Shadow Thursday.
I decided not to blog during the quarantine after all.
My last three blog posts were 1) a snapshot of my pre-COVID-19 world, 2) realizing the world had suddenly changed, and 3) my first Thursday in quarantine.
Two months and a week later feels like a great time to return to A Year of Thursdays. I appreciate the fact that the weeks of this disaster will ever after be marked in my digital archives with this pause, a necessary silence that memorializes our dead, and acknowledges all those who are passing through the portal of the pandemic into a new world.
Yesterday, I ran errands in my neighborhood for the first time since early March.
Today, The Dark Fantastic is a year old!
One year ago, I was so happy! Five years of hard work had finally paid off.
That was then.
This is now.
Well. At least my glasses are the same.
The past 12 months have been challenging, to say the least. I’m commiserating with my teacher friends. #ProfessorLife during a pandemic is no picnic. Crises bring out the best in some, but they definitely bring out the worst in others…
The shadows in the recent picture mirror the shadows I’ll be thinking about in my next major writing project.
You see, when I first had the idea for #TheDarkFantastic in the mid-2000s, I wasn't sure that I could write it. I didn’t think the world would be ready to read my critique of beloved popular stories. Even as recently as the mid-2010s, the world wasn’t ready.
Here’s how I know.
The year before I sent my proposal for The Dark Fantastic to NYU Press, I’d lost the battle over the title of an article for a special issue of Linguistics and Education. Until just before publication, “Dilemmatic Conversations” was “Dilemmatic Whiteness.” In order to publish, I was asked to change the title. One reviewer was adamant that the focus of my analysis was the White teacher’s conversation with the students, not Whiteness itself.
Before Trump, “Whiteness” and “White supremacy” were words reserved only for KKK members and such. After Trump, mentioning whiteness on your personal social media can get you attacked by the Right…
Exhale, Ebony.
Breathe.
But the shadow of that incident remains.
Lately, I have felt that I’ve been accumulating far too many shadows along life’s way. Lately, #ProfessorLife has left my soul feeling like the dark side of the moon.
I’d rather not be haunted like this, but I nodded to Toni Morrison’s majesty in The Dark Fantastic for a reason: Blackness, in this spacetime, always involves haunting.
(What do you do when you’re both the haunted and the haint?)
My spirit, my soul, and everything within me resists the way that academic politics seem to want to compress this haint into an ain’t.
Even during a pandemic.
Especially during a pandemic.
Shadows. The next one I’ve got to contend with is a book on slavery and children's media that I’ve been avoiding for years. I told myself I'd write about Black science fiction and fantasy for young readers first, but honestly, I’d like for the rising generation of Black scholars to put out their books before I circle back to that project. They got next, and in the meantime, I’ve got another song to sing.
My spirit, soul, and mind knows that I need to write The Shadow Book: Reading Slavery, Fugitivity, and Freedom in Children's Literature and Media (working title) next. Yes, I’m paying homage to Dr. Bishop, and to Sojourner Truth, Kevin Young, etc. All the elders. All the ancestors.
I’m also thinking about Perry Nodelman’s work. And Derrida’s notion of hauntology. And Barrie's weird colonialist obsession with shadows...
So much has been swirling around in my mind. For many years.
The Shadow Book is the echo of The Dark Fantastic. It’s all the leavings-behind, the wonderings, the sudden realization that my friend was right when she said in grad school “all roads in Black US scholarship lead to slavery.”
(They do.)
After 10+ years of multiple different kinds of research on how we introduce each successive generation of children to the tragic, unbearable fact that the United States was a slaveholding nation, after serving on a national task force, after speaking about this around the country, after multiple consulting projects and interviews, it's time for me to face the shadows.
The project has changed over time. During and after my Spencer postdoc, I thought maybe I'd write a book for teachers and teacher educators. Talked to three editors at education presses while I was on the tenure track. But my brain resisted writing Children's Literature About Slavery: Theory, Research and Practice. I wrote three outlines, but never could get going on the proposal.
Then I thought, maybe I'll write a trade book about how we introduce slavery to kids (in weird ways) (through children’s books) (usually during Black History Month) (now that I have an agent). My agent said, "let's get your novel polished up and ready to go first." (And! The polishing is nearly complete! So excited! Maybe some dreams really do come true — Stevie Wonder has been promising me since 1985! We’ll see!)
Then I talked to a very wonderful colleague who has gone the trade route successfully, to the tune of multiple awards. That colleague said, sagely, The Shadow Book is not the kind of project that sells. It's too academic.
And then, last year, Nikole Hannah-Jones’ Pulitzer Prize-winning 1619 Project came out…. and now, a lot of people have the trade nonfiction route covered!
It’s an academic book. I feel it in my bones.
So what is The Shadow Book about?
Glad you asked! Means I get to talk about Detroit again. :) One of my mentors back home, Source Booksellers owner and community elder Janet Jones, put Kevin Young’s The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness into my hands almost 10 years ago and opened up new worlds for me.
There’s just so much in it. Here’s just one snippet:
The Shadow Book’s working title was directly inspired by the the start of The Grey Album, which begins with Young’s discourse on the shadow book….
I thought, yeah, talk about it.
We have thousands of shadow libraries, filled with diverse, decolonial, and emancipatory stories for young readers that we should have, and don’t.
The Shadow Book is equally inspired by Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop’s landmark text, Shadow and Substance. Have you read it, and Free Within Ourselves, yet?
Friends and I have been talking recently about the liberatory potential of restorying children’s literature and media scholarship. Some of us are growing interested in excavating the stories of the lifework of women of color, as well as Native women across racial and ethnic backgrounds, who did this work before us in children’s literature — and were suppressed.
We need our own history and archaeology of children’s literature in education, librarianship, and media studies.
Even children’s literature criticism has its shadow books.
The Shadow Book’s foundation rests on the life and legacy of the foremother who inspired Bishop, Young, and so many others: Isabella Baumfree, known to history as Sojourner Truth.
I am looking forward to reading the best recent scholarship about Sojourner’s life and legacy. I’m especially eager to immerse myself in the incredible work of University of Wisconsin - Madison colleague Brigitte Fielder, whose research is directly in this area. She and other 19th and early 20th century scholars of Black children’s literature will be foundational as I take up these issues for education, popular culture, and the media.
The Shadow Book is inspired by, and will begin with Virginia Hamilton, whose books I’ve spent time with lately for my novel revival project. While I started The Dark Fantastic by speaking about feeling excluded from mainstream fantasy and science fiction growing up, the place I’ll begin next time is with the richness that we did have.
So. I'm hoping to traverse the academic book route, once again. I’m planning for a Dark Fantastic-like approach to the topic, but being much more specific about my training as an interactional ethnographer and discourse analyst.
Here’s what you can expect once it’s done: Theory building and frameworks that are useful beyond academia. Accessible scholarship that will be (potentially) for multiple audiences. And as smooth of a read as I can make it.
Peter Pan was obsessed with his shadow.
I’m obsessed with ours.
Let’s go.
What I Am Reading
Here are just a few texts that have recently been on my reading lists as I begin #TheShadowBook:
Web Resources
The Future is Black: Afropessimism, Fugitivity, and Radical Hope in Education
Special issue of English Education on Fugitive Literacies
Writing about Slavery/Teaching about Slavery
To Remake the World: Slavery, Capitalism & Social Justice (Boston Review)
The Atlantic slave trade: What too few textbooks told you - Anthony Hazard (TED-Ed)
Greg Tate, “Hello Darkness: The Radical Black Futurist Imagination vs. Slavery, Inc.” Cooper Union
Academic Articles and Books
Dumas, M. J., & Ross, K. M. (2016). “Be real black for me” imagining BlackCrit in education. Urban Education, 51(4), 415-442.
Gardner, R. P. (2017). Unforgivable blackness: Visual rhetoric, reader response, and critical racial literacy. Children's Literature in Education, 48(2), 119-133
Koss, M. D. (2015). Diversity in contemporary picturebooks: A content analysis. Journal of Children's Literature, 41(1), 32.
Nodelman, P. (2008). The hidden adult: Defining children's literature. JHU Press.
Patterson, T., & Shuttleworth, J. (2019). The (mis) representation of enslavement in historical literature for elementary students. Teachers College Record, 121(6). Online.
Popp, J. S. (2018). Teachers’ Text Selections and Explanations About Text Selection and Use in History/Social Studies. Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice, 67(1), 279-295.
Rogers, R. E. (2018). Representations of Slavery in Children’s Picture Books. London: Routledge.
Weheliye, A. G. (2014). Habeas viscus: Racializing assemblages, biopolitics, and black feminist theories of the human. Duke University Press
Zapata, A., King, C., King, L., & Kleekamp, M. (2019). Thinking with Race-Conscious Perspectives: Critically Selecting Children’s Picture Books Depicting Slavery. Multicultural Perspectives, 21(1), 25-32.
What I Am Writing
In a nutshell: So. Many. Things.
In the meantime, here’s some of what I’ve written, solo and with others, about the implications of slavery for teaching and introducing racial history to children:
Thomas, E.E., Coleman, J.J. & Cicchino, L.R. (2018). George Washington and slavery: Going beyond picturebooks to teach about our flawed founders. Social Education, 82(3), 143-148.
Thomas, E.E., Reese, D. & Horning, K.T. (2016). Much ado about A Fine Dessert: The dilemma of representing slavery in children’s literature. Journal of Children’s Literature, 42(2), 6-17.
Thomas, E.E. (2013). African American children’s literature: Liminal terrains and strategies for selfhood. In Naidoo, J. & Park, S. (Eds.), Diversity in Youth Literature: Opening Doors Through Reading. New York: ALA Editions.
Thomas, E.E. (2012). The next chapter of our story: Rethinking African American metanarratives in schooling and society. In Thomas, E.E. & Brooks-Tatum, S.R.F. (Eds.), Reading African American Experiences in the Obama Era: Theory, Advocacy, Activism. New York: Peter Lang.
And here are links to two of my recent talks and interviews:
Being/Doing/Going.
I’ll give all my non-#ProfessorLife pandemic updates next week. (Whew. What a time.)
I did make it to Wawa and ShopRite today! Thankful for our essential workers. (Universal health care, universal basic income, and debt forgiveness, now.)
Looking forward to returning to this blog. I’m off my main Twitter, @Ebonyteach, for the time being. I found being there during a pandemic exhausting. I won’t return until I’m ready — as a “blue check,” I’ve got a year to decide what I’ll do.
Word(s) of the Week
Light. I’m writing books with words like dark and shadow in the title, but I was born on an August Thursday… during a season of sunshine! That’s why I’ve named my blog A Year of Thursdays. That’s why I’m coming back to complete the year.
We’re finally seeing faint glimmers at the end of a tunnel. As my hometown’s motto says, let’s hope for better things.
Let’s look for the first glimmers of the sun.
And let the sunshine in.
Even as you tread through life’s shadows this Thursday, I hold you in the light.
(Also, have a good Memorial Day if that’s something you acknowledge and celebrate. Otherwise? Just bees and thangs and flowers, etc.)
This blog post is part of the #31DaysIBPOC Blog Challenge, a month-long movement to feature the voices of indigenous and teachers of color as writers and scholars.
Please CLICK HERE to read yesterday’s blog post by Professor Carla España (and be sure to check out the link at the end of each post to catch up on the rest of the blog circle).