A Pedagogy of Liminality: Toward Visual Poetry as a Practice in Decolonizing Creative Writing Pedagogy
Submitted by:
Megan Davis Roberts
Abstract:
This paper explores what we perceive as a lack of visual poetry studies in creative writing classrooms, largely due to its characteristic incompatibility to familiar literary devices, analytical tools, and ways of reading. While our inquiry initially sought to provide an approachable visual poetry curriculum for creative writing teachers, our doing so prompted us toward theoretical frameworks that take seriously subject matter oft-misunderstood as unfit for traditional educational practices, turning to how decolonial theorizing might inform our pedagogy. When considering the work of decolonizing pedagogy, we engage with Silvia Toscano Villanueva’s extensive definition which includes a pedagogy that “negates a standardized pedagogical practice while [embracing] a critically conscious, socially just pedagogical praxis centered on decolonial reflection and action” (29). Further, borderland rhetorician Michael Lechuga provides us a lens for conceptualizing visual poetry’s tension between image and word as a specific site for thinking about decolonization: “a political logic of bordering [is] intended to keep some out and others in.” If we trouble the gate-kept borders of our discipline, we find ourselves better able to illuminate liminal spaces. This paper ground itself in postcolonial and aesthetic reading studies as it aims to limn the disruptive and liberatory possibilities of visual poetics in the classroom. Drawing from and engaging with the work of contemporary visual poets, this paper imagines ways of de-centering traditional forms of literary knowledge and supporting lesser-known, borderless, “in-between” spaces—spaces effectively considered in visual poetry’s liminality between visual art and written word. Working to equip ourselves with new poetic conceptions of language and image, we aim to consider visual poetry in a way that renders it more approachable and theoretically considered for classroom settings.
Lechuga, M & De La Garza, A. T. (2021) Forum: Border Rhetorics, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 18:1, 37-40, DOI: 10.1080/14791420.2021.1898008
Villanueva, S.T. Teaching as a Healing Craft: Decolonizing the Classroom and Creating Spaces of Hopeful Resistance through Chicano-Indigenous Pedagogical Praxis. Urban Rev 45, 23–40 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-012-0222-5