The freedoms of B. Kumasi
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I have long been concerned with what the United States of America owes its citizens. My mind is preoccupied with identifying gaps between the violent disparities endured by Black and marginalized communities and the rhetoric of official government documents and municipal records that establish protections for those within the nation's borders. My creative work centers on sharing truths experienced by minority communities as a means of interrogating narratives that reinforce systems of oppression. My analytical approach to the writing of prose, and particularly fiction, has been shaped by scholarship and research in critical race theory. Many critics and academics adopt methodologies from critical race theory to examine the continued racial discrimination and social disparities in the United States, especially after the Civil Rights movement. Likewise, I apply these frameworks through storytelling. In invented narratives, I aim to engage in the practice of counterstorytelling as defined by critical race theorists such as Daniella Cook and Adrienne Dixson. In their landmark essay, "Writing Critical Race Theory and Method," Cook and Dixson use a critical race lens, to examine the experiences of African-American educators in their efforts to rebuild New Orlean schools post-Katrina. The authors propose an approach to writing race research that engenders "composite counter-storytelling," looking specifically at how counterstories composed of varying parts and elements communicate racialized constructions in American institutions. Cook and Dixson outline the aspects and potential for counter-storytelling: 1. Provides psychic preservation by not silencing the experiences of the oppressed and thus exposing neglected evidence. 2. Challenges normative reality through an exchange that overcomes ethnocentrism and the dysconscious conviction of viewing the world one way. 3. Privileges the voices of people of color as the basis for understanding how race and racism function. 4. Purposefully attempts to disrupt liberal ideology. Recognizing how counterstories provide, challenge, privilege and disrupt, I felt composite counter-storytelling was a methodology I could broaden and apply to my creative examinations of citizenship in the United States. I sought out examples of other authors already engaging in this work and how they approached counternarratives to dominant American ideologies. I found myself focused on the concept of compositing, thinking of a text narrative as an assemblage of elements. I am attracted to fictional stories that feature and highlight legal and official texts or documents. Many of my favorite creative writers such as Percival Everett, Zinzi Clemmons, and John Edgar Wideman, blur the divisions between narrative invention, research, and reporting to produce stories that examine the social and geographical politics of their homelands. As a narrative approach, inserting nonfiction documents into fiction can be a means of responding to realities in a way that mobilizes social movement and political action. These authors subvert genre conventions to undermine national narratives that endanger the life and liberty of marginalized populations. There is reason to center novels that challenge genre conventions in discussions about narratives that reject isolationism, reinvent national narratives, give access to new, global, identities, and allow reflections on global challenges. There is reason to ask, how using historical artifacts and documents in fiction might allow authors to highlight truths experienced by marginalized communities? How might disrupting imagined stories with legal documents and historical texts make space for the interrogation of social injustices? There is precedent throughout the twentieth century of Black authors and writers of color blurring the dominant structures of U.S. fiction to interrogate disparities. Notably, many of these writers insert nonfiction documents into their narratives to critique how marginalized citizens are excluded from their rights to equal protection granted by the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. I argue that a composite counter-storytelling approach in fiction can interrogate the false American ideology that there is a common nationality and a universal national belief that all U.S. citizens are equal and entitled to unalienable rights.
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Ph. D.