Content Objectives
Framework for Understanding
The first question you may ask upon opening this unit is simply, “what, again, is critical literacy?” The term is frequently considered to have grown from Brazilian educator and philosopher, Paulo Freire’s, work.4Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed describes the traditional model for teacher-student dynamics as being “fundamentally narrative [in] character.”5 He writes about the “narration sickness” that plagues education, the way societal expectations assume that the teacher is the one narrating what needs to be learned, and students are the objects, empty and waiting to be filled with whatever information the teacher has to share.6 Freire names this the “’banking’ concept of education,” as it envisions students as empty banks that need funds deposited into them by their teachers.7 Flaws are evident in this traditional understanding of education. Freire identifies the nonsense that is the perception of teachers and students as total opposites, clarifying that students (identified by him as part of the “oppressed” for which the book is named) come to their interactions with teachers with their own knowledge and with the “vocation to become fully human.”8
These Freirean foundations beg the question of what, if not the banking model, is an appropriate method for teaching, a method that would acknowledge the humanness of students in addition to teachers. Freire’s suggestion is “dialogical relations” which he describes as the dialogue between teachers and students that transforms the relationship from subject and object to collaborators in learning.9 Freire discusses “problem-posing education,” which is the antithesis of the banking model. In this model, students are presented with real-world scenarios and issues that they have to consider in conjunction with their own prior knowledge. This form of education, Freire claims, is “education as the practice of freedom,” as it considers humans and the world interdependent, and sees reality as occurring with people as opposed to being objective and separate from us.10 In this model, everyone has the opportunity to contribute to education as it occurs, because everyone has their own, unique experiences that inform their interactions with the world, whether teacher or student.11
This historical background is crucial to our understanding of what we now call critical literacy, which scholars agree is the practice of questioning texts, challenging norms, and interacting with the world rather than what some might believe to be the passive process of consuming a text.12 This definition follows neatly Freire’s problem-posing model, as it similarly prioritizes the impact of an individual’s experiences in the educational setting. Text-to-world connections are crucial in critical literacy, as students (and teachers!) must consider how their experiences affect their reading, as well as how the experiences of the author have affected their writing. For example, McLaughlin and DeVoogd offer a list of questions that may help encourage students to develop a critical stance when reading or viewing a text, including but not limited to: “Whose viewpoint is expressed?” , “Whose voices are missing, silenced, or discounted?” , and “What action might you take on the basis of what you have learned?”13
While what I have discussed above reflects critical literacy specifically as it relates to classrooms and teacher-student dynamics, one must also understand that critical literacy is a way of existing in the world and maneuvering through texts that may not have been created with you in mind. This notion reflects greatly the work that we have been doing in the seminar at the Yale National Initiative, A History of Black People as Readers: A Genealogy of Critical Literacy, led by Roderick Ferguson. In seminar meetings, we have discussed how Black people from the time of slavery into the present have encountered texts that were, in some way or another, “not for them,” and how these individuals have read them subversively, toward the end of finding freedom—whatever that may look like for the individual.
This brings me to Toni Morrison and her book, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, which we have been discussing in seminar meetings. In this book, Morrison lays out her own critical literacy practices that she employs as she reads works from white writers as a Black reader. Morrison begins her book by describing her reading of Marie Cardinal’s The Words To Say It¸ drawing our attention to two moments in the book which Morrison reads critically. The first is the author’s description of an anxiety attack that she experienced “during a Louis Armstrong concert” and the second is Cardinal’s documentation of her emotional responses to war in Algeria.14 Morrison notes that “black or colored people and symbolic figurations of blackness are markers for the benevolent and the wicked” in Cardinal’s book.15 Morrison continues on to share with us the process by which she has critically read Cardinal’s descriptions of Blackness. She shares that these specific instances that stick out for her are not really necessary to understand The Words To Say It, but rather they serve as examples of “how each of us reads, becomes engaged in and watches what is being read all at the same time.”16 By writing this, Morrison explains her own approach to critical literacy. There is a meaning that the author intentionally imbues in the text (in the case of Cardinal, the meaning being to tell the story of her life in the form of a novel), and then there is the meaning that is meaningful to the reader (for Morrison, this is the ways that societal constructs surrounding Blackness have informed Cardinal’s writing). By explaining her critical process, and then cataloguing the examples from Cardinal’s text, Morrison helps us to understand both the deeply personal ways in which she reads, as well as what we can all learn about the representations of Black people in canonical literature by examining how Blackness is written with our own, more critical eye.
Morrison tells us more about her critical literacy by defining her use of the term, “Africanist,” which she describes as “denotative and connotative blackness that African peoples have come to signify, as well as the entire range of views, assumptions, readings, and misreadings that accompany Eurocentric learning about these people.”17 Morrison is clear that she is critically reading for the ways in which ideas surrounding Blackness have informed all of American (and global canonical) literature, and shares various case studies, beginning with the aforementioned instances from Cardinal’s The Words To Say It. Over and over, Morrison describes how the ideas that white writers have about Blackness have tinted the literature they have created, imbuing everything with hierarchical beliefs about whiteness’s purity and Blackness’s corruption.18 It is this critical literacy that my unit is truly based on: the reading of a text to find what is being implied or left out in regard to Blackness, and ultimately, the study of how Black creators have reanimated texts to address such inequities.
In a commonly cited essay among teachers of reading, English teacher Emily Style describes this kind of literature—literature that allows students to see both themselves represented as well as provides students the opportunity to learn about people different from them, as windows and mirrors.19 In “Curriculum as Window and Mirror,” Style, like Freire and Morrison, acknowledges that “learning never takes place in a vacuum; it is always contextual.” She believes that to address the highly contextual (and personal!) nature of learning, what we teach students needs to function both as a window and a mirror “in order to reflect and reveal most accurately both a multicultural world and the student herself or himself.”20 My unit proposes that “canonical” texts from white creatives lack the “window and mirror” quality when it comes to non-dominant cultures and people groups, thus creating a need for Black creatives to construct their own.
Alice Walker’s Revision of Virginia Woolf
The first case study for critical literacy that I will introduce to my students in this unit is the relationship between Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. In the first essay of her book, “Saving the Life That Is Your Own: The Importance of Models in the Artist’s Life,” Walker writes explicitly about the same lack of or misrepresentation that Morrison discusses in Playing in the Dark, and which Style wrote her entire essay on: “The absence of models, in literature as in life… is an occupational hazard for the artist.” Walker goes on to write later in the essay about her thoughts upon being asked about the main difference between literature from Black and white Americans. Walker writes that the differences are less interesting to her than her observations that “black writers and white writers seem to [her] to be writing one immense story—the same story, for the most part—with different parts of the immense story coming from a multitude of different perspectives.”21 As Walker goes on in her book, we see some of the “different perspectives” she is referring to. Specifically, we see her address Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own.
Before we can understand Walker’s revision, we first need to know what she was revising. Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, originally written in 1928 as a series of lectures for students at Cambridge University about women in fiction,22 asserts that “women have been categorically denied the conditions necessary to produce literature,” money and a room of their own.23 We turn to “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” to see how Walker has used her critical literacy to respond to Woolf: “What then are we to make of Phillis Wheatley, a slave, who owned not even herself?”24 In response to the idea that women just need to get themselves some money and a place to write, Walker pushes back, looking to an example of a “sickly, frail black girl… who, had she been white, would have been easily considered the intellectual superior of all the women and most of the men in the society of her day.”25 Walker notices the absence of a Black female perspective in Woolf’s text, and begins re-writing passages from A Room of One’s Own, bracketing her interjections to clearly indicate where Wheatley needed to be included: “[insert ‘eighteenth century,’ insert ‘black woman,’ insert ‘born or made a slave’],”26 “[add ‘chains, guns, the lash, the ownership of one’s body by someone else, submission to an alien religion’],”27 referring to Woolf’s discussing women of the sixteenth century with a talent for writing with the former interjection, and the idea that women with gifts were countered by misogynistic society in the latter.28
Laurie McMillan discusses Alice Walker’s critical literacy in her article, “Telling a Critical Story: Alice Walker’s ‘In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens.’” McMillan writes that Walker’s In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens “renegotiates readings of the past” as a form of literary criticism, but for our purposes, we can use her article to also understand Walker’s critical literacy.29 McMillan describes three of Walker’s essays (“Beyond the Peacock,” “Looking for Zora,” and “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens”)30 by using verbiage from Henry Louis Gates: “Walker ‘signifies’ on the writers Flannery O’Connor, Zora Neale Hurston, and Virginia Woolf.” McMillan paraphrases Gates in explaining that, “’Signifying,’ … is a critical approach with African American roots that enacts repetition with difference.” Repetition meaning that the re-writing takes inspiration from its source material, but difference meaning that changes are made to shed light on misrepresentations from the original.31
McMillan goes on to describe the relationship between “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” and A Room of One’s Own specifically. Regarding Woolf and Walker, McMillan writes, “both writers combine attention to socio-material conditions … However, the African American oppression Walker writes of tends to be more horrific than the injustices suffered by the middle-class white women of Woolf’s text.”32 McMillan writes about Walker’s instinct to alter Woolf’s original text so that it “speak[s] to the experiences of Phillis Wheatley, as well as to the situation of the many black women who were unable to produce creative writing despite a potential talent.”33 Later in her titular essay, Walker shares a narrative about the ways in which Black women, from the time of slavery on, have created art in their daily lives despite the harsh conditions imposed upon them by a society that reveres whiteness. Walker addresses the gaps she has found in Woolf’s writing with her own work, creating a narrative about the Black women whose conditions were not considered in A Room of One’s Own.34
Lorraine Hansberry’s Revision of Sean O’Casey
Another example of a Black creator’s critical literacy leading her to re-write a text from a white creator is that of Lorraine Hansberry’s reading of Juno and the Paycock. Lorraine Hansberry first saw Sean O’Casey’s play about an Irish family living in a Dublin slum during her freshman year at the University of Wisconsin. “She was mesmerized; the student portraying O’Casey’s heroine wailed in grief at the death of her son, killed in the Irish struggle for freedom.”35 After some years, Hansberry reflected that she “’considered [her] own evolution as a writer in ways [she] had not heretofore done.’”36 Hansberry saw in O’Casey’s play reflections of her own upbringing; she saw the parallels between the Boyles living as an oppressed people in a struggling nation and Black Americans, who are also an oppressed people living in a struggling nation. In his biography of Lorraine Hansberry, Charles J. Shields writes that the Boyles in Juno “spoke in their own vernacular, used their favorite expressions, and shook their fists at those who were dominating them,” which again aligns with the Black American experience.37 In her informal autobiography, To Be Young, Gifted, and Black, we see Hansberry reflect on the experience: “The play was Juno and the writer Sean O’Casey—but the melody was one that I had known for a very long while.”38 She goes on to write that she was seventeen years old, and at that time “did not think then of writing the melody as [she] knew it—in a different key,” but that the experience stayed with her, ultimately leading to the play’s influence on her writing of A Raisin in the Sun.
Hansberry further discusses O’Casey in a 1959 interview with radio personality Studs Terkel. When Terkel asks Hansberry to share her thoughts on the Irish playwright, she begins, “Yes. I love Sean O’Casey.”39 She goes on to share that what she admires in O’Casey’s plays is how he accepts and uses “the most obvious instruments of Shakepeare. Which is the human personality and its totality.”40 Hansberry goes on to say how important she feels it is for Black writers to use a similar model, because “O’Casey never fools you about the Irish… the Irish drunkard, the Irish braggart,” etc.41 But Hansberry is clear that there is no need to copy O’Casey or writers like him, because the experience of Black people in the United States is “material… too rich to copy anybody.”42 Hansberry looked at O’Casey’s Juno as a jumping off point for her own writing about the Younger family on the South Side of Chicago; as O’Casey represented his culture and his people, Hansberry would also represent her culture and her family in A Raisin in the Sun.
Hansberry also discusses with Terkel how important it is to write not a general story that appeals to everyone, but rather a highly specific story. Hansberry talks about critics of her play, A Raisin in the Sun, who claim that “the characters of [her] play transcend category,” meaning that her play is not truly about the Black experience, but rather “a play about anybody.”43 Hansberry replies to these criticisms by saying that “in order to create the universal you must pay very close attention to the specific.”44 She explains that A Raisin in the Sun is not only about “a Negro family, specifically and definitely culturally, but it’s not even a New York family or a Southern Negro family. It is specifically South Side Chicago.”45 Like O’Casey, Hansberry wants to represent a very specific situation in her play, but in her work, represents Black families in Chicago, rather than Irish families in Dublin.
Charles J. Shields also references playwright Loften Mitchell in his biography of Hansberry to describe a further connection between O’Casey’s work and A Raisin in the Sun: “’There was always a ‘good’ white who helped the Negro solve his problem,’ said playwright Loften Mitchell. However it’s ‘difficult to recall’, he said, ‘an instance of an Englishman ‘helping’ the Irish in one of Sean O’Casey’s plays.’”46 Mitchell, and in turn Shields (and Hansberry herself), help us understand how O’Casey’s work felt relatable to Hansberry, but they also lay the groundwork to help us see where the gaps existed that inspired Hansberry to write A Raisin in the Sun. Looking at the totality of canonical literature, it is sometimes difficult to find representation of Black individuals or families who are round characters with agency. O’Casey helps to fill a similar void in Irish literature through Juno, and Hansberry helps to fill the void in American Literature with Raisin.
Hansberry clearly articulates her critical literacy in her media interactions when Raisin was first coming into the public consciousness. She is often misquoted, originally so by Nan Robertson, as saying that the play was not “’a Negro play,’” but a play about “’honest-to-God, believable, many-sided people who happen to be Negroes.’”47 Hansberry hates this misattribution, expressing in an interview with Eleanor Fisher in 1959 that "’it is impossible to divorce the racial fact from any American Negro’ since ‘part of his daily experience is that of being a unique person in American culture who is a Negro.’”48 Hansberry does not want to tell a color-blind story in Raisin, she wants to tell a highly contextualized story that more accurately represents herself. As she states in her interview with Studs Terkel, she was never trying to copy O’Casey,49 but rather use her emotional response to his work to put her own experiences to the stage. She saw that O’Casey told a specific story about the Boyles in Dublin, featuring their triumphs and flaws and fears and pains, and she wanted to tell a story of the triumphs, flaws, fears, and pains of the Youngers on the South Side of Chicago.50
Ken Harper’s Revision of L. Frank Baum / MGM
A third case study we can turn to in order to understand inspirational lineages between “canonical” texts and the works Black creatives have developed to address the gaps they leave is the 1975 Broadway musical, The Wiz. The Wiz (And, to be clear, for the purposes of this curriculum unit, we will be focusing only on the original Broadway production, rather than its 1978 film adaptation.) was the brain-child of Ken Harper, who had until that point been working as a radio DJ, first in the army, and then on WPIX, New York, where he worked as the Music and Public Affairs Director.51 Society writer David Patrick Columbia, on his website New York Social Diary writes in August of 2021 about his experiences meeting Harper in passing some 50-odd years prior: “I had met Ken through Bob Schulenberg back in the late ‘60s… The only thing that intrigued me was that he had an idea for a Broadway musical: a black version of ‘The Wizard of Oz.’”52 Columbia writes about not ever really getting to know Harper, but being “fascinated by his ‘idea’ if only because it was ‘thinking big’ and he was then just some young guy in his late 20s who admitted to Big Dreams.”53
Why adapt The Wizard of Oz (the 1939 MGM film) or perhaps The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (the 1900 novel from L. Frank Baum), and more to the point of this unit, why create an all-Black adaptation? To answer this question, we must look not only at the content of The Wizard of Oz when compared to The Wiz, but also at the historical culture of a predominantly white Broadway. In his book, African American Perspectives in Musical Theatre, Eric M. Glover argues that even if a musical has an all-white cast and an all-white production team, it is still simply called a musical. He writes that, “In the United States, white people are the default, and nearly all aspects of everyday life cater to white people at the expense of others,”54 which reflects a similar notion that Morrison expresses in Playing in the Dark. Morrison writes, “In this country… American means white, and Africanist people struggle to make the term applicable to themselves with ethnicity and hyphen after hyphen after hyphen.”55 Once again, we see how figurations of whiteness create an “amnesia about Black people’s activity and influence in the history of the musical,”56 as Glover writes, but also how it impacts the world around us. Broadway, much like American literature, and American culture for that matter, has a history of centering whiteness to the detriment of others, creating a chasm where the experiences of any other race or culture group should be. Enter, The Wiz, and productions like it which feature and celebrate a Black cast and production team.
The Wiz, as a musical almost completely designed and performed by Black people, addresses these problems with Broadway and musical theatre at large in its own way, while also re-writing an all-white story to represent Black audiences. Ken Harper brought in William F. Brown to write an adaptation of The Wizard of Oz with cultural touchstones for Black viewers,57 and Harper brought in Charlie Smalls as the composer, who “drew from pop culture, blending rhythms from R&B, soul and pop.”58 Charlie Smalls appears in a 1968 episode of The Monkees, several years prior to his work on The Wiz, but demonstrating what I believe to be the spirit of his work on the music for the show. In a clip I found on TikTok from creator TV Tangents (@tvtangentspod), Smalls converses with Davy Jones, who asks him “tell me, why don’t I have soul? You’ve known me all these years, why don’t I have soul?” In response, Smalls clarifies that Jones does have soul, and explains the difference “rhythmically,” because “that’s the only way [Smalls] can really talk, is in music.” Smalls goes on to describe the difference between the accented beats that their souls “emanate on,” and gives the example of the Beatles playing on the “one and three,” and then the “two and four” beats being “Motown Soul.”59 The clip is beautiful, as it is a rare example of Charlie Smalls on film, discussing what he knows best, which is music. His sentiments in the clip reflect what Hansberry said about her adaptation of O’Casey: “writing the melody as [she] knew it—in a different key.”60 It also reflects Alice Walker’s single “immense story” comment when asked to compare literature from white and Black Americans,61 in that in all of these instances, we see the critical literacy of Black creators, who could see the spaces where they should fit into the canon, but also where they have not yet been represented. In some cases, like in those of Walker and Hansberry, these creators have been able to take inspiration from predecessors who likewise made space for themselves in their respective canon (O’Casey depicting the struggles of an Irish family during civil war, and Woolf speaking on behalf of women writers in early twentieth century England). Similarly, Smalls could see the greater story of music, and how there should be space for both “white soul” and “Motown soul” in that story.62 The Wiz serves as a creative space to show how Black voices can tell the same story as white voices, but in a way that respects and celebrates their own Souls. Smalls wrote songs that reflected the original Wizard of Oz, but which made space for the Black cast and audience to see themselves on stage.
Another creative on The Wiz’s production team who prioritized telling a Black story was Geoffrey Holder, who was initially on the production team as costumer, and ultimately became the director for the show.63 He put together an adaptation that not only allowed room for Black ideas and music and style, but favored them. Holder, a Trinidad-American, infused the show with fashion that would reflect his culture as both someone of Trinidadian origin and as a Black man in the United States.64 Many credit Holder with being the reason that The Wiz came to be, and certainly came to be the cultural phenomenon that it is. In fact, according to an article that quotes him in the New York Times in May of 1975, it was he who first said that the show should even be called The Wiz when Harper shared his idea for an all-Black Wizard of Oz: “I loved the idea immediately and said if it’s black, it must of course be called ‘The Wiz.’”65 As Jennifer Dunning, a New York Times dance critic, discusses in the 2005 documentary, Carmen and Geoffrey, Holder was in talks with “some young producer” (Harper) to create what she describes as a “safe” adaptation of The Wizard of Oz, but Holder wanted to take the idea to a higher level.66 Holder’s son, Leo Holder, also spoke about his father’s work on The Wiz: “How can you do something that everybody knows, and still surprise them... And somehow he did it.”67 Looking at Holder’s designs for the costumes in The Wiz, we see (and hear! In Carmen and Geoffrey, he describes his creative process with accompanying visuals68) how Holder incorporates “his outrageousness,” as Dunning says, into the visuals for the show. She discusses the bright colors and stunning motifs that Holder brings to The Wiz.69 Though many story elements parallel the original MGM film, The Wiz is visually entirely its own, representing a whole new demographic in its bright colors and “big, expensive, loud, subtle, juicy art,” largely thanks to Holder.70
The Wiz encountered some substantial issues during previews, and soon after the musical opened in January of 1975, the show began receiving negative reviews from critics. However, the show went on. They embarked on “the largest Broadway publicity campaign of the time,” and The Wiz was one of the first shows to advertise on television.71 Harper also reached out to “Black communities and school groups that brought in thousands of young people, many seeing a Broadway musical for the first time.”72 Additionally, an editorial defending the show appeared in the New York Amsterdam News (“the oldest black newspaper in the country”).73 The editorial’s author wanted to remind Black audiences that white critics would likely not readily relate to a production that so heavily emphasized its Blackness, and encouraged them to see the show and take in the “references to black culture… and the message of black pride” that white audiences might not appreciate.74
Ultimately, The Wiz won seven Tony Awards, including Best Musical, Best Choreography, Best Costume Design, Best Director of a Musical, and others.75 Many doubted its ability to succeed due to its diversion from what was typical of Broadway at the time,76 and as David Patrick Columbia thought “in the late 60’s,” the difficulty the show would have in improving upon the 1939 film.77 But since the show’s original run in 1975, it has been adapted to film, toured the country, been produced by local theatre companies more times than I can know, and was produced live for television in 2015.78 It has also been revived on Broadway in 2024, to portray he story “’through the Blackest of Black lenses for Black’s sake.’”79 Rather than leaving the legacy of The Wizard of Oz to simply be about a little white girl who, though she makes friends with a lion and a man made of tin, never encounters a Black character, Ken Harper and the team from the original Broadway production of The Wiz adapted both the story and the mores of a largely white Broadway culture of the time to give us The Wiz, which in turn paved the way for future Black Broadway productions.80
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