Hidden Literacies

locations of cultural struggle

This struggle, then, is taking place in many locations in our culture, from theatres to town squares to libraries, special collections, and courts of law. There are several rapidly developing sites of experimentation with new ways of linking past, present, and future through texts and artifacts. The United States’s enactment of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1990 and a series of international agreements about protecting Indigenous traditional knowledge, for example, have encouraged the growing adoption of post-custodial approaches to cultural preservation, collaborations between institutions and Native communities that relocate to the latter interpretive power over collections. In the study of the African American past, Saidiya Hartman’s influential work asks hard questions about the way sentimentalized depictions of the violence of slavery, past and present, force a reckoning not only with the uncharitable aspects of the antislavery movement but with our own desires as historians to pull voices from the echoes of the Great Hole of History. “How can narrative embody life in words and at the same time respect what we cannot know?” Hartman asks.  How can you represent slavery’s violent past without perpetuating that violence, given the many modes by which History is passed on, the spectrum of means by which people attach to its representations? The most metaphorical version of literacy—cultural literacy—these days incites some of the fiercest feelings, for so much leans on what reading is in this context, and on who is writing.

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