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Orals Reading Reflections Archive — No Comments
30
Mar 16

The Verbal as Proof of Humanity

Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson’s “Rethinking Rhetoric through Mental Disabilities” offers important insight into the pervasive ways that assumptions of rhetorical/communication norms fundamentally impact who is considered fully human in dominant discourses. Her article attempts to work through the question:

“[h]ow can people who have psychiatric and cognitive disabilities that interfere with communication exercise rhetorical agency?” (157).

The question of how this rhetorical agency — and ableist assumptions about who can exercise it and who cannot — has huge implications both for people with dis/abilities and for rhetoric.

Reminding her readers that language is at once material-physical and culturally produced, Lewiecki-Wilson argues that,

“we need… a broadened concept of rhetoric to include collaborative and mediated rhetorics that work with the performative rhetoric of bodies that “speak” with/out language” (157).

She goes on to position facilitated communication as an example of such a redefinition of rhetoricity (and also, perhaps, of literacy). Though negative thoughts and feelings about the efficacy and ethics of facilitated communication abound in popularized debates, the potential power of Lewiecki-Wilson’s argument is that it has the potential to reframe anxieties about facilitated communication by questioning the root of non-autistic people’s anxiety about it.

Lewiecki-Wilson argues that whenever marginalized people enter public debates, the pressures of liberalism push such voices toward using the rhetoric of ‘we are just like you and want to be treated just like you.’ This obliteration of difference from the norm neutralizes the potential power of multiple rhetoricities; this liberalized ‘we are the same’ discourse also delegitimizes any claim to rhetorical agency that is not ‘just like [the norm].’ It validates the norm, situating people with “severe mental dis/abilities” as perpetually striving toward producing normate forms of communication. In this way, Lewiecki-Wilson’s praise of facilitated communication might serve to question the un-question-able: why might people with normate bodyminds be so dead-set against forms like facilitated communication if not because it poses such a threat to the supremacy of the verbal?

Regarding claims of facilitated communication’s relationship with exploitation and appropriation, Lewiecki-Wilson might suggest a reorientation of how we think about exploitation (though I worry that this might be too dismissive of the concern). Because the logics of ‘we are the same’ liberalism also (ironically) claims that we must be fully autonomous individual actors (aside from the fact that this is an impossible aspiration), Lewiecki-Wilson suggests that we define exploitation with the underlying assumption that all people have access to autonomous, individualized, speech-oriented rhetorical patterns. She elaborates, arguing that:

“by insisting on such a sharp demarcation line between individual rhetorical agency and lack, we don’t solve these problems as much as silence them. We may also be revealing our general anxiety to hold back the undifferentiated physical and social flow of language, and our unwillingness to enter into caring and committed intersubjective dependency with others and with the material world” (162).

This discomfort with “intersubjective dependency with others and with the material world” directly feeds in to a cultural refusal to recognize as human people with primarily non-normate rhetorical practices. She argues, crucially, that “we often demand some verbal response from an Other as proof of their humanness” (157, emphasis added).

To me, this work links up importantly with that of Sylvia Wynter, who argues that the very concept of humanity is inextricably tied with race. Her attentiveness to the material histories of race and the violences of racism she argues persuasively that there are several “genres” of lower case-h humanity, which is to be distinguished from upper case-H Humanity. While Humanity is inextricable from western whiteness, those human beings that occupy lower case-h humanity populate rich genres dictated by the power dynamics and cultural interplays of various moments in time and history.

Crucially, here, those who cannot sufficiently perform western whiteness – quite possibly an impossible performative status – are actively barred from achieving Humanity and gaining the basic privileges that accompany this classification.

This denial of capital-H Humanity to people of color is intimately intertwined with the kinds of dehumanizing agency-stripping that Lewiecki-Wilson is observing. Indeed, the history of interpreting non-normate communications and embodiments as less than human has a rich history of conflating racialized people with dis/abled people, through violent histories of dually racist and ableist eugenics practices; racialized reproduction ‘experiments’; and the disproportionate representation of students of color who are labeled as having mental dis/abilities in public schools, just to name a few.

Attentiveness to these interconnections could surely enrich the ways that we understand the relationship between rhetorical agency, interdependency, and the performative rhetorics of non-normate bodies.

CITED:

Lewiecki-Wilson, Cynthia. “Rethinking Rhetoric through Mental Disabilities.” Rhetoric Review (2003): 156-167.

Wynter, Sylvia. “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and Reimprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Desêtre: Black Studies Toward the Human Project.” A Companion to African-American Studies (2006): 107-118.

Teaching by Learning Blog — No Comments
24
Mar 16

Digitized Pedagogies and the Affective Whiteness of Ableism

Jennifer Polish

CUNY Graduate Center and CUNY Queens College

March 25, 2016

UConn Annual Conference on the Teaching of Writing, Storrs, CT

Please feel free to interact with the digital version of this presentation on my website and feel free to Tweet at me @jenniferpolish either before or during the Q&A so that I can respond to your comments or questions. Additionally, please feel free to get in touch with me if any of this information proves inaccessible for you so that I can correct my error.

I’m going to work through this presentation with meditations on three concepts (arranged into a three part harmony, inspired by Suzi Q. Smith’s spoken word piece, “Black Rage in Four Part Harmony”).

My parts will be: Affecting Access; Composition Slash Composure; and Digitized Pedagogies.

These reflections will help me, I hope, begin to tug at the interactions between race and dis/ability in writing class/rooms.

  1. Affecting Access

Melanie Yergeau, in her extremely important contribution to the webtext “Multimodality in Motion”, writes to us about shame. She cannot, in fact, write about access without the affective component of shame.

Shame.

Shame because in classrooms in which digital interactions mean students need to ask professors (and professors needing to ask our colleagues, and our students) for “reasonable accommodations.” Dis/abled students are expected to ask for what they need rather than expecting that classrooms and curricula will be designed with a diversity of abilities in mind to begin with.

People with dis/abilities need to out ourselves when we ask for any of these things, because many (most?) universities require that we provide documentation, and that the “accommodations” we might receive are “reasonable.”

But who determines what is “reasonable”? Ableist rhetorics do.

So in order to gain access, people with dis/abilities must punch through the shame, even when we cannot clench our fists. The logics of accommodation force us to choose between disclosure/shame/dis/ability-is-assumed-to-be-less-than and exclusion/nonparticipation/I-could-not-do-my-homework-or-get-that-tenure-track-job.

So affect is intimately related to access.

Affect: Affect lives in the borderlands between feeling and judgment. More specifically, affect comprises the borderlands between feeling and judgment, mapping the ways that they inform each other and give each other flesh.

Some of our fleshiness is not allowed in the classroom. When it is, it is rendered absent.

Margaret Price argues that the field of computers and writing lacks diversity because it unintentionally marks certain bodies absent, both materially and ontologically.

Unless we think of access differently.

Multimodal pedagogies have become popular ways of trying to engage students on multiple levels, employing mixed media from videos and audio clips to comics and photographs.

However, having more choices doesn’t always mean having access. To quote Stephanie Kerschbaum, “multimodal inhospitality…occurs when the design and production of multimodal texts and environments persistently ignore access except as a retrofit.” By retrofit, Kerschbaum is referring to ‘after the fact’ band-aid fixes that require students and professors to disclose our dis/abilities in order to fully access material. For example, when multimodal presentations (videos, say) are created/shown without captions and students must ask for them.

Engaging studies of African American literacies is tremendously helpful in reshaping access: Adam Banks has broken down technological access into five separate parts, only one of which (“material”) is the form that is usually engaged through “reasonable accommodations.” Broadening our definition of access to be a continuous, multifaceted, structural concept rather than a discrete, “here-have-a-transcript” model, can push our understanding of the kinds of structural changes true tech access would require.

Addressing this, Banks tells us that access comes in (at least) five pieces:

  • Material access, regarding the material conditions surrounding tech usage;
  • Functional access, regarding tech know-how and skills;
  • Experiential access, regarding how tech is or is not useful in everyday experiences;
  • Critical access, regarding a certain fluency with when and how to use which technologies and what their rhetorical implications are;
  • Transformative access, regarding genuine inclusion (not just for inclusion’s sake) as to who gets to shape tech and its uses.

Surely, there are overlaps in his categories. Redundancies.

This is no mistake, for we need redundancies – the same information presented in multiple forms so that there are multiple avenues for understanding – not just multiple modalities.

Redundancies offer various modes of engagement with the same material – my voice, the paper transcripts I have, this talk on my website so people can engage the text as needed here and elsewhere in cases where telepresence is preferable to physical presence..

Redundancy is necessary, and yet “redundant” has such a negative connotation in our society.

Yet Yergeau reminds us why redundancy is a necessary design component of any digitized curriculum, of any assignment, of any scholarly-social interaction. Crucially, she writes that “[t]o [merely] accommodate is to retrofit; it is to assume normative bodies as default and to build spaces and infrastructures around those normative default bodies; it is to deal with deviant bodily and spatial conditions as they bubble out at the seams.”

  1. Composition Slash Composure

Bubbling out at the seams.

I stick on this image because it sticks on me.

When deviant bodily and spatial conditions bubble out at the seams, they force themselves to be noticed by a hegemonic logic that only assumes default positions. Like able-body-mindedness. Like whiteness.

Whiteness. According to José Esteban Muñoz in his work on Latina Affect, whiteness is “a cultural logic that prescribes and regulates national feelings and comportment. White is… an affective gauge that helps us understand some modes of emotional countenance and comportment as good or bad” (680).

Comportment. Behavior or bearing. Put another way: composure.

Performing whiteness is an affective gauge of performing a certain kind of composure, of contorting ourselves into a certain kind of composition.

Composition. We think of composition as something our students are required to take, as something we are required to teach. But what happens when we unpeel composition to its verb form, composing? To compose?

Composure: collect yourself, be calm. Do not express an “excess” of emotion.

Conceal, don’t feel, if you like a good old Disney reference.

Composing affective whiteness, then, becomes the mark of composing ourselves “properly,” of comporting our bodyminds to perform suitable composition, suitable composure.

And by suitable, here, I mean white.

Composing Affective Whiteness: Elsewhere, Muñoz argues that emotional countenances marked by whiteness are characterized by an immense dearth of affective expression such that “the affective performance of normative whiteness is minimalist to the point of emotional impoverishment” (“Ethnicity and Affect” 70).

The rhetorical positioning of white affect is such that white feelings are privileged as fact, as objective. Non-normate rhetorics simply aren’t up to snuff. They are ineffective. They are too opinionated or too emotional or too aggressive. On the flip side, non-normate rhetorics may be dismissed for not being enough, for not being legible, loud, enough. A lose-lose.

Anything that does not compose itself as affectively white is extra. Anything else is “unreasonable.”

Unreasonable. Without reason. Inability to compose oneself.

Dis/abled.

Composition. Composure.

Back to this again.

A plethora of dis/abilities mark people’s (like mine) affective registers as unable or unwilling to perform cognitive and behavioral autonomy in a way that whiteness requires: these dis/abilities are often pushed onto/assumed to be connected with people who are racialized as nonwhite. The ableist suppression of nonwhite performances of behavioral and cognitive processes cannot be unlinked from its fundamentally racist formation, discussed above.

Because the connection between dis slash abled students and students of color extend far beyond the ways that students of color are vastly more likely to be labeled with learning dis/abilities. Students of color, if ever there is violence on campus, are simply students of color. White students, when we frequently shoot up schools, are so unexpected and must have been “mentally ill.” Because white students and professors with dis/abilities are thought to be the exception – I am thought to be the exception. Students of color with dis/abilities are thought to be a tautology: of course students of color are dis/abled. It’s written into the ways that people interpret failure and refusal to compose oneself according to the rules of affective whiteness.

Composing oneself.

Or else.

  1. Digitized Pedagogies

Sushil Oswal alerts us to “technological ableisms”, the vital idea that “technology reflects the needs and interests of the powerful.”

This is surely what Carmen Kynard is signifying on what she writes that her Black students have used Blackboard to re-envision cyberspace to co-participate in the meaning of technology because “their framework is not contingent upon making digitally divided minorities more technologically advanced and better at one type of English, its cultures of power, or its academic discourses. Instead these students experience rhetoric and writing as a way to alter the ways that knowledge is constructed for them and about them…” (330).

“[T]he ways that knowledge is constructed for them and about them.”

In a white supremacist climate in which people of color are much more likely to be considered dis/abled, I cannot help but think of the oft-cited dis/ability activist refrain “nothing about us without us.”

And yet here I am, a white woman with all my white privilege, talking about race. Since I’m coming at it through the framework of exposing the pervasiveness of whiteness, I hope this can remain somewhat effective. Affective.

Adam Banks has written of race and technology in our classrooms that currently “digital theory, rhetoric, and writing [is] white by default because those areas and our American technology sector still appear to be so homogenous.”

When considering the ways that able-bodymindedness is coded into the affects of whiteness –

when considering the ways that students of color across the country are beaten, physically, emotionally, mentally, in their own classrooms for not demonstrating the expected amount of whiteness –

when considering the ways that the ableism of romanticized multimodal pedagogies continues to erase and make absent non-normate bodies from our classrooms –

it is clear that affective whiteness invisibly dominates hegemonic usages of technology in the classroom, and that this affective regime structurally reinforces the technological ableisms that increasingly shape our interactions with our students and our colleagues.

Our intent to promote student-centered methodologies of digitized teaching are admirable and yet must be re-examined to ask the most fundamental but hegemonically un-ask-able question: who is the capital-S “Student” that we imagine when we discuss student-centered, digitized pedagogies?

Pluralizing Literacies Blog — 1 Comment
21
Mar 16

Smashing Mirrors, Spoken Soul

“A language comes into existence by means of brutal necessity, and the rules of the language are dictated by what the language must convey.

There was a moment, in time, and in this place, when my brother, or my mother, or my father, or my sister, had to convey to me, for example, the danger in which I was standing from the white man standing just behind me, and to convey this with a speed, and in a language, that the white man could not possibly understand, and that, indeed, he cannot understand, until today. He cannot afford to understand it. This understanding would reveal to him too much about himself, and smash that mirror before which he has been frozen for so long.”

James Baldwin, “If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?”

My students, almost instinctively, understand this pull towards needing a language to survive, needing to smash the damn mirror.

Whether we’re studying the writings of Junot Díaz and Laurence Yep or the various spoken word pieces we all bring to the table, my students write and speak beautifully — if tentatively (despite our open discussions of white supremacy and our class’s very POC-oriented playlist/syllabus, they are still in school and I am still their white girl professor) — about  various usages of Spanish, Chinese, and Spoken Soul as more liberating than “standard” English, as fundamentally able to convey depths of thought and emotion that bleached language cannot approach. They know, too, that certain linguistic cues almost inherently change the audience of texts, often signalling shifts from writing for their white professors, to writing for their various communities, to writing — radically – for themselves.

Sure enough:

“…White man tells me — hunh —

Damn to’ soul;

White man tells me — hunh —

Damn yo’ soul;

Got no need, bebby,

To be tole…”

Sterling A. Brown, qtd. in Spoken Soul

Sterling A. Brown’s celebration of catharsis vis a vis a blues-style celebration of melancholy validates my students’ insights: punctuating poetic speech with vocalizations of forced physical labor needs not name its discontent with the violence of whiteness. The affective power of this language need not be put into speech itself: as my students say, ‘it just gets at emotions the way ‘standard’ writing can’t.’

Along these lines, Spoken Soul serves as a sharp overview of much of the historical meanderings around meaning and surviving regarding the false binary between “Standard English” and “Black English” (as a stand-in for “everything else”).

The father-son Rickford team, in the Spoken Soul chapter simply called “Writers”, use these pages to lay out their first history of Spoken Soul (a term for “Black English” not yet tainted by the need for quotes around it to offset the history of ire and judgement of white supremacy surrounding terms like “vernacular”).

Instead of casting the violent history of white mangle-strangling of Black speech as the primary thread through which to write about written Spoken Soul, the Rickfords explicitly accord expertise into the hands of Black writers. Writers’ complex relationships to Spoken (written) Soul is made evident throughout this chapter, which provides historical accountings of white minstrelsy but focuses mostly on Black uses of Black languages.

Their discussion of James Weldon Johnson’s long and roller coaster-esque relationship to Spoken Soul begins following their accounting of the violence of minstrelsy and the ways that white writers and performers destroyed and devalued Spoken Soul in their blackface misrepresentations. This placement of their discussion frames Johnson’s (and others’) oft-resistance to Spoken Soul historically, drawing attention to the ways that audience (intended or otherwise) deeply impacts the performance of the verbal realm.

This resonates deeply for me, thinking about teaching freshmen comp: for whom do our students feel like they’re writing? How can we navigate the plethora of non-“standard” Englishes in many of our CUNY classrooms to encourage students to write “for each other” rather than for constraining, strangling white audiences (like… me)? What might it be like for white women teachers of comp (we seem to be… everywhere) to encourage our students of color to take a leaf out of Langston Hughes or Zora Neale Hurston’s (proverbial and literal) books, since they “refused to shun the speech of the black masses just because outsiders had misrepresented it”? It seems to me that this reeks of white privilege: so what’s the acceptable ground here?

Students, I feel like, can get at this dynamic well through reading chapters like this, which gives them a great spread of literature. And, armed with today’s examples of these dynamics, teaching this text could have a lot of potential. The Rickfords’ discussion of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s frustration that “now they don’t want me to write anything but dialect” because white audiences wouldn’t recognize or widely read his poems written in “standard” English reminds me forcefully of Empire: mainstreamed white consumption of Black language, Black imagery, Black bodies, Black music, needs its Blackness to be suitably in “dialect” so as to not disrupt masturbatory white fantasies of Black (non)people.

“They love the way we talk,” my girlfriend said while we were watching some commercial that had a Black woman voicing over a magnetic refrigerator giraffe last night, “but they don’t want to actually deal with our bodies.”

Indeed.

Creative Texts / Pluralizing Literacies Blog — No Comments
14
Mar 16

Digital Griots and the Scratch of the Slash

Presenting a plethora of beautiful (and beautifully written – the two, it seems, go together fluidly here) images and analyses of Black rhetorical excellence, Adam Banks uses Digital Griots to craft and perform several exigent and fleshy calls for a re-vision of both African American literacy studies and digital humanities. An intimate piece of all of these calls is Banks’ prioritization of spaces that refuse to suffocate Blackness (the call itself is performed as a survival technology of sorts in all the texts we’ve read for this term thus far. No coincidence that these calls to Stop Shooting Us aren’t generally presented – quite the opposite – in composition classrooms dominated by whiteness).

In attempt at homage to both Banks’ rhythmic and fluid writing and to my colleague Seth Grave’s technologically poetic introduction to Banks’ text by remixing his notes of the text, the rest of this post will attempt to (perhaps poetically, or perhaps simply badly) remix Banks’ concerns and arguments with attention to constructions and affective experiences of dis/ability in composition classrooms. Queerness and womanness will, too, inflect this remix, because though all of these identities wove themselves in and out of Digital Griots, their more explicit, more persistent, presence can perhaps thicken the already bodily readings Banks graces us with.

(My whiteness, of course, will inflect all of these readings, so they must, by nature, be read as incomplete, as even, perhaps, appropriative with the hope that they will be themselves remixed, re-visioned, through frameworks of color that I do not inhabit.)

Dis/ability

Dis

/

ability

Dis/ability

Dis(s)

ertation,

dis(s)

respect

My students ooohing and exclaiming (pro-claiming) when someone throws shade

glancing at me furtively to see if my whitegirlprofessorness will be mad that they dared raise their voices in something other than

A voice that sounds like mine

Dis(s)

Is bad, diss your friend when they’re not around, without saying it, suck your teeth and

roll your eyes when that white kid be talkin some shit about people need to stop playing the race card,

microsoft word dissin me when it insists on adding ‘g’s to the end of words, when I type out a quote from Banks, some of his most beautiful writing, his rhythmic end to his fabulous book, Word automatically adding ‘g’s to the Words, Banks tellin us we need to be

“building assignments that invite students not only to work across modalities but also to link those multiple modalities, individual assignments, and assignment cycles and in critical examination of the power relations and material conditions inscribed in technological tools, networks, and discourses. Practically, it means working to increase meaningful, transformative access to digital technologies for people on their own terms. It means mix, remix, mixtape. Access and transformation. Healing, celebration, self-examination, and critique. Community. Flow, layering, rupture. Innovation, vision, quality, tradition. Afrodigitzed. Word.”

WORD doesn’t lose its techno-mind until the end, until transformative (UNDERLINE IN RED SQUIGGLES), mixtape (THAT’S NOT A REAL THING, PUT A BLOODY ZIGZAG UNDER IT), and then that sea of green,

all that green because when Banks starts writin rather than

Writing

Word won’t have it. Word shuts that shit down.

or tries to,

with its squiggly underlines,

with its digital policing that “NEUTRALLY” tell my students they’re wrong even when their whitegirlteacher, surprise surprise, tells them it’s cool, write how you wanna write, write how you wanna sound, write how you want to communicate.

Except how you want to communicate is determined by…

Allthethings.

sometimes I have students who can’t speak above a whisper,

Because if they do, they’ll have to shout.

oftentimes, though I am not dis/abled in the same way as these students may be, my bipolarness makes me feel that way, makes me

Perform

That way.

my students, I think, just think I’m energetic, enthusiastic.

I am allowed my energy, my enthusiasm.

I am a youngwhitegirlteacher.

I can speakwritetalkbouncearoundbesilentbelowkeybeLOUDbeactivebeinjuredcommunicate

However I want, need, need to want.

I have the authority.

most of my CUNY students, in one way or another, or others,

do not.

because anyway,

Word says no. Word

disses

people.

Wrong to write “fragments.” Add your ‘g’s to everything.

Oooooooh! DISS!

so it’s hard to say yes.

dis/respect, dis/tasteful, dis/tant (sometimes the words don’t split

E

v

e

n

l

y

)

/

I can’t think of a slash without thinking of slash fanfiction, without thinking of femslash, without thinking of the late-night hours as a teenager, logging onto DIAL-UP (that scratch, scratchscreetchscratch sound like salvation’s on its way, as long as no one else in the apartment hears it), furtively copy-pasting all the lesbian shit I could find (on Star Trek: Voyager, mostly; this was before I knew about The L Word, before I knew… anything), throwing it on a Word Perfect doc so it would look like homework, deleting the words that gave me life – that gave me orgasms – as I read.

Slash.

slash between dis and ability because it scratches the word

it is the scratch(ing) (v. and n.) of the knowledge that the word

is supposed to hold

Slash between dis and ability because Banks wants us to call attention to the simultaneous independent and dependent integrations of DJing as writing, of writing as DJing, of

Knowing tradition, wrapping it around you like a

shawl

(I can’t not think of Meredith Grey’s widow shawl)

immersed in tradition and knowing, because of history, because of affirmations of culture, because

“the learners’ identities are not under constant threat or outright attack; instead, the space [of DJing] is one where their humanity and ability are taken for granted, even while the expectations of rhetorical excellence and agility are always high. Furthermore, there is room for a balance between individual identity and participation in broader communities”

Unlike in classrooms.

unlike in classrooms.

Unlike in classrooms, where you learn a tradition that is not

yours, that, in fact,

seeks constantly to destroy yours,

so how can you switch it up, how can you remix, how can you scratchwithoutwoundingyourself

With the edges of the

slash

/

that allows us to connect

Dis

and

ability

without claiming

one or the other, but

both.

Ability

skill, unskill, one of my students said “they think we’re uneducated”, “they think it means we’re not intelligent”

“They” being me, people with bodies like mine, white supremacy, which is the

shawl I can’t get rid of, but will never suffocate me

Unintelligent for speaking different tongues, for laying down different rhymes

(different from the dominant)

Unintelligent, slow, disabled without the

/

“retarded” without the

“”

independence and dependence,

so strongly a part of DJing, community and individual contribution melding, melding,

Shaping each other.

like my best friend on the couch who needs me to get up and

adjust his pillows

and empty his blood-bile drains

because his body’s been cut open, he is

temporarily

dis/abled,

independence and dependence in a loop, another

/

In/dependence, inside dependence, what might digital griots be like

when people can’t physically hear, when people can’t be in clubs because of

flashing lights or toomanypeopleImightstarthyperventilating

What then of in/dependence

when dis/ability is equated with POC students

because whiteness determines smartness and smartness

determines tracking, determines ability, determines

What is acceptable to put on your

résumé.

Resume.

when affective whiteness makes the rules

I am allowed my outbursts, I am allowed to be extra

but my students of color are not

(they know, of course)

because for them to be extra is for them to be excess(ed),

to be inappropriate, to be

Threatening, and therefore to be segregated,

to be

They be

Marked.

as disabled (no /)

and what of students who do identify

with dis/abilities, how might

dis/abled digitization work with POC digitization to

Disrupt

white digitization?

a key seems to lie in how affective whiteness

dictates

ability, dictates

Access.

what if access is a process, is socialized, is understood as

continual navigations

Negotiations (I keep thinking of Clexa on The 100 and those damn fanfictions

about

lesbian sex with THAT THRONE)

Access is not to be achieved

not to be acquired

because access to tech, to digitization,

Is more than having classrooms equipped with

computers

(Dial-Up tone, google, wipe sweat.

copy, open Word Perfect, paste,

Repeat.

Delete as I read.

Cum.

Repeat as needed.

Repeat as permitted [though none of it is

Permitted.]

Fanfiction as survival technology. Because they dis/able

trauma – AND WITH QUEER SEX – so much better than

white straight cis able-passing men ever do.

Dial-Up tone, google, wipe sweat.

copy, open Word Perfect, paste,

Repeat.

Delete as I read.

Cum.

Repeat as needed.

Repeat as

)

Pluralizing Literacies Blog — No Comments
29
Feb 16

Anchoring into Richardon’s African American Literacies

Kai Davis says it, as per always, so much better than I ever could.

Kai Davis, here again taking three minutes and one second to drop word bombs that pack just about the same punch to white supremacy as all those pages of academic theory on navigating Blackness in classrooms that most white professors swear doesn’t exist (Elaine Richardson’s African American Literacies, for one, talks and testifies against that for sure [yep, a pun to honor Geneva Smitherman, because it’s necessary]).

Kai Davis, without my words to mince hers, because she doesn’t need an introduction from some white girl professor (and yet I guess I just wrote one. *sigh*).

That says it all. I am almost tempted to write nothing more. It was all just said.

“Yo: why these books never be about my peoples?”

Jamila Lyiscott says it all, too (thank you, Carmen, for the gift of linking this video on our class blog!).

And yet I’ll write anyway, because today Carmen wants us to find an anchor in Elaine Richardson’s brilliant African American Literacies; an anchor to “ground [our] thinking, reading, and research”; to haul the thick piece of iron in our pockets with us, bring it to class so we can process how to use it not as an add in, not as a tack on (at the end of term, “if there’s time”), but rather, to use an anchor from Dr. E’s work to fundamentally reshape our own pedagogies so that we, too, can make sure we’re centering Black literacies instead of shredding them with red pens and white books.

“Any approach that does not seek to facilitate liberatory literacy is detrimental as it is subtractive,” Dr. E tells us.

Among the most radically important one-liners in this entire text, Dr. E here answers writing instructors who understand Black literacies as “extra”, as something they “don’t have time or space to add into” the curriculum. Flipping the script completely — as Heather A. Williams did in Self-Taught, discussed here last week — Dr. E suggests instead that liberatory literacy engagement should in fact be the very fabric of all writing courses, rather than “add-ons” or extra. It’s not extra — I mean this colloquially as well — quite the opposite. Any course that does not engage literacy in these ways is actively harmful to students. This reframing of the norm as destructive rather than simply a “netural” engagement with what students “need to know” is extremely powerful, especially in the face of the abundance of white (women) teachers of college composition (and K-12 ), who all too often object,

“But I don’t know how to do this,” and “there’s just no room in my curriculum.”

Yoda from Star Wars shaking his head as he says,

Yoda from Star Wars shaking his head as he says, “Do or not there, there is no try.” Gif from http://www.sharegif.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/7-star-wars-quotes.gif

Dr. E reframes this refusal to centralize minoritized discourses and literacies as actively harming students (which, of course, it is). It is this reframing that needs to be taught in every intro to the English PhD class and every teaching practicum.

To address the “but how?”, Dr. E espouses learning, learning, and learning. She writes,

“To make literacy education relevant to the lives of Black students, an effort must be made to confront unethical educational practices, such as cutting Black students off from investigation and appreciation of their classical culture.  When we cannot facilitate students’ participation in investigating and exploring their literacy traditions, we’re actually teaching them that the world cannot be changed and rhetoric ain’t nuthin’ but rhetoric.”

So we must learn how to facilitate such participation, which — for white teachers like me, whose bodies and classroom presence inherently represent an active threat to the mental health and learning goals of students of color because my body and classroom presence inherently represents white supremacy — involves the surrender of expertise, the surrender of positioning ourselves as knowing more, knowing better, than our students.

Because, of course, we don’t.

A gif from the TV show Friends, featuring a wide-eyed, open-mouthed Joey staring in shock as Phoebe spews out,

A gif from the TV show Friends, featuring a wide-eyed, open-mouthed Joey staring in shock as Phoebe spews out, “That is brand new information!” Gif from https://s3.amazonaws.com/fanning-cloud-front/brandnewinfo.gif

So I suppose that sums up my proverbial anchor from this text: as a white teacher of college writing, I already make it my goal to weave my students’ various identities and forms of knowledges into the fabric of the course, rather than simply tacking some “supplemental” or “extra” readings here and there into a mostly white syllabus.

However, I have found myself stuck on how to move forward not only with affirming, but with developing the various modes of knowledges and literacy practices of my students of color (I’m not only thinking of my Black students, here). Dr. E lays out excellent practices and model works in African American Literacies, and I guess the takeaway from my anchor is the same thing we tell our students when they are stuck in a writing clusterf*ck:

Read more.

Learn more.

Practice more.

Because Black literacies are only some of the literacies in my classroom: my students represent and embody a plethora of literacies (worldviews, worldviews, as Dr. E reminds us) from all across Asia, from all across South America, from all across… everywhere. It’s Queen College, man.

Recognition and affirmation of these literacies is something I already try to give: that’s alright, but it’s not enough. I need to learn more (of everything) so I can be of even better service to my students in supporting them as they hone their own literacy practices.

Principal Wartz from Hey Arnold leaning toward a discouraged-looking Phoebe in a classroom otherwise empty of students, telling her that

Principal Wartz from Hey Arnold leaning toward a discouraged-looking Phoebe in a classroom otherwise empty of students, telling her that “We’re proud of our multicultural students here at P.S. 118.” Image from https://media3.giphy.com/media/uQ07tr7x6vaGA/200_s.gif

This intimately involves a reframing of how we discuss “multicultural” classrooms. Dedefining “multicultural” so it doesn’t mean a commitment to tokenizing people of color in, for example, college brochures, Dr. E’s work resituates multiculturalism as a radical, rather than white liberal, means of doing curricular and activist work: in her hands, multicultural classrooms become classrooms which prioritize “instituting Black, Latino/a, Native American, and Asian peoples, studies, and pedagogies into the center of the educational curriculum and traditional institutions, in a way that expands upon and critiques received knowledge.”

As she points out, the need to reshape the classroom spaces we make for our students is quite literally an issue of life or death.

Final thoughts? Steven Willis should really take this one home (or, as he says, dismiss class).

Pluralizing Literacies Blog — 2 Comments
19
Feb 16

Self-Taught to Challenge Exceptionalist Narratives

I started reading Heather Williams’s Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom on day two of my bronchitis-ridden body’s stubborn attempt to trudge out into the snow and do things, after resting (eg not going to the gym) for a highly irritating four whole days. Day two witnessed the same thing as day one of trying to emerge from sickville too soon: intense dizziness, fits of violent coughing, and the urgent, urgent need to crawl back under the covers after begrudgingly admitting to my concerned girlfriend that she’d been right in the first place: I’m still too sick to be out and about.

So, naturally, I decided to get ahead in course readings. Which brings me to Williams’s Self-Taught. After getting through a page or so — quickly excited by her presentation of a methodology that necessarily runs a blade through the mandate of periodization — I realized something else with glee: I was reading through this text without a problem. My dragging eyes and utterly exhausted mind were having no problem processing Williams’s introduction. Which is when it hit me how beautifully this book is written, and how it performs the kind of access that the history that infuses its pages emphasizes.

In her own introduction of this book to us (by way of the syllabus), Carmen reminds us not to “try to sound like Grad-Student-Turned-Derrida-Extraordinaire” (which I appreciate more than I can possibly describe. No syllabus has ever made me snort with laughter before. Life seems… complete now.). This reminder is particularly apt for this text, because — while it is supremely researched and is by leaps and bounds the most powerful monograph contribution to U.S. educational history that I can think of — the text itself defies expectations of what scholars are “supposed” to write like. It does not make itself incomprehensible in the name of “sounding academic.” Instead, its poetics are of a different kind: its incisiveness is made all the more powerful by the crystal clarity and accessibility of its language.

Perhaps as important as the history it provides is the rhetoric with which Self-Taught provides it. Williams brilliantly rewrites the typical codes with which dominant historical narratives refer to freed people and enslaved people: almost always identified alongside the note that x person was a slave, freed person, or former slave, dominant histories (like the rest of society) rhetorically establish whiteness as the identity that need not be spoken. Williams, however, only ever identifies white historical actors as such, making Blackness the default identity, decentering default whiteness from her history.

With each new personal literacy journey that she portrays, Williams rhetorically forces her readers to assume the Blackness of that the historical figures she discusses (who most often go nameless in white accountings). This centralization of Blackness in her narrative style reflects the centralization of Blackness in the history she tells, which powerfully situates Black Americans as the force behind the creation of a public education system in this country.

This issue of centralization comes up for me all the time while I’m teaching. With each syllabus I design, lesson plan I write, and lesson plan I change on the balls of my feet, I am constantly considering the immense impact of my white privilege in a CUNY freshmen writing classroom. We are taught — through everything we are exposed to — that teaching generally, and teaching writing specifically, is for white people (because everything is for white people). We are taught it so deeply that I hear colleagues say too proudly, too often, that they teach Octavia Butler’s work… amidst an otherwise overly bleached literary backdrop. Always the exception, like Frederick Douglass, for example, is always figured as the exception in narratives of Black literacy history. (Except, of course, in Williams’s telling.)

So, in the interest of refusing to only tack “other” things onto whiteness — in the interest, rather, of completely decentering whiteness, as much as my white body permits in the classroom — the question I ask myself during the design of my courses is always “what will this do for my students of color?” How can I centralize the various narratives of my students of color in my courses, such that I am not teaching an imaginary white classroom? (This imaginary white classroom is what white liberals inadvertently picture when they go simply for ‘awareness of oppression’ and tokenizing teaching agendas whose backbone is in fact, always, the re-centralization of whiteness.)

Williams’s Self-Taught is an excellent enactment of narrative construction that refuses to put whiteness at the center, recreating Blackness as the default. It is therefore, now, an aspirational text for me, both in terms of sharing the history it provides with my students, but also in learning from its models of accessibility, refusal, and reclaiming.

Creative Texts — No Comments
09
Feb 16

A Scholarship and A New Writing Journey

My girlfriend tends to send me along any and all writing-related opportunities and articles she finds (she finds many, being a writer/editor herself). A few weeks ago, she sent me a link to apply for a directed scholarship for taking an online course on writing middle grade literature. The link came with one word: “apply!”

I texted her back, biting the inside of my cheek as I do when new things crop up. “Thanks babe, this looks cool, but I do YA, not MG.”

An iphone-style ellipsis in a speech bubble, showing that the person you're texting is currently typing. Image from telegraph.co.uk

An iphone-style ellipsis in a speech bubble, showing that the person you’re texting is currently typing. Image from telegraph.co.uk

“Apply anyway.”

So I did, and I’ve just received an Andrea Davis Pinkney Merit Scholarship from the Children’s Book Academy. The scholarship enables me to take their 4-week online intensive on writing middle grade lit.

So, for the next few weeks (before the course begins), I will be ceaselessly editing and re-writing bits of my YA manuscript; during the course month, I will continue editing YA, while writing a new MG novel.

Because I agree wholeheartedly with the beautiful words and wondrously radical sentiments of Daniel José Older that we (especially those of us who are not straight white cis non-dis/abled middle class men) do not need to write every day, and that we certainly need to endeavor not to shame ourselves for living our lives.

But sometimes — sometimes, when the proverbial wind is right and I’m feeling very healthy — I’m going to apply anyway, and see what I can create from it.

Pluralizing Literacies Blog — 1 Comment
08
Feb 16

“New” Literacy Studies, Old Composition

As itself an act of composition, Jacqueline Jones Royster and Jean C. Williams’ “History in the Spaces Left” navigates the consequences of the narrative erasure of Black people (and a plethora of other marginalized people) from the composition of history and the dominant histories of composition. Royster and Williams, after generously but incisively dissecting white-dominated texts like James Berlin’s Rhetoric and Reality, Stephen North’s The Making of Knowledge in Composition, and Susan Miller’s Textual Carnivals, locate the consequences of white-washing histories of composition in dominant assumptions about students of color here and now.

Noting the hegemonic conflation between “basic writing” and young Black writers, Royster and Williams turn to “the shadows of composition history” to expose the ways that “basic writing” was a concern discussed at CCCC conferences in the 1950s, when the “basic writing” student population was predominantly white (571). This reconstruction of recent interlinkage between African American history and composition studies is extremely generative not only because of the reparative recovery (as opposed to whitewashed re-covering) that it represents: many white activists advocating against imperialist teaching styles in higher education assert that the rise of concern about “basic writing” was associated with the 1960s increase in POC population in public colleges and universities. Re-situating “basic writing” anxiety as a white anxiety about white abilities that subsequently became a white anxiety about students of color who became conflated with “basic writing” is a more precise — and more effective — way to articulate the ways that ability is racialized in the academy.

In a similar vein, Kate Pahl and Jennifer Rowsell — in the first chapter of Literacy and Education, present a textbook-style account of new literacies which frames literacy as a “social practice” (9). They imagine the ways that marks on a page (or on a computer screen) are “inscribed” (and in another spot, they say “infused,” giving appropriately fleshy language to literacy practices) with cultural experiences (10). This chapter indirectly elucidate the ways that the operationalizations of hegemonic understandings of literacy as an “objective” set of skills in actuality soaks literacy in a bleach that infuses it fundamentally with cultural identity… just those privileged ones that are rendered unmentionable and invisible. In resituating the definition of literacy as fundamentally about cultural experiences and identities, a social definition of literacy exposes the whiteness associated with the particular skill sets rendered legible by dominant notions of literacy. The need to decenter school as a primary site of literacy is a crucial takeaway of this chapter, largely because schools invalidate “narrative as a form of knowledge” (16).

Pahl and Rowsell’s chapter is largely informed by the idea, articulated by Brian Street in “Autonomous and Ideological Models of Literacy”, that an autonomous model of literacy “disguises the cultural and ideological assumptions that underpin it” (1). This disguising can be articulated as a corollary to compulsory heteronormativity and compulsory able-bodiedness, for example, which render cishet and non-dis/abled identities as the normate and anything/anyone deviating from that norm as hypervisible. In a classroom context, this autonomous model of literacy can easily be found in the hypervisibility of non-“standard” Englishes in which only white, middle class, able-bodied-articulated Englishes have the privilege of being unremarked-upon.

In these texts, I don’t think that the authors don’t so much politicize literacy as they expose the ways that notions of literacy are already inherently politicized. From Royster and Williams’ re-centering of Black participation in composition history to Pahl, Rowsell, and Street’s de-centering of the classroom as a site of some sort of supposedly apolitical, “correct” literacy, these readings resituate New Literacy Studies as stretching beyond the typically-figured association of NLS with an (again, often supposedly apolitical) digital technologies. Moving forward, I’m curious about the relationship between these (decidedly not identity-less and power-less) digital connotations of NLS with the kinds of direct, social-/power-based analyses recovered here as the original driving impetus of NLS.

Contact Me — No Comments
04
Feb 16

Contact Info

What fun is a blog without any interaction?

Follow me on Twitter @jenniferpolish, on LinkedIn here, and feel free to email me at jpolish at gradcenter dot cuny dot edu .

 

Creative Texts — No Comments
03
Feb 16

Fictional Journeys, Non-Fictional Career

Welcome to the creatively-oriented section of this website! As I teach freshmen writing, fiction and creative nonfiction writing keeps emerging as a vital lifeblood of learning. In my life, too (not to be extracted from my teaching life), creative writing sustains me just as much as flipping truck tires at the gym and tossing together new vegan recipes for a sometimes skeptical, but always supportive, girlfriend.

This mini-blog will document my experiences with fiction writing while in graduate school and teaching; it will also serve as a space to explore creative writing processes as I polish my first novel, a queer YA fantasy.

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