ABSTRACT
Featuring the foreshadowed forewarnings of prophetic writers from the French Revolution forward, this chapter promotes pedagogical practices which steward students through a learning experience demonstrating comparable relatabilities between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors and the wisdom words and writings of twentieth- and twenty-first-century civil rights activists. Spring-boarding from bell hook’s premise in Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom that college classrooms should be an ‘exciting place, never boring’, this chapter offers a glimpse into a survey course titled ‘Back to the Future’ wherein students discover commonly shared social reform visions bridging transatlantic and literary time. Although the full course compares several British revolutionary thinkers from Wollstonecraft to Woolf with various African American movement makers, this chapter offers illuminating intertextual glimpses into related social reform visions between William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Martin Luther King, Jr., and John Lewis. Students emerge from this course ‘sadder and wiser’ (as was the Wedding-Guest in Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’) about of the challenges impacting the world they presently inhabit and are eager to engage in a wide-range of intersectional social reforms much in need of their activisms across the globe.
