Teaching to transgress is a book in which bell hooks explores education through the dynamics of race, class, and gender. Just like through many of her books, bell hooks analyses using her experience; and in this one as a student in the black segregated schools and the experience as a black student in white schools post-segregation. bell hooks explores pedagogy as a tool for critical consciousness and its limits within conventional academic structures.
This book provided me with a lens to analyze thoroughly the academic space I myself as a student engages with especially in an academic institution that claims progressiveness. I was quite captured by her elaboration on the place of experience in the classroom with full awareness of class, race, and gender dynamics. I however continue to reflect on the part where she describes hostility from black women as a response to domination or exploitation and how white women respond to this hostility by invalidating it, therefore, installing barriers that prevent solidarity from occurring. This could also be applicable to any relation between marginalized folks and groups in positions of privilege, so let me invite you to analyze how you have responded to hostility from women, queer folks, poor folks, fat folks, black folks, trans folks as a person in a position of privilege compared to any group listed.
I recommend reading this book after pedagogy of the oppressed by Paulo Freire whose work bell hooks draws from a lot in Teaching to Transgress and I recommend it for anyone invested in education for critical consciousness no matter the space in which it occurs. And lastly
“The engaged voice must never be fixed and absolute but always changing, always evolving in dialogue with a world beyond itself” Teaching to transgress -bell hooks
Reviewed by Uwase Arlette
GT Coordinator, Rwanda
