Drawing on Black feminist/womanist storytelling and the three-dimensional narrative inquiry space, this article showcases how one Black girl uses speculative fiction as testimony and counterstory, calling for readers to bear witness to her experiences and inviting witnesses to respond to the negative experiences she faces as a Black girl in the United States. I argue that situating speculative fiction as counterstory creates space for Black girls to challenge dominant narratives and create new realities. Furthermore, I argue that considering speculative fiction as testimony provides another way for readers to engage in a dialogic process with Black girls, affirming their words as legitimate sources of knowledge. Witnessing Black girls’ stories is an essential component to literacy and social justice contexts that tout a humanizing approach to research. They are also vital for dismantling a system bent on the castigation and obliteration of Black girls’ pasts, presents, and futures.
Purpose
This paper aims to identify how white preservice teachers’ inability to imagine an equitable space for Black and Brown children contributes to the ubiquity of whiteness in English education. Further, the authors contend that the preservice teachers’ responses mirror how the larger field of English education fails to imagine Black and Brown life.
Design/methodology/approach
Using abolitionist teaching as a guide, the authors use reflexive thematic analysis to examine the rhetorical moves their preservice teachers made to defer responsibility for anti-racist teaching.
Findings
The findings show preservice teachers’ rhetorical moves across three themes: failure to imagine Black and Brown humanity, failure to imagine a connection between theory and practice, and failure to imagine curriculum and schooling beyond whiteness.
Originality/value
By highlighting how preservice teachers fail to imagine spaces for Black and Brown youth, this study offers another pathway through which teacher educators, teachers and English education programs can assist their faculty and students in activating their imaginations in the pursuit of anti-racist, abolitionist teaching.
Emancipating the fantastic from dominant narratives requires educators to center Black authors and characters, highlight stories beyond Black pain, and show a commitment to broadening Black girls' mirrors and telescopes. S amuel R. Delaney, a queer Black male author of science fiction (SF), argued that the imagistic paraphernalia of science fiction functioned as social signs-signs people learned to read very quickly. They signaled technology. And technology was like a placard on the door saying, "Boys Club! Girls, keep out. Blacks and Hispanics and the poor in general, go away!" (Dery, 1994, p. 188
Much of the language at academic conferences is purely metaphorical, so it is important to understand the cultural–historical significance of the metaphors used in constructing organizational gatherings, especially the metaphor invoked by the town hall meeting. Town halls/meetings were spaces where members gathered for democratic rule in a particular geopolitical space that was stolen, settled, and colonized. They often excluded women, indigenous people, and people of color. In using this name, then, Literacy Research Association (LRA) engages in settler colonialism in as far as it is considered townish and aspires to recreate the metaphorical essence of town meetings. However, the historic interconnectedness of LRA, the town hall, and settler colonialism can be upended. In fact, LRA can reimagine the entire concept of the town hall and create new metaphors upon which to base the gatherings. This article departs from the idea of the town hall, and it also departs from the traditional structure of academic papers. Specifically, this article highlights position statements written by five scholars who embody numerous social and individual identities. In each statement, the scholars discuss their ideas for the future of LRA—their concerns and their hopes. Additionally, the article includes symbolic sketches of LRA members to represent the people who are often muted within the organization. Essentially, we, the authors, begin an imagining process as we speculate on what LRA meetings can look like when marginalized voices speak out not only about their questions and concerns but also about their solutions.
Popular culture aids in the conditioning of U.S. society, assisting in the determination of who is esteemed as literate and who is disgraced with illiteracy. Unfortunately, pop culture depictions of black male literacy often reify the stereotype that black males are less literate than their peers. Although a real issue presents itself in the opportunity gap that exists between black males and other racial groups, however, focusing on the negative fails to complicate the narrative. The purpose of this article is to confound monolithic representations by acknowledging positive, nuanced, and complex black male literacy practices. The author uses critical rhetorical analysis and positioning theory to highlight Netflix's Luke Cage series as a site where empowering literacy practices prevail. For educators, the author suggests using a critical rhetorical analysis of popular culture to examine and question content that presents static representations of black male literacy.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.