Reginald Eldridge Jr
Reginald Eldrige Jr. believes that the richest learning experiences engage the spirit and the intellect and aims to aid in the better being of the worlds through inquiry and reflection.
At the University of South Florida’s Africana Studies Department, his thesis work centered on a conversation between Sylvia Wynter’s notion of the “Ceremony” as a (ritual) site for the inauguration of epistemic shift and Black (performative and literary) artistic practice. Since finishing the program, his pedagogical and creative practices have expanded upon these and many other interests. He is currently preoccupied with Black narrative, sonic (especially jazz) and visual tradition, African American and Afro-Diasporic onto-historiographical practices, poetry, philosophy, and outer and inner space(s).
He believes that learning is lifelong and a life-expanding experience, with a classroom as its sacred space. Since 2019, he has taught high-school American History and Government in Brooklyn.
Curriculum
Defining “creative” here in the tradition of those who posit an energetic flow (as the Yoruba asé, or the Bantu ntu) which animates being and gives meaning to matter, he intends to produce a multimedia exploration of creative practices in Benin. These media will include visual and sculptural work, narrative, and ritual practice. His intentions are to begin to develop a curriculum which explores how these works resonate with one another, with the historical (and what might be called historiographical) practices of the region, and with transatlantic practices that developed through the slave trade, instances of Black creative expression in the New World.