Tricking New Literacies

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In class this week, we are discussing Toward a Literacy of a Promise: Joining the African American Struggle.  We’ll pause and (re)look at pages 6-10—  two subsections called: 1) “School Literacy and the Discourses of Power”; 2) “Schooled Literacy and Traditional Forms of Literacy Instruction.”  Powell has taken theories of New Literacies Studies (NLS) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and really made that her own, in her own words/frames of reference, and politics of location.  We need to do the same… here is my version…

In simplest terms, in CDA and NLS, we think of schools as expecting and maintaining certain styles of speaking, writing, and being and thereby recycling power.  There are “prescriptive norms and values” for how you must write, speak, respond, ask questions, look, sit, think, act, walk, feel, question— how loud you do it, when, where, and how.  (We call these norms and values Discourses— with a capital “D”!) What researchers related to NLS and CDA are suggesting is that Anglo, upper middle class students represent Discourses that schools match (see Shirley Brice Heath’s 1983 canonical Ways with Words for a linguistic ethnography of just how much school matched white kids’ homes and ran counter to the philosophies and goals of black homes).  What happens then is that the language and ways of being that have real currency, impact, and effect in the home communities of students of color have no visible value or place in school.  What is important about Powell’s work is that she is NOT suggesting that we teach whitened-school practices to non-white students more effectively or efficiently (which is essentially what most teaching models consciously or unconsciously do).  She is suggesting a rupture of those whitened school-practices that get communicated through textbooks, standardized tests, prepackaged learning objectives, curriculum kits, classroom techniques, etc.  Literacy gets packaged as a set of neutral, static objectives that can be measured and “scientifically” managed and then students must conform to the materials, an altogether different thing than becoming conscious or literate, so that they can be (using Gee’s words):  “apprenticed in the right place, at the right time, with the right people.”

Tricking-VideoLet me bring it home, quite literally.  In my first semester at my current college, I had a first-year writing course that I taught with the theme of NLS.  My idea was that young people of color themselves could chime in on these very conversations and (re)claim how they are literate in ways over and beyond “schooled literacy” in politically necessary ways.  I was not disappointed.  Before midterms even fell down on my first semester at my new campus, Jason taught me about a set of literate practices that I had never heard of before… tricking.  Jason was a trickster!  Now as an oldhead, this was new to me and so this is how I described it upon first seeing it: super-high energy, multiracial youth across the world blending acrobatics with martial arts and a dose of some kind of new crack cuz this stuff was just CRAZZZY!   So how was this NLS for Jason?  Well, to get to tricking, there was a lot of textual sharing that happened first (this was 2008— tricking is more prevalent and popular now.)  What I knew was that Jason spent hours of his time uploading his own videos of his tricking and looking at videos from other tricksters across the world who would comment back to one another with suggestions; when there was no common language, they would use their bodies for the form of their commentary.  In fact, Jason’s video collage and research project for the class examined how tricking embodied what Maisha Fisher calls a “participatory literacy community” where literacy is shaped solely through high levels of participation.

Since Jason’s lesson, I have been following Brandon McCuien (I am still not very knowledgeable about this world though), who I see young people on the internet calling a Black Superhero and/or the Real Neo.

Here is his short, gone-viral collage:

Here he is in public spaces:

Now I don’t mean to sensationalize here but this couldn’t capture more brilliantly something that seems so totally opposite in form, purpose, and dynamic from what school feels like and does:

  • a reinvention of gymnastics (and maybe martial arts too)
  • moving your learning directly into embodied action
  • maintaining connections with other youth across the globe
  • inventing global communication networks where the viewers/youth design a sophisticated “assessment” vocabulary for who’s good and who’s not
  • taking over public spaces— literally flipping them
  • and, if all that ain’t enough: deciding who the hell your own black hero is!

I can dig it.  The point of a theory and practice of African American Literacies, NLS, or CDA would be to see the energy, audience awareness, and skill that someone like McCuien so obviously has and see to it that schooling recognizes it also.  Now many might say: but yeah, they need to learn how to write essays.  I won’t argue for or against that but what I say is this: if we can’t engage all this brilliance with our essay-based teaching requirements, then it is not the students who are lacking, it is us.

 

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Writing New Futures

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Recently, Dr. Suzanne Carothers, my advisor for my doctoral dissertation, asked me some key questions to think and write about as I re-imagine and re-direct this phase of my life in academia.  I thought the questions were particularly poignant and critical and so I share them here.  I imagine myself often returning to these answers and re-addressing these same questions as I way to keep myself in check and move forward with what I say I want to be and do.  I thank Dr. Carothers, the most exquisite writing teacher I have ever had, for always prodding and always teaching me!

Tell me three of your accomplishments that you are most proud of since finishing your dissertation. Given all you have done and do, why do these three stand out for you?

(1) I am proud that I have chosen to always be a critical educator, that I have not seen such work as simply the necessary evil of being a scholar, writer, researcher, and academic, though this has certainly been the message I have been given after graduate school.

(2) I have also never backed down from working at colleges where the students are predominantly working class and of-color.  I refuse to use the bodies of people of color as a marketing tool to promote diversity, the prevailing (and sometimes only) acknowledgement of people of color that I have seen at such institutions.  This means that I have never had (and, thus, am willing to forego) teaching assistants, research assistants, start-up research funds, significant financial rewards/promotion, publishing/professional opportunities, sabbaticals, time, updated technology (at those few places where I have had a current computer, it didn’t work for very long), and other resources that come from prestigious and/or well-endowed research universities.  It’s not that I think these material things compromise people’s work (nothing is ever that simple).  However, these are the privileged spaces that new faculty like me are supposed to mark as coveted where I can, for instance, write about working class black folk but never actually see them in any of my classes. That’s not the route I have chosen. I like this path and I am proud that being on path and being on purpose are how I have chosen to navigate my life thus far.

(3) I am most proud of finishing my book (what was once my dissertation). I don’t so much mean the final product. I am just proud of hanging in there, never backing down from or giving up on my ideas despite the disagreements I had to face.  It would have been quite easy to give up on the book and publishing altogether given the resistance that I face from many circles— especially this notion that things are so much better, a sentiment that I have heard from black scholars too, or that I must make myself more palatable (i.e., marketable and auction-block-able) to wider audiences.  I wonder who these fools are talking about— certainly not the black masses where every measure of structural racism tells us that we are living a Neo-Jim-Crow? I like that publishing means that I have more fully realized my ancestral legacy: the one where we know we have to always keep on pushin.

 

When you think about the teaching and learning environments you create, what makes them work?  What’s central to that dynamic for you? And, how do you know when you have achieved it?

I think classrooms are meant to bring the content of what students are learning and reading full circle.  I think here about the class I will teach in spring 2013: African American women’s rhetoric.  Here, for instance, we will read Ida B. Wells and ask ourselves how she affected the world for all of us by her ways with words.  As the teacher, I ask myself: what does it mean to bring Ida B. Wells alive in this classroom?  What would an Ida-B-Wells-pedagogy look like and do?  It would mean not just talking about her but talking with her!   I want students to fight, and fight hard, come hell or high water, for what is right, notice the racial subjugation of the people around them, and fight for those lives as if it were their own life they were fighting for.  This means I am looking for students to talk about more than just the content of Ida B. Wells’s life and work.  I look for students to engage their own intellectual and political purposes, in their own time and place.  Essentially, I hope they can achieve what Fanon suggested: “each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.”  I may not be able to ensure the fulfillment part but I can certainly move students in the direction of discovery, that’s what teaching Ida B. Wells would have to do.

 

Finish these thoughts:

Scholarship for me is  . . .   and 

My scholarship matters because  . . .

Scholarship for me is slipping through the cracks, digging deep down, and unearthing the voices and visions that can sustain us.

My scholarship matters because the world we live in requires a level of thinking and creativity that moves beyond what we are used to.  Scholarship can do that work if we treat it as something more than static words, bling, and status.

 

What is it you want to do in and beyond the academy?

Both in and out of the academy, if I could achieve my heart’s desire, I would want to be like Parliament and “make my funk the P-Funk… I want my funk uncut.” I like the way they named their collective and their music (Parliament Funk as P-Funk) but also that P-Funk meant that they were intentionally examining and exploring Funk at its highest levels of expression and possibility, as a thing/thought of its own kind and genius.  Though I may not have the right words to explain that here, that’s what I would want writing, teaching, and envisioning myself as a black woman to feel like.  They weren’t claiming to invent funk but they were claiming that they could insert their own version and vision and encourage the world to do the same.  I can’t imagine a better way of being one’s self in and beyond the academy.

 

What four adjectives would you use to describe yourself?

…principled, creative, unapologetically black-centric, and always evolving!

 

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Internalizing Richardson’s African American Literacies

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This week we read Elaine Richardson’s African American Literacies.  I have asked the class, amongst many other things, to come today with an “anchor” from Richardson’s text that works as a grounding definition of African American Literacies.  We will do some multimodal, visual work in the classroom with this anchor and the other writing assignments for the week before we get into more discussion about the book.

I want students to walk away having internalized their positions about this text.  I am not expecting agreement in the classroom but I do expect internalization.  I am more impressed with a student who can articulate a disagreement and stay with it than I am with a student who presents an affinity to Richardson’s work but simply co-opts that work more than lives it out.  What I mean by this is simple: if you agree with African American Literacies, then you have to follow it through. There’s some stuff that just shouldn’t sound or look or feel right to you.   There are some ways of talking about students that should contort your mouth so bad that it can’t even escape your lips.  And, there are some things that you should notice and really question about the educational institutions in which you work and live out your thinking.

In sum, I am suggesting that consciousness cannot live in contradiction to your daily awareness.  As one simple example, I am talking about  holding one’s self accountable to the wide variety of racial, code words that stamp African American students and other students of color as “other” to the processes of schooling and culturally/mentally deficient: a pantheon of codes that frame students within constructs like motivation, achievement gap, at-risk, basic writers, transitional, impoverished, colorblindness, and more.  To frame black students this way would be the antithesis of Richardson’s project.

Think back on what we read last week in Gloria Ladson-Billings’s “Landing on the Wrong Note: The Price We Paid for Brown” and now see below how she particularly interrogates the use of the code “at-risk” (a term I have heard at this institution more than I have ever heard anywhere else):

(This is a 10-minute clip from a larger talk that is available in viewing resources)

If you want to claim Richardson’s ideas as part of your own internalized system of beliefs, then you need to be willing to deconstruct the images and ideas in front of you, not simply roll out Richardson’s name.  Don’t just read African American Literacies… internalize it!

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World-Historical People

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I attended a conference this summer and though many of the researchers and presenters left a lasting and positive impression, there was one graduate student who I still just can’t get out of my head.  I don’t know her name but I found her absolutely entertaining to observe, albeit somewhat horrifying.

I was standing outside of a room, waiting for that session to end, when I overheard this woman talking with other graduate students who she had obviously met at the conference.  She explained a very specific conference strategy: she attended the sessions of the most famous scholars, made sure to sit up in front, ask really smart questions publicly in the session, and then go talk to the individual presenters after the session.  This, according to her, was how you get the “famous people” to notice you, remember you, work with you, and help you forward your career.  I found this conversation absolutely fascinating so I did the inevitable: I watched her… because when someone doesn’t see you, you’d be surprised at just how much you can see of them.  She did not disappoint.  In every feature session, there she was: all up in the front, asking a question with little regard for whether or not it actually contributed something to the conversation, and then there she was on the que waiting to talk to folk afterwards.  I was wildly entertained, I will admit, but I am, at the same time, sympathetic to her cause.  She was only mirroring  the  kind of superficiality that academic culture sustains today, a culture that is telling a young black woman grabbing at a Ph.D. that groupie-stalking is what it takes for her to survive and thrive in the academy, not a serious engagement with ideas and thinking.  While this young woman’s practice might seem, well, a bit CRAZY, what was more astonishing was the actual response from the “famous people.”  They ate it up like famished souls where only this kind of attention could satiate their hunger.

These are the moments when I often think of Professor Wynter, when I am reminded that the work one does is the WORK one does: the way you live out your life is the way that you live out your words on the page too. They are not opposing forces.  What concerns me most about the young woman who I have described is that the reality she describes for being noticed was not a hallucination on her part.  It served her to good effect at the conference and it might also serve her to good effect in her larger career.

Meanwhile, every chance Wynter gets, she reminds her audiences to think past the epistemic boundaries of a given world/social order and reach out past it, as evidenced even in a letter she wrote to the Centre for Caribbean Thought.  Even in only a letter, she talks about what it means to be “world-historical people” who have no choice but confront “the imperative of the effecting of a profound mutation in what is now the globally hegemonic Western European, secular, and thereby naturalized understanding of being human.”  It becomes wildly absurd then to imagine trying to get the attention of famous people at an academic conference in the context of Wynter’s call that we begin to completely upturn the “naturalized, now biologized, globally homogenized, homo oeconomicus understanding of being human” so that we can finally displace its referential system with its “now internet-integrated planet of the middle class suburbia/exurbia/gentrified inner city ‘referent we, on the one hand, and on the other, that of the rapidly urbanizing ‘planet of slums.’ ”

It makes sense to me that Wynter does not call the “Crisis of the Negro Intellectual” in this historical moment ONLY the product of white liberalism and racism in the academy.  She loads that crisis with the processes and products of what black scholars themselves have created in the quest to replicate the very models which had ontologically, intellectually, and aesthetically excluded them in the first place, fully incorporating all of its cognitive closures and impediments to radical social change.  That’s more than a notion right there!  I also see Wynter’s points here in the very way that she enacts her scholarly identity.  I am often amazed at how connected I feel to other scholars who deeply engage her work, a connection I had never once even articulated to myself because it just seems so self-evident.  But even this aspect of her scholarly identity points to the alternate space in which she does intellectual work. I am often stunned by how graduate students, for instance, of a specific scholar will go above and beyond to “market” themselves as the heir of that advisor  (i.e., which can quickly become the “auction block” code for which plantation provided the best skills) and/or do their best to patrol who and how their advisor is referenced (making the example of the woman I describe all the more believable).  Scholarship in this mode becomes a kind of white property to be maintained and sustained by measuring its exchange value against other properties.   I no longer think it is a mere coincidence that the folk I know who engage Wynter do not unleash these kind of beasts/pseudo-intellectual pathologies.  In fact, it seems safe to say that Wynter herself would not allow it!

I certainly don’t mean to harshly castigate the young woman who I described at the beginning of this post.  Like I said, I am sympathetic and very concerned for her cause.  At this point in my life and career, I find myself most drawn and interested in those black thinkers and scholars who are really interested in liberation rather than bling, status, and attention.  I think this is why I have become so much more deeply grateful for the model that Sylvia Wynter offers, a model that has lately become a kind of life preserve in this sea I must swim in.

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