December 22, 2005
Paul, Dierdre Glenn. Life, Culture and Education on the Academic Plantation: Womanist Thought and Perspective. Questions about the Purpose(s) of Colleges and Universities, Vol. 2. Ed. Norm Denzin, Josef Progler, Joe L. Kincheloe, and Shirley R. Steinberg. New York: Peter Lang, 2001.
“Through the processes of reflexivity and life history, Paul writes, “I attempt to cohere the concentric spheres of race, gender, and class as they play themselves out in my daily living and multiple roles” (xi). A collection of essays not necessarily meant to be read linearly, Life, Culture and Education on the Academic Plantation documents the author’s own social location as a Black woman in “a racially schizophrenic society, a single mother, a former public school teacher, a teacher educator, and an emerging intellectual” (xi). Just as Paul must live each day through multiple and contradictory roles, so too must the reader of this book encounter linguistic, formal, and narrative multiplicity: an “amalgam of genres and writing styles,” the book is written to promote “disequilibrium” (xii).
Chapter 1, “Opposition and the Valuation of Difference,” introduces the book as a whole and is a scholarly and yet personal assessment of inhabiting oppositional identity positionalities. In Chapter 2, “Young, Black, and Female in Academe,” Paul notes the personal difficulties she has faced as a Black female teacher and scholar, and yet defends her position as an academic, writing that “transformation can best be achieved by those who work from within to effect it” (9). Chapter 3, “Voice…Muted and Regained,” documents Paul’s struggle to harmonize her prior life experiences with her work as a scholar and a writer of these very essays. “The Perplexities of Black Scholarship,” Chapter 4, interrogates the way research is raced in the United States, and uses Paul’s experiential account of being arrested for protesting in order to conclude that perhaps
researchers from traditionally marginalized cultures study their communities in a more empathic and culturally sensitive fashion” (58). In her fifth chapter, “Toward Self-Definition of Black Maternal Epistemology,” Paul explores her role as a mother and notes that “we have so many lessons yet to learn about mother hood written from the perspective of Black mothers, from all stations in life” (68). “The Elective Auction Block” is Paul’s sixth chapter, and it describes the racist, damaging effects television can have and the way in which “Talk, text, and the presentation of racialized images impact public policy” (74). Chapter 7 is entitled “Rap and Orality: Critical Media Literacy, Pedagogy, and the Issue of Cultural Synchronization,” and it charts the author’s attempts to use rap as a pedagogical strategy, the ways this strategy does not lead to the “contrived epiphanies” described by popular films, and the ways this strategy was nonetheless pedagogically valuable (78). In Chapter 8, “‘Do Unto Others’ Schooling,” Paul looks at the role education plays in the disenfranchisement of people of color, and concludes with the concept of “liberatory pedagogy,” an educational philosophy that combines political praxis and “approaches Black subject matter and that involving people of color in an empathic and culturally sensitive fashion” in order to build coalitions and to theorize an anti-oppressive pedagogical education (99).
The book ends with a series of responses to Paul’s essays—responses that further the book’s “transformative agenda” by carrying on the conversation beyond the book’s more formal conclusion at the end of Chapter 8.
First of all, as an “emerging” intellectual, she should write it as motherhood, not mother hood. How stupid of these people to expect to be taken seriously when they cannot spell. Finally, you are another of the canonized single mothers, which means your child, or children are bastards. No wonder that the mainstream does not take you seriously, even if the left academia does.