Remaking the World Through the Word: Multimodal Fiction Writing as a Fugitive Literacy Practice

• In Event: 51.032 - Finding Freedom and Fugitivity in Literacies: Multimodal Narratives as Lived Resistance in Educational Spaces

Abstract

For several days in January 2003, thousands of people poured into the streets of Porto Alegre, Brazil, shouting, “another world is possible!” (Hammond, 2003). The crowd was a gathering of social activists communing at the World Social Forum, a symposium for those “committed to building a planetary society directed towards fruitful relationships among Humankind and between it and the Earth” (Caruso, 2016, p. 414). The crowd’s chant communicated dissatisfaction with the unrest ravaging the world, and hope for a different world. The possibility of “another world”— particularly one where Blackness exists away from the dominance of Whiteness—fuels many Black Studies scholars. This paper, situated at the intersection of Black Studies in education and critical literacies, embraces that hopeful possibility, and concerns itself with the utility of fiction writing as a method for making a world—actual or imagined—wherein Blackness is human(ized). Specifically, I ask: How does the fugitive literacy practice of writing multimodal fiction narratives that center Blackness inform students’ makings of another more equitable and just world?  
The notion of “fugitivity” is fundamental to this inquiry’s theoretical framework. As Campt (2014) explains, “the concept of fugitivity highlights the tension between the acts or flights of escape and creative practices of refusal, nimble and strategic practices that undermine the category of the dominant” [emphasis added]. In this paper, I position multimodal fiction writing as an exemplar of creative literacy practices of refusal. This positioning merges the idea of fugitivity (Moten, 2018; Campt, 2014) with an understanding of literacy practices as “particular ways of thinking about and doing reading and writing in cultural contexts” (Street, 2000, p. 78). Thus, fugitive literacy practices are envisioned here as literacy practices that creatively inspire thinking, reading, and writing that strategically refuse cultural hegemony (Gramsci, 1971).  
This self-study (Hamilton & Pinnegar, 2010; Loughran, 2007) was enacted in “Introduction to Black Studies,” a semester-long university course that I taught. There were 27 students enrolled, 16 of whom consented to the study. I collected data using three methods: writing (Richardson, 2000); interviewing; and surveying. Participants read and then wrote multimodal fictional narratives that centered Blackness. Hence, the corpus of data was participants’ multimodal writings, and responses to interview questions and surveys about the writing project. I used content analysis to analyze data interpretively.
My preliminary findings indicate that the practice of multimodal fiction writing informed students’ makings of another world that refuses the positioning of Blackness as subhuman by freeing students to feel: 1) inspired; 2) introspective and self-reflective; and 3) emboldened.
Ultimately, this study demonstrates how multimodal fiction writing, as a fugitive literacy practice, provides a tool for strategically (re)constructing the university classroom a site of social change. Moreover, it shows that the practice of multimodal fiction writing can not only deepen students’ understandings of and engagements with the injustices of this hegemonic world, but also propel them to ponder and enact action driven by a concrete vision of another more equitable and just world.

Author

• Esther Ohito, Denison University