Arts Education in Action

Collaborative Pedagogies for Social Justice

Sarah Travis, Jody Stokes-Casey, Seoyeon Kim, Sarah Travis, Jody Stokes-Casey, Seoyeon Kim

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780252085659
• eBook ISBN:
  9780252052545
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Art General

Arts educators have adopted social justice themes as part of a larger vision of transforming society. Social justice arts education confronts oppression and inequality arising from factors related to race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, class, ability, gender, and sexuality.

This edition of Common Threads investigates the intersection of social justice work with education in the visual arts, music, theatre, dance, and literature. Weaving together resources from a range of University of Illinois Press journals, the editors offer articles on the scholarly inquiry, theory, and practice of social justice arts education. Selections from the past three decades reflect the synergy of the diverse scholars, educators, and artists actively engaged in such projects. Together, the contributors bring awareness to the importance of critically reflective and inclusive pedagogy in arts educational contexts. They also provide pedagogical theory and practical tools for building a social justice orientation through the arts.

Contributors: Joni Boyd Acuff, Seema Bahl, Elizabeth Delacruz, Elizabeth Garber, Elizabeth Gould, Kirstin Hotelling, Tuulikki Laes, Monica Prendergast, Elizabeth Saccá, Alexandra Schulteis, Amritjit Singh, and Stephanie Springgay

“Plotting” the Story of Race: Pedagogy Challenges in History and Literature

Amritjit Singh

In a frequently cited passage from his essay, “Twentieth Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity” (1953), Ralph Ellison invokes the centrality of race in the narrative of the United States as a nation by proposing that “we view the whole of American life as a drama acted upon the body of a Negro giant, who, lying trussed up like Gulliver, forms the stage and the scene upon which and within which the action unfolds.”¹ Most African Americanists know from their classroom experience how even short pieces such as W. E. B. Du Bois’s “The Conservation of Races” (1897) or “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” (the opening chapter in Souls of Black Folk [1903]) or “Souls of White Folk” (1910), Randolph Bourne’s “Trans-National America” (1916), Marita Bonner’s “On Being Young—a Woman—and Colored” (1925), Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926), Wallace Thurman’s “Nephews of Uncle Remus” (1927), Zora Neale Hurston’s “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” (1928), Ellison’s “What America Would Be Like without Blacks” (1970)—or, for that matter, Peggy McIntosh’s “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” (1989)—can convey the layered complexity of “race” in the United States. Some of our students, like us, can come away from any one or two of these essays with humility and appreciation for the insights and provocations they comprise. Along with scores of films and countless discursive and fictional writings, these very teachable essays show the challenges involved in climbing the steep and treacherous terrains of the racial mountain.

Faced with the mountain, all of us—scholars of literature, history, anthropology, political science, and sociology alike—can benefit immensely from the new understandings of race that interdisciplinary, interethnic, feminist, transatlantic, transnational, postcolonial, and global approaches have brought us in recent decades. In this regard, the intersection of history and literature is quite telling. History is not simply the “story,” a chronological narrative of events, as it is often perceived to be. It is in fact much more like the “plot,” Aristotle’s “mythos.” The distinction between story and plot is commonly honed in gateway courses for English majors. “Plot,” according to M. H. Abrams’s widely used text, A Glossary of Literary Terms (2011), refers to the events and actions of a narrative or dramatic work, “as these are rendered and ordered toward achieving particular artistic and emotional effects.”² Our teaching, no less than our scholarly monographs in history or literature, involves a respect for chronology, but it calls even more for techniques and strategies that resemble the careful arrangement of a literary plot. In history, we would aim our arrangements or strategies toward a desired end or outcome, focusing our plot on critical issues and consequences.

At their best, the classes we teach are shaped by our goal of challenging our students’ assumptions and unsettling the narratives of America or race that they might have already received from uncles and aunts, priests and politicians, friends and neighbors, teachers and mentors, myth and folklore. While most of us do not have a particular doctrine to preach or a specific content to sell, we are not entirely neutral or detached, either. We could be moral and purposeful, activist and political, in varying degrees, in our different styles of teaching. We are interested in making our students aware of the existence of multiple narratives of history and culture—some of them more historically grounded than others. We want to help our students to rearrange the furniture in their minds and to begin questioning any ideologies of white supremacy they might have internalized consciously or unconsciously. We expect them to become critical readers in their own right, capable of examining or imagining the past in fresh and sophisticated ways. The distinction between story and plot is thus an appropriate metaphor for much of what we do as teachers and scholars in the humanities. As in rendering an essay or monograph, so in the classroom, the more palpable our design, the less effective we become in achieving our goals, regardless of our teaching styles or theoretical preferences. In teaching or writing, we are more likely to lose our audiences if our personal biases or ideological predilections are openly on display. I, for one, feel very fortunate when, in the midst of a difficult dialogue, one or two students bring up a critical point of view before I feel compelled to express it. I know from experience that such a point when expressed by me, a figure of authority in the classroom and a foreign-born person of color, would meet with resistance from some or many of my students, making it harder to achieve my goals as a discussion leader.

In this issue of JAEH, such pedagogical concerns find expression in Laila Haidarali’s extended exploration of Du Bois’s novel Dark Princess (1928), and even more directly in the other six shorter pieces that encapsulate a wide range of uses historians make of fictional and life narratives in their teaching and scholarship. These thoughtful reflections by historians would likely bear a cousinship to similar accounts that some teacher-scholars of literature might offer about their uses of history in their work. In either case, our goal is to help our students develop into alert and articulate readers of diverse books and become smart and skeptical consumers of everything they find on the Web or watch on the screen. In literary pedagogy and scholarship there has been “the race for theory” (Barbara Christian’s phrase) since the 1970s. But there has also been a growing recognition of the dangers in surrendering completely to the abstraction and undecidability that deconstruction and other poststructuralist approaches have valorized at the cost of historical specificity and cultural context. Postmodernists and poststructuralists such as Jacques Derrida and Jean-Francois Lyotard declared the demise of objective truth, leaving us solely with difference (Derrida’s différance), signaling the need for tolerance of each individual’s construct of reality shaped by his or her dominant social group.³ As Christian notes in her 1987 essay, the dominance of poststructuralist theory came about—ironically—at the same time as the emergence of African American and other ethnic literatures in the U.S. literary canon. She was concerned that literary criticism was becoming an end unto itself, abandoning literature as the focus of its endeavor. As she put it, “Critics are no longer concerned with literature, but with other critics’ texts, for the critic yearning for attention has displaced the writer and has conceived of himself as the center.”⁴ She was also reluctant to give literary criticism the power to determine that which is valuable, giving rise to the possibility that creative artists would stifle their organic creative tendencies and instead pursue moves that adhere to critics’ definitions of what is worthy and valuable in literature. Christian viewed women writers and writers of color as especially vulnerable, and she worried that literary criticism would reproduce social inequities by denying the dynamic nature of difference and the power of difference to empower both writers and readers.

Evidently, Christian’s understanding of difference was quite distinct from Derrida’s and much more centered in the particularities of history and culture. While some colleagues read Christian’s cautionary essay to represent a rejection of theory, others would view it as a plea to recognize that theory, like culture, takes place in multiple modes, forms, and styles. The following words from the early pages of Christian’s essay are especially relevant to the special focus for this issue of JAEH:

People of color have always theorized—but in forms different from the Western form of abstract logic. . . . Our theorizing (and I intentionally use the verb rather than the noun) is often in narrative forms, in the stories we create, in riddles and proverbs, in the play with language, because dynamic rather than fixed ideas seem more to our liking. . . . My folk, in other words, have always been a race for theory—though more in the form of the hieroglyphic, a written figure that is both sensual and abstract, both beautiful and communicative.⁵

In his essay “Listening to Learn” (1990) and in his book Time Passages (2001), George Lipsitz has expressed similar concerns, arguing that “American studies would be served best by a theory that refuses hypostatization into a method, that grounds itself in the study of concrete cultural practices, that extends the definition of culture to the broadest possible contexts of cultural production and reception, that recognizes the role played by national histories and traditions in cultural contestation, and that understands that struggles over meaning are inevitably struggles over resources.”⁶ Both Christian and Lipsitz would be supportive of the uses historians are finding today for memoirs, autobiographies, short stories, and novels in their teaching and scholarship—turning to such texts to validate and complicate the interplay between the story (chronology) and the plot (arrangement, construction, design) of history.

Haidarali’s Dark Princess

Haidarali’s essay on Du Bois’s intriguing novel Dark Princess gestures toward color and transnationalism, but it examines the narrative mostly through a feminist historian’s lens. While primarily a work of new scholarship, the essay has pedagogical meanings both in relation to women’s voices in our classrooms and the possible uses of woman-centered texts authored by male writers. Haidarali seeks to reposition both African American women and Asian Indian women as central to understanding Du Bois’s heroine, Kautilya, as a raced, gendered, and classed representation of the brown woman’s body. Haidarali views Dark Princess as an unusual text that offers perspectives on both Asian Indian and African American womanhood during a period of vibrant social change and static gendered values. She underscores in her own way the grand problematic of race as we experience it in the discursive, fictional, and autobiographical prose, as well as in writings in other genres, by diverse writers throughout the African American literary tradition. In many ways, African American novelists of the 1920s and 1930s—such as Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, Jessie Fauset, Rudolph Fisher, Thurman, and Hurston—both struggled against, and rejoiced in, the racializing of their identities as New Negroes. As a consequence, Harlem Renaissance literature is rich in the multiple voices and meanings that were often articulated as modern, urban, and progressive. Both as scholars and teachers, historians can surely gain alternative understandings from this literature as well as nuanced ways of viewing popular historical narratives about race, gender, and sexuality during the 1920s. The focus on brownness as a literary metaphor highlights the broader social and cultural factors influencing the meanings of race.

Haidarali references incisive critiques by many black feminist historians and literary scholars that drew attention in the 1980s and 1990s to the peripheral treatment of African American women’s writing during and after the Harlem Renaissance, paving the way for continuing engagements with black feminism by sociologists, historians, and other scholars. It has been especially helpful that courses in Africana Studies, English, History, and Women/Gender Studies have paid particular attention to reading women-authored texts in order to listen more carefully to the social concerns, physical realities, and emotional subjectivity of African American women during the Harlem Renaissance years.

So why does Haidarali analyze a male-authored text to address the raced and gendered ideologies of the 1920s? What does it mean to draw on a text by a most powerful African American man of the era whose intellectualism, activism, and personal life have continued to elicit a diverse body of scholarship on his long career as truly a renaissance man? For African American artists and thinkers of the Harlem Renaissance, both men and women, Du Bois was as indispensable a figure as Ralph Waldo Emerson was to the American Renaissance of the 1850s. Inspired by Souls of Black Folk and in awe of his influence as the editor of The Crisis, most of them admired Du Bois’s intellect and civil rights commitments even as they often challenged or rejected his aesthetic criteria.⁷ But instead of assessing Du Bois’s personality or biography to determine his gendered and sexed politics, Haidarali has chosen to read Dark Princess as a literary representation whereby the audience, rather than the author, assumes responsibility for the reading engagement. In doing so, she underscores the historical meanings of brownness in broader contexts. In considering gender as a relational category, Haidarali also demonstrates the value of this text not necessarily in firming up knowledge about African American women’s social realities, but more directly in showing how representations from the period reveal sets of social and community ideals as informed by the raced politics of the era and in ways that a typical historical narrative might not. Additionally, this essay hints as to why certain male-authored texts on women’s bodies may tell us something that women-authored ones may not. For example, in Dark Princess, Du Bois draws women’s bodies with reverence, sensual delight, and a conservative masculine imperative. Contrasted with Du Bois’s radical race politics, his transnational vision, and his celebratory view of modern interracial sexuality, the conservative gender values accorded in the novel to brown and black women highlight the ideology of the period as one that strategically embraced only some ideals of modern womanhood.

Haidarali’s analysis is thus instructive in understanding multiple layers in the histories of African American women. She helps us to see how past and contemporary perceptions of African Americans demanded rethinking, especially in relation to the growing social values of a modern 1920s America and its expanding embrace of independent womanhood along with greater sexual freedoms. Her analysis also draws attention to how representations of African American middle-class women continued to reflect concerns that collectivized race without including women’s gendered position from a female point of view. Women’s voices rightly deserve our continued attention, and perhaps more in conversation with, rather than in opposition to, the voices of the male authors with whom they socialized and worked to create the body of literature that historians and others find invaluable in considering the ideologies of the 1920s. Certainly Haidarali’s analysis is a pointer toward how our syllabi might be constructed to model gender discourse: to allow both male and female voices to share space in one course as they validate, refine, or contradict one another.

Forum on Pedagogy: Race in History and Literature Courses

Some of Haidarali’s concerns are reflected again in the six pieces that comprise the Forum section in this issue, focused as they are on the uses of fiction and life narratives in the teaching of history and general education courses on a variety of U.S. campuses. For the most part, these essays strike a personal note in documenting and reflecting upon the interdisciplinary approaches that help to break down students’ resistance to imagining the role race has played in our past and how it continues to blur our understandings of social and political phenomena in the present. While only some of the essays describe in some detail students’ interaction with the particular texts, these essays individually and collectively do convey a view of U.S. history not as a steady expansion of freedoms but as a constant struggle, with many setbacks and backlashes along the way. Cheryl Greenberg relates this resistance or denial quite aptly to the way the Civil Rights Movement has been often taught to show that “American history is a slow but inexorable trek from inequality to equality, from injustice to justice, from an imperfect to a more perfect union.”

Greenberg is fortunate that most of her students at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, have a “basic knowledge of the civil rights movement . . . and know the names of Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, and Malcolm X,” something uncommon on most U.S. campuses. In responding to the needs of student populations who often know little about the major events and figures in U.S. history, I begin my courses in nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American literature by showing a video such as Marlon Riggs’s Ethnic Notions (1986), followed by an extended presentation on U.S. history from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In offering this history to groups comprised mostly of European Americans, ethnically inflected or not, I am aware, as my students sometimes are too, that they are learning the fundamentals of their own history from a turbaned Sikh immigrant from India. I build my sweeping narrative of U.S. history, that “drama acted upon the body of a Negro giant” in Ellison’s phrase, from the Reconstruction years, 1865–1877, our first short-lived affirmative action program, through the 1890s, widely regarded as the nadir of African American citizenship rights, to the Harlem Renaissance, whose considerable successes in the arts did not translate well into basic civil rights for blacks. I underscore along the way the importance of dates such as 1876 (the election of President Rutherford Hayes and the subsequent withdrawal of federal troops from the South) and 1896 (the Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision). I note wryly the significance of 1895 in the trajectory of black leadership: the year in which Du Bois, with a PhD from Harvard in hand, embarked on his academic and public career; Booker T. Washington made his controversial Atlanta Compromise speech; and Frederick Douglass died after making for three years some of the bitterest and most despairing speeches on race after having been persuaded back into public life by Ida Wells following years of silence and retreat. Despite his access to the White House, Washington’s failure to stem the level of violence directed at young African American males around the turn of the century brought the resounding rejection of his accommodationist politics by the Niagara Movement in 1905, leading eventually to the formation in 1909 of the NAACP as the first major civil rights organization by a g...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Art Education in Civil Society • Visual Arts Research, 2005 (31, no. 2)
• Social Justice and Art Education • Visual Arts Research, 2004 (30, no. 2)
• “Plotting" the Story of Race: Pedagogy Challenges in History and Literature • Journal of American Ethnic History, 2012 (32, no. 1)
• Utopian Performatives and the Social Imaginary: Toward a New Philosophy of Drama/Theater Education • Journal of Aesthetic Education, 2011 (45, no. 1)
• Disability, Hybridity, and Flamenco Cante • Women, Gender, and Families of Color, 2015 (3, no. 1)
• Beyond Participation: A Reflexive Narrative of the Inclusive Potentials of Activist Scholarship in Music Education • Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education, 2016 (no. 210–211)
• Companion-able Species: A Queer Pedagogy for Music Education • Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education, 2013 (no. 197)
• (Re)Constructing Cultural Conceptions and Practices in Art Education: An Action Research Study • Visual Arts Research, 2014 (40, no. 2)
• Art, Native Voice, and Political Crisis: Reflections on Art Education and the Survival of Culture at Kanehsatake • Visual Arts Research, 1993 (29, no. 57)
• Affinity, Collaboration, and the Politics of Classroom Speaking • Feminist Teacher, 1997 (11, no. 2)
• Knitting as an Aesthetic of Civic Engagement: Re-conceptualizing Feminist Pedagogy Through Touch • Feminist Teacher, 2010 (20, no. 2)
• Back Cover