States of Precarity and Pains of Utopic Pedagogy: Methodologies of Hope in Times of Crises

Abstract:Drawing on personal teaching experience, this article considers the potentiality and pains of a pedagogic strategy that practises what José Esteban Muñoz calls a "methodology of hope" (2009). How can educators, particularly those located in the "enlightenment-type charade" (Moten and Harney 2013, 39) that is the university, enact a critical yet hopeful pedagogy when the "ghostly aspects" (Gordon 2008) of social life haunt both students and educators before they enter the classroom? Using Gail Lewis' (2014) defense of the reparative position within queer feminist debates on paranoid and reparative readings, I argue that Lewis' emphasis on relationality as a mode of criticality can foreground connection as a reparative mode of pedagogy. Reflecting on my own experience teaching Frantz Fanon's scholarship through a lens that confronts his homophobia and simultaneously refuses his disposal, I argue for the need for connection for both students and educator alike. The reparative stance, in this pedagogic moment, opens students to the analytical modes of Black diaspora studies, Black queer studies and queer of colour critique that thinks insurgently with and through Fanon to imagine otherwise.