Politics in Action: Teaching Alice Walker’s Meridian

What feminist “classics” we use to introduce the field of WGSS and how we teach these texts are examples of how pedagogy enacts politico-affective relationships. Returning to texts in different contexts is one of the pleasures of teaching for me. While my syllabus for the introductory course in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies has changed over the years, one feminist “classic”—Alice Walker’s novel Meridian—has remained in the mix and continues to generate enlivening discussion and often intense critical reflection and complicated emotional responses among students. Meridian is one of the most generative texts for exploring conceptual, historical, formal, affective, and political questions, and the interrelationship between these kinds of questions. A multi-layered question-based pedagogical approach provides the scaffolding for all my teaching and also for my analysis in this essay of both Walker’s text and my experiences teaching it. I discuss why and how I teach Meridian in my introductory course in WGSS, exploring the ways the text helps illuminate some key concepts in the field (including intersectionality, the personal is political, and womanism), historical examples of diverse politics in action, and experiments with form in order to tell politico-affective stories of violence and trauma, love and endurance.