Critical Education Reading Blog

My impression is that the Africanist presence in mainstream American literature is rooted more in anti-blackness than anything else. Morrison describes how Americanness is constructed in response to Africanism. A part of this is also drawing from some antiracist ideas, that whiteness is itself constructed through anti-blackness. Morrison goes on to describe how criticism engages in a form of White Talk, especially engaged in color-blindness. She lists a number of works which explicitly engage with blackness and how that blackness is invisibilized by the White Listening Ear (more the White Reading Eye in this case?). I understand this perception of the American literary canon as more indicative of how Americanness (and thereby whiteness) interacts with Africanism than the American literary canon itself.  Tangent: Storytime. Zora Neale Hurston used Black English in her work. Modernists loved to co-opt Black English for their work. Zora Neale Hurston engaged with a lot of features of Mode

 I am going to talk about names, because that's one of the activities Christensen brings to the forefront.  I've previously mentioned I hate the activity (which many teachers adore) involving "My Name," making meaning out of your name, and sharing it. Reason 1: The first time I did it (DirecTrack), I was a closeted trans woman still picking a new name and had to talk about this thing I hate in a way that didn't just out me because this was day one and I didn't know these people. Reason 2: The second time I did it (observing a professional development session), I shared with a practicing teacher the joy I get from my actual name, and she asked me what my "birth name" was. I acknowledge that this is an activity with strong backing for usage with a wide span of diverse groups, but I haven't yet figured out how to fix it for trans* kids. Let's try to do that again, then. Problem 1: Closeted trans* students often have understood and identified dis

 I think that this chapter's concerns about the fallout of deconstruction is a little silly. The crisis caused by saying "this text might not have a specific meaning" is a good and important one to spur in a classroom. Britzman writes that deconstruction "called into question the foundations of their personal identities and core beliefs," and I think that exact questioning is essential to critically developing one's own identities and beliefs (125). If I did not constantly deconstruct myself, I would be a worse and more miserable person. To not question the foundations of one's personal identities and core beliefs is both a mark of power - I have to  constantly evaluate how being a trans woman affects how I exist in the world to just stay safe, whereas I do not have to  do the same for being white - and a missed opportunity for growth. I think you could handle introducing deconstruction better. I would like to introduce it further from the end of the sem

I want to start by repeating my favorite maxim in my interactions with theory: bell hooks is never wrong. That seems to hold true again today, although it feel like she could have dug further into how critical fiction is positioned as a useful resistance tool uniquely compared to other genres/mediums. I think I'll start by attempting to explore that question. So, how does critical fiction work in a way that, say, a critical memoir does not? Well, bell hooks begins to explain that it's the component of imagination, which she explains using a quote by Gabriel García Marquez talking about how the source of imagination is reality... so what is the difference here? Working to decode this further, it seems like maybe she is saying that imagination is where resistance is held maybe because a lack of imagination (or an imagination unrelated to reality) leaves reality intact? Okay, I think that sort of makes sense. Now, what if I think of it with critical essays? After sitting with that

 I want to think about this with a particular experience I had during my undergraduate career. During my class "Survey of US Literature II," one of the books we read was The Clansman . For those unfamiliar, it's a book that is about a mythological version of the inception of the Ku Klux Klan and reflects on it positively. It was written after a period in which the KKK had fallen out of relevance, but it sparked the beginning of its second wave (and the film The Birth of a Nation ). Point being: fucked up book right there. It's also bad from a craft angle (insofar as craft exists). So, we read a badly written, white supremacist book in class. By exercising critical literacy (specifically, by reading from a resistant perspective), I got useful ideas - especially about features of white supremacist discourses. My point is that "Critical Literacy" aligns with this experience. I am a gigantic fan of the "taking social action" section. The "Smash it

 I first want to speak to this text's (current) irrelevance to me: my student teaching placement is currently focused much more on writing than on reading and the reading within the classroom seems primarily interested in thinking a New Critical approach, focused on the features of writing which students can use within their writing. This is not to say that it is irrelevant to my future career, just mostly irrelevant within my current context. Anyways, I think this is awesome. I want to point out lenses that are missing and can be really impactful to implement in a variety of texts which are also still relatively accessible to students: queer theory, disability theory, theory of hegemony, and technically new criticism but I think that's much more present in the secondary classroom anyways. This is sort of just "hey these schools of thought are always undervalued in general literature classrooms, and this continues to do so" but also books sometimes need to be smaller