Abstract
hooks (1990) cautions that if people don’t tell their stories, others do it for them . . . retaining authorship and perpetuating racial supremacy. hooks simply says, “Stop!”
In this country and others, many would argue that racial justice is one of the most essential issues of our time and that the color of one’s skin determines the value of her or his life (Coates, 2015). This edited collection responds to the diminished value placed on Black and Brown female bodies. Grounded in feminist/womanist/critical frameworks, the text offers a counternarrative, unpacking a history that has held Black/Brown bodies as lesser.
In Chapter 11, Hudson Weems states that the plight of the African American woman cannot be addressed without addressing race, first and foremost. In many ways, this chapter provided a cogent framework for the overall text and might have been more suitably placed as the opening chapter.
In Chapter 1, Sealy Ruiz and Johnson Bailey discuss the culture of Whiteness in the academy and the ways it enforces racial superiority. Offering an important argument for Black women to support each other through honoring the concept of lifting while climbing, the authors acknowledge that as women of color in the academy we each stand upon the shoulders of those who have made space for us.
The next chapter provides a glimpse into the precarious lived realities of Black female musicians. The author focuses on the narrative of Memphis Minnie (1807-1873), a musician who repeatedly reshaped her role in the world. The chapter touches on important themes regarding Black women and the context in which they attempted to author both words and worlds, including the ways in which they advocated for themselves and, by doing so, made space for others.
Johnson, in Chapter 3, describes a longitudinal study highlighting preteen literacy scores as predictors of teenage pregnancy. Examining beliefs/practices among a group of African American women, the chapter outlines each woman’s narrative and sociocultural lived reality. It includes the women’s hopes of the next generation succeeding in literacy proficiencies in ways they did not.
Chapters 4, 5, and 6 focus on international contexts. Ntiri, in Chapter 4, maps literacy development of women in Africa while also unpacking connections to gender inequality. Using a transformative/emancipatory framework, the author discusses ways in which literacy has fostered inequality in an elitist African educational system. One might wonder whether more polyrhythmic theoretical frameworks might have been more effective given the subjects of the chapter and the critique of Mezirow’s framework (although emancipatory) being rooted in more Eurocentric worldviews.
Mguni and Muwati, in Chapter 5, focus specifically on Zimbabwe and the sociohistorical, political, and cultural dynamics regarding women’s literacy as well as the important role of nonformal education. The authors posit ways in which literacy was a method of conquering; and education an expensive privilege unevenly shared. The chapter calls for literacy needing to be an important focus of the government. Because of the density of material covered, while valuable, this chapter was challenging to follow.
In Chapter 6, Strohschen recounts her journey as an immigrant and community literacy worker. She offers ethnographic accounts of work in Afghanistan and Kenya and poses a critical literacy framework that can support paradigmatic shifts regarding working with women adult literacy learners.
The next three chapters focus on health literacy. Chapter 7 focuses on the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Malawi and the role of literacy. The authors use a postcolonial, feminist perspective focusing on a qualitative study that explored the sexual, physical, and emotional violence experienced by the women. The authors saw education as being key.
Chapter 8 describes a nutritional health literacy program, which is part of the Cooperative Extension at Kansas State University. The chapter offers adult education principles as a way of supporting community service providers who work with specific marginalized groups. Offering some discussion of the limitations of adult education principles (which have been widely critiqued) would have strengthened and complicated this discussion.
Critiquing mainstream media campaigns, the author in Chapter 9 unpacks privileged underlying agendas and interests dominant media campaigns (e.g., certain types/color of bodies). This is an important chapter in its call for more racialized and gendered understandings of media’s repressive practices.
The final two chapters of this volume focus on theoretical discourses of gender and literacy. Merriweather, in Chapter 10, unpacks historically who has benefited from human, social, and political capital and ways these have been and continue to be linked to access, power, and discourses of privilege. By highlighting Black feminist thought, she suggests that Black women can discover their own capital and be assured of its integrity. The last chapter links advancement of society to the education/literacy of women in that society. The author offers Africana womanism as an answer to urgent issues described throughout the text.
I would recommend this text for anyone interested in gaining deeper understandings of structural racism/violence and how it influences discourses on gendered literacy. This text could be used in many graduate adult education courses. Despite some minor unevenness, both in some chapters not citing the rich Africentric/womanist literature in the field (e.g., Vanessa Sheared, Scipio Colin III, Elizabeth Peterson, Derise Tolliver, etc.) and also as errors in published text (misspellings in references, etc.), I would highly recommend this important text.