Unforgetting Black Literacies: Historical Embodied Practice Beyond School Walls

• In Event: Critical and Embodied Literacies: Narrations of Unforgetting by Intergenerational Women of Color

Abstract

What is literacy and who gets to be considered literate? Although I was born and raised in the US speaking English as my first language, my 4th grade teacher in South Carolina doubted my ability to be a literate, successful student. Without a single conversation with my family or an assessment for accurate measure, I was placed into ESOL and could not escape it until high school. Carrying multiple languages and literacies from my parents - a Jamaican mother and a Dominican father, I did not enter schools thinking there was only one way to speak or navigate in the world. Reflecting back on the African ancestors who were forcibly brought, their sense of literacy was very different, as 1740 marked the year when it became illegal for Black people to learn to read or write in SC. What does literacy mean, when these people still were literate in speaking, cultivating, performing, laboring, and other practices to navigate their real worlds in community?
As Carmen Kynard (2013) reminds us, literacy is not something that people have or do not have, but rather are practices that we utilize to navigate and make sense of our real worlds. What does literacy mean, when the practices of reading and writing were carefully guarded and restricted from Black people, and yet we know from enslaved narratives and newspaper ads searching for family that Black people have long known how to read and write? In considering how we unforget histories, it is important to consider the limits of historical archiving of Black literacy and to imagine a future where literacy across time can shape shift based on its users’ needs - whether for colonial physical safety and survival or contemporary academic exploration.

Author

• Chelsea Jimenez, University of South Carolina Beaufort