Imagination Is Our Birthright: Nurturing a Black Feminist Radical Imagination in the Classroom

Abstract

This article explores radical learning rituals deployed during an experimental intensive course targeting first-year students at a Hispanic Serving Institution. Using the Radical Imagination Laboratory (RIL) as a template, the course explores imagination through a Black Feminist lens, specifically engaging the works of Angela Davis, Sylvia Wynter, and Audre Lorde. The article chronicles the lessons and challenges of coteaching, creating and practicing innovative teaching methodologies, and race-conscious pedagogy, while grappling with differences in race and gender positionality among instructors and students. Each of the class activities highlighted here represents a foundational theorist for the course (in conjunction/conversation with contemporary theorists). While describing these examples of alternate ways of understanding and experiencing the classroom as a laboratory for time travel and world-making, the article also investigates both students’ resistance to and their embracing of the Black Feminist framing of imagination that is at the core of the class. The article concludes that attempts to nurture imagination through an explicit centering of Black Feminist ways of knowing and being serve to stretch and elevate students’ understanding of imagination’s relationship to the past and present and the collective responsibility, costs, and power of this birthright.