Women’s radical cultural criticism: reflections and projections on teaching with Fredi Washington and Claudia Jones

In the recent publication of The Ghost Reader: Recovering Women’s Contributions to Media Studies, Hristova, Dorsten and Stabile ask readers to imagine structuring their modules around expanded foundations and thus transforming the arc of development. Taking this call for expanded imaginative teaching seriously, this presentation explores teaching with Fredi Washington and Claudia Jones on the undergraduate module “Cultural Dispatches: Practical Criticism and Journalism” (final year | Bangor University, Wales, UK). In its first iteration, the module rooted social justice activism as an essential component of cultural criticism, by using Washington’s original 1940s columns from the weekly Harlem newspaper People’s Voice. The presentation reflects, with the module’s students, on teaching and learning with Washington; and projects on further developments by centering Claudia Jones’s 1950s political and cultural work in London’s West Indian Gazette and Afro-Asian Caribbean News.