Teaching Gloria Anzaldúa as an American Philosopher

Authors

Alexander V. Stehn, The University of Texas Rio Grande ValleyFollow

Document Type

Book Chapter

Publication Date

2020

Abstract

Many of my first students at Anzaldúa’s alma mater read Borderlands/La Frontera and concluded that Anzaldúa was not a philosopher. Hostile comments suggested that Anzaldúa’s intimately personal and poetic ways of writing were not philosophical. In response, I created “American Philosophy and Self-Culture” using backwards course design and taught variations of it in 2013, 2016, and 2018. Students spend nearly a month exploring Anzaldúa’s works, but only after reading three centuries of U.S.-American philosophers who wrote in deeply personal and literary ways about self-transformation, community-building, and world-changing. The sections of this chapter: 1) describe why my first students rejected Anzaldúa as a philosopher in terms of the discipline’s parochialism; 2) present Anzaldúa’s broader understanding of herself as a philosopher; 3) summarize my reconstructed Anzaldúa-inspired American Philosophy course and outline some assignments; 4) discuss how my students respond to Borderlands/La Frontera when we read it through the lens of self-culture; and 5) explain my attempt to shape the subdiscipline of American Philosophy by teaching Anzaldúa to specialists at the 2017 Summer Institute in American Philosophy.

Comments

Copyright the Arizona Board of Regents.

Recommended Citation

Stehn, Alexander. “Teaching Gloria Anzaldúa as an American Philosopher.” Teaching Gloria E. Anzaldúa: Pedagogy and Practice for Our Classrooms and Communities, edited by Margaret Cantú-Sánchez et al., University of Arizona Press, 2020, pp. 296–313.

Publication Title

Teaching Gloria E. Anzaldúa: Pedagogy and Practice for Our Classrooms and Communities