An "Enduring Disability" and the Policing of Urban Literacy Frontiers: Conceptualizing De-Literacy as a Process of Internal Colonialism

• In Event: Race, Coloniality, and Occupation: Interrogating Dominant Logics and Conceptualizing Emancipatory Possibilities

Abstract

This work examines the entanglements of settler colonialism and literacy to surface new understandings about the ways literacy and literacy education can be understood as a means and site of internal colonization. Examining U.S. educational and legal frameworks through a settler-colonial lens reveals a phenomenon occurring when internal colonialism intersects with literacies. This work coins this phenomenon as deliteracy, a term and concept introduced here and offered as an organizing principle for understanding how internal colonialism uses literacy and literacy education to replicate and accelerate settler colonial logics of destruction and dispossession. Through deliteracy, internal colonialism positions cultural and individual identities and literacies as colonial frontiers wherein non-ascendant, nonwhite literacies are subjected to erasure, subordination, commodification, and corruptive transformation.

Author

• Mark Latta, Marian University