Chapter 7: Intersecting Race, Language, and Identity: Toward a Sensuous Curriculum of Investment

Curriculum, it seems, has different interests for different people, especially when it comes to psychic and emotional investment. Here, one invests where one sees oneself mirrored. Referencing a published study (Ibrahim, 2011, 2014), my aim in this chapter is to discuss fragments from that study using the concepts of “investment,” “sensuous,” and “sensuality.” The study focuses on a group of continental African youth who enter, so to speak, a “rhizome of Blackness,” where Blackness is not one but multiple categories with multiple meanings and frames of reference. The end result, I will show, is, first, learning Black English as a Second Language (BESL) (instead of so-called “standard English” or ESL) and, second, taking up and investing into Hip-Hop cultural identity, which these young people access in and through Black popular culture. I will offer, in conclusion, a terse discussion on what I am calling a ‘sensual curriculum of investment.’