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In her groundbreaking Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, bell hooks contends that the classroom is a "location of possibility" and, as a result, "we have the opportunity to labor for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades, an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress" (1994, 206). In hooks' view, the most necessary tool for ending oppression is education, but not the type of education that teaches "obethence to authority" (4). Rather, hooks calls for learning that fosters critical thinking, for it is through this critical thinking that "we" - teachers and students - can begin to change our own lives and the lives around us. Jn my experience as a professor of writing and literature, the lives, contexts, and contributions of authors who "transgressed" in order to liberate themselves and others bring to life the very concept of "trangressive" creative acts. To this end, the phoenix-like Nella Larsen has proven, time and again, to be a class favorite and Passing always incites a productive cross-race/gender dialogue. In short, Larsen and her novel Passing successfully aid me in "teaching to transgress."
Passing is a novel dedicated to the exploration of transgressions, and Larsen frequently transgressed as a bi-racial woman, an intellectual, and as an author. In one brief novel, Larsen masterfully melds her own as well as her period's many anxieties and discontents with characters who transgress all available boundaries. Moreover, she accomplishes these goals within a text that refuses to be limited to a singular meaning or interpretation. Such traits identify Passing as a quintessential modernist text. Though my students tend to desire a finite interpretation of the text, and, so, resist its complexity at first, ultimately they embrace - and appreciate - Larsen's perfectly-crafted modernist aesthetic. As in their response to T. S. Ehot's The Waste Land, students can feel the experience of modernity as a time of radical social shifts, of breakdowns in beliefs and morals, of instability and fear of the unknown when they read Passing.
Two years prior to hooks 's Teaching to Transgress, Pamela Caughie interrogates issues of authority of experience and essentialism (as hooks does in her...