Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Local Publics. Elenore Long

across scenes and acts. Theatrical imagery dominates descriptions in public-spheres studies, as well. Fraser, for instance, explains that “‘[t]he idea of the public sphere’ [. . .] designates a theater in modern societies in which political participation is enacted through the medium of talk” (110, emphasis added). This chapter suggests theatrical imagery is particularly well suited to describing the performative aspects of public literacies. However, it follows from Catherine Prendergast’s reading of Ways with Words that the image does not sufficiently illuminate political dynamics between and among the other publics with which a local public inevitably interacts.

      Foremost, Prendergast has taken issue with Heath’s characterization of Trackton as a closed community (“Race” 48–50).2 Prendergast argues that this description isn’t so much untrue but insufficient. Using critical race theory to revisit Ways with Words, Prendergast argues that Trackton was a closed community not because it was free of racism, nor because it was isolated from the neighboring white community (for it was not), nor even so residents could take a break from racism’s grasp. Rather, the fact that Trackton was a closed community is testament to the multi-generational mechanism of racism that shaped the history of these Piedmont mill communities and—by implication—that continues to shape racist public opinion and educational practice.3 Prendergast argues that at the time of Heath’s study Trackton was already socialized into the discourse of racism. For this reason, adults found it necessary to teach children “[s]trategies for dealing with the basic inconsistencies and inherent contradictions” that constitute “the experience of double-consciousness” (Prendergast 48), the paradox “in which people of color have to believe simultaneously that they have a right to participate equally in society and that rights are whatever people in power say they are” (49). Comparing Trackton’s public discourse to a theatrical performance captures many of its distinctive qualities, but not its race relations with other Piedmont communities.

      4. Performative discourse is especially adept at public making.

      In Publics and Counterpublics, Warner uses the phrase “world making” to refer to the capacity of certain discourses “to bring a public into being” (129). It is this world-making capacity that Heath captures in her choice of dramatic imagery. Public stage challenges, for instance, created a crucible in which children developed signature styles such as Darret’s “smart-cat strut,” capable of calling into being a public space and drawing others into the public stage performance. Dramatic performance—what Warner calls “corporally expressive performances” (147) and what Heath calls “public [. . .] stage performance” (79)—creates a discursive reality that is more dimensional, more compelling, and more provocative than any text could create or any textual analysis could suggest. In choosing theatrical imagery to characterize and interpret Trackton’s public qualities, Heath highlights the capacity of Trackton’s discourse to make its own world. When it comes to world making, performative practices are far more effective than venerated academic texts or the “straight talk” rewarded in Roadville (294–310), both of which value extended, consistent, and predictable discourse. Heath makes clear that some communities cultivate this world-making capacity better than others.

      5 The Cultural Womb and the Garden: Local Publics That Depend on Institutions to Sponsor Them

      Some local publics depend on institutional sponsors and use these institutional affiliations to create “inspired contexts” for literacy learning that operate in locations of stress and scarcity (Willinsky 153). As inspired contexts, these local publics employ democratic practices to nurture participants within their walls and to prepare them for literate social action outside them. But what makes an inspired context for literacy learning a decidedly public achievement—albeit, a local one? The answer lies within the rhetoric of transformation that such sites enact. To explore the rhetoric of transformation and its relation to public life, this chapter compares an African American congregation in south central Wisconsin to a women’s writing workshop in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco.

A Cultural Womb: The Local Public in Brandt’s Literacy in American Lives

      In Literacy in American Lives, the local public is a cultural womb that nurtures the whole person, even as it prepares members for social activism outside its borders.1 This image describes Metro AME, eight of whose members participated in Brandt’s study of “how ordinary people learned to read and write” over the course of the 20th century (American 2). The image of the cultural womb describes the black church at large and also Metro AME as an individual congregation. The image evokes not the biological womb supporting the lone fetus but the political space safeguarding a colonized people. As such, the cultural womb evokes the political significance of what bell hooks calls “homeplace” (41)—whether the slave hut or the meetinghouse—where “colonized people can project an alternative future partly on the basis of a place beyond domination” (I. Young, Body 160).2

Distinctive Features: Nurtures and Prepares

      As an image of local public life, the cultural womb first reclaims nurturing as a potentially political act of meaning making. The image then pairs nurturing with preparation for social action outside its walls.

      Nurtures. Nurturing is a key feature of the African American church at large, and of Metro AME, in particular.3 Organic and holistic, the cultural womb suggests a place that nourishes the many dimensions and phases of human development. Unlike a school that prioritizes the intellectual development of its students or a Boys and Girls Club that prioritizes social or physical aspects, the image of the cultural womb attends to the full range of human needs. In the context of the African American church, the act of nurturing members from cradle to grave—in art, music and politics, for instance, as well as theology—has had political, as well as spiritual, implications. In various forms of “cultural support and uplift” (Brandt, American 118), nourishment has played a “compensatory role [. . .] in providing against poverty and government neglect” (114).