Sites of instruction: education, kinship and nation in african american literature

Sites of Instruction: Education, Kinship and Nation in African American Literature” explores education as a site of racial subjection and identity making in African American Literature and culture. Through close readings of selected narratives, I explore how writers use education to represent the navigation, and imagining, of the relationships between community, the individual and the nation. In chapter one, I explore Sutton Griggs and Frances Harper’s post-bellum narratives of education as attempts to recuperate both Southern landscapes and kinship through articulation of the black teacher as communal healer and sacrificial leader. Griggs and Harper represent scenes of instruction which engage with education as a negotiation between generations, occurring within intimate scenes of domesticity, and on larger public stages. In chapter two, I identify black teachers, and intellectuals, in flight as a symptomatic response to the constraints and contradictions of early twentieth century racial uplift ideology, with a focus on Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem. In the face of anxieties about race purity, national borders and miscegenation, Larsen and McKay center characters whose immigrant and marginal status provide alternative insights, and perspectives, that critique and challenge conservative discourses of both citizenship and black instruction. The third chapter focuses on the literary production of narratives about school desegregation by exploring critically neglected civil rights fiction by Ntozake Shange and Thulani Davis. Shange’s Betsey Brown and Davis’s 1959 articulate the meaning of desegregation through an exploration of adolescent subjectivity and gender. The prominence of children’s voices, within civil rights fiction, suggests that children can write a different narrative of their political agency and participation in school desegregation politics, one that moves beyond both a damage thesis of black childhood and surface representations of black children’s innocence. My epilogue contemplates the meaning, and construction, of post- Civil Rights subjectivities and communities by looking at representations of educational spaces in the works of Lorene Cary, Sapphire and Andrea Lee. I ultimately conclude that fictions of education embody educational history and also propose narrative as a source of pedagogical intervention.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Amira Abdur-Rahma