Time traveling forward and backward: multimodal speculation as racial literacy

Abstract

Amid a pandemic, protests (on masking and mattering), and presidential campaigns in 2020, adults and young folx alike were wading through an exhaustive socio-political milieu, that called for speculation. In this study, students had the opportunity to practice their writing and analytical skills while developing their racial literacy – the processes of understanding the effects of race in daily living – through their encounters with speculative fiction texts. This article examines the multimodal productions of two young women of Color, Carmen and Imani. Through their explorations of various speculative texts, it becomes clear how racial literacy can also be rooted in the act of time traveling that speculation affords folx of Color. In other words, by playing with temporal registers—or time traveling—these students of Color demonstrated the unending expansiveness of racial literacy.

Keywords:

• Racial literacy
• speculative fiction
• time traveling
• girls of Color

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Oluwaseun Animashaun

Oluwaseun Animashaun is a doctoral student in the Department of Curriculum and Teaching at Teachers College, Columbia University and a middle grades teacher at Prospect Schools. Her current research interests center on popular culture, play, and Black speculative futures.

Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz

Yolanda Sealey-Ruizis Associate Professor of English Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research has appeared in several top-tier academic journals. She is co-editor of three books, and co-author (with Detra Price-Dennis) of the awardwinning Advancing Racial Literacies in Teacher Education: Activism for Equity in Digital Spaces. Yolanda is founder and faculty sponsor of the Racial Literacy Project@T C Series where for 14 years, national scholars, doctoral, and pre-service and in-service Master's students, and young people facilitate informal conversations around race and other issues involving diversity and teacher education for the Teachers College / Columbia University community. Yolanda has appeared in two documentaries: 2 Fists Up: We Gon' Be Alright (directed by Spike Lee), and Defining Us: Children at the Crossroads of Change (directed by Connect with Kids). She is author of two full-length volumes of poetry: Love from the Vortex & Other Poems and The Peace Chronicles. Yolanda is currently working on a poetic memoir about her experience of growing up in the South Bronx during the 1980s