Participatory Literacy Practices Among a Virtual Collective of Queer and Jewish White Immigrants

• In Event: Telling Our Own Stories, Together: Singularity and Solidarity in Literacy Collectives

Abstract

Objectives:
Critical race scholars and activists have urged white people to challenge their “possessive investment in whiteness” beyond the benign notion of privilege (Lipshitz, 1998; Lorde, 1984; Leonardo, 2004). Among white Americans, immigrants who are read as white in the U.S. are active in the racializing process of “becoming white” and thus, may reveal its workings (Baldwin, 1948; Brodkin, 1998). While most scholarly work on whitened immigrants has extended only through the 1950s, the post-Soviet Jewish diaspora of the 1980s and 90s serves as an ideal case study for understanding racialization in the last three decades (Brodkin, 1998). This study engages with the participatory, literacy-based work of a virtual collective of white, queer and gender- marginalized post-Soviet Jewish immigrants who converged to understand their complex racialized identities and build toward a vision of collective liberation.

Perspective(s):
This study is informed by theoretical perspectives from cultural studies (Hall, 1996) and critical sociocultural literacy (Bakhtin, 1981; Freire, 2018; Hull, 2006). Hall (1996) frames identity as a site for self-articulation: a relational process of negotiating subjectification and subjecthood via discursive practices. Drawing on this conceptualization, I analyze how participants make sense of their identities and social positions through dialogue and cultural production with others of shared backgrounds, remaking themselves in the process as individuals and social subjects.

Methods:
This study asks: how did participants make meaning of their white immigrant identities and positionalities within a literacy-based participatory virtual context? What were the relational, political, and creative affordances and limitations of these virtual meetings?

Data sources:
Data was collected over the course of ten months of a year-long qualitative study of the literacy practices of a group of 23 white, queer, post-Soviet Jewish 1.5 and 2nd generation immigrants in the U.S. and Canada. Data included 40 hours of audio-visual recordings of participant collaboration, transcripts of ten semi-structured participant interviews, and 50 multimodal artifacts produced for the group’s printed zine publication.

Results:
While diverse in gender, ability, and religious observance, participants shared experiences of estrangement from their communities of origin and from American-dominated spaces. Data analysis suggests that collaborative discursive practice in the group affirmed identities that had previously been hidden, silenced, or shamed, offering participants a site of belonging they dubbed “semya” - family. The process of “rooting” into their histories and identities opened up space for participants to deepen their understanding of whiteness, learn from each others’ activism, and articulate their stake in collective liberation. Furthermore, as the group shared their cultural production with wider audiences, participants grappled with the complexity of speaking from nuanced whitened subject positions.

Significance:
The participatory dialogical and literacy-based work of this collective offers an emergent framework for rooting into historical subject positions in the service of healing, justice, and co-liberation, a kind of “radical diasporism” (Kaye, 2007). Findings suggest the creative and political potential of virtual literacy collectives to support immigrants in countering assimilation and working toward collective justice.

Author

• Sophia Sobko, University of California - Berkeley