DIVERSE VOICES FOR DIVERSE EXPERIENCES: WHAT CAN POST-BELLUM, PRE-HARLEM WRITERS TEACH SECONDARY STUDENTS?

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o remarked almost forty years ago that “[l]anguage carries culture, and culture carries, particularly through orature and literature, the entire body of values by which we come to perceive ourselves and our place in the world [...] at their entire relationship to nature and to other beings” (1986 [1992], 16). Although his comment originated in post-colonial literary thought within an East African linguistic context, these words retain increasing significance today and are more broadly applicable to any sociologically-informed literary discussions in the American classroom. To this end, the literature of the Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem (cf. Chesnutt 1931, inter alia) offers a window into the complex sociocultural, historical, and political context of the United States in the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries, which had previously been defined as the Black Nadir. Accordingly, this paper presents the results of a four-week instructional unit, which took place in a tenth-grade English classroom at a semi-suburban high school in north-central New Jersey, that required students to read and engage critically with James Weldon Johnson's (1912 [1927]) The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. Most importantly, the present study advocates a departure from ‘interpretation by free association’ (Reader Response Theory) and, instead, proposes a more nuanced understanding of the United States at the fin de siècle through student-driven questioning of and conversations about the sociological, cultural, historical, linguistic, and literary dimensions of such works.