Watery Linguistic Depths: Intergenerational Storytelling as Pedagogical Resistance & Geographic Reorientation

• In Event: Black Roots and Reservoirs: Reclaiming Black Education Through Radical Everyday Knowledge Cultivation

Abstract

Building on Edouard Glissant’s “submarine roots,” McKittrick & Woods (2007) describe Black geographies as the “oceanic history of [the] diaspora…integral to and entwining with…‘coloniality’s persistence’” (pp. 5). That is, to map Black genealogies is to dig into watery depths–upending Eurocentric ideologies of place. Though often celebrated, the watershed moment of Brown v. Board extended settler colonial persistence by exposing Black roots to the “white rage” (Love, 2024) of academic literacies and language. This paper explores this entangled linguistic legacy through the storytelling genealogies of two historically Black neighborhoods as mediated by the author. Through an auto-interactional analysis of interviews with the author’s elders, this paper discusses how Black epistemologies of education are passed to continue counternarratives that question dominant definitions of language, literacy, and equality.

Common sense notions of place and belonging situated in white supremacy have been undermined by the Black geographies since 1619–birthing, feeding, and nourishing the Black languages that carry Black knowledge. Intimately tied to the Atlantic and the waterways that are both sites of Black suffering and liberation, this non-normative mapping is “a network of branches, cultures, and relations that position black geographies and the oceanic history of diaspora as integral to and entwining with – rather than outside – what has been called “coloniality’s persistence”” (McKittrick & Woods, 2007, p. 5). While Black folx are no longer on the plantations of yesterday, white supremacy still dictates American ideologies.

In order to chart the Black educational geographies of Haiti in Rockville, MD. and Harrisburg, PA, I asked family elders to create maps of their neighborhoods and engage in interviews about their maps. These elders consisted of my father and five of his siblings (Rockville), as well as my mother and three of her cousins (Harrisburg). These elders completed their K-12 schooling during various phases of racial desegregation from its initial implementation following Brown v. Board to later attempts at rectification of de facto segregation. Through critical multimodal discourse analysis (CMDA), I analyze these maps and interviews as a subjective member of a conversation negotiating memory and meaning to create an intergenerational pedagogy of resistance (Rusoja, 2022).

By engaging CMDA, this paper decentralizes the whiteness that creates figured worlds (Gee, 2004) of Blackness to focus on how Black Language builds geographies through intergenerational exchange. Thus Black Language is the linguistic context through which I understand the specific connections between intergenerational storytelling within family, Black communal space, and understandings of education. Given context is strictly interrogated down to the socially-situated production and reception of a text (Ledin & Machin, 2019) in CMDA, I focus on the network of meaning-making beyond what is said. This takes into account gestures and movement within space.

Based on preliminary analysis, the data demonstrates an exclusion of formal schooling places from community, mediated by communicative and linguistic moves that emphasize a Blackness formed by local and generational knowledge counter to global epistemologies. Black geographies are thus the foundation of Black knowledge that evolves not under the demands of whiteness, but in response to individual and communal experiences molded by intergenerational relations.

Author

• Taylor Lewis, University of Maryland