Pedagogy, Textured

This essay reflects on Carolyn Cooper’s research on Afro-Jamaican feminisms via literary history, literary criticism, and cultural studies and her use of that research in various pedagogical spaces. The author’s approach is personal and layered, working primarily through memories of being taught by Cooper in the mid- to late 1990s as a literature student at the University of the West Indies, Mona. These memories are lensed through a rereading of Cooper’s scholarship and also framed from the vantage point of the author being a university instructor now herself. Drawing from Cooper’s complex working out of the proverbial Jamaican woman “digging up” her own luck and thinking with her sophisticated verbal code-switching, with the materiality of her presence as a public intellectual, and with the closing of her 1993 Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender, and the “Vulgar” Body of Jamaican Popular Culture, where she re-encodes “textuality” with its rippled weave as “textile,” the author arrives at the idea of texture as a way to think with and through the example of Cooper’s work.