Cultural Amnesia and Literature for Change

I have often viewed literature as the voice through which the silenced, the colonized, the oppressed and marginalized tell their stories—stories the history textbooks, at least in my experience, often leave out or gloss over. That is one of the reasons I have always been drawn to literature, and one of the many reasons I look forward to teaching literature and learning from my students. Honestly, though, it wasn’t until the last few months in my program at the University of Minnesota that I began to recognize the role literature can play in helping students—and me—interrogate whatever realm of the universe we all live in. So, in this post, I reflect on a few themes and standout quotes from recent course readings, Heather Coffey’s “Critical Literacy” (2008) and Justin Grinage’s “Socializing with the Ghosts of Our Racial Past: Embracing Traumatic Teaching and Learning in Literacy Education” (2018).

Cultural Amnesia

Grinage published “Socializing with Ghosts” more than two years before George Floyd’s murder, which struck me because the victims whose names Grinage mentions rarely surface in mainstream conversations today, as if we as a country can only handle so many murders of Black men, women, and children at a time. Once processed, their names and legacies seem to be compartmentalized and filed away--not by all, by any means, but by some. Among other things, as a society, we seem to suffer from intentional cultural amnesia. We forget what we cannot or will not acknowledge rather than interrogate the issues, the circumstances, the “why,” and we refuse to embrace the cognitive dissonance necessary to move beyond the “not my problem” or “I don’t get it” scenarios to contribute to the solution.

Grinage speaks of American society’s longterm cultural amnesia—I borrowed the term from him—noting that “various scholars have also chronicled how education in the United States carries out practices of historical and cultural imperialism by distorting, misshaping, and silencing racial violence through the positioning of the U.S. as a democratic nation free of racial strife and indignation surrounding our racial past.” (p. 5) It’s kind of like how we learned in 1980s and 1990s social studies classes that Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, and then all was well. Except it very obviously was not then, nor is it now. Ergo, literature.

Interrogating Society through Critical Readings

Paolo Freire (1987) talks of reading the word and reading the world. Similarly, Coffey talks of teachers creating “experiences that offer students opportunities to actively construct knowledge” and how schools must “become places where students interrogate social conditions through dialogue about issues significant to their lives.” (p. 2) Together they speak of teachers and students engaging with literature and literacy to participate in societal interrogation and social action.

Grinage takes liberal pedagogy a step further, asserting that “learning to understand, represent, and interact with racial ghosts can lead to anti-racism through the usage or critical literacy.” (p.3) Trauma novels can play a valuable role in unpacking for all of our students the toll racism and racial violence have had, and continue to have, on our society. I can see incorporating trauma novels into some classes to bring this to light, asking students to take a critical approach to exploring and identifying the damaging systems and beliefs that are embedded in society, and exploring ways in which we can move to a more just society.

As much as I subscribe to Grinage’s philosophy here, and as much as I value its place in liberal pedagogy, I worry about traumatizing students further. I worry about overdoing trauma, as well.

Are there ways to uncover racial truths without leaning solely on trauma to acknowledge massive failures past and present and engender hope in the future? Where trauma novels may not be appropriate, or would be gratuitous, there are texts of all kinds just waiting to be unpacked and discussed on the social justice front. In addition to reading the word and the world, teaching is very much about reading the class, which looks like me earning students' trust and keeping it.

Feliz Aniversário

In recognition of his contributions to critical pedagogy and humankind, I celebrate what would have Paolo Freire’s 100th birthday today.