Plotting a Course

What Story Does A Syllabus Tell?

Faith Ringgold, The Sunflower’s Quilting Bee at Arles, 1997 (Source)

It is common enough to tell a story to make a specific point in a classroom discussion or even to use a narrative to anchor an entire lecture. But what if we extended the idea of story to structure an entire course? Then, we would have to think a bit about plot.

In this post, I want to reflect on recent efforts in designing university-level courses at a time when everyday work tasks can seem inadequate to the moment. Shout-out to Catherine Clepper whose Course Design Institute at The P3 Collaboratory at Rutgers University-Newark instigated this reflection.

The Power of Story

In her 1993 Nobel Lecture, Toni Morrison uses a common folk tale of a wise blind person who sees past a boy’s trick to make a singular statement about the power of narrative to help people feel, remember, gain insight, and ultimately live their lives. She adapts the tale to fit the cultural milieu of an African American tradition and uses the story itself, and alternative readings of it, to offer a timely and timeless reflection on language and power. A group of city kids go out to expose an old blind woman known for her wisdom as a superstitious fraud. They ask her is the bird in their hand living or dead.

Morrison takes the story to be an allegory, with the woman representing the practiced writer and the bird signifying language. The writer, like the old woman, blind and wise, is a witness to the constant threat that institutions—whether they be the state, the university, the corporation, or the media— poses for the captive fledging of language. The lecture is too good not to quote verbatim:

“The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek – it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language – all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.” Toni Morrison, “Nobel Lecture,” 1993.

The lecture is spellbinding. Its lyricism is hypnotic and its message unforgettable. She practiced what she preached. This alignment of content and form, this poetics, offer a case study of what a story can do where arguments alone, to say nothing of “information,” miss the point. Indeed, she was weary of the “pseudo-empirical language” of the academic that verges on death. It is no coincidence that the power of story help give language a pulse.

In our time of genocide, the coming out (again) of fascism, and technofeudalism, a moment when the university struggles against a coordinated pincher attack of the state and the market, those of us with a modicum of control of designing our courses have the urgent task of going beyond “coverage” of subject content. If we hope that our offerings will have a meaning for our students beyond the final exam, we would do well to tap into the living capacity of language by thinking of our courses as powerful stories.

Plotting a Course

Narrative, as the likes of Jean-François Lyotard and Sylvia Wynter have argued, has long served to organize life or death information for humanity. While one might argue that the shift toward the algorithmic organization of society makes such an antiquated technology obsolete, we are already seeing, with the development of post-literacy, a return to social forms and sensibilities we might associate with what communications theorist Walter Ong described as primary orality. Accordingly, narrative is becoming again a necessary means of establishing, and holding onto, meaningfulness.

In order to work with this development, we should think with plot as a way of structuring our courses. For the sake of ease, let’s take Christopher Booker’s The Seven Basic Plots to identify common narrative structures:

1. Overcoming the Monster

2. Rags to Riches

3. The Quest

4. Voyage and Return

5. Comedy

6. Tragedy

7. Rebirth.

As a thought experiment, look at a course syllabus near you. Which of the seven stories does it resemble? What are the implications of this story if carried all the way through? And what would happen if you were to organize the same course as a different narrative plot? Clepper once posed this question to me as I was residing my intro to Africana studies course at Rutgers University-Newark. Doing this exercise with a course with which I had taught several times was revelatory of the deeper theoretical and political stakes a story might tell.

“The African American Odyssey”

The dominant approach to an introductory course in Africana or Black studies is broadly historical, and it tends to follow a chronological arc. From African origins, to slavery to freedom, is more or less how the story goes. The title of a common textbook for African-American history, one I encountered as an undergraduate at Morehouse College, invokes this narrative form in the title itself: The African American Odyssey by Darlene Clark Hine, William C. Hine, and Stanley Harrold (2003).

I have long been a skeptic of this default historical organization for such a course because it privileges the discipline of history over the other disciplinary orientations that make up the field. Of course, correcting the lies told about Black history has played an important role in the development of Black studies, as attested to in the title of the collection of outlawed texts in recent anti-DEI witch hunts: “Our History Has Always Been Contraband” edited by Colin Kaepernick, Robin D. G. Kelley, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (2023). At the same time, Black studies is not limited to the historical perspective and the introduction to the field should reflect the field’s interdisciplinary nature.

But carefully deployed, even what appears as a straightforward historical approach bears a range of theoretical implications, which gestures toward interdisciplinarity.

Let’s take the typical story that is often told. It is structured as the story of the overcoming the monster of racial injustice in multi-racial democracy. Philosophically, this is a story that is aligned with Black liberalism and speaks to a justifying politics of racial realism.

But when you consider what other stories could be told with the same material, you begin to notice other theoretical schools with their implications for alternative political-economic and socio-cultural orientations.

Voyage and return, for example, becomes the narrative that animates and naturallizes a Black internationalism and Pan-Africanism while tragedy captures an emergent perspective of afropessimism that views anti-Blackness as ontological. The story of rebirth might be the stuff of AfroFuturism with engagements with an ecological Black feminism and meditations on technological post-humanism.

The point is not that one plot is correct and the others are wrong. The point is that every course is already telling a story. The pedagogical task is to become conscious of that story, to test its implications, and to ask whether it is worthy of the students we are inviting into it.

In Our Hands

At the end of Morrison’s tale, the old woman responds to the children who have come to mock her: “I don’t know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands.”

It is an old wisdom that reminds us of the responsibility to work, build, and craft to the best of our ability, within our locus of control, no matter how dire the stakes.

It is a message we should remember whenever we have an opportunity as educators to plot a course.