Expressions and Implications
Rappin' in the Classroom: The Black English Vernacular in Education
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Yousif Elhindi
When children start their education, more often than not they bring to school a variety of language that is different from the “standard” used in education. The greater the differences between the two varieties, the more challenges they have to overcome in order to be successful. It has often been asserted that the racial gap in academic performance of Caucasian and African American students in the United States is partly the result of an education policy that stigmatizes the Black English Vernacular (BEV) and forces students to learn a mainstream standard variety that is not part of their identity. This paper reiterates the merits of using the BEV in education by reviewing the attempts to use the vernacular in the curricula. It focuses on incorporating the communicative verbal practices of urban Black America into the education system since the vast majority of African Americans live in urban centers. These Black communities have a vibrant communicative style and a rich repertoire that includes verbal practices such as rapping, signifying, and marking. Properly channeling these practices into the classroom would help African Americans emerge from their mute state because they will be given a voice that is part of their heritage, identity, and culture.
Until "History" Stops Repeating Itself: Rethinking the Future of the Humanities Through Black Speculation
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jermaine Singleton
In 1993, Mark Deary coined the term “Afrofuturism” to describe a cultural phenomenon, aesthetic genre, and interpretive lens that explores the relationship between Black Atlantic art, and issues of social justice in a global and technology-intensive world. This paper builds on existing critical conversations about the role ahistorical narrative approaches to the past play in redirecting the claims of “History” on Black socio-technical futures. This study sets the table for a reexamination of the legal and philosophical questions that underpin the contemporary bioethical debates embedded in Black speculative textual languages. I uncover these debates—from questions of freedom, power, and surveillance in relation to the carceral state and digital technologies to questions of reproductive inequality—as the source and critical departure of Black speculative narrative structure, language, and metaphor. Revising what Mudhu Dubey calls “the haunting afterlife of past in the present,” this paper explores how these texts advance an interdisciplinary, revisionary hermeneutic. Through their refusal to accommodate the intertextual relationship between the “History” and the racialized present they creatively lay bare, I uncover a grammar for understanding how these texts uniquely cite, map, and redirect the connections between past and present forces of racialization. If the obstacles to critical thinking are covered and disavowed in and through racial terms, Black speculation, I argue, take us “a step forward to go a mile deep” in moral reasoning toward more robust pedagogies at the intersections of textual studies, critical race studies, bioethics, and the future of liberal learning.
Negotiating Black Childhood Identity: Precarity in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017)
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sanra Reji
The social categorization of childhood historically overlooked the experiences of Black children while gatekeeping the worldview of innocence and normative codes of development. Moreover, literature and cultural productions facilitated this exclusionary agenda by stereotyping Black children and their performances of childhood. Recent debates in the academic discipline of Childhood Studies attempt to reconceptualize Black childhood and thereby unravel the systemic inequalities affecting the formative years of Black children. In this context, the paper reads Jesmyn Ward’s novel Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) to delineate the contemporary representation of Black childhoods. Amid the ongoing movements for Black dignity, Ward’s oeuvre grabs attention by representing diverse childhood experiences. Ward’s narrative strategy involves delineating family sagas through young protagonists navigating the turbulent terrains of deep-rooted systemic racism. By engaging with the pertinent question of gatekeeping childhood from Black children, the study interrogates the doctrines of childhood. Drawing on Judith Butler’s observations of precarity, this paper examines the novel Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) while maintaining the vantage point of childhood studies. A thorough analysis of the novel indicates that the afterlife of slavery continues to have ripple effects on Black childhoods and render them precarious. By engaging with the novel in the context of Black Lives Matter, the study concludes by commenting on Black children’s resilience in the face of impending adversity.
