Teaching Series: Case Study 2

It strikes me as odd that I’ve not talked about teaching yet. I do not think of teaching as the thing that interrupts my writing. Instead, I understand it as a practical arm of the research, a way to bring my thoughts to a small audience. In the next few weeks, I’ll write about how I blend my teaching with my writing.

So far, I’ve written about the structural aspects of teaching including the larger institutional frameworks and the syllabus. I’d like to offer you two case studies for how I am thinking about my syllabi and my writing next semester. Last week, it was Black Poetry. This week, it is Arab American literature.

My goals for this class are specifically tied to getting me to write essays about contemporary Arab American literature. Last spring, I did a presentation for Arab American Heritage Month on Arab American speculative fiction. The presentation was well received by folks at University of Illinois – Urbana Champaign, which I deeply appreciated. A friend suggested I think about a series of essays about contemporary Arab American literature. So, I am using the semester’s class to create space for that.

While I do not know exactly what will go on the syllabus, I have some ideas about what I want to explore in my writing. So, I will be guided by that. Each week, I have set myself the task of free writing about each book I read. That is all the work I plan to do. Nothing more. Nothing less.

The Arab American Book Award nominee list helps me figure out what to teach. Working on new books helps me because I get to stay present in the field. For the students, it is an opportunity for them to be on the cutting edge of research with their work.

There are a few books that I am committed to: I want to sit with Fady Joudah’s latest collection entitled […] because it directly deals with the current genocide in Gaza. I also think that his collection pairs well with Suheir Hammad’s work because she too writes about Palestinian liberation…. and has been writing about this for a long time.

I plan to pair Zeyn Joukhadar’s The Thirty Names of Night with recent scholarship by Mejdulene Shomali about gender, queerness, and Arab American history. All too often, Arab American studies has to combat the idea (often from non-experts) that queerness is a newfangled notion for Arabs (regardless of nation) and that gender is about fighting culturally specific oppression. Neither is true. So, I think it crucial for me to write about the way these writers provide reading strategies for the archive, explanations of the social power of desire, and conjectures about the future.

As you can see, even in the thinking of the course, I cannot shake my comparative impulses to pair works, or to look across genre and time. I suspect the rest of the syllabus will create this interplay. After all, I do not think it wise to attempt as many essays as there are weeks in the term. It would help if the essays (as loosely defined as they are) have some contours. For the rest of the weeks, I am reading work I have already read, but not free-written about.

I would be remiss if I did not say the following. I look for guest speakers for my classes. I get tired of hearing my own voice as an interlocutor. But also, I think the students benefit from another perspective and set of reading strategies. So, each course will benefit from guest speakers if I can manage it.

I hope this discussion of teaching structures, strategies, and case studies helped you.

Sending all my best for the rest of your semester and the one to come.