Chris Denecker: When Narratives of the Past Meet the Present
When narratives of the DALN meet African American slave narratives, one informs the next, which informs the next and so on—creating a intra-textual and extra-textual dialogic that allows students to hear (both literally and figuratively) voices, past and present, negotiating what Pierre Walter (1999) might call “the consequences of literacy,” which “include political consciousness, empowerment, freedom from oppression and action for social change” (p. 43). Not only are students provided the opportunity to recognize more fully the slave narrative as a 19th Century “vehicle for dialogue over slavery and racial issues between whites and blacks in the North and South” (North American Slave Narratives), but they are also given the chance to come to an inductive understanding of the DALN Collective's contention that through “dialogic exchanges . . . people formulate their identities and their identifications with specific individuals and groups” (pp. 9-10). To take it a step further, students are also encouraged to understand that while narratives and their authors “become subject to social molding” (Gergen & Gergen, 1988, p. 268), the narratives, themselves have shaped and continue to shape the surrounding culture and greater cultural narrative.
For instance, when students reason that the positioning of self or creation of cultural identity is not done in isolation and is dialogic in nature, they have the opportunity to come to the conclusion that identity must be built through some exchange or through some pushing up against something or someone else in order for that identity to take shape. Consequently, they can also see the antebellum narrative of William Grimes (1825) as the recollection of a man whose life was culturally and relationally situated. Some of the forces that pushed up against him included slavery and slave masters, an inconceivable string of bad luck, his own literacy, and an obvious desire for his voice to be heard amidst the chaos of the existing culture. In this particular narrative, students have a chance to discover an undeniably fierce spirit pushing back against these cultural, social, and political forces. In this push, Grimes’ identity, his answer to the question of “’Who am I?’”—to borrow Bamberg’s words (1997, p. 337)—becomes clear. To many readers, he is a man steeled enough by life to bitterly offer his skin as “a legacy to the government, desiring that it might be taken off and made into parchment” with which to “bind the constitution of glorious happy and free America” (p. 68).
Furthermore, when the voices and experiences of Williams and Blackburn are added to that of Grimes, students have the opportunity to witness an over-arching, essential dialogic that ties past to present; they also are given a space to experience first-hand what Walter (1999) argues is literacy’s ability to precipitate “a variety of changes in individual and communal lives” (p. 43). In other words, they have the opportunity to grasp the potential for literacy and literacy education to transform cultural, social, and political perspectives, not just for individuals but across generations.
"Williams discussing her parents' advice" Video File
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For example, Williams remembers with admiration her mother’s push for her children to excel academically in order to be “free from the constraints of ignorance” and “write” their “own ticket[s]” in life.
"Blackburn discusses Violence" Audio File
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Blackburn, in comparison, recounts a time of “letting go” with her son, a time when she watched him “fall into [a] book” that held “violent moments in our American history, in our history of humanity” from which she had been shielding him.
These revelations are not unlike those of Alice Walker (1983), who eloquently acknowledges the connection among past, present, and future by stating that “so many of the stories that I write, that we all write, are my mother’s stories . . . I have absorbed not only the stories themselves, but . . . something of the urgency that involves the knowledge that her stories—like her life—must be recorded” ( p. 235).
Considering African American slave narratives alongside Williams’s and Blackburn’s literacy stories offers students the opportunity to witness a complex shaping of identity that is both temporal and static as it pushes up against the literacy practices, familial relationships, cultural hardships, ideological visions, and political agendas of more than one time frame. By engaging with these narratives, students can come to learn about the ways in which “our identities and subjectivities are multiple, changing, and always constructed in relation to others” (Maher, 1999, p. 50). In addition, they can come to better recognize and value new means for defining and “expanding the concept of literacy” (Daley, 2003) as well as new venues for articulating their literate experiences. Such a pedagogical approach, I would argue, positions students to consider the extent to which Frederick Douglass, William Grimes, Hazel Williams, Jessie Blackburn and they, themselves, have revealed and reveal multiple identities while the lens of history, culture, and literacy constantly refines and repositions its focus.
An integration of DALN narratives into instruction, although it might not be an immediately intuitive pedagogical choice, promises many and varied learning opportunities—and not just in the African American Literature classroom (or in a course on gender studies, as Christine Tulley’s section demonstrates). In fact, integrating the DALN into English classrooms may simply be good teaching. As Andrew Wood and Deanna Fassett (2003) argue, “Technological innovation in the classroom gives rise to a particularly rich opportunity for the exploration of identity” (p. 291). In terms of the African American Literature classroom (and others), that exploration can occur on multiple levels: intra-textually and extra-textually, as well as within and among students themselves. Furthermore, the approach I described here challenges students to take ownership of their learning by using, in Sibylle Gruber and Jean Boreen’s (2003) words, “different levels of both personal and academic experience to respond to and interpret similar issues” (p. 6). Perhaps most poignantly and for the purposes of this argument, the goals of both Matthews (1895) and Selfe et al are served by such a pairing: heroes are remembered, voices are recorded, stories are preserved, less is forgotten, and more is understood about this greater narrative of which we are all a part.