An insightful exploration and moving meditation on identity, art, and belonging from one of the most celebrated writers of the last decade. What happens when we begin to consider stories at the margins, when we grant them centrality? How does that complicate our certainties about who we are, as individuals, as nations, as human beings? Through the lens of visual art, literature, film, and the author’s lived experience, Out of the Sun examines Black histories in art, offering new perspectives to challenge us. In this groundbreaking, reflective, and erudite book, two-time Scotiabank Giller Prize winner and internationally bestselling author Esi Edugyan illuminates myriad varieties of Black experience in global culture and history. Edugyan combines storytelling with analyses of contemporary events and her own personal story in this dazzling first major work of non-fiction.
Through accessible language and candid discussions, Storytelling for Social Justice explores the stories we tell ourselves and each other about race and racism in our society. Making sense of the racial constructions expressed through the language and images we encounter every day, this book provides strategies for developing a more critical understanding of how racism operates culturally and institutionally in our society. Using the arts in general, and storytelling in particular, the book examines ways to teach and learn about race by creating counter-storytelling communities that can promote more critical and thoughtful dialogue about racism and the remedies necessary to dismantle it in our institutions and interactions. Illustrated throughout with examples drawn from contemporary movements for change, high school and college classrooms, community building and professional development programs, the book provides tools for examining racism as well as other issues of social justice. For every facilitator and educator who has struggled with how to get the conversation on race going or who has suffered through silences and antagonism, the innovative model presented in this book offers a practical and critical framework for thinking about and acting on stories about racism and other forms of injustice. This new edition includes: Social science examples, in addition to the arts, for elucidating the storytelling model; Short essays by users that illustrate some of the ways the storytelling model has been used in teaching, training, community building and activism; Updated examples, references and resources.
This book discusses the role of television drama series on a global scale, analyzing these dramas across the Americas, Europe, Asia, Australia, and Africa. Contributors consider the role of television dramas as economically valuable cultural products and with their depictions of gender roles, sexualities, race, cultural values, political systems, and religious beliefs as they analyze how these programs allow us to indulge our innate desire to share human narratives in a way that binds us together and encourages audiences to persevere as a community on a global scale. Contributors also go on to explore the role of television dramas as a medium that indulges fantasies and escapism and reckons with reality as it allows audiences to experience emotions of happiness, sorrow, fear, and outrage in both realistic and fantastical scenarios.
In Consuming Stories, Rebecca Peabody uses the work of contemporary American artist Kara Walker to investigate a range of popular storytelling traditions with roots in the nineteenth century and ramifications in the present. Focusing on a few key pieces that range from a wall-size installation to a reworked photocopy in an artist’s book and from a theater curtain to a monumental sculpture, Peabody explores a significant yet neglected aspect of Walker’s production: her commitment to examining narrative depictions of race, gender, power, and desire. Consuming Stories considers Walker’s sustained visual engagement with literary genres such as the romance novel, the neo-slave narrative, and the fairy tale and with internationally known stories including Roots, Beloved, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Walker’s interruption of these familiar works , along with her generative use of the familiar in unexpected and destabilizing ways, reveals the extent to which genre-based narrative conventions depend on specific representations of race, especially when aligned with power and desire. Breaking these implicit rules makes them visible—and, in turn, highlights viewers’ reliance on them for narrative legibility. As this study reveals, Walker’s engagement with narrative continues beyond her early silhouette work as she moves into media such as film, video, and sculpture. Peabody also shows how Walker uses her tools and strategies to unsettle cultural histories abroad when she works outside the United States. These stories, Peabody reminds us, not only change the way people remember history but also shape the entertainment industry. Ultimately, Consuming Stories shifts the critical conversation away from the visual legacy of historical racism toward the present-day role of the entertainment industry—and its consumers—in processes of racialization.
Winner of the 2003 Trillium Book Award "Stories are wondrous things," award-winning author and scholar Thomas King declares in his 2003 CBC Massey Lectures. "And they are dangerous." Beginning with a traditional Native oral story, King weaves his way through literature and history, religion and politics, popular culture and social protest, gracefully elucidating North America's relationship with its Native peoples. Native culture has deep ties to storytelling, and yet no other North American culture has been the subject of more erroneous stories. The Indian of fact, as King says, bears little resemblance to the literary Indian, the dying Indian, the construct so powerfully and often destructively projected by White North America. With keen perception and wit, King illustrates that stories are the key to, and only hope for, human understanding. He compels us to listen well.
This research-based book foregrounds Black narrative traditions and honors alternative methods of data collection, analysis, and representation. Toliver presents a semi-fictionalized narrative in an alternative science fiction setting, refusing white-centric qualitative methods and honoring the ways of the griots who were the scholars of their African nations. By utilizing Black storytelling, Afrofuturism, and womanism as an onto-epistemological tool, this book asks readers to elevate Black imaginations, uplift Black dreams, and consider how Afrofuturity is qualitative futurity. By centering Black girls, the book considers the ethical responsibility of researchers to focus upon the words of our participants, not only as a means to better understand our historic and current world, but to better situate inquiry for what the future world and future research could look like. Ultimately, this book decenters traditional, white-centered qualitative methods and utilizes Afrofuturism as an onto-epistemological tool and ethical premise. It asks researchers to consider how we move forward in data collection, data analysis, and data representation by centering how Black girls reclaim and recover the past, counter negative and elevate positive realities that exist in the present, and create new possibilities for the future. The semi-fictionalized narrative of the book highlights the intricate methodological and theoretical work that undergirds the story. It will be an important text for both new and seasoned researchers interested in social justice. Informed and anti-racist researchers will find Endarkened storywork a useful tool for educational, cultural, and social critiques now and in the future.
While critical race theory is a framework employed by activists and scholars within and outside the confines of education, there are limited resources for leadership practitioners that provide insight into critical race theory and the possibilities of implementing a critical race praxis approach to leadership. With a continued top?down approach to educational policy and practice, it is imperative that higher education leaders understand how critical race theory and praxis can assist them in utilizing their agency and roles as leaders to identify and challenge institutional and systemic racism and other forms/manifestations of oppression (Stovall, 2004). In the tradition of critical race theory, we are charged with the task of operationalizing theory into practice in the struggle for, and commitment to, social justice. Though higher education leaders and leadership programs are often absent in this process, given their influence and power, higher education leaders need to be engaged in this endeavor. The objective of this edited volume is to draw upon critical race counter?stories and praxis for the purpose of providing higher education leaders?in?training and practicing higher education leaders with tangible narratives that demonstrate how racism and its intersectionality with other forms of oppression manifest within higher education. An additional aim of this book is to provide leaders with a working knowledge of the central tenets of critical race theory and the tools that are required in recognizing how they might be complicit in the reproduction of institutional and systemic racism and other forms of oppression. More precisely, this edited volume intends to draw upon and center the lived experiences and voices of contributors that have experienced racism in higher education. Through the use of critical race methodology and counter?storytelling (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002), contributors will share and interrogate their experiences while offering current and future higher education leaders insight in recognizing how racism functions within their respective institutions, and how they can address it. The intended goal of this edited volume is to translate critical race theory into practice while emphasizing the need for higher education leaders to develop a critical race praxis and anti?racist approach to leadership.
While critical race theory is a framework employed by activists and scholars within and outside the confines of education, there are limited resources for leadership practitioners that provide insight into critical race theory and the possibilities of implementing a critical race praxis approach to leadership. With a continued top-down approach to educational policy and practice, it is imperative that educational leaders understand how critical race theory and praxis can assist them in utilizing their agency and roles as leaders to identify and challenge institutional and systemic racism and other forms/manifestations of oppression (Stovall, 2004). In the tradition of critical race theory, we are charged with the task of operationalizing theory into practice in the struggle for, and commitment to, social justice. Though educational leaders and leadership programs have been all but absent in this process, given their influence and power, educational leaders need to be engaged in this endeavor. The objective of this edited volume is to draw upon critical race counter-stories and praxis for the purpose of providing leaders in training and practicing K-12 leaders with tangible narratives that demonstrate how racism and its intersectionality with other forms of oppression manifest within K-12 schooling. An additional aim of this book is to provide leaders with a working knowledge of the central tenets of critical race theory and the tools that are required in recognizing how they might be complicit in the reproduction of institutional and systemic racism and other forms of oppression. More precisely, this edited volume intends to draw upon and center the lived experiences and voices of contributors that have experienced racism in K-12 schooling. Through the use of critical race methodology and counter-storytelling (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002), contributors will share and interrogate their experiences while offering current and future educational leaders insight in recognizing how racism functions within institutions and how they can address it. The intended goal of this edited volume is to translate critical race theory into practice while emphasizing the need for educational leaders to develop a critical race praxis and anti-racist approach to leadership.
This tightly edited volume contains the finest, highly accessible articles in the fast-growing legal genre of critical race theory--a field which is changing the way this nation looks at race, challenging orthodoxy, questioning the premises of liberalism, and debating sacred wisdoms. Including treatments of two new, exciting topics--Critical Race Feminism and Critical White Studies--this volume is truly on "the cutting edge." Questions for discussion and reading suggestions after each part make this volume essential for those interested in law, the multiculturalism movement, political science, and critical thought. In this wide-ranging second edition, Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic bring together the finest, most illustrative, and highly accessible articles in the fast-growing legal genre of Critical Race Theory. In challenging orthodoxy, questioning the premises of liberalism, and debating sacred wisdoms, Critical Race Theory scholars writing over the past few years have indelibly changed the way America looks at race. This edition contains treatment of all the topics covered in the first edition, along with provocative and probing questions for discussion and detailed suggestions for additional reading, all of which set this fine volume apart from the field. In addition, this edition contains five new substantive units--crime, critical race practice, intergroup tensions and alliances, gay/lesbian issues, and transcending the black-white binary paradigm of race. In each of these areas, groundbreaking scholarship by the movement's founding figures as well as the brightest new stars provides immediate entry to current trends and developments in critical civil rights thought. Author note: Richard Delgado, Jean Lindsley Professor of Law at the University of Colorado at Boulder, is one of the founding members of the Conference on Critical Race Theory. Winner of the Association of American Law Schools' 1995 Clyde Ferguson Award for outstanding law professor of color, he is the author of over 100 articles in the law review literature on civil rights and of several books, including Failed Revolutions, Words that Wound, and The Rodrigo Chronicles. Jean Stefancic, Research Associate in Law at the University of Colorado, is the author of leading articles and books on Critical Race Theory, Latino/a scholarship, and social change, including No Mercy: How Conservative Think Tanks and Foundations Changed America's Social Agenda (Temple).
