Thinking About Love, Justice, and Education Through African American Literature and Womanist Studies: Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Bell Hooks on Educational Improvement

Presentation given at American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting.

Sabrina Ross will draw on bell hooks’ works on transgression (hooks, 1994) love (hooks, 1997, 2001a, 2001b) and community (hooks, 2003) and Audrey Lorde (1984), among others, to show that within the dominant white, male culture there has emerged a counterculture of Black womanist efforts to understand and enact educational improvement through justice and loving relationships. Such emphases can be seen as curricula in the public sphere through the emergence of movements for greater justice. Emphasis is placed in the need to build on the insights of prominent literary figures to show the saliency of loving relationships to a more just society -- leading to a broad societal image of education, as well as to a school-oriented conception of education and curriculum – such a can be gleaned through works of Alice Walker (1973, 1997, 2003) and Toni Morrison (1987, 1992, 2008). Myriad spaces and places of Womanist community, from other-mothering to activist organizations, may be seen as educational alternatives not sponsored by the corporate state. Moreover, such Womanist education can be studied and emulated as significant examples of vital curricula that bypass and work to overcome the dominating influence of corporate states.