Can I Get a Witness? Speculative Fiction as Testimony and Counterstory

Abstract

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.

From Haiti to Detroit Through Black Immigrant Languages and Literacies

“…We acknowledge that our analysis of a single text is limited in its potential to generate a new or complete pedagogical approach. Rather, we recognize existing research and scholarship that attends to how books dealing with race, language, and culture can be productively used in literacy education (Brooks & McNair, 2014;Toliver, 2020). What we add to this work is a call for introducing students to a wider array and number of texts that represent the experiences of minoritized immigrant youth of color.…”

Freedom dreaming with Black Canadian mothers

“…Call-and-response patterns characterized play and work songs and spirituals sung by enslaved Africans in the Caribbean and North America (Sale, 1992). Call-and-response is a dialogic exercise between a speaker and listener where "the speaker's statements ('calls') are punctuated by expressions ('responses') from the listener" (Smitherman, 1977, p. 104;Toliver, 2020). Indeed, call-andresponse is a shared storytelling event requiring communal participation (Boone, 2003;Richards-Greaves, 2016;Toliver, 2020).…”

“…Call-and-response is a dialogic exercise between a speaker and listener where "the speaker's statements ('calls') are punctuated by expressions ('responses') from the listener" (Smitherman, 1977, p. 104;Toliver, 2020). Indeed, call-andresponse is a shared storytelling event requiring communal participation (Boone, 2003;Richards-Greaves, 2016;Toliver, 2020). Boone (2003) and Toliver (2020) noted the prevalence of call-and-response patterns in everyday exchanges in Black communities across North America.…”

Disorientation as Critical Practice: Confronting Anti-Black Perceptual Regimes and Activating the Otherwise in mayfield brooks's Improvising While Black Pedagogy

“…Unknowing is also encoded within witnessing as a “Black church literacy practice” (Smitherman 1977, 104), which vests testifiers with the authority to produce knowledge and historical records that exceed the written gospel (Ross 2003, 15). If the role of the testifier is to share their experience so that it can serve the community, witnesses are those who can “recognize the truth in the tale,” which hinges upon their willingness to “see beyond the truths they know” (Toliver, 2020, 510). In her synthesis of the components of witnessing, S. R. Toliver has argued that, in order to be witnesses, listeners are asked to suspend their own assumptions and to see themselves within the context of the testimony: “Through this process, the listener is encouraged to participate by challenging prior suppositions, suspending judgment, analyzing the story for meaning, and situating their own stories within the context of the story being told” (508).…”