Description
Book SynopsisIn this narrative rooted in autoethnography, the author juxtaposes her personal story with that of international stories of resistance to oppression and calls on educators to include children's personal stories as critical pedagogy to honor their funds of knowledge and foster their historical consciousness. With a focus on eighteenth-century freedom fighter Nanny of the Maroons, From the Middle Passage to Black Lives Matter emphasizes the historical connections between Indigenous people worldwide who have harnessed their ancestral roots to disrupt cultural hegemony. The book emphasizes the imaginative and radical assertions of the enduring resistance of the formerly colonized, going back to the era of slavery through to the Civil Rights Movement and Black Lives Matter, and calls for a radical shift in the global curriculum to include these stories.
Storytelling is acknowledged as an intergenerational teaching methodology rooted in Indigenous Epistemology which serves to
Trade Review
"From the Middle Passage to Black Lives Matter invites readers to re-examine the history of European discovery and colonization told from out-side of the colonial gaze. Marva McClean overcomes the erasure of truth telling, which has cen-sored our participation and influence within history as people of color, via vivid emotional and visual discourse in storytelling that at times can best be described as poetry. Readers are invited back to the time of Nanny of the Maroons, an archetypal figure connecting resistance movements across the Black Atlantic to give birth centuries later to the Civil Rights Movement and now Black Lives Matter as part of her legacy. “Marva McClean takes us on a journey running throughout the centuries, recounting her own his-torical consciousness in confronting social inequities across the globe in search of our common human dignity. She makes an urgent call to educators to acknowledge students’ funds of knowledge in creating a cultural space within the curriculum that embraces their cultural he-roes/heroines in the awareness of their own empowerment, in much the same way feminist free-dom fighter Queen Nanny of the Maroons lighted the path of social justice for the author as a young woman growing up in Jamaica. It is a call we must heed.” Marcus Woolombi Waters, Program Director, Creative and Professional Writing, Griffith Uni-versity – Gold Coast, Australia
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments – Introduction – Preamble to Part I: Reading the Curriculum Through a Post-Colonial Lens – Rooting Identity: Individual Memory and the Collective Narrative – Fostering the Indigenous Spirit – Gazing Inward: The Efficacy of Communal Research – Preamble to Part II: Reading the Curriculum Through Global Inquiry – Narratives From the Classroom – Creating Cultural Spaces in the Classroom – Reading the World: A Praxis of Global Citizenship – From the Field to the Classroom: Celebrating the Heroes of the Black Atlantic – Correcting History: Indigenous Children Writing Their Cultural Narratives –Preamble to Part III: Viewing the Curriculum Through an Anti-Colonial Lens – From Africa to the New World: The Sustainable Maroon Communities of Jamaica – African Cultural Retentions – Postscript: Writing Truth into History – Index.
