Quiet Methodologies: Humility in the Humanities

Reimagining humanities scholarship with humility and inclusive attention How might foregrounding the writings of colonized peoples transform the ways we work in the humanities? In an era dominated by loud political rhetoric, Suzanne Bost advocates for quieter modes of scholarship: intellectual humility rather than ego, collaboration and conversation rather than singular argumentation, continual reflection and revision rather than defensiveness, and a willingness to believe in different ways of being and knowing rather than adhering to academic norms. With Quiet Methodologies, she demonstrates practical decolonial scholarship and proposes alternative approaches for fostering meaningful engagement. Turning to feminist, queer, and decolonial writings from Gloria Anzalda, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Audre Lorde, and many others, Bost reflects on what we do when we work with literature, culture, and ideas. She weaves together multiple voices, methods of writing, and culturally diverse epistemologies and uses creative devices such as collage, her own original poetry, revision, lists, images, and conversation to disengage academic thought and writing from colonial theories and archives that have passed as neutral. Eschewing conventional monograph formats, her work embraces a reciprocal and heterogeneous learning process with profound ethical implications. Part of a movement of reimagining research and education through care, Quiet Methodologies is a powerful exploration of the possibilities of criticism during crises. It encourages readers to be visionary and pragmatic, challenging current conditions and offering alternative ideas for the future of the humanities. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.

Table of Contents:
Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Digging up the Relics of Colonialism 1. Decolonial Silence and Noise 2. The Gloria Evangelina AnzaldÚa Papers and Literary Research Methodologies 3. Changing My Mind with Ana Castillo 4. Pods, Undercommons, and the Futures of Graduate Study Inconclusive: A Collage toward Future Knowledge Notes Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Suzanne Bost is professor of English at Loyola University Chicago. She is author of several books, including Shared Selves: Latinx Memoir and Ethical Alternatives to Humanism.

Review :
"Suzanne Bost’s book is a powerful exploration of literary criticism during an age of crises, when planetary, human, and other-species futurities are at stake. It privileges a careful, porous reading of texts that center the decolonial and the resistant. Bost offers a nuanced reflexivity that never crosses into navel-gazing-and asks us to reimagine how we make scholarly arguments through a method that is dialogical, critical, and even tender."-Piya Chatterjee, coeditor of The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent "Quiet Methodologies showcases post-oppositional approaches to conventional academic scholarship, creating new opportunities for provocative multispecies, cross-temporal conversations and inter-dimensional communities of knowledge creators. Replacing the combative critique that so often dominates contemporary academic life with intellectual humility, radical inclusivity, invitational pedagogies, and alchemical dialogues, Suzanne Bost offers much-needed possibilities for transformation. I can’t wait to share this book with my students!"-AnaLouise Keating, author of The AnzaldÚan Theory Handbook