Felix's Reviews > Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

bell hooks makes so many valuable points in this. A lot of them may seem dated now, since a lot of her proposed reforms to the university classroom environment have largely come to pass (at least in my experience of studying at the University of Liverpool). This book was published in 1994 after all. The whole discourse surrounding race and education has changed enormously since then, and the notion that in university literature courses (I use them as an example, since that was where I first encountered critical theory) should be inclusive environments for multi-faceted discussion, open to experiential readings - that's pretty much the norm. Maybe not at all universities, but certainly at mine. bell hooks, as it turns out, was quite prophetic on this stuff.

Some of bell hooks's concerns about the inclusion of students in multicultural environments remain a problem however. I have personally witnessed discussion groups try to turn to their one person of colour, or perhaps one of two or three people of colour, in order to treat them as a kind of 'authority' on texts about race. A similar dynamic can exist for classes with skewed gender ratios. These things can be hard to combat, because acting in this way is a natural thing for students to want to do, having grown up in our Western cultural background. I suppose there aren't easy solutions for this sort of thing. If there were, we'd have actioned them.

That said, this book is a mess. It is a hodge-podge of various essays, loosely united by topic, but often repeating each other, and often running on a lot longer than they need to. I would hesitate to recommend reading all of this collection, because its content does not totally justify its page count. The essays, for the most part, are good, but they don't need to be grouped together like this. Some of them are about extremely niche areas of critical theory research, while others seem to be written for a general audience. Some of them are straightforward and easy to read, others are couched in dense and confusing academic language. Perhaps this book is better served as a reference work, for finding certain pieces of assigned reading, than as something to be read from cover to cover.