Beauty in Anguish: (Re)Membering as Resistance in Black Families From West Africa and the Caribbean

• In Event: Black Lives Matter, ¡Todas! Fugitive Formations in Latin America and the Caribbean

Abstract

In this article, memories in a Taino/Bahamian and Biafran family illustrate specific opportunities to forefront Black experiences, alongside an interrogation of anti-Black colonial frameworks. Using narrative and content analyses, we join personal memories with Haitian artist Francie Latour’s (2018) children’s storybook Auntie Luce’s Talking Paintings and Cuban author Margarita Engle’s (2011) historical poetry from Hurricane Dancers. Grounded in discourses from Black Geographies, Early Childhood, Children’s Literature and Migration, we theorize about the conditions in learning spaces that support practices of care for young children and their families who have become racialized as Black. Drawing on memories from traditional celebrations like weddings and Junkanoo, this work moves beyond excessively narrow representations of families to expose embodied communications, relationships with more-than-human beings, and ancestral liberatory practices. The findings offer a complicated illustration of care that looks beyond the precarity (Sharpe, 2016) to uphold nurturing love for young children with mahogany, chestnut and ash complexions.
For many young children, our racializing educational systems, ignore their humanity by muting or demeaning their family stories and experiences. The phenotype of Black and Brown skin tones in discourses around education renders distinctions in their experience hyper (in)visible (Dumas and Nelson, 2016; Muhammad & Haddix, 2016). In other words, even when researchers, artists and scholars in education name distinctions in racialized experiences, these features become the register for surveillance or exclusion in educational environments. Critical early childhood scholars (Nxumalo & ross, 2019; Perez & Saavedra, 2017; Dumas & Nelson, 2016) brilliantly examine the racial-colonial dimensions of representation in early learning spaces, particularly for children who have been historically targeted. In accepting responsibility to advance care for young children, education scholars can learn from families who uphold beauty while negotiating and resisting anti-Black frameworks. This work responds to this hyper (in)visibility by animating the details in a story as an illustration of complicated care across family memories and an offering for educational scholars.

Author

• Nnenna Odim, University of Texas at Austin