Scott Challener

I have taught online, hybrid, and on-ground courses on U.S., Latinx, Latin American, and global literatures and cultures at Hampton University, the College of William & Mary, Rutgers University, and Northeastern University’s College of Professional Studies. I frame my courses through case studies that give rise to unresolved problems and provoke reflection and conversation. In a recent course on twentieth-century African American literature, for instance, we began with a unit comparing the manifestos of Black modernism with those of the Black Arts era. This framing enabled us to perceive deeper affiliations and throughlines across the period while also differentiating between them in more nuanced ways. In courses on Latinx literature and culture, I often begin with the vexed debate around the “x” or equis. Students engage with a variety of materials—mainstream journalistic and academic editorials, clips, podcasts, talks, and essays—in order to consider historical and political differences between terms like Hispanic, Latino, Latin@, and Latinx as well as the limits of latinidad and the dimensions of the “x” that extend beyond buzzword ideals of belonging and inclusivity.

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Our conversations prepare my students to write for different audiences by helping them differentiate among publics and publication contexts, discern motivations and preoccupations, and examine how works are oriented toward their anticipated reception. These materials are more inclusive of different kinds of audiences and more open to non-disciplinary ways of knowing and being in the world. By talking through them, students reckon not only with the realization that they too are situated, constituent members of some publics (and not others), but also that the question of how they write is inseparable from that of who they write and speak for. And crucially, they learn that critique is as much about pleasure and connection as it is about disaffection, disillusionment, and dismay.

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In my classes, students grapple with competing imperatives. Interpretation becomes an urgent, necessary struggle requiring imagination, care, and thought. Their questions expand. They examine cultural and media logics, the conditions of the work’s production, circulation, and reception, and the motives and limitations of articulation. After studying the centrality of alternative print practices to Black and Latinx literary and cultural history, for example, students explore consider digital and, when possible, institutional archives (such as the Peabody Collection and Museum archives at Hampton). For their final, public-facing project, they have the option to make their own zine or pamphlet in response to a text, object, problem, question, or performance we have studied. Students have made zines and pamphlets and art objects reflecting on the foster care and bail bond systems; the history of dress codes; lost friendship; the gendered and sexualized division of labor; intersectional vulnerability; language justice; growing up Salvi in America; being nonbinary, white, and Cuban; social media discourse among the African diaspora; and the legacy of muralism in the U.S. Southwest—and much else besides. As these topics suggest, when they find themselves in interpretive situations where positive/negative evaluations and commonplace ideological and political assumptions are insufficient, students wrestle creatively with relational questions that deepen engagement with the real-world stakes of their education. As they write and speak with more anger, pleasure, and salt, their interpretations become stronger—more dynamic, assertive, convicted, and imaginative.

 

My research into poetry as a mode of redistributive address informs my approach to the classroom as a space of multiple address and encounter. I recognize that I address students not simply as their teacher, guide, mentor, and advocate, but as a member and beneficiary of our shared community. I also recognize that we address one another and ourselves, and that some students are more vulnerable than others, and thus more likely to become objects of unwelcome or injurious address. This recognition informs how I participate in our discussions of the ways difference organizes the spaces we create together and those in which we live, work, and study. I envision these spaces as spaces of circulation. No room—classroom, committee room, locker room, boardroom, home or office—is a neutral or de facto inclusive space; instead, the spaces we inhabit must be made inclusive through the articulation of collective norms and active collaboration.