1st Edition

The Future is Black Afropessimism, Fugitivity, and Radical Hope in Education

Edited By Carl A. Grant, Ashley N. Woodson, Michael J. Dumas Copyright 2020
    144 Pages 1 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    144 Pages 1 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    The Future is Black presents Afropessimism as an opportunity to think in provocative and disruptive ways about race, racial equality, multiculturalism, and the pursuit of educational justice. The vision is not a coherent, delimited conversation, but a series of experiences with Afropessimism as a radical analytic situated within critical Black studies. Activists, educators, caregivers, kin, and all those who love Black children are invited to make sense of the contemporary Black condition, including a theorization of Black suffering, Black fugitivity, and Black futurity. These three concepts provide the foundation for the book's inquiry, and contribute to the examination of Black educational opportunity, experience, and outcomes. The book not only explores how schooling becomes complicit in, and serves as, a site of Black material and psychic suffering, but also examines the possibilities of education as a site of fugitivity, of hope, of escape, and as a space within which to imagine an emancipation yet to be realized.

     

     

    Concept Field Notes: An Introduction

    [Carl A. Grant]

    Part I. Afropessimism and Fugitivity

    Chapter 1: On Black Education: Anti-blackness, Refusal, and Resistance

    [kihana miraya ross]

    Chapter 2: Afropessimism for Us in Education: In Fugitivity, through Fuckery and with Funk

    [Ashley N. Woodson]

    Chapter 3: Literate Slave, Fugitive Slave: A Note on the Ethical Dilemma of Black Education

    [Jarvis R. Givens]

    Chapter 4: On Labor and Property: Historically White Colleges, Black Bodies, and Constructions of (Anti) Humanity

    [T. Elon Dancy and Kirsten T. Edwards]

    Chapter 5: Black Space in Education: Fugitive Resistance in the Afterlife of School Segregation

    [kihana miraya ross]

    Chapter 6: Anti-Blackness is Equilibrium: How "Disparity" Logics Pathologize Black Male Bodies and Render Other Black Bodies Invisible

    [Hari Ziyad and Timothy DuWhite]

    Part II: Conceptual Considerations

    Chapter 7: Radical Hope, Education and Humanity

    [Carl A. Grant]

    Chapter 8: Anti-Blackness and the School Curriculum

    [Keffrelyn D. Brown and Anthony L. Brown]

    Chapter 9: Kissing Cousins: Critical Race Theory’s Racial Realism and Afro-Pessimism’s Social Death

    [Kevin Lawrence Henry, Jr. and Shameka N. Powell]

    Part III: Research Vignettes

    Chapter 10: Seeking Resistance and Rupture in "the Wake": Locating Ripples of Hope in the Futures of Black Boys

    [Roderick L. Carey]

    Chapter 11: Knowledge and POWER: A Case Study on Anti-Blackness within Schooling

    [Tiffani Marie]

    Chapter 12: Debating While Black: Wake Work in Black Youth Politics

    [Shanara R. Reid-Brinkley]

    Chapter 13: Making the World Go Dark: The Radical (Im)possibilities of Youth Organizing in the Afterlife of Slavery

    [David C. Turner III]

    Chapter 14: More than Just Potential

    [Erika C. Bullock]

    Biography

    Carl A. Grant is Hoefs-Bascom Professor of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

    Ashley N. Woodson is the Stauffer Endowed Assistant Professor of Learning, Teaching and Curriculum at the University of Missouri-Columbia.

    Michael J. Dumas is an Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Education and Department of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.