Abstract
ABSTRACT This paper describes a telling case account that occurred during an ethnographic study in the United States in a secondary school senior British Literature class with only two African American young women, Pam and Natonya. The telling case complicated silence and also made visible other reflexive processes that provided opportunities to unpack and theorize silence, which led to the articulation of the silence trilogy. Further, it also made visible how the African American woman scholar’s own lived experiences informed her attempt to make sense of how Pam and Natonya navigated the silence(s). This paper will primarily foreground the works of Scholars of Color and use Black feminist and sociolinguistic theory to explore the following question: How did two African-American females in a predominately white educational space negotiate the silence(s) (e.g., silence, silencing, and silenced)? How did the African American woman researchers of color make sense of their negotiation?
Highlights
This paper describes a telling case that emerged from an ethnographic study that took place in the United States in a predominately white senior British literature classroom with only two African American young women, Pam and Natonya
As I observed how Pam and Natonya negotiated their racial and gendered identities in a British literature class, dominated by literature written from a Eurocentric perspective, primarily by White males, a telling case began to emerge
What is unique about this particular telling case is that the case itself begins to make visible other processes and provide opportunities to both theorize silence, and unpack what I call the silence trilogy; it begins to articulate and make visible how I, a woman of color scholar, moved reflexively between, across, through, and within the professional context to the personal context to make sense of how Pam and Natonya were negotiating silence
Summary
This paper describes a telling case that emerged from an ethnographic study that took place in the United States in a predominately white senior British literature classroom with only two African American young women, Pam and Natonya. What is unique about this particular telling case is that the case itself begins to make visible other processes and provide opportunities to both theorize silence, and unpack what I call the silence trilogy; it begins to articulate and make visible how I, a woman of color scholar, moved reflexively between, across, through, and within the professional context to the personal context to make sense of how Pam and Natonya were negotiating silence. It is important to note that while this paper includes scholars in the field of language and literacy broadly to unpack silence more deeply and capture the processes that emerged, as I engaged in a process of exploring the experiences of two African American young women, I constructed an analytic approach that is interdisciplinary in nature and grounded in the wisdom and knowledge of Black people. I will present evidence of how Silence, Silencing, and Silenced were experienced by Pam and Natonya
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