Engaging with Multicultural YA Literature in the Secondary Classroom

Critical Approaches for Critical Educators

Ricki Ginsberg, Wendy Glenn, Ricki Ginsberg, Wendy Glenn, Wendy J. Glenn, Ricki Ginsberg, Wendy J. Glenn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367147211
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429627910
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

With a focus on fostering democratic, equitable education for young people, Ginsberg and Glenn's engaging text showcases a wide variety of innovative, critical classroom approaches that extend beyond traditional literary theories commonly used in K-12 and higher education classrooms and provides opportunities to explore young adult (YA) texts in new and essential ways. The chapters pair YA texts with critical practices and perspectives for culturally affirming and sustaining teaching and include resources, suggested titles, and classroom strategies. Following a consistent structure, each chapter provides foundational background on a key critical approach, applies the approach to a focal YA text, and connects the approach to classroom strategies designed to encourage students to think deeply and critically about texts, themselves, and the world. Offering a wealth of innovative pedagogical tools, this comprehensive volume offers opportunities for students and their teachers to explore key and emerging topics, including culture, (dis)ability, ethnicity, gender, immigration, race, sexual orientation, and social class.

Chapter 1
Positioning Theory

Exploring Power, Social Location, and Moral Choices of the American Dream in American Street

Jennifer Buehler

Stories of the American Dream are central to American identity. One of our core cultural beliefs is that America is the land of opportunity; everyone can make it if they work hard enough. References to the American Dream appear throughout popular culture, from rags-to-riches stories of individuals who achieve wealth through hard work and ingenuity to bootstraps stories of immigrants. The concept of social mobility—that is, the notion that individuals can ascend to a higher-class status than the one they were born to—is central to our national ideology. Through the American Dream narrative, we tell the world who we as a country believe ourselves to be.

But there is a darker side to the American Dream. While some Americans do rise from humble origins to achieve financial success, the playing field is not level. Government policies ensure this. For example, throughout the 20th century, federal laws and local ordinances were designed to create and maintain racial segregation in neighborhoods, which limited African-Americans’ access to home ownership, jobs, and quality education (see, for example, Coates, 2014 and Rothstein, 2017). It is impossible to consider the American Dream without also considering the social location of the person trying to achieve it.

Ibi Zoboi explores these ideas and more in American Street (2017). On one hand, the novel presents a classic immigration story: main character, Fabiola Toussaint, struggles with the tension involved in acclimating to a new home in Detroit while holding on to parts of Haitian culture she finds essential to her identity. Her struggle is more intense because she must undergo it alone. When her mother is detained at an immigration center in New Jersey, Fabiola has no choice but to continue on to Detroit where an aunt and three cousins are waiting for her. In the midst of a strange new world, Fabiola relies on spirit guides, called lwas and drawn from Haitan vodou, to help her make sense of the moral choices that confront her. The plot hinges on the question of what Fabiola is willing to sacrifice in order to be reunited with her mother. Meanwhile, she wonders how to reconcile the “empty houses, and broken buildings, and wide roads that lead to nowhere and everywhere” (p. 247) with the good life she expected to find in America.

Alongside Fabiola’s struggle, Zoboi reveals the struggles of Fabiola’s Haitian-born aunt, Matant Jo, who came to America looking for work and opportunity; her cousins, the Three Bees, whose father was murdered in Detroit when they were children; and others in the community, including drug dealers and a homeless man. At key moments, Zoboi provides her main characters with back-stories. Presented in the form of first-person interludes, these backstories allow characters to speak in their own voices about who they are and what they have lived. Readers are thus challenged to view characters’ behaviors as reflections of the history they have inherited as well as their hopes and dreams.

Positioning Theory

Because much of what Fabiola experiences in America contradicts with what she has been told, she must construct a new story about what one must do to claim power and agency here. Part of learning to navigate her environment involves figuring out how to interpret the behaviors and motivations of people around her. Students perform similar acts of interpretation when they read literature. Positioning theory provides them with tools to do this work critically.

Drawn from social psychology and discourse analysis, positioning theory begins with the premise that we are always making sense of our own and others’ lives in terms of storylines that tell us what to expect in social situations. Storylines help us recognize and interpret the parts we and others are playing in everyday interactions.

As Harré and his colleagues have argued (e.g., van Langenhove & Harré, 1999), during conversational interactions, people use narratives or “story-lines” to make their words and actions meaningful to themselves and others. They can be thought of as presenting themselves as actors in a drama, with different parts or “positions” assigned to participants in the conversation. Positions made available in this way are not fixed, but fluid, and may change from one moment to the next depending on the storylines through which participants make meaning of the interaction (Barnes, 2004). Storylines and subject positions may be drawn from everyday life (e.g., routines of classrooms, courtrooms, or churches) or cultural repertoires (e.g., roles such as damsel in distress, gangster, or superhero). We live our lives in relation to storylines; that is, “strips of life are usually lived stories for which told stories already exist” (Harré, 2012, p. 198).

If storylines are present in everyday conversation, then acts of positioning occur when people use speech acts to reveal beliefs about others’ personal characteristics, merits, or flaws (e.g., “He’s such a hard worker”) or their own status in comparison to others (e.g., “We only shop at Whole Foods”). Positioning also happens when people locate their own or others’ experiences within a moral context (e.g., “Good guys finish last”). How people are positioned in any situation depends on community values, personal characteristics, and the histories of individuals (Barnes, 2004).

Because positions carry associated rights and duties, such as the right to be heard or the duty to care for others, positioning is linked to power. Being positioned in a certain way carries obligations or expectations about how one should behave and/or constraints on what one may meaningfully say or do (Barnes, 2004). Positioning is a social and interactive process in that participants in a conversation position others while simultaneously positioning themselves. Once one individual is positioned by another, the initial positioning can be challenged (van Langenhove & Harré, 1999). The process of establishing or relinquishing power in social interaction hinges on the way individuals interpret the meaning of their own and others’ speech acts.

Positioning matters because it has moral implications. Speech acts are used to rank, sort, and judge. People can be positioned in terms of their individual attributes and with regard to moral orders (van Langenhove & Harré, 1999). The way we use language locates people and groups as trusted or distrusted, with us or against us (Moghaddam & Harré, 2010). In acts of positioning, we reveal our beliefs about others as right or wrong, virtuous or flawed, deserving of reward or punishment.

Since positioning theory is concerned with storylines and roles, it provides a useful lens for analyzing literature. The following teaching plan consists of three parts: 1) introducing students to core concepts of positioning theory; 2) engaging students in drama-based activities focused on characters and events in American Street; and 3) having students apply positioning theory through community-based research.

Introducing Positioning Theory

To get comfortable with positioning theory’s core concepts, students may find it helpful to bring a series of questions to their reading of the novel. These questions, presented in Figure 1.1, suggest theory-driven ways of interpreting speech acts.

The following examples illustrate positioning in American Street as seen in characters’ thoughts, first-person interludes, scenes of dialogue, and references to the American Dream.

Characters’ Thoughts

When Fabiola meets her three cousins in person—Chantal, the oldest, and the twins, Primadonna and Princess—she positions herself as mature and responsible, just like Chantal, the good student with the big SAT score who now attends community college: “Everything she’s said sounds like she has a good head on her shoulders. I decide then and there that we will be the second set of twins in this family” (p. 18).

Figure 1.1 Questions for exploring core concepts in positioning theory

Fabiola’s self-positioning corresponds to the way she is positioned by Pri— as a good girl different from the rest of them: “Ma, don’t be so hard on her. You finally got the little good girl you prayed for. She looks like she’s on that straight and narrow” (p. 17).

First-Person Interludes

In the interlude, “Princess’s Story,” Pri tells the reader how she and her sisters were positioned as “other” when they were children: “They thought just ’cause we were Haitian, we didn’t bathe, we wore mismatched clothes, and we did voodoo” (p. 45). Pri and her sisters reject that positioning and construct new positions for themselves:

I don’t remember who came up with it first, but Chantal is the brains, Donna is the beauty, and me, I’m the brawn. Three Bees. Biggest, baddest bitches from the west side. Nobody, I mean nobody, fucks with us.

(p. 46)

By repositioning themselves as big and bad, Pri and her sisters claim the right to intimidate and dominate those who threaten them. In doing so, they rewrite the power dynamic in their school and neighborhood.

Later, Chantal’s interlude (“Chantal’s Story”) shows how the position she constructs for herself is more nuanced—both a reflection of her dreams and a response to her environment:

I try to walk a path that’s perfectly in between. On one side are the books and everything I have to do to make myself legit, and on the other side are the streets and everything I have to do to stay alive out here.

(p. 117)

Pri’s and Chantal’s interludes show how acts of positioning can only be fully understood in relation to context and personal history.

Scenes of Dialogue

When Fabiola is getting to know Kasim, who later becomes her boyfriend, she asks if he reads books. Kasim hears a storyline drawn from Detroit and takes offense at being positioned in it: “You’re asking me if I’m literate? […] I’m sorry, Fab. I just don’t like it when girls do that. Either they think I’m swimming in cash money, or they think I’m dumb as fuck” (p. 101).

Fabiola tries to smooth things over by drawing on storylines from vodou to position Kasim as different from Donna’s boyfriend, Dray: “There are guys like Dray in Haiti. […] We call them vagabon, drug dealers. Maybe some of them like to study, but they love money more” (p. 102). These exchanges show how positioning is linked to power. Participants use speech acts to affirm or refute how they are seen and understood by others.

References to the American Dream

When Aunt Jo tells Fabiola what motivated her husband, Uncle Phil, to buy their home in Detroit (“Matant Jo’s Story”), she invokes a cultural narrative that connects home ownership to the American Dream: “He had dreams, you know. That’s why when he saw this house for sale, on the corner of American Street and Joy Road, he insisted on buying it. […] He thought he was buying American Joy” (p. 57).

When Dray explains how he came of age in those same streets (“Drayton’s Story”), he invokes a different narrative about American life: “If my pops and his pops before him been fighting all their lives to just fucking breathe, then what’s there for a little nigga to contemplate when somebody puts a gun in his hand?” (p. 314). The position Dray claims as a drug dealer is his response to being dealt an empty hand.

Pri invokes both narratives when she explains how she and Donna got their names (“Princess’s Story”):

Ma named us Primadonna and Princess ’cause she thought being born in America to a father with a good paying job at a car factory and a house and a bright future meant that we would be royalty. But when our father got killed, that’s when shit fell apart.

(p. 44)

Pri’s account shows how she replaces one storyline about life in America (the possibility of rising from humble origins to become royalty) with another (shit falls apart).

Drama-Based Activities

While positioning theory is useful for analyzing characters and scenes, text-based analysis may not lead students to interrogate why they respond to characters and situations as they do. Drama-based activities provide space for students to examine how social location shap...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: The Critical Power and Potential of Multicultural Young Adult Literature
• 1 Positioning Theory: Exploring Power, Social Location, and Moral Choices of the American Dream in American Street
• 2 The Social Mind: Using Drama to Walk through Racism in Out of Darkness
• 3 Neoliberalism: A Framework for Critiquing Representations of the “Superspecial” Individual in Marcelo in the Real World
• 4 The Dominant/Oppositional Gaze: The Power of Looking in Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass
• 5 Multiethnic/Multicultural/Multiracial Alloys: Reading the “Mixed” Experience in Little & Lion
• 6 Borders and Borderlands: Interrogating Real and Imagined Third Spaces Using If I Ever Get Out of Here
• 7 Understanding Racial Melancholia: Analyzing Race-Related Losses and Opportunities for Mourning through American Born Chinese
• 8 Interrogating Happiness: Unraveling Homophobia in the Lives of Queer Youth of Color with More Happy than Not
• 9 Queer Reading Practices and Ideologies: Questioning and (Not) Knowing with Brooklyn, Burning
• 10 Complicating the Coming Out Story: Unpacking Queer and (Anti)Normative Thinking in Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda
• 11 Theories of Space, Place, and Navigational Identity: Turning Inside Out and Back Again in the Exploration of Immigration
• 12 Teaching #BlackLivesMatter and #SayHerName: Interrogating Historical Violence against Black Women in Copper Sun
• 13 Critical Race English Education: Engaging with Hip-Hop, Resistance, and Remix in All American Boys and Viral YouTube Videos
• 14 Critical Language Awareness: Unpacking Linguistic and Racial Ideologies in The Hate U Give
• 15 Critical Comparative Content Analysis: Examining Violence, Politics, and Culture in Two Versions of I Am Malala
• 16 Deconstructing the Superhero: Interrogating the Racialization of Bodies Using All-New, All-Different Avengers, Vol. I
• 17 Arts-Based Approaches to Social Justice in Literature: Exploring the Intersections of Magical Realism and Identities in When the Moon Was Ours
• 18 Afrofuturist Reading: Exploring Non-Western Depictions of Magical Worlds in Akata Witch
• Conclusion: Recognizing and Speaking to the Challenges that Come with Courageous Teaching
• Acknowledgments
• Editors and Contributors
• Index