The Struggle for Voice: Narrative, Literacy and Consciousness in an East Harlem School

Writing and thinking are intimately connected. But the connection is neither simple nor direct. Many variables intervene to shape that connection in ways specific to the social, political, economic, and ideological dimensions of social reality. Comparative historical and cultural studies show that the social uses of writing, the values associated with it, the forms it assumes, and its use as a tool for thinking all vary considerably across historical time and cultural space. Because literacy plays such a central role in schooling in modern societies, writing and schools make ideal natural “environments” for studying how particular forms of consciousness are shaped in those societies. Schools are sites of an ideological struggle in which learning how to write and think takes on implicit political dimensions. This paper reports an anthropological and ethnographic study of writing and the shaping of consciousness in an East Harlem school. We focus on narrative and performative modes of literacy and show how black and Puerto Rican students struggle with their writing as they seek to develop a voice that can express their own lived experience in a partially hostile world.