My pedagogical approach can be described as antiracist and socially engaged, aiming to heighten students’ awareness of the social, political, and economic forces shaping their lives and the world around them—a concept Paulo Freire called “critical consciousness.” I treat literature as a highly mediated product of historical circumstances, institutional legacies, ideological crosscurrents, and a writer’s unique positionality within this matrix of forces. In my classes, I emphasize close reading as a means of interpreting and historicizing theme and form, all while encouraging students to question the presumed “naturalness” of power structures that perpetuate exploitation, racism, and sexism. I reject the notion that education is a top-down transfer of knowledge, however valuable that knowledge may be. Instead, I empower students by supplying them with the analytical tools to critique culture and society in creative, materially grounded ways.
Recent Courses Taught
English 133 (Illinois Wesleyan University): “Crime and Punishment: Searching for Justice in Film and Literature”
English / History 257 (IWU): “Promised Lands: A Cultural and Literary History of the Great Migration, 1917-1970”
English 170 (IWU): “Special Topics in Literature: Speculative Fiction of the Working Class”
English / History 252 (IWU): “Slavery in US Literature and Film”
English 351 (IWU): “Manifest Destinies: American Literature to 1865”
Selected Course Descriptions
ENGL 133 (Illinois Wesleyan University): “Crime and Punishment: Searching for Justice in Film and Literature”
In this course, we will examine literary texts that explore themes of justice and injustice, criminality and victimhood, legal and extralegal punishment, the intricacies of the legal system, and the interplay between law and socioeconomic structures. Moving from the early 20th century to the present, we will investigate how history, genre, and ideology shape literary portrayals of the law, crime, and the state. How have authors conceptualized the relationship between morality and legality? How do their works critique the social arrangements that define crime and punishment? And what are the notions of justice that authors have put forth in response to prevailing social inequalities?
ENGL/HIST 370 (IWU): “Special Topics in Literature: Countercultures of Black America”
This course will argue that African-American culture, history, and politics have always existed inside and outside occidental modernity, at once shaping its construction and interrogating its guiding principles. In their simultaneous affirmation and rejection of Enlightenment conceptions of social progress, Black cultural movements in the US have routinely embodied an epistemic “double-voicedness”; that is, they have been both constitutive of and excessive to Western civilization in general and American society and culture in particular. This ambiguous status—a hallmark of what Paul Gilroy calls “countercultures”—will supply the theoretical basis of the course.
“Countercultures” will move chronologically from the antebellum period to the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement in the early 21st century. Cultural highpoints will include the Harlem Renaissance, the proletarian thirties, the Black Arts Movement, the rise of feminisms of color, and others. The course will render visible points of connection between and among moments of cultural efflorescence often considered radically different, if not ideologically antagonistic.
“Countercultures” will answer the following questions: How has African Americans’ fraught relation to the nation shaped their (counter)cultural productions from the 19th century onward? What are the specific social, political, and economic conditions that have historically heightened African Americans’ sense of racial and national belonging? How have these conditions enabled or foreclosed privileged understandings of the social totality? And: What are some of the “compensatory” and “anticipatory utopias”—to quote Ernst Bloch—that African Americans have imagined as responses to (or reactions against) prevailing social arrangements?
Juan Rodríguez Barrera 