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On the thirtieth anniversary of bell hooks’s Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (1990), a significant text on cultural criticism and the visual arts, this panel explores the role of critical and liberatory pedagogy within ongoing interdisciplinary reassessments of Black artistic practices. According to hooks, critical and liberatory pedagogies concern “habits of being” for decolonizing knowledge and promoting “the insurrection of subjugated knowledge.” In light of vast intellectual and curatorial work since 1990, in what ways do pedagogies of African American art participate in, problematize, or reaffirm, the space for independent thought? Drawing upon the field’s heterogeneity, we seek papers that address this question by probing ways of teaching and learning African American Art.

The goal is to examine how critical and liberatory pedagogies perform important epistemological work for students and scholars. How do archives and the digital humanities enrich coursework and object study? How might deconstructive analysis produce additional modes of criticality in the wake of recent publications and museum surveys? Although Fred Moten and Stefano Harvey have described teaching as perfunctorily “performing the work of the university” in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (2013), these scholarly investigations will illuminate pedagogical strategies for resistance, liberation, or even self-critique.