On These Haunted Streets

Abstract

This chapter outlines the development of a collaborative transmedia storytelling process by the authors, whose visual and poetic work is articulated here within the framework of critical multimodal literacy (CML). The authors were tasked to help bring forward the stories of black musicians involved in the opera Omar, and in doing so discovered an artistic process that was strengthened by the intersection of their critical approaches. Chronicling their engagement with Omar provided them with a uniquely situated opportunity to describe their individual meaning making processes, and then discuss how consideration of each other's process impacted our storytelling. The authors do this through sharing specific story examples from the oral history project. Engagement with black artistic presence in opera also allowed them to explore our shared focus on anchoring this work within a socio-political context that supports the naming/transformation of inequities; helping to illustrate how this work is situated within the framework of CML and reflects a transmedia process of layered storytelling.