This book explores the curriculum theorizing of Black women, as well as their historical and contemporary contributions to the always-evolving complicated conversation that is Curriculum Studies. It serves as an opportunity to begin a dialogue of revision and reconciliation and offers a vision for the transformation of academia’s relationship with black women as students, teachers, and theorizers.
Taking the perennial silencing of Black women’s voices in academia as its impetus, the book explains how even fields like Curriculum Studies – where scholars have worked to challenge hegemony, injustice, and silence within the larger discipline of education – have struggled to identify an intellectual tradition marked by the Black, female subjectivity. This epistemic amnesia is an ongoing reminder of the strength of what bell hooks calls "imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy", and the ways in which even the most critical spaces fail to recognize the contributions and even the very existence of Black women. Seeking to redress this balance, this book engages the curricular lives of Black women and girls epistemologically, bodily, experientially, and publicly.
Providing a clarion call for fellow educators to remain reflexive and committed to emancipatory aims, this book will be of interest to researchers seeking an exploration of critical voices from nondominant identities, perspectives, and concerns.
This book was originally published as a special issue of Gender and Education.