Professor W. Chris Johnson taught WGS1029 — Black Feminist Histories: Movements, Method, and the Archives in the fall of 2024. Over the 12 weeks, we learned the historiography and lives of Black feminists from the nineteenth century to our contemporary moment. We read Saidiya Hartman, Toni Cade Bambara, Dionne Brand, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, Hazel Carby, and so on.
Studying Black feminism raises crucial questions: when and how do Black feminist movements and practices — which stress the intersection of racism and sexism in shaping racialized people’s experiences — evolve into living, breathing frameworks that not only shape our theoretical perspectives but help us create new ways of being and relating with one another?
We have since wondered what, exactly, about Johnson’s class left such a profound mark on us. Although this course could have easily dissolved into just another seminar — a cycle of painfully endured readings, weeks of attendance rather than presence, a room full of bodies barely noticing one another — the course offered a space where we not only engaged with ideas but also with each other. Johnson’s classroom was a place where we could forge connections, be vulnerable, and collectively dream of freedom.
Reimagining the classroom
Johnson’s class operated beyond the usual academic disciplinary mechanisms in which students are constantly evaluated, graded, and then left to the wayside. Rather, this class had its own kind of rigour; one where we challenged each other through laughter and tears to push each other to envision a new world.
In bell hooks’ vision of education as a practice of freedom discussed in her 1994 book Teaching to Transgress, the classroom is a space for self-actualization and growth. Both educators and students engage in a collaborative process of learning and unlearning, facilitated by practices of mutual care and solidarity. As hooks explained in her book, “when education is the practice of freedom, students are not the only ones who are asked to share, to confess.”
In reflecting on the class, we also turned to Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s concept of “study” from their 2013 book The Undercommons. They argue that “study is what you do with other people.” This may sound so simple and trite, but there’s a nuance here. Study — not in the traditional academic sense which focuses on laboriously learning facts, arguments, and methods in order to march toward their own, solo intellectual pursuits — but study as the act of ‘thinking’ and ‘doing’ with other people.
Moten’s and Harney’s ways of thinking and doing prioritize the “incessant and irreversible intellectuality,” of the everyday ways of learning. This version of study occurs all the time: grandparents teaching younger family members recipes, grassroots collectives supporting marginalized communities, community groups creating study circles to understand struggles of the past, and reading groups like the Caribbean Grad Student Reading Group at U of T, which encourages students to come together and think with their ancestors.
Johnson invited us to sit with and listen to the Black thinkers and activists across the diaspora to learn from their legacy, and to continue the rehearsals and discussions they so passionately began. We use ‘rehearsals’ here with the definition theorized by US abolitionist scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who describes Black feminists’ political theorizing and movements as rehearsals — trials and errors, breakthroughs and setbacks in our efforts to build lives otherwise. We strongly believe that the pedagogies in U of T classrooms must aim to support such efforts.
In this spirit, Johnson’s classroom itself was a rehearsal space.
Recognizing oppression in its many manifestations and intersections is only the beginning, liberation demands that we dream beyond. Beyond survival. Beyond the limits imposed by colonial and heteronormative thinking and systems. Beyond the given and what we have been told is possible. But we must also study, create, and rehearse new ways of being together.
Embodying abolition in the classroom
So how do we breathe life into Black feminist theorizing within the classroom? This class taught us that it is by embracing collectivity, listening, and embracing vulnerability. We saw and acknowledged each other as our whole, complicated selves — and, just as importantly, we made space for our ancestors and their teaching.
Although Black, Indigenous, and racialized people around the world were never meant to survive or thrive under colonial structures, our ancestors laboured, dreamed, mothered, and nurtured a future where our freedom remains possible. It is in the present moment, in the small, personal spaces, that abolition must begin; in the relationships we cultivate and the care we extend to each other.
On our class’ last day together, we baked pistachio lemon crinkle cookies and brought them to share. Johnson bought treats from a bakeshop, and another student brought sambuusi — a traditional Somali fried snack. It was not just a celebration that we made it to the end of a difficult term, but that we did it together in the ways we listened to and cared for one another both within and outside the classroom.
In the quiet offering of a smile, a homemade cookie, or a Polaroid picture, we planted the seeds of prefigurative politics — the practice of embodying the values, relationships, and futures we want to create in the present moment — essential for building alternative worlds.
The stakes of this kind of study are that we demand new and more possible worlds for Black, Indigenous, and racialized people everywhere. Always.
Magdalee Brunache is a second-year PhD student in political science and a collaborative student at the Women and Gender Studies Institute. She is co-chair of the Women’s Caucus of the Graduate Association of Students in Political Science and an executive member of OtherWise e-Magazine for Racialized and Marginalized Women.
Stephanie Sawah is a first-year master’s student at the Women and Gender Studies Institute. She is a member of the Caribbean Grad Student Reading Group and an organizer with the Ripple Community Collective.
