Transnational Imagination and Oral Storytelling Among Global Peers

• In Event: 35.040 - Literacies Across Local, Global, and Translocal Imaginaries: Ethnographies of Becoming Transnational

Abstract

Blommaert (2005), Pennycook (2010) and other transnational literacy theorists (Medina 2010; Maira & Soep 2005) argue that texts and identities are transcultural and translocated; and therefore constitute and are constituted by histories of power within particular spaces. According to Pennycook (2010), the analytic task of interpreting language practices across spaces includes an account of “linguistic landscaping…the active production of space through language” which “allows us to see how different linguistic resources are used, different worlds evoked, different possibilities engaged in as people use the linguistic wherewithal around them” (p.69). Such research resists broad categorizations of youth in terms of their presumed national and cultural identities. Like other researchers of youth transcultural literacies (c.f. Ek 2009; Lee 2005; Ngo 2010) I look to the ways youth actively construct intersections of identities and spaces that rupture the segregated world of schooling.
I focus on youth ‘co-narrations’ (Ochs & Capps 2001) and related navigations of power and identity among global peers within the space of an informal, in-school, lunchtime story club. I am interested in how immigrant and non-immigrant youth use oral storytelling to ‘landscape’ and recreate the places they imagine and live in transnationally as they also reconstitute the meaning of a school space (library) and their identities within their school and community. Drawing on more than thirty storytelling events with sixth-seventh grade youth, I examine how they describe, claim, remake, and value the places they live in, whether imagined or real/everyday.
Fifteen youth, representing a Midwestern middle school’s nationally, ethnically, and racially diverse population, participated in story club 10-12 times each year, between January –May, 2009-2011. Drawing on critical ethnography (Madison 2012), I worked within the school to understand how a setting might be organized to allow for a ‘fracture (Weiss & Fine 2004) ‘in an otherwise closed system’ of interaction between immigrant and non-immigrant youth. The lunchtime story club invited youth to initiate and develop a wide range of narrative topics and forms. All sessions were documented using video/audio recording and fieldnotes. All stories were organized chronologically and topically to identify continuing themes and tellers. Ethnopoetic transcription (Hymes 1994) enabled analysis of narrative forms for selected tellings.
For this presentation, data analysis focuses on one episode of jointly narrated storytelling (Ochs & Capps 2001) among 3 boys who merged elements from traditional Cambodian, Appalachian, Savladoreñan and contemporary US sci-fi films to create a variant of Jack the Giant Killer. Through narrative theory, especially the growing scholarship in ‘small stories’ analysis (c.f., Bamberg 2011; Juzwik 2009; Poveda 2004) and transnational discourse theory I argue that linguistic landscaping can be seen in the ways youth claim authority and evaluate one another’s imagined worlds as they also draw on and transform one another’s transcultural knowledge to create new story forms and images. This analysis highlights the ways youth co-construct identities and visions of co-existence through jointly constructed narratives. In so doing, this research disrupts discourses of insurmountable differences among youth that are often used to legitimate practices of cultural segregation and linguistic isolation.

Author

• Patricia E. Enciso, The Ohio State University