Racial Literacy in Our Post-Truth Age: Cultivating Fugivity and Collective Response-ability Through Literature and Collage

• In Event: 28.072 - Literary Study as Transformative Practice in a Post-Truth Age

Abstract

Purposes: Racism in the U.S. endures through thorny and slippery sets of material-discursive practices that shift across the centuries but nonetheless persist, albeit in new iterations. Franklin-Phipps and Rath argued, "Thinking about race is never finished" (2018, p. 144). We agree. We take up earlier work on racial literacy and expand it through arts-informed practices that highlight the always unfolding, never totalizable iterations of racism and the always unfolding racial literacies we need in order to materialize more just schooling practices in a time of "racial chaos" (Johnson, et al, 2016, p. 61).Theoretical Framework: Building from the substantial and important work on racial literacy (e.g. Dutro, Kazemi, & Balf, 2005; Franklin-Phipps & Rath, 2018; Guinier, 2004; Rogers & Mosely, 2006; Sealey-Ruiz, 2012, 2013; Sealey-Ruiz & Greene, 2011, 2015; Skerrett, 2011; Twine, 2003), we add the concepts of Barad's (2007) "cuts" and Patel's (2016) "fugivity" to explore how art-making and literature invite preservice teachers to read and compose race in collectively response-able ways.

Mode of Inquiry: Franklin-Phipps and Rath (2018) enact what they call a "collage pedagogy" in their pre-service English education course, and like them we brought collage and artmaking in general to bear on our teaching and research. We used collaging to produce data from the class, engage in analysis, and inquire about the shifting nature of racial literacies (see Franklin-Phipps & Rath, 2018; Gertenblatt, 2013; Holbrook & Pourchier, 2014; Kay, 2013) in our interpretivist, arts-informed study (Barone & Eisner, 2012).

Data Production: The focal data for this study include: 26 participant-created collages about racism, 8 audiotaped and transcribed small and whole group classroom discussions of race, and 40+ visual-verbal journals featuring literary texts such as The Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois, 1994/1903), The Fire Next Time (Baldwin, 1993), and Citizen: An American Lyric (Rankine, 2014), and All American Boys (Reynolds & Kiely, 2015).

Substantiated Conclusions: Students arrived in our anti-racist oriented English education program thinking that they were somewhat enlightened regarding the operations of racism in the U.S. We found that they had little experience reading literature written by Black authors, with the exception of a few writers from the Harlem Renaissance. Based upon this, we added several texts to the reading list so that students would have more knowledge about America's sustained relationship with racial violence and discrimination and the long tradition of Black creativity and resilience. The artwork participants created in response to their readings demonstrates their shifting conceptions how race operates and their changing ways of relating to the world as a result of these engagements.

Scholarly Significance: Johnson, et al, 2017 argued that we live in times of racial chaos, times when literal and symbolic bullets are snuffing out possibilities for students of color living fully in the world. Teachers must learn flexible, "temporary-sense-making practices for perceiving and responding" to racism in and out of schools (Franklin-Phipps & Rath, 2018, p. 148) and the power of highlighting and inviting Black resiliency and creativity.

Authors

• Karen Spector, The University of Alabama

• Patricia Elmore, The University of Alabama - Tuscaloosa