Critical Literature, Critical Literacy

       The words struggle, resistance, and revolution can often and easily be construed as violent and reactionary, as a backlash. That is not the framework used by bell hooks in her discussion of critical literature. It is, she says, a tool for building, for finding hope, an invitation for a shared imaginative experience. Anyone can be be an audience for a particular work if they engage willingly and with empathy, an empathy that is rooted in the ability to image different ways of knowing and speaking (hooks 1991). Critical fiction is fiction that explicitly highlights the struggles and lives of subaltern groups. Critical lenses, as they are argued for by Deborah Appleman, give readers the tools to overlay this framework on any text (Beach, et al 2016). 

What first came to find when investigating the dialogue between critical literacy and critical fiction was Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611). The historical context in which it was first written positions the text as a testament to the colonial powers of Europe. However, more recently the text has been appropriated in Latin America and Africa as a counter-colonial narrative through the lens of post-colonialism. The character of Caliban is in one reading the vicious and violent savage, tamed and controlled by the valiant and wise Prospero, and in the other a heroic figure himself, resisting the colonial oppressor (Vaughan 1988). The same text, read different ways and in different historical contexts, tells radically different stories. This is the power of critical literary lenses.

“If you can’t quickly, off the top of your head, name 10 African American or 10 Latin@ or 10 Asian authors that you’ve read, you probably need to do some more searching for such texts, no matter who’s sitting in the seats of your classroom (Beach, et al 2016).” I am still unpacking my feelings towards this statement. My initial response to this quote was, “I would be hard pressed to name 30 authors of any stripe!” Names are not my strong suit. Then I thought, well, I have the Asian part covered, and I have been reading a lot of texts by African American authors. My exposure to Latin@ literature definitely needs some work. I have House on Mango Street, but is that it? I honestly don’t know, and that is something I should probably pay more attention to. 

Next, I moved on to what groups this statement glossed over or erased. What about women, Gender non-conforming, and other groups? As an example, what does Asian even mean? I have read lots of texts by Asian authors, but they have mostly been Chinese or Japanese. What about South and South East Asian? Hmong literature? Do we count the Middle East here? It is, after all, where the word oriental was first applied. When I was studying in Vancouver, I had a peer who was very focused on Asian Canadian literature. The very first question out of my mouth was, “Isn’t that just Asian American?” It is not, and she was very passionate about the need to recognize the difference.

I am now on to the question of can we really read and have on hand for easy recall 10 of everything, a veritable Ark of representation? The answer is probably read as widely and extensively as possible, and write stuff down. As a reader this was never something I really had to consider, but as a future teacher I can see how important it will be as a resource. The question has also challenged me to really think about how different literatures are classified. What makes “minority” literature? Is it a question of representation? Authorship? Message? Readerly interpretation and engagement with the text? As the example above with The Tempest shows, there is no simple answer to this question.

My first explicit exposure to this conflict was with the 1965 Japanese novel Black Rain by Ibuse Masuji. It tells the story of the aftermath of the atomic bomb being dropped on the city of Hiroshima from the perspective of a survivor. In Japan, due to shared trauma and societal stigma, survivors of the atomic bombs constitute their own group, hibakusha. Ibuse was not himself hibakusha, and his novel garnered much criticism for telling a story that was not his to tell. The novel was and remains widely popular, telling a sympathetic and nuanced story, but his lack of direct affiliation with the group whose story was being told remains a point of contention for many. Still, there is no consensus, among hibakusha or otherwise, as to the validity of Black Rain.

  Recently I have been reading the graphic novels Roller Girl (2015) and All’s Faire in Middle School (2017) with my daughter. The protagonist in Roller Girl is of Puerto Rican descent, and the father of the protagonist in All’s Faire in Middle School is Latin@. Ethnic identity is present enough to be noticed in both texts, but is not central to the story of either. I believe both of these texts can function as pieces of critical literature, speaking as they do about gender identity, class, social structures. However, are they Latin@ literature? I tried to look up the ethnic background of the author, Victoria Jamieson, but could find no reference to it. If she is Latin@, does the story weigh more heavily to that identity than to her identity as a woman? If she is not, should we discount its representation of young Latin@ women?

In an attempt to wrangle this all up into a single cohesive line of thought, I posed this question to myself, what does it mean for a text to be relevant? If someone says that they feel totally disconnected from a text based on representation, or lack thereof, based on message, based on authorship, there is something to be explored in that distance between reader and text. Why does it feel irrelevant? What does this say about the values of the society that produced the text compared the the values of the reader? What would make it feel relevant? What does that say? 

This post has posed a multitude of questions while positing very few answers. I opened the discussion with the line from bell hooks saying that anyone can be an audience for any text with the right orientation to that text. Critical lenses are tools to guide the orientation. The key here is understanding that they guide, not dictate, engagement. That relationship is something that will look different for every individual.

Citations:

Beach, R., Appleman, D., Fecho, B., & Simon, R. (2016). Teaching literature to adolescents.

hooks, bell. Narratives of Struggle. In Mariani, P., & Dia Center for the Arts. (1991). Critical fictions: The politics of imaginative writing :

      Symposium on "Politics of writing" : Papers. Bay Press.

Vaughan, Alden T. "Caliban in the "third World": Shakespeare's Savage As Sociopolitical

      Symbol." The Massachusetts Review. 29.2 (1988): 289-313