As a Black literary scholar working and living at the intersection of the urgent matters of the COVID-19 pandemic and national racial unrest, I felt a sense of despondency and disillusionment about ...the kind of work I could and should be doing and what its impact would be. Racial fatigue weighed heavily on my mind and spirit. I questioned, how does literature help us to better understand the concerns of our moment and imagine a more equitable future? What does ethical and engaged pedagogy look like in this moment? “Breath-taking Pedagogy” examines my concerns and anxieties while navigating these coinciding threats to Black breath and the ways this experience informed a radical shift in my approach to teaching and public scholarship. Specifically, I detail how I have tried to reconcile my role and contribution through community engaged scholarship that demonstrates the transformative potential of literature and through an ethical teaching practice that privileges equity, empathy, and self-care.
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Understanding Alice Walker is organized into four chapters: “Understanding Alice Walker: The Sign of the Family” (Chapter 1); “The Sight of the Familiar: ‘I Love Myself…’” With an ethic of care, ...Walker represents the interior lives of characters that are often discarded and neglected in society as evident in her early works Once: Poems, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, and In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women. Davis illuminates Meridian’s significance in exploring the cost of survival in the fight to create a beloved community. ...Davis argues that “Meridian may be Walker’s most brilliantly conceived and realized novel” (46) despite its relative obscurity in comparison to The Color Purple.
In this novel that meditates on mourning and loss, the civil rights movement is not simply imagined as a series of legislative triumphs culminating in the Civil Rights Act, but the civil rights ...movement is importantly represented through its casualties. ...while an engagement with the strategies of the civil rights movement is central to the text, Meridian is fundamentally a novel about the place of black rage in the civil rights movement.\n Nor should Carr's statements be judged embarrassing or shameful or evidence of a young woman with bipolar disorder whose meds had failed her, as her mother would later claim to news reporters. ...it is silenced and driven underground, in its own way employed as mere evidence of the pathology of black urban youth and culture.
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