Mapping Adolescent Rebellion: Sag Harbor and the Intersection of Dissident Subcultures and Dominant Pedagogies

• In Event: Reinventing the Black Literary

Abstract

As the United States witnesses a new federal administration and a new Secretary of Education assumes power, no better time exists to interrogate and explore the intersections of American education and multiculturalism. Questions about pluralism in American schools are particularly important when considering the global rise of nationalism, xenophobia, and populism, which increasingly influences political interventions in all aspects of life.


In the United States, several studies point to the ongoing challenges African-American students face at elite preparatory and post-secondary institutions. The 2014 documentary "American Promise," for example, traces the psychological struggles that African-American students face in elite schools, where the dominant culture remains largely white-washed. In 2015, "The Atlantic" published a study detailing how black enrollment at elite universities has dropped since 1994. As these studies remind us, acculturation in educational settings remains largely imbalanced, with white culture remaining dominant.


Colson Whitehead’s 2009 novel, "Sag Harbor," emblematizes the resistance many African-American adolescents have to the imbalanced acculturation that exists in elite educational institutions. By considering how Whitehead’s novel conceives of and represents the summer vacation space, this paper examines how retreats like these contribute to the lived experience of African-American youth as they resist the white dominant culture that pervades elite schools. More specifically, the paper enlists the work of James Scott, a resistance theorist and sociologist, to consider how the novel reifies the importance of vacation spaces as a place for “everyday resistance.” Benji Cooper, Sag Harbor’s fifteen-year-old protagonist, is representative of the many black youth who still experience a racially polarized school culture. In Benji’s case, the privileging of white wealth, social status, and institutionalized pedagogy is nowhere more evident than in his predominantly white preparatory school. For Benji, though, his summer home at Sag Harbor is unlike school because it is a place where “we fit in.” Here, according to Benji, he would never encounter a “senior partner in the law firm of Cracker, Cracker, and Cracker,” who would fetishize him as a “little prince from an African country.” In Benji’s mind, the community is a place where he can resist the institutionalized mores and pedagogy of a dominant white culture by “catching up on nine months of black slang and other sundry soulful artifacts I’d missed out on.”


In "Weapons of the Weak" (1985) and "Domination and the Arts of Resistance" (1990), Scott uses the term “everyday resistance” to refer to an undeclared, patterned opposition to dominant cultures. Such resistance is mobilized by what he calls a “dissident subculture.” Part of a larger research project, this paper considers how communities like Sag Harbor function, in Scott’s words, as a “dissident subculture” that engages black youth in “everyday resistance.” Using Whitehead’s novel to read such spaces, the paper considers how geography and community can influence resistance. To that end, the paper raises vital questions about how the pedagogies of dominant cultures intersect with such resistance by tracing how place punctures and unravels the education the novel’s protagonist has internalized.

Author

• Benjamin D Batzer, University of Iowa