Humanizing the Black Immigrant Body: Envisioning Diaspora Literacies of Youth and Young Adults from West African Countries

Abstract

Background/Context

This conceptual essay contributes to recent education research on immigrant youth from West African countries that examines the interplay of popularized narratives of immigrant youth and young adults, and their Diasporic literacy practices. Specifically, we examine embodied Diaspora literacies as affirming and extending presences and absences of Black immigrant bodies across two contexts: an after-school African Club, and a qualitative inquiry of civic learning and action-taking of immigrant youth and young adults from West African countries.

Purpose

We theorize in this conceptual essay the interplay of the humanity of Black immigrant youth and young adults and their embodied Diaspora literacy practices. We highlight possibilities for research, literacy teaching, and teacher education when intentionally naming, affirming, and building with the humanity of Black immigrant youth and young adults from West African countries—what we conceptualize as humanizing the Black immigrant body. We conceptualize humanizing the Black immigrant body as an enacting of embodied Diaspora literacies. In theorizing embodied Diaspora literacies, we build with African Indigenous lensings, and African, Black, and Chicana/Latina feminisms. We further contextualize humanizing the Black immigrant body as an enacting of embodied Diaspora literacies expressed in the creative and artistic practices and artifacts of artists, literary authors, playwrights, and youth and young adults who have long authored and told narratives that affirm, extend, and historicize the strengths of Black immigrant communities.

Interpretive Analysis

We highlight in this conceptual essay the urgency of humanizing the Black immigrant body across four moments, or tellings of embodied Diaspora literacies. Our use of Diasporic tellings, an intentional naming and humanizing research approach, draws on the words of Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian author who refected on the urgency of a global “balance of stories.” We examine four Diasporic tellings: (1) youth in an African Club in a high school in New York City attending an off-Broadway play authored by a daughter of Ghanaian immigrants, (2) participating in a group discussion following the play, and (3) engaging in Youth Participatory Action Research inquiries; and (4) youth and young adults from West African countries discussing their creative and artistic embodied Diaspora literacies, and civic learning and action-taking across contexts of peers, schooling, and families.

Conclusion / Recommendations

We theorize humanizing the Black immigrant body as a vibrant, necessary research and teaching stance to recognize the humanity of Black immigrant youth who daily negotiate and render visible their language and literacy practices. These practices comprise the coalescing of Black immigrant bodies, discursive perspectives, and material artifacts of teaching and learning, and their racialized, social, and educational experiences across contexts of schools and communities. These Diasporic tellings provide important insights for productive approaches in research, teaching, and teacher education with youth and young adults making sense of the lives of Black immigrants, across contexts of literacy learning and lived experiences that meaningfully recognize the humanity of Black immigrant youth from West African countries.