Envisioning "the Wake" in Music: Youth Songwriting as "That We Already Know to Be Present"

• In Event: 79.020 - Division G Vice-Presidential Session: Educational Research in the Wake: Becoming "Undisciplined" Post-Truth, Post-Trump

Abstract

Novelist Toni Morrison (1998), in The Site of Memory, draws attention to long histories of literacy enacted as action-taking by Black authors writing of Black communities. Morrison notes that she seeks, “to rip that veil drawn over ‘proceedings too terrible to relate.’ The exercise is also critical for any person who is Black, or who belongs to any marginalized category, for, historically, we were seldom invited to participate in the discourse even when we were its topic” (p. 91). We thus examine youth of color extending meanings of histories of racial violence and schooling inequities across three songs written in a literacy-and-songwriting initiative. We build across Sharpe’s (2016) framings of Black annotation and Black redaction, and Morrison’s (1988) conceptualizing of a “literary archeology,” in analyzing youth-composed songs across Author 2's critical ethnography, ongoing since spring 2016. Data sources across the broader inquiry have included ethnographic observations, focus-group interviews, and more than 200 multimodal artifacts. Analysis for the current inquiry involved open- and closed-coding processes, in conversation with analytic questions situated in Baker-Bell, Butler, and Johnson’s (2017) call for teachers, teacher educators, and educational researchers to consider their “responsibility” in enacting teaching and research as stance-taking with youth and communities of color (p. 123).

In a post-truth era distinguished by popularized narratives of marginalization, youth songwriters evoke, as Sharpe (2016) asserts, an underscoring of what it may mean in writing to “make manifest ‘humanity’ that we already know to be present” (p. 116). A youth songwriter, for example, opens their first verse, “Who do you call when you falling, / When you dying? / Why do you fear of my skin?” Peers in the songwriting group pointedly name the song “Oppression,” youths’ title selection thematically underscored in a second youth, singing the chorus: “Officer please, be my hero, / Save my life, don’t be my enemy / Why do you have to disagree.”

In the song, “I’m stuck in this box,” youth songwriters chronicle a public school day, period by period: “The teacher’s writing on the board / I’m so bored / give me more / more than books.” Underscoring Sharpe’s framing of Black annotation and Black redaction, and the purposeful marking and implicating of racial violence as systemic schooling inequities, youth call out to a teacher, “give me more.” We further understand youth’s asserting of their role, across literacy activities, as participants to their schools and communities, in Morrison’s (1998) histories of literacy, sustained across Black communities, an evoking of possibilities as “literary archeology” across which, in youth songwriting words and music suggest “a reconstruction of a world, [...] an exploration of an interior life that was not written (p. 95). We understand youth, in this way, posting to Soundcloud.com, a music-sharing sites, the completed songs that youth had their beginnings as lived experiences, then drafted as journal entries, then recorded as lyrics and music in a studio setting. We understand youth across songwriting as rendering visible possibilities, vividly, of broadened, global meanings, as writers, and in writing.

Authors

• Bessie Dernikos, Florida Atlantic University

• Vaughn W.M. Watson, Michigan State University