Capturing Little Africa: Immigrant Youth Re-Presentations of Home in Thirdspace

• In Event: Roundtable Session 6
  In Roundtable Session: Curriculum Beyond Policy and Practice: A Symposium on Research in Curriculum for Postqualitative Times

Abstract

For Henri Lefebrve (1991), spatial arrangement and social interaction are largely about representation. Representations of space—the concepts that lay the blueprints for how space is organized—affect how people interact in space. Images, language, events, values and other signs associated with a place provide important indicators about why and how to enter and embody space. Immigrant youth are often described as living in thirdspaces at the intersection of their multiple homes and their evolving connection to these places (Anzaldua, 1987; Soja, 1996). Thirdspace and borderland literature largely study Latina/o youth who physically migrate between the US and homes outside the US (Sanchez, 2007). Their thirdspace experience is pronounced because they physically inhabit multiple locations that refuse corroborating signification by one another. African immigrants need not travel (and in this study are unable) to the continent to “return” to Africa; they encounter Africa on billboards, in curriculum, and in popular media. In New York City, they enter African apartment complexes, groceries, churches, community centers, and businesses. How do such encounters shape how young people negotiate the multiple senses of home(s)?

To understand how African immigrant youth embody representational space, this study employed Youth Participatory Action research (Cammarota & Fine, 2008). The youth chose two projects: (1) to document their lives and the lives of other Africans in NYC and (2) to critique how they and their homes are perceived by White and Black Americans. To address the first question, youth conducted walking tours of Harlem and Brooklyn (with their respective “Little Africas”), mapped these communities, and documented experiences using photography and interviews. The youth chose photography, short films with interview clips, and collages as methods for showcasing their African lives in NYC and critiquing how they perceived their first homes to be represented in the United States. This paper presentation focuses less on the analysis of the representations students produced and more on the processes of enacting those methods. There is significance in what these methods do and do not enable. The struggles the youth experienced carrying out their research and depicting it to others reveals some of the challenges of thirdspace living and representation. Efforts to document life in New York, even as insiders to African communities, were met with distrust. Their subjects did not always welcome our youth photographers even after developing a script that shared their intentions of re-dressing common portrayals of African communities. Their subjects doubted the ability to be read by those seeing the images. The young people themselves struggled verbally with representing their work. Was any given representation a depiction of “Fulani” or “Conakry” or “Guinea” or “Africa”? The scales were not mutually exclusive but the concepts and depictions not universal. The work with these methods creates discussion about what it means to know, what is possible to know, and how to know within colonial worldview. The complexity of coming to know, re-present, and navigate thirdspace and using this to understand firstspace and homes already departed are explored further in the complete paper.

Author

• Sandra Schmidt, Teachers College, Columbia University