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Pedagogic Paths to Liberation: Personal Struggles, Institution Building and the Rise of the Walter Rodney School of Groundings Praxis in Atlanta
Abstract
Dr. Seneca Vaught interviewed Dr. Jesse Benjamin about his personal pedagogical background and process, its intersections with activism and scholarship, and how this led him to working with the Walter Rodney Foundation and various associated projects in the Atlanta area. The discussion moves from research at a radical experimental Quaker international college, to activism and research in upstate New York, at Binghamton University, and finally to work as an engaged community professor in Atlanta. Also covered are the establishment of a Coloniality Research Working Group and a Walter Rodney Study Group in New York, and the influence of Sylvia Wynter. The discussion concludes with an overview of institution building activities in Atlanta, conjecturing the rise of Walter Rodney School of Praxis.
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Footnotes
Jesse Benjamin. “The Negev Bedouin: The Struggle for Equal Rights.” New Outlook 33(8) (August 1990).
A brilliant radical mentor in Kenya, Kavetsa Adegala, first named for me what she called the “Mzungu corridor” (literally the White/Western corridor, based on the Swahili word mzungu), that narrow band of familiar spaces and references that most Friends World students and most Western travelers stayed in when they visited Kenya, and which I found myself avoiding like the plague—places like the Hilton, popular safaris, the one Italian trattoria in Nairobi, spots designed explicitly around colonial nostalgia, fancy beach resorts, that kind of thing.
A traditional Swahili wooden boat used for fishing or transporting goods.
This was a major moment for me, and a few others. But for the movement, a key moment was the famous “oversight” comment made by Dean Don Blake at a heated meeting, where he tried to explain why his diversity committee was comprised of all White faculty, mostly men, and when confronted with this problematic representation, he remarked that it had been just an oversight. His flippant excuse set off a major wave of curricular contestation we referred to as the diversity struggle, centered around a fight for a critical diversity requirement, when the administration wanted to impose a completely watered down one.
The 3rd annual Walter Rodney Symposium, held at the Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library in March 2006, where I gave a paper on one of the panels.
Seneca Vaught, “‘Grounding’ Walter Rodney in Critical Pedagogy: Toward Praxis in African History,” South 1(1), Article 1, 2015. Available at: https://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/south/vol1/iss1/1.
Derrick White, “Audacious Visions: The Intellectual-Activist Legacies of W.E.B. DuBois, the Institute of the Black World, and Walter Rodney,” South 1(1), Article 4, 2015. Available at: https://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/south/vol1/iss1/4.
Jesse Benjamin and Devyn Springer, “Groundings: A Revolutionary Pan-African Pedagogy for Guerilla Intellectuals,” in: Keywords in Radical Philosophy and Education: Common Concepts for Contemporary Movements (Critical Understanding in Education), Derek Ford (ed.), Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2019.
“‘The Brutal Dialectics of Underdevelopment’: Thinking Politically with Walter Rodney,” The C. L. R. James Journal 23, 1-2, 2017.
These are: (1) Rodney, Walter A. The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World, edited by Robin D. G. Kelley and Jesse J. Benjamin, Preface by Vijay Prashad. London and New York: Verso Books, 2018; (2) Rodney, Walter A. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Foreword by Angela Davis. Verso Books, 2018; (3) Rodney, Walter A. The Groundings With My Brothers, 50th Anniversary Edition, edited by Asha T. Rodney and Jesse J. Benjamin, new Introduction by Carole Boyce Davies, and new reflective essays by Patricia Rodney, Randall Robinson, Verene Shepherd, Bongo Jerry Small, and David Austin. New York and London: Verso Books, 2019.