Dismantling the Organism: Race and Power in a First Nations Music Video

• In Event: Literacy as a Body Without Organs: Democratic Assemblages, Multiplicities, and Intensities of Multimodal Practices

Abstract

Against the backdrop of historical oppression of First Nations people, and white literacy norms, the aim is to “dismantle the organism” of schooled literacy (Deleuze and Guattari 1987), to show how to embed racial identities in authentic ways in literacy practices with digital media. This presentation describes a participatory, multimodal literacy research project with an Indigenous school community in which students did not have to forfeit their culture in exchange for literacy education. Bringing together a white researcher, a talented local filmmaker, and an Indigenous teacher, elementary students (9.5-11.5 years old) became the stars – screenwriters, actors, and musicians - of their own short music video about their cultural ways of knowing and being entitled “We are the People of the First Nations”.

This presentation will challenge assumptions of race, demonstrating that race matters to literacy practices in an Indigenous school community in Australia. Drawing on principles of Critical Race Theory (Ladson-Billings 2009), the author sees that post-colonial societies are not racially neutral, normal and invisible. Similarly, mainstream literacy practices are not racially neutral. They are based on Eurocentric ideals of education, white culture, literate identities, and individualistic success. As this research demonstrates, many First Nations people believe that schooling has failed if it does not develop a student’s Indigenous racial identity.

The music video created by Indigenous students is the basis of a multimodal analysis of constructions of race in audio, image and linguistic design (Use link to view: https://youtu.be/nMJWzdr2BBA). The analysis applies Critical Race Theory (CRT) (Lynn and Dixon 2013) to identify the key themes of race in the video, combined with multimodal analysis to identify how racial identities are configured through the multimodal design elements – audio, linguistic, visual, spatial and gestural – and other semiotic features within these categories (Jewitt 2011).

Key issues of race and power that emerged as significant in the music video included the following: i) self-determination and pride, ii) respect for self, family, mob, people and nation, iii) connectedness to specific language regions and land, and iv) Indigenous lore – cultural beliefs and traditions passed on orally. This knowledge is urgently needed, because in spite of intentions to the contrary, schooling continues to sort children along social class, race, and gender lines, reproducing inequalities in educational outcomes.

The research is significant because literacy has always been deeply entangled with race, yet there have been few studies of how Indigenous Australian children use multimodal design in school to voice the cultural values and identities that are most central to their lives and the lives of their community.

References

Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.
Jewitt, C. 2011. The Routledge Handbook of Multimodal Analysis. (Paperback ed.). London: Routledge.
Ladson-Billings. 2009. "Race Still Matters: Critical Race Theory in Education". In The Routledge International Handbook of Critical Education, edited by M. W. Apple, A. W. and L. A. Gandin, 110-123. New York: Routledge.
Lynn, M., and A. Dixon, eds. 2013. Handbook of Critical Race Theory in Education. UK: Routlege.

Author

• Kathy Ann Mills, Queensland University of Technology