Anti-Racism as Vocational Practice: Reading with Alice Walker, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Edwidge Danticat

Abstract

Literary reading, used as vocation-building both individually and collectively, can enact antiracism. Focusing on significant voices within Black women’s writing, the chapter contends that reading can cultivate antiracist thinking and action, both through an examination of the writer’s personal experience and through textual analysis. Reading calls us to reimagine a world held captive by racism. In personal essays that are simultaneously aesthetic treatises, literacy narratives, and vocation memoirs, Alice Walker, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Edwidge Danticat tell and retell their reading stories. Three modes of reading shape these writers’ vocational ethics and, by extension, the vocation-building of their readers: reading as intertextual reflection, reading as social transformation, and reading as global connection. This chapter casts the imaginative work of reading as means to do the vocational work of restoring and remaking the world around us—even a world that privileges white identity and that denies black women in particular a voice.