“Where Our Forefathers Come From”: An Archival and Ethnographic Study of Black American Storytelling About Africa (Poster 13)

• In Event: AERA Promising Scholarship in Education Research: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

From the moment of the forced arrival of the first enslaved Black person in the United States, chattel slavery has dictated the relationship between what it means to be Black and what it means to be literate. For the past 400 years, Black people have been cast as criminal readers, nonreaders, reluctant readers, and similar labels of deficit. ​​While many studies have documented and disputed the hegemonic narrative of Black deficiency, little research challenges the assumption that slavery is anything more than distal history in the literate lives of Black people today. Drawing on theories of temporal nonlinearity that interpret contemporary Black experiences through the lens of slavery and its afterlives, this paper is part of a larger dissertation project exploring Black literate lives under enslavement and in the present. In this paper, I analyze the ways Africa recurs in the Black literate imagination. I place a critical textual analysis of select Federal Writers’ Project Slave Narratives in conversation with student work from a year-long ethnographic study in which I serve as a participant observer of 20 Black children’s literate lives in and out of school. This methodological approach offers a unique perspective into the throughlines between the barriers to literacy faced by both enslaved people and Black children today, as well their shared literacy practices and aspirations for the future. A preliminary finding from this work is an enduring theme of Africa as a source of inspiration for endurance, escape, and cultural reclamation in Black storytelling practices.

Author

• CoCo Massengale, Stanford University