A "Celebration of African American Life and Freedom": Researching Free-Writing as a Fugitive Literacy Practice

• In Event: Seeking Routes to Freedom: Fugitive Methodologies for Rethinking Community Research, Literacies, and Engagement

Abstract

I begin with this likely damning confession: I am not wholly invested in being a researcher and teacher educator. Refrain from judgement, however, and consider that I am a Black scholar navigating the wake—that is, one ensconced in “the conceptual frame of and for living blackness in the diaspora in the still unfolding aftermaths of Atlantic chattel slavery” (Sharpe, 2016, p. 2). For survivance, I enact freeing research and teaching in this enclosed space; therefore, I research and teach in ways that “attend to the spectacular but also to those quotidian experiences of unbreathability where really the ability to fully live in a Black body is continually curtailed, foreclosed” (Sharpe in Lambert, 2017, p. 52). Stated otherwise, in subversive response to the terrors of social death that constrain Black lives and bodies in the afterlife of slavery (Sharpe, 2016), I endeavor to research and teach what Black liberation can look, sound, smell, taste, and feel like. Furthermore, as an English teacher educator, I utilize reading and writing as tools for inquiry in my pedagogical efforts to “ask the student to learn what he or she feels freedom to be” (Lester, 1979, p. 37).
This paper details my pursuit of methodological and pedagogical freedom, illuminating the challenges and possibilities—plus the tensions lodged in interstitial spaces—that surface when Black liberation is desired and welcomed as a worthwhile (learning) outcome for reading and writing which centers the creativity, imaginations, knowledges, and lived experiences of Black people. Notions of survivance, fugitivity, and literacy are woven into my conceptual framework. Vizenor (2008) states that “[s]urvivance is an active resistance and repudiation of dominance, obtrusive themes of tragedy, nihilism, and victimry” (p. 11). Resistance and refusal are themes in Campt’s (2014) idea of fugitivity, which positions this as a verb that “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.” In this paper, Campt’s conceptualization of fugitivity is complemented by a perception of literacy as “the process of using reading, writing, and oral language to extract, construct, integrate, and critique meaning through interaction and involvement with multimodal texts in the context of socially situated practices” (Frankel, Becker, Rowe, & Pearson, 2016, p. 7).
With survivance, fugitivity, and literacy as conceptual anchors, I theorize and operationalize free-writing as a fugitive literacy practice—that is, as a creative writing practice which refuses the dehumanizing themes of tragedy, trauma, pessimism, and victimization that characterize Black life in dominant discourses circulating in public and social spheres. Using self-study (Loughran, 2007) and feminist critical discourse analysis (Lazar, 2007), I scrutinize the fictional narratives of two (self-identified) Black women who enrolled in a semester-long course that I taught. My analysis illustrates that free-writing resists the foreclosure of Black liberation by inviting ingenious constructions of fictive worlds wherein Black people—particularly Black women—experience freedom. Hence, free-writing invites possibilities for Black freedom in real spaces, including university classrooms that daringly engage writing and literacies as routes to Black liberation.

Author

• Esther O Ohito, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill