Teaching in Times of Crisis

Mich Yonah Nyawalo is an Associate Professor of Critical Ethnic, Black/Race Studies at Xavier University, Cincinnati, Ohio. His areas of specialization are globalization studies, postcolonial criticism, African literatures (including audio and visual cultures from the continent), media studies, critical pedagogy, and service learning. The years he has spent living and studying in Kenya, Uganda, France, Sweden, and the United States have highly defined his academic projects, which appropriate a mixture of critical tools and scholarly texts derived from the fields of African, African diaspora, and African-American studies. Some of the classes he teaches include World Literature, Black Transnationalism, Comparative Feminist Literature, Comparative Queer Theory and Literature, Introduction to Media and Culture, Graphic Novels and Animation, as well as Video Games and Virtual Worlds.

• IntroductionMemo I—The Deliverance or Domestication of Others: Memos from Comparative Literature Classes in Appalachia Memo II—Syllabusing: Mapping Appalachian Texts onto a World Literature CurriculumMemo III—Pedagogies of Cultural Translation: Debating Polygamy, War, and Patriotism in Comparative Literature ClassesMemo IV—Syllabusing: Mapping Appalachian Queer Texts onto a Comparative Literature CurriculumMemo V—Monstrous Encounters in Outer Space: A Pedagogic Analysis of Star Trek’s Racial Politics from a Comparative PerspectiveMemo VI—Comparative Feminism and Social Justice: Instrumentalizing the Poetics of Assia Djebar’s "The Woman in Pieces" in Experiential Learning CoursesConclusion