‘There are two truths’: African American women’s critical, creative ruminations on love through new literacies

Abstract

In this article, the author explores what happens when a group of African American women came together to engage with popular culture narratives (PCNs) soon after 9/11. The author relies on Endarkened Feminist Epistemology to understand the development of raced and gendered meaning making and knowledge development within the inquiry. She also draws from Critical Literacies theory to understand the group members’ patterns of questioning and positioning. She found that the women’s literate lives became particularly responsive to post-9/11 popular culture narratives. The women evolved their literacy practices and pushed forward analytic methodology in order to satisfy their desire to invoke personal meaning and align it with the narratives they chose. The author focuses on one narrative in particular to show how the women evolved their new literacies and produced subsequent texts (a critical/creative, responsive, participant-generated poem is presented as a new literacy event). She also explores the methodological and analytic evolutions that happened in response to the women’s literacy practices. Implications for literacy research, pedagogy and theory are presented.