Abstract
The field of literacy research has seen a recent surge in scholarship focusing on how matter—both human and nonhuman—comes to matter in literacy research and practice. This article explores how new materialist theories may be recruited for literacy research motivated by an anti-racist ethic. We present an illustrative intra-action analysis of a short autobiographical video produced by Malcolm, a Black male high school student, for a digital autobiography class assignment. Our analysis, informed by both new materialist and poststructuralist theories and emphasizing both discourse and materiality, produces varied interpretations of Malcolm and his literacy practices. Based on our multitheoretic analysis, we raise ethical concerns regarding analyses of racialized students’ literacy practices that emphasize materiality and affect without also retaining a critical eye toward powerful discourses of race and racism. We end with implications and recommendations for others engaging new materialisms in literacy research.
There has been a recent surge of literacy scholarship focused on materiality, how matter—both human and nonhuman—comes to matter (Barad, 2003) in literacy research and practice. This scholarship, framed within new materialist theories (e.g., Ehret, Hollett, & Jocius, 2016; Honeyford, 2015; Kuby & Crawford, 2017; Thiel, 2015; Wargo, 2018; Zapata, Kuby, & Thiel, 2018), is part of a broader material turn in fields ranging from biology and physics to feminist theory, cultural studies, and social sciences, including education (Hultman & Lenz Taguchi, 2010). Although notable distinctions exist between new materialism, relational materialism, posthumanism, material feminism, actor-network theory (ANT; Latour, 2005), and other concepts (Hultman & Lenz Taguchi, 2010), each of these theories challenges humanist understandings of agency and the dichotomization and ordering of human bodies in relation to material objects. We use the term new materialisms (NMs) to refer to this family of thought.
A primary argument of this NMs is that matter and meaning do not operate separately from one another, nor does one fully determine the other. Rather, NMs assert an onto-epistemological stance whereby being (ontology) and knowing (epistemology) are mutually productive and meaning is spontaneous, ephemeral, and multiply constituted (Barad, 2007). According to Fox and Alldred (2018), “the materialities considered in new materialist approaches include human bodies; other animate organisms; material things; spaces, places and the natural and built environment that these contain; and material forces including gravity and time” (p. 1). These understandings highlight the limits of language and anthropocentric frames for understanding phenomena such as literacy practices.
The emergence and proliferation of NMs as a frame for literacy research is evidenced in part by Volume 48(3) of the Journal of Literacy Research, devoted to nonrepresentational perspectives (Anders, Yaden, Iddings, Katz, & Rogers, 2016), as well as other literacy journals (e.g., Research in the Teaching of English and Journal of Early Childhood Literacy). Parallel to this emergence, the Literacy Research Association (LRA; 2016) committed to combating the complicity of literacy research in perpetuating racial inequities, as articulated in an LRA board resolution, “The Role of Literacy Research in Racism and Racial Violence.”
With some exceptions (e.g., Zapata et al., 2018), we find a troubling absence of conversations in new materialist literacy research about race and intersectionality that intentionally deconstruct oppressive practices. Yet, other areas of new materialist research show evidence of critical engagement. For example, Hamraie (2017) theorized how curb cutting by disability activists reflects “[materialized] politics” that shift how bodies (able and disabled) intra-act with the environment (p. 102). Similarly, Kinard, Gainer, and Huerta (2018) draw on NMs in their research on multilingual play-based early learning, narrating entanglements of children, language, materials, and historical patterns of inequity.
We also see important linkages between NMs (Barad, 2003) and poststructuralism (e.g., Butler, 1990; Foucault, 1977). Poststructuralist theories pay close attention to the circulation of discourses of power and how social agents, or subjects, negotiate and participate in such processes. These kinds of analyses of subjectivities are often unrecognized or unaddressed in new materialist work (Pennycook, 2018). As NMs gain traction in literacy studies, we consider how minimizing attention to racialized youths’ subjectivities may inadvertently contribute to the erasure of particular ways of being human. We share Nichols and Campano’s (2017) concern that new materialist literacy scholarship may “disregard those teaching and research methods that have historically contributed to equitable literacy education” (p. 249).
Our purpose is threefold: (a) to explore the ethical and moral implications of employing new materialist frames in literacy research involving racialized youth, (b) to argue for the value of a multitheoretic approach that retains criticality while engaging new materialist analyses, and (c) to offer guiding principles for socially just and anti-racist new materialist literacy research. We do this by presenting our analysis of a short autobiographical video produced by Malcolm, a Black male high school student. Specifically, we wondered what a new materialist analysis that retains critical epistemologies illustrates about Malcolm’s literacy practices. Ultimately, our aim is to counteract racial violence that is often inadvertently perpetuated by literacy scholarship that fails to recognize how historical cycles of oppression render some human bodies worthy of protecting and others as expendable (Butler, 1990). We hope readers will engage with our analyses not as any final word on new materialist literacy research or what critical new materialist analyses should look like, but instead as one step forward in reconciling what have been viewed as incompatible frames for theorizing literacy research.
We write as three White women who desire to engage in transformative, anti-racist research. As such, we stand positioned to reap material gains from this publication. We do not experience the same cycles of racial oppression and violence as people of color, which creates blind spots for us as researchers. Our previous research practices are rooted in social constructionism and poststructuralism, both of which view knowledge as discursively and socially constructed and power-laden (Handsfield, 2016). Hruby (2001) referred to this theoretical frame as poststructural social constructionism—a critical stance that privileges discourse, albeit interpreted broadly to include visual data, body movements, and emotions (Handsfield, Crumpler, & Dean, 2010; Hunt & Handsfield, 2015).
Building on scholarship outside of literacy studies (Bozalek & Zembylas, 2017; de Freitas & Curinga, 2015; Højgaard & Søndergaard, 2011), and attempting to “think with” theories (A. Y. Jackson & Mazzei, 2012), we articulate potentially productive overlaps between post-structuralism and NMs. Indeed, foundational new materialist theorists (e.g., Barad, 2003; Bennett, 2010; Berlant, 2011; Massumi, 2015) draw on poststructural scholars (e.g., Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze) to argue that materiality and affect should be considered alongside discourse as crucial aspects of how relations are produced. We explicitly attempt to reinforce these connections (which often get lost as researchers take up NM theories) in our analysis. As Barad (2003) writes, “discursive practices and material phenomena do not stand in a relationship of externality to one another” (p. 822). Rather, they are “mutually implicated in the dynamics of intra-activity . . . [and] neither has privileged status in determining the other” (p. 822).
As new materialist thinkers turn literacy researchers’ attention to materiality and affect, they emphasize the “ethical imperative” to examine the “emergent and entangled ‘we’ of experience” (Ehret et al., 2016, p. 374) with an understanding of agency as shared among all materialities entangled in processes of becoming. We feel the momentum of these theories in literacy studies, which inspired us to theorize our data in alternative ways. However, we simultaneously question their value for transformative literacy research when materiality is privileged at the expense of discourse.
The New Materialist Turn
Fox and Alldred (2018) identify four related strands of NMs, beginning with Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of affect and rhizomatic becoming, in which all human and material bodies, and social and abstract entities, are relational, with no ontological status independent of assemblages with other bodies and ideas. Second, Karen Barad, informed by quantum physics and the work of Niels Bohr, characterizes scientific practice as “material-cultural.” Thus, it cannot involve independent observers and objects of inquiry, but rather, entangled intra-action among them. The third strand centers on Braidotti’s concept of vibrant materiality, which emphasizes processes of becoming within an “ecology of the human and the non-human in which neither is distinguished from or privileged over the other” (Fox & Alldred, 2018, p. 8). The fourth strand is Latour’s (2005) ANT, which disrupts binaries, such as nature/culture and agency/structure. An ANT-inspired sociology involves the “tracing of associations” or “connections between things that are not themselves social” (Latour, 2005, p. 5) rather than focusing on entities themselves (Dressman, 2008).
Although multifaceted, NMs share a critique of humanism and anthropocentric inquiry, reject binaries between the physical and social, and emphasize material things as agentic actors in social phenomena (Fox & Alldred, 2018). new materialist scholars encourage attention to materiality as it relates to and extends beyond spoken discourse, and they challenge social constructionists’ privileging of human utterances as primary sites for locating agency. They argue that language is a component of a multifaceted network of human and nonhuman bodies energetically and simultaneously engaging in the world (Coole & Frost, 2010).
Why Matter Matters
Barad (2003) conceptualizes power not only as human and discursive, but as material, requiring an “understanding of the nature of power in the fullness of its materiality” (p. 810). Matter is not inert; it operates on phenomena and human understandings of those phenomena. This view stems from criticisms of human- and language-centered epistemologies, derived largely from Cartesian assumptions of nature and matter as fixed and thus available for human action and measurement. This Enlightenment philosophy undergirds Newtonian physics and classical understandings of cause and effect (Coole & Frost, 2010), the assumption of correspondence between objective reality and subjective knowing, and the view that through systematic scientific inquiry humans can arrive at objective truth.
This mind/body separation also underlies the assumption in linguistics of a clear separation between subject and object. This dualism was challenged by Saussure (1959), who argued that the words used to describe objects and phenomena are not independent of people’s ideas about those things (Dressman, 2008). This integration of sign and signified is central to social constructionist theories, which, unlike social constructivism (e.g., Vygotsky, 1978), emphasize how discursive performativity and social structures, including identity, are mutually constitutive (Handsfield, 2016; Hruby, 2001) and refute the notion that knowledge exists independently of people’s experiences, social contexts, and ideologies. Also rejecting positivist paradigms, poststructuralists turn to discourse theories and methodologies (Butler, 1990; Foucault, 1977) to understand power, ideologies, and identities as constructed in social practice. Although poststructuralists reject the mind/body dualism and other binaries, their writing and research methods have often prioritized discourse to the exclusion of the material.
Addressing materiality is not new in social and developmental theories or literacy research. Vygotsky (1978) and Leont’ev (1981) understood semiotic mediation as involving an array of cultural tools, both material and nonmaterial. Leont’ev (1981) emphasized tool use within collective social activity, forming the crux of cultural historical activity theory (Engeström, Miettinen, & Punamäki-Gital, 1999). Similarly, Kress (2003) argued that literacy research “. . . needs to be complemented by work on the affordances and potentials of the stuff, the material which is involved in the practices” (p. 13). Digital literacies scholarship (Lankshear & Knobel, 2003), focused on globalization and expanding literacies, has also drawn researchers’ attention to materiality. Furthermore, in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, the notion of discourse has broadened to account for a wider array of semiotics.
However, from these theoretical vantage points, materiality is typically framed through language (e.g., Kress’s grammars of design) or as discursively constructed and subject to human agency—how humans act on matter. NMs are critical of overemphasizing human agency, arguing that discursive and humanist frames are insufficient for accounting for how humans and nonhuman matter are entangled in research data. It is not simply texts or discourses that exert power. Using an example of a student taking a standardized test, Nichols and Campano (2017) explain the multiple dimensions mediating such activity, underscoring the insufficiency of discourse-centered frames: the biological (synapses firing in the brain), physical (cramps in the writing hand), environmental (temperature and condition of the testing room), cultural (relation between student identity and the assumed background knowledge in exam questions), [and] institutional (the web of standards, curricula, and instruction that underpins a student’s formal learning to date). (p. 246)
In short, NMs decenter the (Cartesian) human, asserting that matter matters. This does not negate the significance of discourse and human agency, or human constructs like culture, social forces, and biological markers (A. Y. Jackson & Mazzei, 2012). Rather, it means recalibrating toward an understanding of the material and discursive as entangled (Barad, 2007).
Central Concepts and Terms in New Materialisms
Next, we explain new materialist understandings of agency, intra-action, entanglements/assemblages, new materialist ethics, affect, and representation. We also briefly discuss how these concepts have been taken up in education and literacy research.
Agency and intra-action
Poststructuralists typically situate agency as the discursive negotiation of subjectivities within power-laden sociocultural contexts (Handsfield, 2016). NMs also view agency as a process, emerging through networks of humans, nonhumans, and “historically specific sets of material conditions” (Barad, 2007, p. 23). As such, NMs call for a distributed accounting of agency, shifting the focus of subjectivity from speech acts to emergent sets of linkages with other human and nonhuman matter (A. Y. Jackson & Mazzei, 2012).
This view of agency reflects a “return of the thing” (Lather, 2005, p. 5) in qualitative research, refocusing analyses away from individuals, discrete objects, or interaction toward intra-action. Phenomena and agency are “produced through complex agential intra-actions of multiple material-discursive practices or apparatuses of bodily production” (Barad, 2007, p. 206). This shifts attention away from Cartesian cuts between subject and object toward Barad’s (2003) agential cut, wherein boundaries and whole beings emerge through spontaneously occurring assemblages, with no predetermined meaning. The notion of intra-action is inclusive of race, culture, context, history, memory, and so on, but also emphasizes the infinite number of intra-actions of phenomena, breaking down the subject/object binary potentially produced through a focus on interactions between bodies and the world.
These processes of intra-activity are termed entanglements (Barad, 2007) or assemblages (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), whereby agency is shared between humans and nonhuman matter and emergent in each passing moment. As an illustration, Hultman and Lenz Taguchi (2010) write about a toddler playing in a sandbox through which the sand-girl assemblage produces agency as they “come into play” (p. 530).
The sand and the girl, as bodies and matter of forces of different intensities and speed, fold around each other and overlap, in the event of sand falling, hand opening, body adjusting and balancing, eyes measuring height and distance and observing the falling movement of the glittering sand into the red bucket. (p. 530)
Ethics and affect
new materialist scholars often point to decentering the human as part of new materialist ethics, which “go beyond the human/non-human divide and acknowledge our co-existence with the rest of the world” (Hultman & Lenz Taguchi, 2010, p. 538). Globalization and the Anthropocene require new ways of understanding interconnected phenomena that are impacted significantly by human activity (Bennett, 2010). Thus, for NMs, understanding agency as distributed situates power among ever-shifting assemblages and away from a single locus of control (human or otherwise). This does not excuse humans from the consequences of their actions. Rather, “the ethical responsibility of an individual human now resides in one’s response to the assemblage in which one now finds oneself participating” (Bennett, 2010, p. 37). On this point, Zapata et al. (2018) argue that “this onto-epistemological shift, rooted in ethics and co-constitutive relationships between human and non-human . . . can deliberately work to remake writing pedagogy, assessment, and research” (p. 497).
Affect refers to how bodies affect and are affected by other bodies in motion. Bodies are understood as porous, unbound, and therefore perpetually open to influence by other bodies. Materiality can be viewed as “a differential of intensities” (Bennett, 2010, p. 57) with its own vitality or capacity to act on other beings, like Latour’s (2005) description of an actant.
Niccolini (2019) suggests that in literacy research this view of affect may “help us find new modes of feeling how literacies act on bodies in ways that don’t privilege individualized bodies, contained texts or single sources.” She continues, “Affect is the body reading the world” (p. 112). Thiel (2015) emphasizes vital materiality and ethics in her analysis of how children and fabric intra-act in an out-of-school space as students take up materials and fabrics. She writes that “the children and the fabric can be seen as performative agents working together to produce a ‘more powerful’ costume than might be available to them otherwise” (p. 122). Thiel argues for providing access to a wide array of materials and opportunities, expanding what counts as literacy, to make classrooms more engaging and equitable. Similarly, Ehret et al. (2016) focus on affectivity and intra-actions of human bodies and nonhuman matter (e.g., a student, a book, a clipboard, a whirring ceiling fan).
Representation
The terms presented above reveal a long-standing criticism in feminist and social science communities regarding the limits of representation, specifically how discourse shapes representational categories (Barad, 2007). In literacy studies, Leander and Boldt (2013) critique the uptake of the New London Group’s (1996) representational view of literacies. They argue that “representational readings position researchers outside of [students and their literacy activities] as sets of signs that may be coordinated via expanded ‘grammars’ to convey meaning” (p. 4). Instead, they use rhizomatic analyses to seek a “nonrepresentational emergence” (p. 4) in their exploratory investigation of an assemblage related to a youth’s literacy practices. This reading “re-locates texts as ‘participants in the world’ rather than being ‘about the world,’” allowing researchers to trace how the youth moves with and through texts “in the production of intensity” (p. 4). Similarly, Kuby, Rucker, and Kirchhofer (2015) draw on rhizomatics to examine students’ material-discursive intra-actions during a multimodal literacy workshop, showing how students’ literacy practices unfold in relation to time, space, and materials.
Importantly, attention to discourse does not equate to acritical representation, and poststructuralist scholars also challenge representation. That is, discourse and nonrepresentation are not mutually exclusive. As Barad (2003) argues, “discourse does not refer to linguistic or signifying systems, grammars, speech acts, or conversations. To think of discourse as mere spoken or written words forming descriptive statements is to enact the mistake of representationalist thinking” (p. 819).
Criticisms of New Materialisms
Attending to ethics, affect, and materiality is crucially important, and we particularly appreciate some new materialist scholars’ explicit focus on questions related to equity (e.g., A. Y. Jackson & Mazzei, 2012; Kinard et al., 2018; Thiel, 2015; Zapata et al., 2018) and direct engagement with the critical (Dutro, 2019). Yet, as Nichols and Campano (2017) caution, “tracing material objects’ trajectory around the classroom . . . does not, by itself, lead to transformation” (p. 249). Furthermore, new materialist literacy scholars often do not acknowledge the poststructural roots of NMs (e.g., Butler, 1990; Foucault, 1977; Pennycook, 2018), much of which attends to discourse, thus losing sight of how poststructuralist theories contribute to deconstructing race and gender. For Massumi (2015), even pre-subjective moments are wrought with histories informing how bodies integrate with and encounter one another. We value the transformative potential afforded through the liminal, which Massumi (2015) argues can be strategically disruptive, akin to de Certeau’s (1984) notion of tactics. Yet, this work must not discount how historically salient discourses shape embodied experience.
Others articulate similar ethical concerns related to how NMs approach historical becomings (Bruining, 2016). Leong (2016) takes issue with a “preconscious multisensorial” onto-epistemology that leads to perpetuating “ahistorical representations” and minimizes racial discourses based not on “ethical practice” (p. 5) but rather on “feeling right” (p. 9). This is apparent in some new materialist literacy research. In the following excerpt, for instance, Ehret et al. (2016) describe intra-actions involving students’ reenactment of the digging scene from Holes (Sachar, 1998) for their digital trailer, which “brought together hard dirt, heavy shovels, and swinging arms” (p. 351). They continue as follows: This historical, discursive-material becoming of boundaries differed from both the immediate in-place-affect of afternoon sunlight on (and not on) the grass, and the resistance of dirt in the grassy patches. These in-place-affects of, for instance, the shovel struggling through sinewy earth moved bodies within and across places as students felt, sensed, and saw. (pp. 369-370)
What we notice in this example is how new materialist theories are leveraged in ways that minimize historical patterns of racial and gender inequities despite the authors’ intention to explore the production of “boundaries and exclusions” (p. 348). This is particularly problematic when research participants explicitly or tacitly evoke or respond to such patterns in practice (Kinard et al., 2018). Rereading Ehret et al.’s example in terms of an emergent historical present (Berlant, 2011) would attend to how long-enduring patterns of racism are co-emergent with “in-place-affects.” This would include recognizing how racialized bodies swinging shovels in a detention camp could index actual and slave-like conditions that people of color and poor White people have historically endured. This interpretation is plausible given the setting of Sachar’s novel in a boys’ detention camp and current critiques regarding race and the criminal justice system (Alexander, 2012).
We are concerned that seeking to understand literacy practices without fully considering salient positional identities or subjectivities (race, gender, class, etc.) decenters human bodies in discussions about power and agency in a world where the components of our bodily compositions signify whether we deserve to live or die (Butler, 1990). As Ahmed (2006) asserts, “objects, as well as spaces, are made for some kinds of bodies more than others” (p. 51). Our point is that, like uncritical humanist methodologies, new materialist research that minimizes historical patterns within social phenomena treats the interplay between materiality and discourse as if it were a zero-sum game. This obfuscates connections between poststructuralist and new materialist theorizing and risks producing color-blind analyses. These critiques informed the framework for our analyses: the human body as historical becoming.
The Human Body as Historical Becoming
As equity-minded scholars, we argue for the importance of centering human bodies, discourses, and agencies when accounting for how nonhuman bodies matter within literacy research and practice. We stress that historically situated subjectivities are part of material, affective emergence. As Berlant (2011) writes, “the visceral response is a trained thing, not just autonomic activity. Intuition is where affect meets history, in all of its chaos, normative ideology, and embodied practices of discipline and invention” (p. 52). Humans experience affect related to normative ideologies and disciplined practices in the “historical present” (Berlant, 2011, p. 55) or “ongoing historicity” (Barad, 2003, p. 810).
Critically Reading Human Bodies
Critical NMs (Braidotti, 2016) and critical affect theory (Ahmed, 2004; Berlant, 2011; Zembylas, 2014) offer direction for literacy researchers committed to transformative, anti-racist work to explore affective emergence and materialities by embracing the historical present. Zembylas’s (2014) concept of “technologies of affect” (p. 2), for instance, highlights “how psychic elements of relational encounters are entangled with historical, cultural, social and political norms and conventions” (p. 3).
We view bodies as perpetually undergoing processes of becoming or embodying through unfolding relational processes that include the histories that inform how bodies move, feel, and transform. Our references to the body intentionally indicate bounded (albeit porously) human beings. This refocuses analysis on “. . . what a body can do—not what a body ‘is,’ . . .” (Zembylas, 2014, p. 5). Bodies speak, gesture, communicate, think, interact; they are made from flesh, bones, skin, blood, and experiences; and express emotion, desire, pain, pleasure, frustration, and joy. Our focus on the body helps us examine how bodies “take shape” and transform in relation to one another (inclusive of spoken language) and to how people think, feel, live, love, and interact—how they “are affected by the ‘where’ of that movement” in and across various cultural, social, and historical communities (Ahmed, 2006, p. 53). This includes subversive relations and affect that challenge dominant discourses and relations of power. Furthermore, we are interested in how bodies inform one another as expressions of human agency.
Literacy practices (indeed, any school practices) discipline the body (Cruz, 2001; Zapata et al., 2018). Young people entering school buildings become classified as students, who must follow rules dictating norms for how bodies dress, communicate, and move. These practices always involve power and positioning, regardless of whether they are consensual and joyful or violent and colonizing (Zapata et al., 2018). Because student subjectivities materialize—are embodied—partly in relation to dominant discourses of schooling, accounting for discourse illuminates how bodies are regulated, controlled, erased, liberated, and transformed. What does this mean with respect to agency and emergent becoming?
Agency may be understood as relational and materially-discursively produced in assemblages of humans and nonhumans. By removing the body (for the purposes of reconstructing the body differently), liberating it from the “theater of repetition” (Deleuze, 1994, p. 10), we risk glossing over race and other historical discourses and structures through which people have been sorted and othered (Ahmed, 2004). We argue that new materialist literacy research must account for the asymmetrical (Massumi, 2015) ways in which human bodies emerge through intra-actions by attending to dominant discourses that are inscribed on or erase othered bodies.
Illustrative Analyses
In the analyses presented below, we tried to address discourse and materiality as entangled to understand the historical and emergent production of Malcolm as a writer in his autobiographical video. This was difficult, however, as we found ourselves slipping into binary logic, separating discourse and materiality. First, we introduce Malcolm, the research context, and Malcolm’s video. Then we describe our analytical process as it evolved over time.
Focal Participant and Research Context
Malcolm generated his autobiographical video during a semester-long ethnographic study examining racialized youths’ processes and products of digital storytelling in an urban public high school African American literature class (Beucher, 2015). Malcolm, a 19-year-old senior, was one of three participants in the original study.
Malcolm
Malcolm wrote prolifically, often sharing excerpts from his poetry during class poetry slam sessions. Yet, he struggled to earn passing grades. Early in the study, Malcolm left his mother’s house, missing a week of school, and returned to find his progress report featuring all F’s. Malcolm often spoke with Becky (Rebecca Beucher) about his grades, his desire to pass his classes, and his conflicted ideas regarding his plans beyond graduation. Although Malcolm had suffered an injury, forcing him to leave the football team, he mentioned playing in college as a possible postgraduation plan. He also entertained working for United Parcel Service (UPS) to pay for college and living off the grid in the woods. Once, Malcolm shared a story and photos with Becky of a drive-by shooting he narrowly survived, and explained that the school was taking him to court over stolen computers, a criminal act in which he denied playing a role. Malcolm entertained competing narratives outlining his future trajectory in response to school discourses framing him as a criminal and failure.
Research context
In the literature course, Becky and the teacher, Kira, also a White woman, created the Digital Media Project (DMP) assignment, requiring students to compose digital autobiographies, including voice-over, music, and images, and to share their narratives with the class. Becky collected data after school, when Malcolm and a small group of students worked on their DMPs in a school computer lab. Malcolm, Angelique (Malcolm’s romantic partner), and Becky attended this group regularly for 3 to 4 hr after school, 4 days a week. Becky captured Malcolm’s composing process using video and audio recorders. Malcolm frequently solicited Becky’s and Angelique’s opinions on his project. Despite stating he did not know how to use computers, Malcolm discovered features of iMovie for producing and manipulating video content. He composed several videos of himself, two of which he included in his final project.
Lara and Carolyn had no relationship to the original research project and only joined Becky for this analysis. We use the pronouns him/his for Malcolm and she/her for the authors.
Malcolm’s DMP
Malcolm employed a “comeback” plot structure to his DMP, opening with a playful future-oriented video, presenting himself as a famous rapper returning to his former high school to see his fans. He followed the video with images of himself as a football player, with his family, and wearing colorful outfits and showing off his tattoos. Malcolm layered the photos with his original writing, focusing on working hard, beating death, and making a comeback (see Figure 1, in the online repository for a screenshot from Malcolm’s DMP). Two songs by rap artist Meek Mill, about garnering success through struggle, played in the background. Malcolm ended with the focal video.
“Success” Slide From Malcolm’s DMP.
He created the focal video using a desktop computer webcam in the computer lab. Malcolm addresses viewers as MoStacks, a rap star, in a digitally modified voice, and alludes to his DMP opening video. Malcolm’s face and torso predominantly fill the center frame. Halfway through the video, Becky momentarily enters the frame behind him. Tables and chairs, a room divider, and some of Becky’s belongings on the table behind Malcolm populate the space on camera.
Upon completing the video, Malcolm called Becky and Angelique over to view it. The three discussed the implications for how Malcolm’s body and words, and Becky’s body, would be read. In this discussion, Malcolm referred to his video as “pure comedy,” a point that Becky and Angelique argued against given Malcolm’s description of his threat to kill his audience members at what Malcolm called the “funniest part.” Given Becky’s and Malcolm’s varied interpretations, this parodic video offers an important point of analysis for exploring tensions regarding race, affect, and Berlant’s (2011) idea of the historical present.
Data Analysis
We conducted an integrated analysis, attending explicitly to the material-discursive production of the assemblage of Malcolm’s video. Our analysis is multitheoretic, reflecting elements of discursive transcripts, narrative, affective response, and poetic forms.
We began by creating a multimodal transcript, dividing the video into 17 clips, each spanning no more than 3 seconds (see Table 1 for an excerpt). See the online repository for an overview of the 17 video clips (Table 2), transcript conventions (see the appendix), and the full multimodal transcript (Table 3). Drawing on microethnographic discourse analysis (Bloome, Carter, Christian, Otto, & Shuart-Faris, 2005), in the left-hand column, we transcribed utterances, distinguishing between semantic features, volume, and other contextualization cues (e.g., rising intonation, stress). We italicized additional contextualization cues from the video (e.g., gaze, gestures, body movements with respect to material objects, and background noises and utterances). We bolded words representing “modal density” (Norris, 2004), the objects or people that held the most intensive attention in the event. The right-hand column of the table includes video stills for each clip, selected to illustrate Malcolm’s movements and expressions throughout the video.
Excerpted Table: Analysis of Utterances, Matter, and Movements.
Basic Table: Video Clips and Utterances.
Full Table: Analysis of Utterances, Matter, and Movements.
The transcript and video clips guided our interpretations, appearing in the middle column. In generating these interpretations, we made a concerted effort to think with theories (A. Y. Jackson & Mazzei, 2012), integrating the discursive and the material (Barad, 2003). However, we struggled. Initially, we created a four-column table with two separate columns for intra-action and interaction analyses, attending to materiality and emergent affect, and the discursive construction of Malcolm’s subjectivities, respectively. Thus, although our intention was not to reproduce a discourse/materiality binary, we found ourselves doing precisely that.
To operationalize our framework of the body as historical becoming, accounting for the “historical present” (Berlant, 2011) and “language as material expression” (de Freitas & Curinga, 2015), we integrated these analyses into one column to represent the fullness of Malcolm’s historical becoming. However, for the purposes of our critical analysis, we maintain different margin justifications in the middle column to indicate points in which we emphasized differentially the material and the discursive.
We invite readers to view our integrated interpretations in the middle column of the table as a visceral poem or poetic assemblage in the sense of poiesis (Heidegger, 1971)—emergence of something that did not previously exist, a process of generating multiple and potentially unexpected meanings (similar to Rosenblatt’s [1978] view of readers’ understandings of text as poems). We describe this poetic assemblage as visceral because of our attention to affect, including interpretations of Becky’s affect while viewing Malcolm’s video. Viewing these interpretations as a visceral poem recognizes discourse and materiality as entangled, emergent, heterogeneous, and historical, while allowing us to highlight varying theoretical commitments influencing our interpretations. It also reminds us that our analysis is a part of the assemblage of Malcolm’s video.
This visceral poem includes Becky’s affective responses, or “felt focal moments” (Ehret, Hollett, & Jocius, p. 355), including how her body (heart rate, eye gaze, facial response) intra-acted with the video as a viewer. These are marked in the transcript with a “B”: and include quotation marks (e.g., B: “I smile watching this video”). Our purpose was to account for the process of discovering moments arising from sight or affect where video data drew Becky’s attention (Thiel, 2015). We also documented assemblages of modally dense moments by hyphenating human and nonhuman matter (e.g., The Malcolm-Becky-laptop-webcam assemblage fills my body with a quiet laughter). These elements of our interpretations, inspired primarily by NMs, are justified to the left-hand margin of the middle column.
In addition, we examined how Malcolm discursively positioned himself in relation to broader ideologies and power relationships, focusing on how language, context, and meanings are coproduced. We included statements about Malcolm’s and Becky’s positioning and how their juxtaposed bodies, utterances, and nonhuman matter (Malcolm’s hat, Becky’s lunch bag) signified meanings related to Becky’s institutionally granted power as part of the historical present within the video. These interpretations, inspired largely by poststructuralism, are justified to the right-hand margin.
Limitations
Incorporating the discursive and material into the same space in the table facilitated our resistance to false binaries and helped us elucidate how they simultaneously shape our understandings of Malcolm’s literacy practices. However, even after integrating our interpretations into one column, we realize that our different margin justifications and how we discuss our interpretations in the following section still separate these to a certain degree. This reflects our own limitations in thinking and writing outside of humanist epistemologies. We found it extremely difficult to illustrate our integrated new materialist analysis without spending page space devoted specifically to materialism and discourse and their unique contributions to this analysis. Our analysis should thus be read as necessarily partial. Furthermore, as mentioned in our introduction, our own identification as White women surely generates blind spots that some readers will note.
Interpretive Tensions
We articulate two related sets of findings: (a) human agency and critical affectivities and (b) syntax and body matters. Within each subsection, we discuss how Malcolm enters into relation with other bodies in ways that engage both materiality and racial discourses, referring to clips and line numbers in Table 3 (in the online repository). To be clear, these are two examples (among many possibilities) of how literacy researchers might conduct critical intra-action analyses. In presenting these interpretive tensions, we draw on all three columns in Table 3. However, the middle column, “Integrated Interpretations,” was essential in illustrating how the discursive works in tandem with the material and what a critical reading of interactions might entail. We strongly encourage readers to access and refer to Table 3 as they read the following sections.
Human Agency and Critical Affectivities
Our poetic assemblage produced differential understandings regarding agency and the participation of various forms of matter in Malcolm’s video. These include Malcolm’s utterances and body movements and the texts and discourses he recruited, Becky’s body captured in the video, and her affective responses as a viewer. First, we examine Malcolm’s agentic production of his video. Then, in the section on affectivities, we broaden our lens to include materiality and affect, examining how Malcolm’s parody was produced within a material-discursive assemblage inclusive of Becky’s affect while viewing the video.
Yo I’m a rap star now
Aspects of our interpretations centered on how Malcolm agentically engaged racialized discourses, bodies, and nonhuman matter as he constructed a subversive parody. This parody is subtly evident throughout the video: when Malcolm is on the verge of cracking a smile, when Becky enters the video behind him, and when he self-corrects from “shit” to “stuff” (Clip 15, Line 128). Rap, and gangsta rap specifically, represents a theatrical subversive performance that is both fun and revolutionary (Saddik, 2003, p. 112). Malcolm recruits language (Yo I’m a rap star now↓; Lines 001-002), clothing (cap over eyes), and movements (gesturing hands, rocking head side to side) to establish this rap star identity (Clip 4). His emphasis on “rap” indexes a popular and “allowable” frame for Black male success (Lines 012-013). We also note his allusion to MoStack, an up-and-coming Black British rap star in his early 1920s, who raps about street life and his emotions, and wears stylish clothing and dark sunglasses (Clip 5, Line 016). By taking on the alias of MoStacks, Malcolm follows gangsta rap tradition (McKee, 2013), becoming the gangsta rapper.
Malcolm as MoStacks engages embodied gangsta rap discourse with emphatic hand gestures and threatening language: Next time it aint gon’ be this
And in Clips 14 and 15, he “takes up a rap star identity” (Line 118). This includes the rhythmic quality of his voice and his use of hand gestures to establish his authority (e.g., Lines 111-112, 125-126, 128).
The critique of hip-hop as threatening “lies in the power of the performing body to subvert traditional, hence safe, modes of representation” (Saddik, 2003, p. 112). Malcolm “confuses the boundaries between ‘innocent’ entertainment and revolutionary impulse” (Saddik, 2003, p. 112). Yet, he also cracks a smile throughout his video, manipulates his voice to sound menacing, and decides to keep the recording that includes Becky’s body in the frame as he makes violent threats. Attending to discourse, we can see how Malcolm engages “subversive theatrical performance” as an “exposition of the Black male rap artist as the disobedient ‘other’ in relation to White patriarchal control” (p. 112). Drawing attention to Malcolm’s choices about how to construct his digital autobiography illustrates how he creatively uses his body (and Becky’s) to subvert school failure discourses institutionally inscribed on his Black body while highlighting the “materiality of racialized bodies” (Zembylas, 2014, p. 4).
A collusion of smiles
Using critical affect theory, we explore Malcolm’s literacy practices as part of the emergent iMovie-after-school-lab-desk-chair-research space-webcamera-utterances-Becky-Malcolm-smiles-teeth-hands-arms-sounds-emotions assemblage. We interpreted Becky’s affective responses in relation to on-screen intra-actions. These included how Becky felt Malcolm’s body parts gesturing toward and away from the camera, and how she felt her body movements, as she oscillated in and out of the frame, toward and away from Malcolm’s body. In Clip 4, Becky notes the following: Watching the video up close, I feel Malcolm’s presence viscerally. The lowness of his voice reverberates in my chest. His hands reach out toward me. Through this hand-body-low voice-low cap-eyes shadowed assemblage, my attention is captivated by Malcolm, whose body fills half the screen. (Lines 001-005)
This hand-body-low voice-low cap-eyes shadowed assemblage intra-acts with Becky’s body. Becky feels Malcolm’s hands reaching toward her. Similarly, in Clip 5 Becky explains how her eyes, face, and smile form an assemblage: “My eyes are simultaneously drawn to my face as it sinks into the screen from above, and I catch the smile on my face.”
This assemblage intimately incorporates Becky’s affective embodied intra-actions emerging on and off screen into our interpretation of Malcolm’s literacy practices. However, critical affect theory calls our attention to the absence of Malcolm’s agency in our analysis: We did not consider why Malcolm gestured toward the screen, wore his cap low, or changed his voice. Rather, we focused primarily on Becky’s responses to Malcolm’s choices.
Yet, inquiring, What does the convergence of these bodies indicate about Malcolm? (Clip 4, Line 015) compels us to consider the discursive construction of race and gender—specifically, how Malcolm’s Black, male body is shaped through Becky’s reading of the on-screen intra-action between her White, female body, and vice versa. Throughout, Becky feels “Malcolm’s presence viscerally” (001). Her attention is drawn to Malcolm’s “commanding presence” (Clip 5, Line 016) and the smile that emerges on her face in the video. At the same time, we identified the potential for fear viewers might experience while viewing the video, with the historical meanings of Malcolm’s emphatic hand gestures and threatening language. Critical affect theory pushes us to analyze what the recorded intra-action inclusive of Malcolm’s words-Black male body-tone of voice-smile-Becky’s smile-White female body suggests about historically becoming bodies. Moreover, naming race and gender accounts for how entangled bodies and discourses “produce something new other than what would be produced singularly” (A. Y. Jackson & Mazzei, 2012, p. 121): It’s unclear if Malcolm knew Becky was on screen as he recorded, but his and Becky’s simultaneous smiles indicate collusion, as if in on some joke that Malcolm-MoStacks was playing on his audience. (Clip 7, Lines 40-43)
A critical intra-action analysis accounts for the historical present (Berlant, 2011) and race as a technology of affect (Zembylas, 2014)— a collusion of smiles amid historically and socially policed relationships between Black men and White women, and White teachers and Black students. Yet, it also allows a recasting of dominant discourses and relationships. Critically considering affect resulted in documenting the spontaneous emergence of subversive love that challenges discourses of White women as either saviors or victims of Black masculinity (McMahon & Kahn, 2018). Malcolm’s hand-computer-Becky’s heart assemblage forms in Clip 7 (Line 46) and in Clip 8, and Becky’s affect shifts from a raised heartbeat to a spontaneous smile: B: “I see my smile as he points his hand down and toward my body positioned directly facing the screen. As the viewer, I feel a smile growing on my face as my eyes bolt back and forth between Malcolm’s face-hand-Becky’s(my) body-hands.” (Lines 50-53)
This moment signals a reflexive thought that drives Becky’s attention back to the research site, where memory lingers, “coming from the past to energize the present” (Massumi, 2015, p. 61). Becky’s body experiences affective intensities emerging from the memory of her love for Malcolm: B: “I see my face smiling at the camera as Malcolm lunges toward (me), making a strangling gesture with his hands . . . I believe my smile in that moment was a spontaneous occurrence and expression of the care I felt for Malcolm.” (Clip 10, Lines 90-100)
Returning to our research question (what does a new materialist analysis that retains critical epistemologies illustrate about Malcolm’s literacy practices?), we found that we articulated love across racial difference. However, in the parts of our analysis focused on affective emergence, we privileged Becky’s experience with subversive love over Malcolm’s affect. Alone, this aspect of our analysis risks obscuring Malcolm’s agentically composed subversive parody.
Syntax and Body Matters
Maintaining a critical eye toward our visceral poem, we now highlight our syntactic decisions as researchers, as we talk about Malcolm’s and Becky’s bodies, drawing on both poststructuralism and NMs. Our intention is to consider the impact of these syntactic choices as we seek to hone a critical intra-action analytical approach.
Examining our language choices, we remained fairly consistent syntactically between the transcription and our interpretations that are justified to the right side of the middle column. For example, in the left-hand column of Clips 14 and 15, we describe Malcolm’s body movements by presenting him as the syntactic subject:
He moves his right hand forward toward the webcam, and points finger down in time with “start,” “this,” and “shit” (Lines 117-120).
Malcolm moves his right hand outward on “stuff” (Line 128).
This syntax is consistent with our interpretations in the middle column in those same clips:
Malcolm commands his audience’s attention and asserts control (Lines 123-124).
He performs a school identity by self-correcting to the more “appropriate” (for school) “stuff” (Lines 131-132).
We represent Malcolm as the agentic subject, actively claiming his identity as a rap star.
Of course, there are places where we used the passive voice or attribute agency to nonhuman matter in these same sections, and where we used the active voice when privileging materiality. However, our analysis indicates different syntactic choices when talking about Malcolm in the portions of the middle column justified to the left (privileging materiality) and to the right (privileging discourse). In the former, we reserved the active voice mostly for moving bodies, sounds, nonhuman matter, and utterances and for Becky’s affective responses to the video:
A Becky body-Malcolm body assemblage forms (Clip 4, Line 014).
Malcolm’s hands-webcam-audience-words-threat assemblage strengthens with his shift forward and increased volume on “easy” (Clip 10, Lines 082-083).
We also syntactically attribute agency to parts of Becky and Malcolm’s bodies (e.g., “My hands gather items; Malcolm’s hands return to his chin”; Clip 11, Line 105). This relates to our representation of human bodies.
Consistent with other NM research, we hyphenated nouns and eliminated verbs describing the connections with which those entanglements were formed. See our use of hyphens in Clip 5 (Lines 026-028), which differs from our statements in the same clip attending more explicitly to discourse (Lines 029-032). When we used full prose to describe emergent agency in portions of the column justified to the left, we often phrased descriptions such that Malcolm or his body parts (hand, eyes, etc.) became indirect objects, or passive receivers of actions carried out by nonhuman matter: “As the viewer, I feel a smile growing on my face as my eyes bolt back and forth between Malcolm’s face-hand-Becky(my) body-hands” (Clip 8, Lines 051-053).
These portions of our analysis provide a detailed account of Malcolm and his literacy practices, including the role of affect and his and Becky’s relationship. However, they are less critical and, absent the discursively centered portions of the analysis, erase Malcolm’s human agency as a subversive composer.
Conclusion
How we tell research participants’ stories and our rhetorical choices in using social theory matter (Dressman, 2008). Kinloch, Burkhard, and Penn (2017) remind researchers of their important and powerful role to play as allies in the fight against educational injustices. Our illustrative analysis raises ethical concerns regarding the consequences of removing human agency through uncritical readings of racialized students’ literacy practices.
Material Consequences
Attention to both agency and affectivity necessitates cultivating a conscious awareness of how racialized discourses are inscribed on the body, informing gestures, movements, words, emotions, values, and beliefs. The embodied nature of discourse is important in digital narratives, as agentive authorship relies on the author’s ability to understand the implications of representations of self and experience through voice, written text, music, and so on. We read Malcolm’s and Becky’s smiles as emergent becomings (or affectively charged accounts; Dutro, 2019) grounded in histories and memories shared between them. Accounting for historically inscribed narratives woven into the assemblage that influence how we read human skin underscores asymmetries (Massumi, 2015) of power, including the complex reasons why people smile, and why Malcolm and Becky were smiling in this moment. We read Malcolm’s video as an affective emergence of love alongside a social critique of Black masculinity. Here, we understand Malcolm’s subtle and fleeting smiles throughout the video as signaling his parodic intent and his sociopolitical motivations for assuming the character of a successful and powerful rapper, and we read Becky’s affective response to that construction.
Malcolm did not shy away from engaging directly and playfully with discourses of race and gender through his parody. His self-correction from “shit” to “stuff,” his decision to keep Becky in the video because “it’s funny,” and his wielding of the nonhuman matter and his body (e.g., manipulating software to lower his voice, wearing his cap over his eyes, gesturing emphatically), when read discursively, underscore Malcolm’s creative efforts in subverting oppressive narratives labeling him as a criminal and school failure.
Using hyphens to represent assemblages of human and nonhuman matter potentially offers a robust view of how specific moments emerge; yet, through this portion of our analysis, we minimize or even erase his affect and agency. Furthermore, shifting the focus toward what Malcolm’s body or body parts are doing displaces his agency as the author of his autobiographical text in these unfolding moments, positioning him as less-than-human or less-than-student. This is inseparable from long-standing histories that criminalize young Black men and construct them as anti-intellectual, anti-school, and emotionally hard (Givens, Nasir, Ross, & de Royston, 2016).
Humanizing New Materialist Literacy Research
Opening a research gaze to nonhuman matter and emergence enables diffractive readings that may push back against hegemonic discourses (Kinard et al., 2018; Zapata et al., 2018). We submit that such diffractive readings require an eye toward history and power, purposefully turning the research gaze back to discourse and the human. Leong (2016) writes that “the limits of a new materialist ethics appear most forcefully . . . as we attempt to move from an embodied ‘responsiveness’ to the dislocation of structures” (p. 9). In other words, when all matter is treated equally, race, gender, class, ability, sexual orientation, and other identity markers cease to fully matter. We are reminded of the words of Africana philosopher Lewis Gordon, who argues that Black people must be humanists for the “obvious” reason that “the dominant group can ‘give up’ humanism for the simple fact that their humanity is presumed,” whereas “other communities have struggled too long for the humanistic prize” (as cited in Z. I. Jackson, 2013, p. 672). Thus, a key element of more critical new materialist analysis includes examining emergence as related to human connections. While our intra-action analysis privileged Becky’s voice and affective moments over Malcolm’s agency, it also attended to the affective emergence of human love, which we view as essential for socially just and anti-racist literacy research.
Critical new materialist literacy research must engage directly with the paradox of rejecting static social categories while simultaneously acknowledging the need for recognition of difference and historical inequities. Kinard et al. (2018) maintain, Not all are happy to feel as if their bodies are connective tissue to the bodies around them. They are asking to be recognized, for their bodies to be seen for the trials they have suffered and the trails they have been forced to walk, bound on all sides. (p. 105)
A focus on emergence need not mean ignoring or negating race, gender, or other sociohistorical categories. Likewise, engaging with “race as an identity category . . . is not a return to an essentialization of race”; rather, “it is a re-insertion of racial markers as simultaneously culturally and biologically produced” (A. Y. Jackson & Mazzei, 2012, p. 119).
Critical new materialist literacy research might ask, “How is the skin being politicized, institutionalized, and socially constructed across contexts?” (Zapata et al., 2018, p. 491). Kinard et al.’s (2018) research on a multilingual play-based school offers a helpful example. Their narrations include thick description and reflexive theorizing, along with robust storytelling from multiple perspectives. Crucially, they integrate elements of social constructionist theories with NMs to offer counternarratives to dominant ideologies of language and learning. Their multitheoretic (both/and) approach focuses directly on what children are doing rather than on privileging their own affects and agencies.
This approach requires a critical analytical reflexivity that attends to how interpretations (including syntax and other rhetorical choices) account for or gloss over discursive histories and inequities. For us, three White researchers relatively new to new materialist thinking, this critical reflexivity was painstakingly detailed and recursive. Collaborative efforts between literacy researchers deeply engaged with new materialist theories and researchers guided by more discursively oriented and poststructuralist work may further support this kind of rigorous reflexive analysis. Such a mending of theoretical fissures can support the equity-related goals of researchers from both (and additional) traditions.
In considering what matter matters for equity-centered analyses of racialized youths’ literacy practices, we agree with Leong (2016) that we must reckon with our political and libidinal investments in black flesh. This would require us to address how the entanglements of blackness, matter, and the human make only certain forms of matter both legible and desirable . . . [C]hallenges to human exceptionalism should proceed through a critique of race, or we risk reorganizing old privileges (“All Lives”) under new standards of being (“Matter”). (pp. 20-21)
As long as people are making choices about whose lives matter more, literacy researchers must stand on the side of justice. We wield power with our words just as words wield power on our bodies. As we theorize pre-discursive moments, making notable efforts toward dislodging bodies from constructs that imprison, we cannot lose sight of how literacy practices are produced in relation to the discourses from which we seek to liberate ourselves.
Footnotes
Appendix
Acknowledgements
We thank Amy Smith and Bruce Franson for their support in preparing this manuscript. We thank Roberto de Roock for his careful reading and comments.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
