The Dark Fantastic: Emancipating the Imagination Through an Urban Literacy Practitioner-Researcher Partnership

• In Event: Communities of Inquiry as Literacy Innovation: The Role of the Imagination and Local Knowledge in a Period of Common Core Standards

Abstract

Literacy researcher Allan Luke has suggested that we characterize the purpose of English language arts education as “political interventions, struggles over the formation of ideologies and beliefs, identities and capital” (Luke, 2004, p. 86). These interventions and struggles happen in classrooms all over the nation through instruction in language, literature, and history. Sociologist Basil Bernstein (1996) further characterizes this pedagogical process as developing horizontal solidarity through the transmission of mythological discourses. Mythological discourses, serve two functions: (1) to celebrate and produce a united, apparently common national consciousness; and (2) to obscure or render less visible social hierarchies within and outside of schools. The transmission and internalization of these mythic metanarratives about the nation’s origin, achievements, and destiny are critical to societal and cultural reproduction (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990) and “express views about what should count as knowledge and as displays of knowledge and of achievement” (Rex & Murnen, 2002, p. 789).
Middle school students are invited to internalize mythic metanarratives of American culture that are both historical and imaginative. However, the “uses of enchantment” for those who have been subjugated, minoritized, and/or oppressed within the larger culture diverges from those from groups with privilege. In the Anglo-American literary canon that is most often taught and privileged in secondary English Language Arts education, the Dark Other is the spectacle, the monstrous Thing that is the root cause of the hesitation, of the ambivalence, and of the uncanny (Bhabha, 1994; Edwards, 2009; Ricoeur, 2004; Todorov, 1973). The traditional purpose of the Dark Other in the fantastic is to unsettle, to cause unrest. Thus, those readers and hearers who have been endarkened by society can never be plausible conquering heroes nor prizes to be won in these stories, unless the fantastic tale is meant to be comedic, tongue-in-cheek, a wink and a nod that breaks the fourth wall and assures audiences that this is a parody of the fantastic, not the real Thing. Because the Dark Other is always already the problem, and not the happy ending, it is the Dark Other that these stories must end, once and for all.
This study focuses on students’ reading choices, and how they responded to historical and imaginative literature that positions students of color and/or “dark” characters in problematic ways, through a focus on student text selection and discussion in a Philadelphia public middle school’s literacy program. Data that was collected over the course of one academic year included records of materials students checked out from the school library media center, reading logs from English language arts classes, and interviews and focus groups with the principal investigator and student researchers. The results show the ways that African American adolescents construct historical metanarratives after choosing, reading, and responding to children’s and young adult literature; how they narrate their own personal, family, and community histories after choosing, reading, and responding to children’s and young adult literature; how technology and the digital age affects and influences students’ text selection, modes of reading, and composing.

Author

• Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, University of Pennsylvania