As much as gender, race, class, and sexuality reflect socially constructed categories of accrued, and often problematic meanings, so, too, does adolescence represent a social category of significations currently viewed as "true" but understandable as
Identifying English Education courses focused on young adult literature as apposite sites for exploring teacher conceptions of youth and the texts aimed for youths’ consumptions, this article addresses the multiple sources of tension—and pedagogical potential—of teaching a young adult literature course centrally framed around controversial discourses of adolescence. Reflecting on six years of teaching the course at two different institutions with a strong focus on critical perspectives of youth, the article examines why students in the class would understandably strain against this curriculum, as well as what it might mean for secondary literacy curricula and secondary students if teacher educators and secondary teachers take up these pedagogical risks and sources of resistance in efforts to interrupt dominant and stereotypical discourses about youth.
Abstract. Recent applications of Freud's theory examine the social value of the lost love object as a way of understanding the suffering of non-majority groups. Rather than pathologizing the individual suffering the loss, the lens of racial melancholia pathologizes the discourse that constitutes racially marked others as alien to the majority. Through a close reading of image and text, Sophia Tatiana Sarigianides applies David Eng and Shinhee Han's theory of racial melancholia to Gene Luen Yang's graphic novel American Born Chinese. Sarigianides argues that texts such as American Born Chinese provide grounds for a public language for examining the suffering that ensues from the failure of assimilation as a desired outcome for immigrants in the United States.Taking up the widely recognized role of literature in approaching questions of difference, this essay utilizes Gene Leun Yang's award-winning graphic novel American Born Chinese to examine how melancholia, as theorized by scholars like David Eng and Shinhee Han, can provide a means for better understanding marginalized identities. Reading Yang's complex text through the lens of melancholia exposes the impossibility of assimilation as an option or preferred response to difference, especially for Asians in America.The essay begins with a review of Sigmund Freud's theorizations on mourning and melancholia as individual pathology. Then, drawing on the narrative of the graphic novel, it presents a detailed examination of how Freud's ideas might be applied to non-majority identities. By looking closely at the social value of the lost object through the lens of melancholia, it is possible to see how that pathology shifts from the individual to discourse in ways that demand our social attention and political action. Theorizing MelancholiaFreud juxtaposes the states of mourning and melancholia in an effort to better understand the causes of and potential clinical solutions to patients' individual, pathological suffering following profound loss. 1 The source of this loss, in both cases, may be the death of a love object or the loss of an abstraction that takes the place of the love object (for example, homeland or freedom). The suffering involves supreme dejection and a distancing from the social, both of which follow from the ego's identification with the lost object. Though mourning and melancholia share many traits of suffering, in mourning the process is finite, whereas the melancholic lingers in this state of deep loss.
As the U.S. grapples with a racial reckoning, teacher educators need to know what education programs can do to send preservice teachers into the field committed to engage in antiracist teaching and confident that they can do it well. This semester-long, bi-institutional qualitative study of preservice teachers in two white-dominant methods courses for the preparation of English teachers examines the research question: What factors contribute to preservice teachers’ commitment to teaching about racism in the context of literature study? Defining commitment as a combination of intention and demonstrated ability to enact antiracism in future antiracist teaching through Love’s concept of abolitionist teaching, as well as Kant’s conception of a categorical imperative, this study identified four factors affecting participants’ commitment to antiracism: 1) knowledge about race and racism; 2) the role of participants’ racial identity in doing antiracist English teaching; 3) experience with antiracist pedagogies; and 4) field-based experiences tied to race. Implications from the study focus on the need to connect teachers’ racial identity understandings to discipline-based teaching; modeling discipline-centered antiracist pedagogies; and helping candidates to racialize field experiences as part of their preparation.
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