Child Pedagogues of Dissent: Reading the Lessons of Young People in Literature and Performance

Session Submission Type: Paper Session: Traditional Format

Abstract

Childhood is itself pedagogical. Children of color in the past, in particular, mediate historical knowledge; structure understandings of race, resistance and voice; and challenge American Studies scholarship today. Young people of color are thus "pedagogues of dissent," who teach us to interrogate the very meanings of those terms by calling into question who may speak and listen, write and read, teach and learn. Recognizing children as pedagogues, both in and outside of formal learning spaces, unsettles normative conceptions of the roles of author and teacher. While the term pedagogue may ring negative, its etymology in the Latin term for a slave who took children to school registers a history of oblique approaches to education.

This panel demonstrates methodologies for hearing the lessons of children of color in American literature and performance, even in the context of minority young people’s limited opportunities to speak on their own terms. Children act as pedagogues in their roles as characters, as authors and as audiences, requiring an imaginative and flexible view of where agency lies. By becoming students of children’s bodily movements, poetic practices and readership, our panelists consider how childhoods of color can teach us to approach American Studies scholarship in inventively dissenting ways.

Allison Curseen reveals the signifying lessons of black children’s physical movements in antebellum texts. Examining a white abolitionist’s complaints about black children’s bodily conduct in light of the unruly movements of Harriet Wilson’s protagonist Frado, Curseen reads documents of schoolroom discipline as records of children’s gestures of dissent, a physical vocabulary of pedagogical contestation. Turning to children’s writing practices, Amy Fish argues that 1960s-70s adults turned to child poets of color to speak to America about racism and inequality. Examining the adaptation of minority children’s poetry into a hit Broadway musical, she presents children and adults as unequally positioned yet mutually influential collaborators in an aesthetic project of dissent. Contributing a metacritical perspective on literary childhoods, Marilisa Jiménez García identifies the terms by which Latinx literature for youth becomes visible in the academy. She proposes the trope of “side by side/ lado a lado” to map the interdisciplinary terrain of children’s literature and Latinx Studies, pedagogy and the humanities, in which Latinx youth literature can emerge as a subject of study. Michelle Martin approaches her role as chair and commenter from the perspective of children’s literature and education, including her interrogation in Brown Gold of what defines an African American picture book, as well as her current research on the children’s works of Arna Bontemps and Langston Hughes.

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• Michelle H Martin, University of Washington Seattle

Individual Presentations

• Burning the School: Reading Movement as a Way of Reading the Minor in American Archives - Allison S. Curseen, Baruch College (CUNY)

• Minority Youth Poetics from Page to Stage in circa-1970 America - Amy Fish, Harvard University

• At the Intersections of Latinx Studies and ChYALit - Marilisa Jimenez, Lehigh University

Comment

• Michelle H Martin, University of Washington Seattle