2021 Articles

Time traveling forward and backward: multimodal speculation as racial literacy

Animashaun, Oluwaseun; Sealey-Ruiz, Yolanda

Amid a pandemic, protests (on masking and mattering), and presidential campaigns in 2020, adults and young folx alike were wading through an exhaustive socio-political milieu, that called for speculation. In this study, students had the opportunity to practice their writing and analytical skills while developing their racial literacy – the processes of understanding the effects of race in daily living – through their encounters with speculative fiction texts. This article examines the multimodal productions of two young women of Color, Carmen and Imani. Through their explorations of various speculative texts, it becomes clear how racial literacy can also be rooted in the act of time traveling that speculation affords folx of Color. In other words, by playing with temporal registers—or time traveling—these students of Color demonstrated the unending expansiveness of racial literacy.