Professing the Liberatory Power of Womanism

Abstract

Narrating his journey toward becoming a black male professor of feminism, in this chapter the author identifies himself as a “black male outsider.” He writes about how his study writings by black/feminists of color helped him to accept his difference as a male who grew up on the margins of the “black community” in which he lived. Not only does he credit Alice Walker’s idea of womanism as personally and politically self-transformative for him, he also acknowledges bell hooks’s belief that men can be feminist comrades. In the chapter, he focuses on experiences teaching course-work on “writings by radical black/women of color” in departments of English and women’s studies at the university where he teaches. He employs autocritography as a genre that interweaves memoir with social criticism to express his commitment to the practice of womanist pedagogy.