Extraordinary literacies & empyreal logics: regarding the everyday praxises of Black girls and women in schools and society

Introduction

This collection brings together the voices of Black women and other people of color whose scholarship, teaching, artistry, and advocacy regard lovingly the interior lives of Black girls and women. The works creatively and critically portraiture these lives. They clarify how girls’ and women’s interiorities inform and shape their identities and experiences, vis-à-vis the exteriorities of schools and society. These papers respond to the questions: How do Black girls and women hurt? What happens as a result of uninterrupted hurt? How do Black girls and women heal? and How can teachers help? The urgency of now, as it relates to the lived experiences of Black girls and women, is a primary rationale for this collection and its significance. My work precedes this collection by leading the field in discussions about the ways white supremacist patriarchal ideologies bear effect on the interior lives of Black girls and women (Staples, 2011, 2012a, 2012b, 2015, 2016). I’ve found that when socialized in academic and social contexts pervaded by implicit and explicit white supremacist patriarchal beliefs and behaviors, these students and citizens develop a matrix of oppression within their soul and soma. The matrix is comprised of five phenomena: limiting belief systems, hypervigilant defense mechanisms, persistent survival programs, toxic narrative structures, and exaggerated somatic pain and tolerance (Staples, 2011, 2016). I discuss this matrix extensively in “How Black Girls Hurt.” It’s included in this issue.

In “How Black Girls Hurt,” I share how I’ve explored the literate lives of more than 4000 girls and women over the last 20 years in order to understand how girls and women overcome these five phenomena. I’m specifically focused on identifying how we triumph over the t/Terror narratives formed at the phenomenological root. I’ve discovered that we generate extraordinary literacies and access empyreal logics as cornerstones for exceptional thriving, despite the patriarchy. To establish and extend conversations about these literacies and logics, I invite you to enter into the communications and cadences within this issue and share responses and questions, as you will. This special issue is important for members of the field of education focused on developing pedagogies that are responsive to what Black girls and women do, desire, and deserve in teaching/learning contexts. It is also of great value to those who design qualitative studies that push the boundaries of methodologies, epistemologies, and ontologies for research in education, particularly those that presume the genius of minoritized and marginalized members.

A brief on the problem at hand

The systemic effects white supremacist patriarchal ideologies have on the identities and lived experiences of marginalized people, as they take shape in schools and society, are ubiquitous and pervasive (Civil Rights Data Collection, 2016; Jacoby-Senghor, 2016; Staples, 2011, 2012a, 2012b, 2015). Scholars often measure their impacts and reverberations in broad, quantifiable terms so we can begin to grasp the myriad ways they shape, and limit, exterior life. We have learned, for instance, that Black girls and women are disproportionately surveilled and cruelly penalized in schools and society for looking, speaking, and behaving in ways that are perceived and named as deviant and threatening (Ancy Annamma, 2015; Crenshaw, et al., 2015; Losen & Skiba, 2010; National Council on Crime and Delinquency, 2008; Oswald et al., 2002; U.S. Council on Women and Girls, 2014). These public punishments occur while they are most often, in fact, embodying multiple developmentally appropriate performances of personhood that are simply not recognized, understood, or respected by white establishments.

As a result, there are calls to examine and revise laws, policies, and curricula, in addition to instructional, evaluative, and behavioral practices that govern public spaces within which Black girls and women live and learn (Morris, 2018; Crenshaw, et al., 2015). These social justice projects are necessary and laudable. Yet, their emancipatory reach is dangerously unenlightened and woefully limited when they only consider exterior lives and the health and safety of the body and material. They are not informed by deep, sustained emotional justice projects that privilege interior life and the health and safety of the soul and soma. In contrast, soul-centered projects account for the complex, dynamic interior lives of Black girls and women. We have not regarded seriously enough the everyday, unseen, social, cultural, soulful, and spiritual praxises Black girls and women privately inherit and employ to not only survive but thrive in schools and society, despite myriad hindrances. These are our extraordinary literacies. They include, and are not limited to: practiced imaginations, speculative energies, intentional visualizations, prayer circles, celestial chant, evocative mantra, scripture readings, epigenetic explorations, analytic meditations, freestyle battles, tribal dance, yoga, drumming, walking meditations, mindfulness practices, reiki, nidra, ethereal silences, dedicated rest, cognitive behavioral therapies, kinship collaborations, liturgical drama, spoken word, critical and creative journaling, emotional freedom techniques, psychodramatic inquiry, neuro emotional techniques, magic and craft, quantum shifting strategies, immersions in white noise, solfeggio and binaural sound baths, and the like.

What are the affordances of these extraordinary literacies? If we don’t understand how Black girls and women use these praxises to illuminate and uproot internalized oppressions, remain sane, protect the sanctity of their bodies, build communities of care, and thrive in schools and societies, we will also remain unclear about how to:

• Understand the necessity of applied spiritual sensibilities in the work of dissolving material effects of white supremacist patriarchal ideologies in schools and society;

• Access, and privilege, interior life healing in our efforts to appreciably affect exterior life inequities;

• Value the inherent wealth of Black girls’ private genius and Black women’s personal wisdom as a way of making schools and society more inclusive and just;

• Grasp the carefully constructed processes involved in decolonizing a soul that has been intergenerationally dehumanized in teaching/learning contexts and social, cultural, and political terrains;

• Name the (r)evolutionary possibilities for sociocultural and political healing in exterior life resulting from intrapersonal healing via deep excavations of interior life;

• Meet the duplicitous, narcissistic, maddening attributes and structures of whiteness, hyper patriarchy, toxic masculinity, racism, sexism, misogynoir, ableism, homophobia, ageism, xenophobia, and the like with literacies and logics that defy these monstrosities with powers they cannot know, and;

• Further imagine possibilities for Black feminist futures that heal race and gender injuries across multiple intersectional terrains for all people, everywhere.

A solution + definitions for new and necessary phenomena

I proposed this special issue to center such emotional justice projects. The issue commingles new and established leaders whose research, teaching, and philosophies explore and reveal the extraordinary literacies and empyreal logics that make these projects possible. I define extraordinary literacies as the social, cultural, spiritual, soulful, and somatic practices that conduit deep excavations and decolonizations of interior life. These literacies influence and shape exterior life by actualizing and operationalizing embodiments of power through evolved beliefs and observable behaviors. They are distinct, different from “critical literacies,” for example, because they are anchored in the Divine. We explore extraordinary literacies by privileging them and regarding seriously how they empower girls and women to thrive in multiple contexts. The corresponding dialectics through which we understand extraordinary literacies are also significant. They are the logics that root and extend these socio emotional and spiritual practices.

Empyreal logics are the complex and remarkable spiritual laws that organize and advance spiritual principles and divining practices communicated through extraordinary literacies. They are regulatory frames for supernatural epistemologies and ontologies (i.e., our ways of knowing and being in multiple realms). They emerge from the Highest Heaven and are anchored in the cosmology of the ancients. They are not religion, though they are reflected in most religions. We know them, for example, as dharma, or biblical principles that we aspire to actualize in daily life while we grapple with human problems and group conflicts. These logics activate healing trajectories and resolve arrivals in the iterative salvations of the oppressed. They guide us in awe and salvation. We need them to transgress systemic suffocations. We need them to decidedly and defiantly know who we are in the midst of messaging that says we are nothing. This special issue explores these literacies and logics, attending specifically to the ways they can be understood and challenged in relation to the distinct identity formations and lived experiences of the marginalized, minoritized, resistant, and triumphant. See the transcribed conversation in this collection (“Exploring Extraordinary Literacies and Empyreal Logics Through the t/Terror Narratives of Three Black Women In The Academy: A Transcript, Notes, and Guiding Questions”) and corresponding notes on these literacies and logics for more on this.

Questions to consider before, during, and after your reading

As you read the works in this issue, I invite you to ask yourself several questions. In fact, ask them not only of yourself, but also meditate on them with colleagues, students, parents, friends, and anyone who’s vested in transformative justice work. Whether as an educator or scholar, artist, or activist, imagine:

1. What are the extraordinary literacies and empyreal logics evolved by Black girls and women in schools and society? What is the value of these phenomena, as they relate to personal and collective safety and liberation?

2. How do Black girls and women develop revelatory, sustaining connections to the Divine, healing attachments to other worlds, and supernatural powers through engagements with extraordinary literacies?

3. What can Black girls and women’s extraordinary literacies and empyreal logics teach us about what it takes to identify and dismantle the often imperceptible and elusive energies and effects of white supremacist patriarchal ideologies in schools and society?

4. In what ways can our understanding of these literacies and logics identify and dismantle white supremacist patriarchal ideologies, advance our understanding of student identities and experiences, dynamically responsive teacher education, critical and curriculum design, school policies, media literacy, voting rights, reproductive education, and healthcare, that govern exterior life?

The authors of the following papers explore these kinds of questions, as they launch emotional justice projects in schools and society. In Wideline Seraphin’s “Dyasporic Dreaming: The Extraordinary Literacies and Superpowers of Haitian and Haitian American Girls,” you’ll find a rich and vigorous discussion about the ways Haitian Vodou functions as an empyreal logic that helps girls organize spiritual energies directly from ancestral wisdoms of resistance, justice, balance, and communal harmony. Oluwaseun Animashaun and Jabobē Olu theorize endarkened third spaces, extraordinary literacies, and an archeology of the self in “An Encounter With the Divine: The Extraordinary Literacies of Black Girls and Women in Endarkened Third Spaces.” Adrian Dunmeyer extends discussions about the significance of circles, community, affinity, orbit, and circumnavigation as meaningful responses to/guards against unilateral attacks that reproduce fragmentation among Black girls and women in their work, “We Are Not Broken: Using Sista Circles as Resistance, Liberation, and Healing.” Francheska Starks brings her findings on Black women’s writing to the collection by using narrative methods and Black feminist theorizing to explore teachers’ stories of personal and professional literacies in “From Critical to Extraordinary: A Narrative Analysis of Black Women’s Educators’ Literacy Practices.” To add more dialectic energies to the collection, I invited three powerful Black women who lead with me as new literacies scholars and sociocultural literacists to be in conversation about t/Terror narratives they’ve encountered in schools and society. Our conversation is entitled, “Exploring Extraordinary Literacies and Empyreal Logics Through the t/Terror Narratives of Three Black Women In The Academy: A Roundtable Transcript, Study Notes, and Guiding Questions.” I use our conversation to notice an name the extraordinary literacies they generated to navigate and supersede their subsequent injuries, in addition to the empyreal logics in which they are rooted. Finally, I conclude the collection with my piece, “How Black Girls Hurt: Naming the t/Terror narratives Accumulated in Schools and Society [Or, A Call for a Third Wave New Literacies Education for All People, Based on the Dynamic, Triumphant Literate Lives of Black Girls and Women].” In it, I clarify more about the epistemological and ontological reasons that these literacies are extraordinary, and far more than just self-care: they draw on logics that counteract those of white Supremacist Patriarchal Ideology (Staples, in review). My hope is that this collection is of service to you in your highest work in the field of qualitative studies for education.

Table of contents

“Dyasporic Dreaming: The Extraordinary Literacies and Superpowers of Haitian and Haitian American Girls” by Wideline Seraphin.

“An Encounter With The Divine: The Extraordinary Literacies of Black Girls and Women in Endarkened Third Spaces” by Oluwaseun Animashaun and Jacobē Olu.

“We Are Not Broken": Using Sista Circles as Resistance, Liberation, and Healing” by Adrian Dunmeyer.

“From Critical to Extraordinary: A Narrative Analysis of Black Women Educators’ Literacy Practices” by Francheska Starks.

“Exploring Extraordinary Literacies and Empyreal Logics Through the t/Terror Narratives of Three Black Women In The Academy: A Roundtable Transcript, Study Notes, and Guiding Questions” by Jeanine Staples-Dixon, Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, Autumn Griffin, and Detra Price-Dennis.

“How Black Girls Hurt: Noticing and Naming the t/Terror narratives Accumulated in Schools and Society [Or, A Call for a Third Wave New Literacies Education for All People, Based on the Dynamic, Triumphant Literate Lives of Black Girls and Women]” by Jeanine Staples-Dixon.