CRITICAL ENGAGEMENT
“The use of practical strategies and pedagogical methods that challenge dominant intellectual legacies, theological resources, and ideologies that undermine the goals of womanist ethics, namely, the empowerment of woman.”
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From:
Floyd-Thomas
Mining the Motherlode (page 13)
Critical Engagement is...
“Womanist ethics ascertains the just and unjust in personal, social, and divine will...womanist ethics reveals the inner workings of the moral crises that oppressive ideologies create for black women and the various entrapments in which they are placed.”
From:
Floyd-Thomas
Mining the Motherlode (page 171)
Womanist Ethics
The Importance of Critical Engagement
"Teaching black women's literature allows the reader to travel into worlds other than their own." (Floyd-Thomas, 60)
Background Information of Critical Engagement
Critical engagement allows black women to critically engage their world when they are being treated unfairly. Throughout the history of the modern world, they have constantly been through social injustice.
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Especially for black women, liberation requires an unending struggle for freedom, justice, and equality.
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In the absence of critical engagement, our society would continue to have an injustice system and oppressions would remain. The most important part about critical engagement is recognizing the inequalities and being critically engaged in our society.
The Dialogical Literary Journal
The dialogical literary journal helps the readers be able to identify key points in womanist literacies.
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The list on the left are some of the ideas mentioned in the journal to keep in mind when looking at womanist literacies.
Understand what the text says, then summarize the writing.
Brief Rendering of the Reading
Distinguish parts of the text that includes radical subjectivity, traditional communalism, and redemptive self-love.
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Attempt to understand why and how the passage affected you and what you liked about it.
Identify Passages in the Text
Figure out which parts of the passage the author might have written that encompasses the moral significance of the reading.
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What moral lesson did you take away that includes your understanding of racial, gender, or class justice?
Moral Significance
Did your moral values change as you were reading? Did you experience any "reality inversions" through the lives of these characters?
How the Passage Impacted You
Womanism
Womanism is for ALL people and for ALL races.
Who are womanists?
Many people believe that womanists have to be women, when in reality, womanists include people of any gender and race.
Womanists can appreciate and love women both sexually and non-sexually.
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Womanism is trying to widen the idea of what womanism is to include everyone's stories and points of view in order to get the "full story".
Womanist Ethics
Where students critically reflect of their own personal social formation in regards to race, ethnicity, gender roles, and class.
Womanist Epistemology
Womanist epistemology challenges dominant epistemology by elevating and validating black women's knowledge as authoritative and beyond the subjective realm.
​“The fantastic hegemonic imagination traffics in people’s lives that are caricatured or pillaged so that the imagination that creates the fantastic can control the world in its own image.” (Townes 21)​​
Townes is being critical of our society and is trying to broaden people's imagination to a hegemonic thought process. ​
Fantastic Hegemonic
Imagination
"Central to the task of womanist ethical literary analysis is the reader's ability to engage her literary imagination so as to immerse herself in a world of 'otherness' that transcends one's own understandings and experience."
— Floyd-Thomas
Mining the Motherlode (60)