Illuminating the canon: perspective in Angela Davis’ ‘Dialectical’ pedagogy

Abstract

ABSTRACT In 1969, while teaching under threat of dismissal, Angela Davis gave a series of lectures at UCLA in which she read Frederick Douglass' Narrative against canonical conceptions of freedom, chief among them Sartre's. This paper reconstructs these “Lectures on Liberation” as an exercise in dialectical pedagogy. Davis unsettles these conceptions by confronting them with a consciousness formed through racialised oppression and collective struggle, changing the questions through which freedom is investigated. Her critique is immanent in its standard but perspectival in its disclosure: the inherited conception is held to its own claim to universality and found wanting, since it presents a particular standpoint as universal while concealing the oppressive relations that sustain it. To explicate the consciousness Davis relies on but leaves implicit, I introduce the notion of perspective: an orientation that organizes the agenda guiding inquiry and the understanding it enables. Working from the standpoint of the enslaved, Davis illuminates the relations of domination the inherited conception obscures. She renders freedom's universal claim concrete by reconstructing the concept of freedom from standpoints excluded by the inherited conception. Her philosophical pedagogy thus models transformative rather than additive canon reform: excluded thinkers alter the questions through which canonical concepts are taught, rather than entering an agenda left intact.