Seldom Recorded from Keith Feldman's Ethnic Studies Students

Seldom Recorded from Keith Feldman's Ethnic Studies Students

BCNM faculty, Keith Feldman, invites us to read an anthology titled, “Seldom Recorded and Hardly Recognized: An Anthology of Pandemic Writing by Ethnic Studies students at UC Berkeley” by his ethnic studies students. He revised his writing assignments and turned towards experiences and senses during COVID-19.

From Seldom Recoded website:

What a semester. Now behind so many of us, now stretched out before us as we pick through the fragments to construct what’s to come.

From a place of grief, then, we revised the syllabus. I recorded a series of asynchronous lectures on This Bridge Called My Back–what was up next for us anyway–inviting students to attune to its women of color feminist visions, approaches, and interlocutors. I underlined the practice of writing through one’s embodiment and against the silencing systems of racism and capitalism and heteropatriarchy. I sketched the communities made through anthologizing, through the intertextual weft of Lisa Nakamura and Cassius Adair tracing the digital labor of women of color, through Alexis Pauline Gumbs‘ poetic communion with M. Jacqui Alexander‘s essaying the decolonial possibilities opened by This Bridge. The lectures were rushed and low-fi, modest attempts to offer moments of intellectual nourishment, perhaps, or at least a place for students to put their thoughts for a time.

And we revised the writing assignments. We turned towards experience, towards the senses. Our Ethnic Studies diaspora of students of color and queer students and white students and student parents and first gen students and returning students and system impacted students and undocumented students had something to offer this moment, and one another, through their collective imagination–“seldom recorded and hardly honored,” as Cherríe Moraga puts it, yet perhaps glimpsing something beyond, more fulsome, more just.

To read the entries by students click here!