Critical Education Reading Blog

 I want to start by saying that I am a fundamentally traumatized person. I don't feel the need to recount any of my traumas to prove that, just trust me when I say this is true.  I understand this essay as characterizing making trauma speakable as a fundamental product of healing. I don't disagree with it, but it must be informed by the fact that its subject is trauma novels. The trauma must be speakable because it has been spoken. However, I feel as though I have recovered from trauma that I cannot speak. I can point towards them (hypothetical ex: reading was made harder for me due to a traumatic experience involving my teacher in 3rd grade and now reading is not harder for me) but I cannot describe the trauma (the hypothetical traumatic experience with my 3rd grade teacher). I feel like many progressives view trauma as unrecoverable from and unchallengeable. I can point at countless discourses or discursive techniques for this, but the one strongest in my mind is "Someon

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