“I’m Very Hurt”: (Un)justly Reading the Black Female Body as Text in a Racial Literacy Learning Assemblage

Abstract

There has been a recent rise in research that has attuned to matters of the body in literacy learning. This article is a contribution to that emerging corpus of scholarship. Specifically, the article is a Black feminist narrative inquiry into the undertheorized role of embodiment-and relatedly, the embodied knowing that materializes as emotion or affect-in racial literacy learning. To illustrate, I employed a blend of embodiment, affect, and assemblage theories to examine an episode of a university-based (self-described) antiracist pedagogue's racial literacy instruction in an English teacher education program in the United States. A sociomaterial approach to literacy frames my exploration of the relation between the emotions generated during classroom discourse about the contents of a curricular text used by the Black female pedagogue and the reproduction of anti-racist ideology. Findings underscore that racial literacy instruction is (inter)embodied and affective and that each body is a particular racialized, sexed, gendered, and otherwise marked text. These findings underpin my clarion call for a turn to Black feminist racial literacy instruction, an approach entailing the enactment of reparative and healing pedagogical practices that care-fully tend to the embodied and psychic wellness of Black women and girls in particular while simultaneously cultivating pedagogues' and students' commitments to justice and humanization in English teacher education classrooms. Without the body there is no textThere is no text without breath No breath without the body The body is the text This is about landscape and psyche This is about language and earth Breathing together we are the text We are speaking even when we are silent (Herron, 2013, p. xiv) #SayHerName: A PreambleOnce upon a time, on the ancestral lands of the Shawnee, Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Osage people, there lived a brown-skinned Black woman named Breonna Taylor. On March 13, 2020, Breonna Taylor' s heart was badly hurt. In the wee hours of the dark night, six of the 32 bullets fired by three white Louisville Metro Police detectives-Brett Hankison, Myles Cosgrove, and Jonathan Mattingly-struck the Black medical worker' s body as she lay dead asleep in her Kentucky home. The detectives "fired into the sliding glass patio door and window of Ms. Taylor' s apartment, both of which were

Pedagogy or “trauma porn”? Racial literacy as a prerequisite for teaching racially dignifying content in the Australian social work context

“…For Blac/k bodies in the social work classroom, trauma porn is not racially dignifying; rather, it is a dehumanising experience that is mobilised for the white gaze and maintains the very structures of trauma and oppression it seeks to dismantle. As (Ohito, 2021) suggests,…”

“…For Blac/k bodies in the social work classroom, trauma porn is not racially dignifying; rather, it is a dehumanising experience that is mobilised for the white gaze and maintains the very structures of trauma and oppression it seeks to dismantle. As (Ohito, 2021) suggests, questions must be asked about the affects present when media showing a Black girl experiencing embodied pain is read as a curricular text for the purpose of racial literacy instruction. [There are] complexities of reading bodies that are racialised, sexed, gendered, and situated within larger socio-cultural, sociohistorical, and socio-political dis-courses.…”

“…Privileging “voices of colour” also means “epistemological innovation”, which begins with de-centering damaging and pathologising representation of Blac/k communities. Ohito (2021) cautions, however, that though racial literacy education “can be considered an anti-racist pedagogical practice”, we must be careful to examine which “tools” we use in this process. Audre Lorde’s cautioned against reliance on the master’s tools for those attempting to undo the master’s house.…”

Race talk tensions: practicing racial literacy in a fourth-grade classroom

“…Developing racial literacy is a complex social and cultural, interactive and discursive process that involves much more than “the transference of knowledge about race(ism) from person to person–usually, pedagogue to student” (Ohito, 2022, p. 613). Scholars have illuminated the nonlinear, corporeal and at times, contradictory nature of racial literacy development, particularly for teachers and students in schooling contexts that have historically evaded issues of race (Nash et al , 2018; Ohito, 2022).…”

“Blackness is not just a single definition”: multimodal composition as an exercise for surfacing and scaffolding student theorizing in a Black Studies classroom

“…Consequently, “more courses specifically devoted to race are now offered and often required in undergraduate education and in graduate programs” (p. 13). Yet these courses are often populated by white students and taught by white faculty, resulting in several racialized dilemmas (Ohito, 2021; TuSmith and Reddy, 2002; Yancy and del Guadalupe Davidson, 2014). “As scholars of color who teach courses that critically engage questions of race […] we are witnesses to [white students’] resistance, anger, obfuscation, denial, and bad faith” (Yancy and del Guadalupe Davidson, 2014, p. 4).…”