location/s? Deconstructing her pedagogy scenario further, I have to ask, based on my own search for “purpose and meaning” for almost two decades of teaching in American higher education, might “we,” as non-native-born faculty of color, even have a politic of roles as location? Th is chapter will address a few of these questions central to the less-researched professor’s identity as a construct shaped by the intertwined and interlocking entities of gender, ethnicity, and class.
