The first paper, “The Power of Paper to Fly” explores how writers in Colombia self-publish and circulate their literary works in order to build peace after decades of civil war. Beginning with literacy’s socio-materiality, defined as the ways writing’s material affordances get taken up in community, in peace-building processes, it draws on understandings of writing’s materiality as crucial to meaning making (Micciche), as part of decolonial healing and memory work (Ruiz and Arellano), and as integral to structures of government power. In the case of Colombia, where over five decades of war have given way to building peace, adults who identify as literary writers use the physical objects of books or papers to contribute to peace. One sells his small press books from a suitcase at community festivals. Another writes poems on individual papers that fit in a seed packet, suggesting that they are to be dispersed. Other writers publish limited editions of hand bound poetry collections or pass out poems on book marks. Still others created and distributed a board game on writing for peace, and recipients of this “writing for peace kit” signed a piece of paper promising to pass on the kit when they no longer used it. This paper concludes by reflecting on how writers take up literacy’s material affordances in specific historical and cultural moments is crucial to understanding the contours of literacy’s potential to create social change.
The second paper, “Subverting the Boarding School Mandate,” focuses on four indigenous women who taught in Indian boarding schools and, together with mostly unknown others, helped to sustain and transmit indigenous culture for their students, develop innovative pedagogies, and prepare the way for more progressive education for indigenous youngsters. Sarah Winnemucca, who wrote extensively in newspapers, publicized the school she established for Paiute children, and underscored the importance of bi-lingual and bi-cultural education. Alice Callahan’s novel Wynema offered a model for educating teachers of indigenous children and forced Euro-American readers to confront distance between the Christian values they advocated for and the realities of boarding schools. Angel DeCora instituted the teaching of Indian art and wrote to persuade Euro-Americans that it belonged in art museums rather than anthropological collections. Ella Deloria drew upon Euro-American traditions of pageants to and wrote multiple anthropological reports to create a living record of indigenous cultures. These four indigenous women teachers and their peers employed literacy to foster the survivance of indigenous culture and develop schools centered on indigenous values.
The third paper analyzes two writers’ recent imaginative engagements with Phillis Wheatley’s literacy life (c1753-1784): Eve L. Ewing’s “Proof [dear Phillis]” lyric for The 1619 Project and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s The Age of Phillis poetry collection. Both these writers generate poetic re-presentations of Wheatley’s literacy in action to perform and claim agency for themselves as authors and for shared Black cultural work’s efficacy.
Wheatley herself is best known for her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773). She claims academic prominence in scholarly and pedagogical frameworks including African American and transatlantic literatures, Black (diaspora) studies, and race and gender studies. While acknowledging such foundational work on Wheatley, this paper examines how Ewing’s and Jeffers’s responses to her writings address broader public audiences. Like previous academic studies, they revisit her purposeful management of literacy practices within the constraints of her era, her forced relocation from West Africa to North America, her enslavement during youth, and her highly controlled access to publication. But Ewing’s and Jeffers’s poems ultimately generate a layered, aesthetic-historical re-presentation of a “Wheatley-for-now,” giving her writing new agency by building a transtemporal literacy record—reshaping and reconfiguring an authorial history to claim reinvigorated cultural power. Their work thus re-positions our engagement with Wheatley, going beyond a focus on her book or her lived experiences to spotlight the ongoing agency of her literacy operating through these authors’ current reading and writing.
Each speaker will talk for 15 minutes to assure that there is adequate time for discussion with the audience.