“What’s Blackness Got to Do With All This?”: Racializing Literacy Assemblages

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis is a qualitative case study about the literacy practices of a Black family living in an urban context in Cali, Colombia. I analyzed the interaction between a Black family and social institutions, as mediated by literacies that assemble racial processes and family configurations. I collected data about the family in the settings in which the seven family members participated. Drawing from Black feminist/critical theories, I analyzed how this Black family’s configuration and functioning link to a particular view of literacies, how those literacies are interwoven in practice with racial processes, and how such a weave is knitted through interaction with social institutions. The findings suggest that this Black family assembles family and race with literacy formations that are collective, multimodal, organic, aesthetically based, emotional, embodied, and performed. These assemblages have no structural space because they are out of the system of what Man has typically defined as official literacy, ideal race, and expected family functioning. Nevertheless, the family creates a wide assemblage repertoire for collaborative ways of living aimed at validating Black humanhood. These racializing literacy assemblages are, then, liberatory formations that reaffirm Black people’s pasts, presents, futures, and hopes.