Vernacular Insurrections

Race, Black Protest, and the New Century in Composition-Literacies Studies

Carmen Kynard

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781438446370
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Multicultural Education

Winner of the 2015 James M. Britton Award presented by Conference on English Education a constituent organization within the National Council of Teachers of English Carmen Kynard locates literacy in the twenty-first century at the onset of new thematic and disciplinary imperatives brought into effect by Black Freedom Movements. Kynard argues that we must begin to see how a series of vernacular insurrections—protests and new ideologies developed in relation to the work of Black Freedom Movements—have shaped our imaginations, practices, and research of how literacy works in our lives and schools. Utilizing many styles and registers, the book borrows from educational history, critical race theory, first-year writing studies, Africana studies, African American cultural theory, cultural materialism, narrative inquiry, and basic writing scholarship. Connections between social justice, language rights, and new literacies are uncovered from the vantage point of a multiracial, multiethnic Civil Rights Movement.

Notes

Introduction

1. CUNY traces its beginnings to the founding in 1847 of the Free Academy which later became The City College, the first CUNY College. Today it is the nation's largest urban university: eleven senior colleges, six community colleges, a graduate school, a law school, and The Sophie Davis School of Biomedical Education. CUNY has more than 450,000 degree-credit students and adult, continuing, and professional education students. An additional 40,500 students are enrolled in College Now, the university's enrichment program for high school students at CUNY campuses representing more than two hundred New York City high schools. Another eight thousand students are enrolled in CUNY-affiliated high schools. In 2003, 45 percent of all the college students in the city of New York were attending CUNY with 62 percent of CUNY students having attended NYC public high schools. 31 percent were black; 29 percent were white; 26 percent were Latino; 14 percent were Asian. Sixty-two percent of the students were women and 35 percent were twenty-five years or older. Forty-three percent of first-time freshmen were born outside of the United States; 49 percent of entering freshmen had a native language other than English, with 119 languages in total represented. Forty-four percent work more than twenty hours per week. The City University of New York (Web site) (2003); available from http://www.cuny.edu/; internet; accessed August 30, 2003.

2. Carter G. Woodson, The Miseducation of the Negro (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press), xi.

3. For a discussion of how I connect the underprepared K-12 teaching force often at the helms of working-class, black and Latino/a schools to the faculty who teach freshmen composition, please see: “Writing While Black: The Colour Line, Black Discourses, and Assessment in the Institutionalization of Writing Instruction,” English Teaching: Practice and Critique 7, no. 2 (September 2008): 4–34.

4. Quoted in Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Verso 1993), 187.

5. Catherine Prendergast, Literacy and Racial Justice: The Politics of Learning after Brown v. Board of Education (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003).

6. See Manning Marable and Leith Mullings, Let Nobody Turn Us Around: Voices of Resistance, Reform, and Renewal (An African American Anthology) (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 376. I am using the term “Black Freedom Movement” rather than treat the Civil Rights movement and Black Power movement as separate epistemological experiences and historical trajectories. As Kathleen Cleaver further argues, the term Civil Rights movement might even minimize and exclude the role of Black Power in black liberation struggles. See Kathleen Cleaver, “And the Beat Goes On: Challenges Facing Black Intellectuals,” in The New Black Renaissance: The Souls Anthology of Critical African-American Studies, ed. Manning Marable (Boulder and London: Paradigm Publishers, 2005), 284–96.

7. When I say modes of discourse, I am talking about four overdetermined forms that classify and organize how language is discussed and taught across many composition textbooks and classrooms: description, narrative, exposition, and persuasion. For a discussion of how Bain was actually radically altering previous nineteenth-century American college textbooks by imagining discourse outside of the classification of oration, history, romance, etc, see Jon Harned, “The Intellectual Background of Alexander Bain's ‘Modes of Discourse,’” College Composition and Communication 36, no. 1 (February 1985): 42–50.

8. Joseph Harris, “After Dartmouth: Growth and Conflict in English,” College English 53, no. 6 (October 1991): 631–46.

9. Louise Rosenblatt, Literature as Exploration (New York: Appleton-Century, 1968).

10. See James Berlin, “Freirean Pedagogy in the U.S.: A Response,” Journal of Advanced Composition 12, no. 2 (Fall 1992): 414–20; Deborah Brandt, “Accumulating Literacy: Writing and Learning to Write in the Twentieth Century,” College English 57, no. 6 (October 1995): 649–68; Deborah Brandt, Literacy in American Lives (Cambridge University Press, 2001); Patricia Bizzell, Academic Discourse and Critical Consciousness (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992); Patricia Bizzell, ““Paulo Freire and What Education Can Do,” JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory 17, no. 3 (1997): 319–21; Suresh Canagarajah, “Safe Houses in the Contact Zone: Coping Strategies of African-American Students in the Academy,” CCC 48, no. 2 (May 1997): 173–96; Ellen Cushman, “The Public Intellectual, Service Learning, and Activist Research,” College English 61, no. 3 (1999): 328–36; Ellen Cushman, “The Rhetorician as an Agent of Social Change,” College Composition and Communication 47, no. 1 (February 1996): 7–28; Keith Gilyard, Voices of the Self (Wayne State University Press); Gary Olson, “History, Praxis, and Change: Paulo Freire and the Politics of Literacy,” Journal of Advanced Composition 12, no. 1 (Winter 1992): 1–14; Jacqueline Jones Royster, Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change among African American Women (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000); Ira Shor, ed. Critical Literacy in Action: Writing Words, Changing Worlds (Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1999).

11. Susan Kates, Activist Rhetorics and American Higher Education, 1885–1937 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001).

12. Joseph Harris, A Teaching Subject: Composition Since 1966 (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1997), xi.

13. Gwendolyn Pough, “2011 CCCC Chair's Address: It's Bigger than Comp/Rhet: Contested and Undisciplined,” College Composition and Communication 63, no. 2: 301–13.

14. See Arthur Applebee, Tradition and Reform in the Teaching of English: A History (Urbana: NCTE, 1974); James Berlin, Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century American Colleges (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984); Sharon Crowley, Composition in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998); Kelly Ritter, Before Shaughnessy: Basic Writing and Yale and Harvard, 1920–1960 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009).

15. Crowley, 235; Carmen Kynard, “Writing While Black.”

16. Tom Fox, “Working Against the State: Composition's Intellectual Work for Change,” in Rhetoric and Composition as Intellectual Work, ed., Gary Olson (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002), 91–100.

17. Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 177.

18. Robinson reminds us that these catchments are “often abused when we turn from the ordering of things, that is chronological sequencing, to the order of things, that is the arrangement of their significances, meanings, and relations” (Robinson, 177).

19. Nell Painter, The History of White People (New York: Norton, 2010).

20. David Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (New York: Basic Books, 2005).

21. Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (Routledge, 2008).

22. Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998).

23. Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno, eds., Are Italians White? How Race is Made in America (Routledge, 2003).

24. Manning Marable, “The Political and Theoretical Contexts of the Changing Racial Terrain,” Souls 4, no. 3: 1–16.

25. Ibid., 1.

26. Ibid., 5.

27. Houston Baker Jr., Afro-American Poetics: Revisions of Harlem and the Black Aesthetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 7.

28. Kent Ono and John Sloop, “The Critic of Vernacular Discourse,” Communication Monographs 62 (1995): 19–46.

29. Roland Robertson, Globalisation: Social Theory and Global Culture (London: Sage, 1992); Allan Luke and Victoria Carrington, “Globalisation, Literacy, Curriculum Practice,” in Language and Literacy in Action, ed. R. Fisher, M. Lewis, G. Brooks (London: Routledge, 2004).

30. Gerard Hauser, Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999).

31. Marable and Mullings, Let Nobody Turn Us Around, 376.

32. Robin D. G. Kelley and Earl Lewis, To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), xvi.

33. Robinson, Black Marxism, 307.

34. Baker, Afro-American Poetics, 17.

35. Ibid., 18.

36. Robert Connors, “Rhetorical History as a Component of Composition Studies,” Rhetoric Review 7 (1989): 230–40.

37. Baker, Afro-American Poetics, 3.

38. Louise Phelps, “Paths Not Taken: Recovering History as Alternate Future,” in History, Reflection, and Narrative: The Professionalization of Composition, 1963–1983, ed. Mary Rosner, Beth Boehm, and Debra Journet (Stanford, CT: Ablex, 1999), 39–58.

39. Ibram Rogers, The Black Campus Movement: Black Students and the Racial Reconstitution of Higher Education, 1965–1972 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

40. Elaine Richardson, African American Literacies (New York: Routledge, 2003).

41. V. P. Franklin, “Introduction: African American Student Activism in the 20^th Century,” Journal of African American History 88, no. 2 (Spring 2003): 105–109.

42. Glynda Hull and Katherine Schultz, School's Out!: Bridging Out-of-School Literacies with Classroom Practice (New York: Teachers College Press, 2002); Jabari Mahiri, What They Don't Learn in School: Literacy in the Lives of Urban Youth (New York: Peter Lang, 2004).

43. Charles...