Black Feminist Paths to Freedom: A Generative Writing Workshop [Online]
Full Tuition: $320 — Scholarship options are available in the drop-down enrollment menu for you to self-select.
Instructor: Kagunda | Thursdays | February 22 - March 21 | 5:00 - 7:00 PM ET | ONLINE
“As Black feminists and Lesbians we know that we have a very definite revolutionary task to perform and we are ready for the lifetime of work and struggle before us.” –Combahee River Collective Statement
Black feminists have always understood that the root of their oppression lies in society's insistence that they can only occupy one identity--the negation of their right to fully inhabit their multiplicity as both Black and woman. In the Combahee River collective’s foundational 1977 statement, they write: “Black, other Third World, and working women have been involved in the feminist movement from its start, but both outside reactionary forces and racism and elitism within the movement itself have served to obscure our participation.” What the Combahee River Collective presented was the idea that Black, Global South, Brown and Indigenous working women have always been involved in the work of feminism as a freedom project–a freedom project that would also include their own freedom.
In this course, we will read Black feminist texts in order to build a material strategy against hierarchical structures of oppression while simultaneously imagining a free, Black feminist future drawn from their ideas. We will read fundamental Black feminist authors like bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, and Joy James, alongside other contemporary Black feminist scholars such as Kimberlé Crenshaw, Saidiya Hartman, Sylvia Tamale, and Christina Sharpe. We will also encounter storytelling and poetry in the works of June Jordan, Assata Shakur, Mariame Kaba, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs, among others.
This will be a call and response class which means writing prompts will be offered along with opportunities to creatively or reflectively respond to the class discussion pieces in writing. Good writing isn’t created in a vacuum; instead it usually is in conversation with work that has come up before it and work that is coming up around it. Let us respond to the call of Black feminist revolutionaries who dreamed of liberation for all of us!
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Recordings may be provided upon request for missed classes.
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Scholarships: We are currently able to offer three full scholarships per class. Our full scholarship tier is a nonrefundable offering, limited to one per student per month. Because our scholarship funding is limited, selecting multiple full scholarships in a single month will result in disenrollment from all classes. If the scholarship tier you need is sold out please email us directly, and we will add you to a waitlist and notify you if additional scholarships become available. Please see our FAQ for more information, including installment plans and refund policy.
Asynchronous Auditing: Classes are discussion-based and designed to be taken synchronously. However, we do offer an asynchronous audit option for most online classes if you need to follow along at your own pace. You must choose the audit option to receive all course recordings; please do not register using a scholarship if you do not plan to attend the majority of class sessions as you will not receive the recording materials to follow along. We do not automatically offer scholarships for auditors, but if you need one, you may request one by filling out this form.