Critical literacies: Ever‐evolving

My heartfelt thanks to the editors for inviting me to participate in this special issue. I am humbled by the invitation and doubly pleased to share my thoughts. I was given the freedom to respond via interview or written text; the latter suits me best. I have written in a tone hoping to convey the way an interview may have occurred as I consider the framing of the call and respond to a few queries posed for this conversation. I am a US-based scholar, thus while extending the conversation globally, my response is on evolving notions of critical theorising in the United States. My body of research includes interrogating traditional accounts of the history of literacy, most notably as portrayed in the United States. I have done so, in part, by questioning colonialism, Eurocentrism, and Westernised definitions and views of literacy that fail to acknowledge literacy as a global construct. From a critical perspective, I understand that the perpetuation of siloed Eurocentric geopolitical views of literacy is not haphazard; they are intentionally crafted to valorize a quest for literacy dominance and power. I argue that to democratise histories of literacy, we must include literacy among non-European and non-English-dominant people, given that centuries of literacy existed among some groups of people before Europeans were aware of their existence. A retelling of the history of world literacies exceeds the available space of this response, but an example from the African Diaspora may help clarify this point. every historian of the multitude, the disposed, the subaltern, and the enslaved is forced to grapple with the power and authority of the archive and the limits it sets on what can be known, whose perspective matters and who is endowed with the gravity and authority of historical actor. (Hartman, 2019, p. xiii) Histories of literacy among Black people, written by Black scholars, acknowledge Black achievement, brilliance, culture, experiences, language, and literacy. To be clear, millions of African people were captured, transported, and enslaved throughout the Americas, leading Diouf (1998, 2011) to estimate that around 10% of enslaved African people transported to the Americas were literate. The impact of this statement is hard to grasp. The idea of literate enslaved African people supports a counternarrative to traditional histories of literacy as emanating from Greece and Italy. Acknowledging that tens of thousands of literate African people existed before most Europeans acquired literacy will be contested in the face of undeniable historical facts. Moreover, there is likely to be an outcry to whitewash the centuries-old mischaracterization of people of African descent as biologically, genetically, and intellectually incapable of learning to read. The pathologising of people of African descent has been most pronounced in Europe and the Americas, although the impact has been global. The autobiography of Omar Ibn Said is the only known autobiography to have been written by a person while enslaved (Alryyes and Said, 2011). His autobiography is among hundreds of autobiographies written by formerly enslaved people of African descent in the United States. Equally important are the autobiographies written by formerly enslaved people of African descent globally, for example, Brazil, Canada, England, Haiti, among others (see also Khan, 2020). Collectively, these texts are representative first-hand accounts of Black life under enslavement that must be acknowledged, celebrated, and reclaimed within an inclusive history of literacy. In my literacy analysis of Omar Ibn Said's autobiography, I uncovered revelatory information about the role of literacy beyond the West, not beholden to American exceptionalism, Eurocentrism, or White supremacy. In his autobiography, Omar Ibn Said, boldly claims his humanity in the face of White supremacy. His epistemological and ideological positions are not rooted in Europe or America—they are African and Islamic—and imperative for his survival. The new approach to understanding literacy, a transcendent approach (Willis, forthcoming), democratises and reconceptualises the definition of literacy: respecting the humanity of each person as a fellow human, providing access to literacy as a human right, understanding literacy as a global construct, and producing authenticated knowledge. Authenticated knowledge does not begin with the coloniser nor with the knowledge of the coloniser's ways of knowing. Authenticated knowledge begins with critical consciousness that examines and values the world's cultural, ethnic, gendered, linguistic, racial, and religious knowledge as explained by those closest to it. We all can learn from a broad and inclusive history of literacy among all cultural, ethnic, gendered, linguistic, racial, and religious groups. This knowledge should inform critical literacy researchers as they work among and within varying populations. We should ask ourselves, as Brayboy et al., 2012, suggests: ‘What kinds of connections can you envision among epistemologies (ways of knowing), ontologies (ways of being), axiologies (value systems), and the research process?’ (p. 427). We also can learn to decentre Whiteness and discard the colonialist stance toward the literacies of non-Eurocentric and non-English dominant people. It will take work as we learn to value and centre Africana, Arab, and Muslim, Asian, Latinx, Native American, and Indigenous epistemologies. And we must learn to move beyond the White gaze and produce critical and socially just literacy. Is this possible? Is it realistic in modern society? It is absolutely possible, as described in and across multiple chapters in an outstanding compendium of critical literacy theorising by Pandya et al.'s (2022) The Handbook of critical literacies. The transnational group of editors, founders of the Transnational Critical Literacy Network present a compilation (50 chapters) of critical literacy and social justice scholarship. They enhance our understanding of critical theorising, as they acknowledge their ‘deliberate attempt to broaden and diversify the scholars who might find intellectual homes under a revitalized critical literacy umbrella’ (p. x). Building and expanding the history, traditions, and theories within critical literacies along with acknowledging current knowledge and theoretical approaches; they offer a definition of critical literacies as ‘literate practices individuals need in order to survive and thrive in the world, foregrounding the concept that information and texts are never neutral; they afford the ability to produce powerful texts that address injustices and our lived worlds’ (p. 3). Importantly, they highlight, ‘we intentionally draw on multiple critical epistemologies, including those of European, Black, and Indigenous thinkers from the Global South and the Global North’ (p. 3). In so doing, they enlarge the scope of critical theorising and reflexively note the shifting meaning of critical literacy as traditionally dominated by scholars from the Global North, ‘especially by white, Anglophone discourses’ (Mora et al., 2022, p. 466). The traditional framework ‘sometimes obscures attentions that scholars and non-Anglophone regions face when they move across the different languages they use to talk about literacy’ (p. 466). The editors and authors represent multiple geo-political spaces as they engage and re-imagine critical literacy and literacy approaches, assessments, curriculum, instruction, methods, praxis, and theories as inclusive of cultures, ethnicities, genders, languages, and races. EQ: Historically, you come from a long line of scholars and a tradition of literacy that has seen various waves of evolution informing what we believe critical literacy is today. Tell us, what major shifts have you experienced since the inception of your time in the field and what led you to choose critical literacy as a vehicle for changing classrooms and schools? AIW: I begin with snippets of my own journey, followed by brief comments from Luke's (2018) critical literacy scholarship and commentary informed by Crenshaw's (1991, 2021) critical race theory scholarship. As a Black woman in the academy, my journey always has been both personal and political. I was prone to consider the role of oppression and power in shaping the outcomes of Black people's lives growing up in the United States during the 1970s. I read Black scholarship before entering the professoriate and quickly learned it was an undervalued resource among some White academics. The onset of my theoretical journey in the academy is rooted in Critical Theory (CT), as I read widely about its foundations, locating a theoretical space that seemed both familiar and distinct. Although CT focused more exclusively on social economic class in relation to power in Europe, I was not unfamiliar with such conversations in the United States centred on social class, power, and race. As broader notions of critical theorising emerged, I was eager to examine their affordances in literacy. I expanded my reading to include critical theorists in the United States and beyond who were engaging in critical literacy research, including the late Brazilian scholar, Paulo Freire. I found an early ideological space in CT that was missing in traditional histories of literacy. Later, I became a devotee, or Freirediana, reading everything written by him and his contemporaries. My ideas, however, began to shift after I attended a Pedagogy of the Theatre conference in Omaha, NE, in the late 1990s. Paulo Freire was in attendance and responded to questions from the audience. He appeared noticeably uncomfortable when queried about why issues of race/racism, and gender seldom appeared in his work. Through translators, he apologised for his oversight of women but did not engage in a discussion of race. At the time, I knew little about the complicated and vexing history of race and racism in Brazil. makes possible a more adequate and accurate reading of the world, … as Freire and others put it, people can enter into rewriting the world into a formation of their interests, identities, and legitimate aspirations more fully present and are present more fully’. (p. xviii) They also expressed an uneasiness about the roots of CT as reflected in theorising by Europeans, scholarship centred on Whiteness, and a lack of inclusion of globally and nationally racialized and oppressed people. After reading bell Hooks's (1994) Teaching to Transgress, in which she shares her interview with Freire and his description of himself as White, I was surprised and left wondering, had I misread his critical literacy concerns? Who was he identifying, or not identifying, as the oppressed in Brazil? Next, I read his edited text, Mentoring the Mentor: A Critical Dialogue with Paulo Freire, in which Gloria Ladson Billings (1997) discusses race as a missing feature of critical pedagogy. My need to understand Freire (2002), description of critical literacy drew me to search deeper, re-reading his Education for Critical Consciousness (1973), wherein he acknowledges slavery in Brazil (again, not identifying race), and his Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), wherein his reference to the oppressed is conveyed in the term, peasants. Who were considered Brazilian peasants in the mid-1900s? Had I assumed he would acknowledge that the oppressed of Brazil were poor people who were also Black, Brown, and Indigenous people? Clearly, he does not specifically identify people by race (photos of the period and progeny illuminate racial differences). His focus is on people who were poor, people who were on the margins of Brazilian society, yet without cultural, ethnic, gender, linguistic, or racial identifiers. I even enrolled in Portuguese language classes to better grasp the language; was something lost in translation? I wondered whether, as a Black American, had I romanticised his scholarship and failed to see its shortcomings about race/racism in Brazil, and during a Fulbright in Brazil in 2014, I explored Paulo Freire's life, scholarship, and legacy. I read his writings, attended courses, seminars, monthly Freirediana meetings, and a statewide Paulo Freire conference. I also interviewed devotees of Freire's scholarship, people who were carrying on his work in Rio Grande do Sul. Across these experiences, Freire was regarded in reverent tones, hailed as a people's hero, honoured for his work in literacy, remembered with immense gratitude, and worshipped by some. During one of my interviews, Imaculada was moved into a trance-like space, she shook, and her eyes filled with tears that gently rolled down her face, as she recalled his influence on her life (Willis, 2017, p. 47). S. She holds a doctorate and has served as the Coordinator of Popular Education in RS and taught at the university level using Freire's theoretical and pedagogical models. Her activism far exceeds teaching graduate courses and writing academic papers, and she each semester she continues to negotiate with the state government to offer free adult literacy courses in some of the poorest Black neighbourhoods in her community. reading the word is not only preceded by reading the world, but also by a certain form of writing it or rewriting it … transforming it by means of conscious practical action. For me, this dynamic movement is central to literacy. (p. 18) I agreed, but remained bothered by his initial weak attribution of Fanon, 2008 concept of critical consciousness that addresses colonialism, oppression, and race. In my world, addressing race and racism were integral to critical literacy. While in Brazil, I began to understand his scholarship, how Freire's lack of attention to race and racism as embedded in Brazil's geopolitical contexts, and his approach to race and racism, both historically and contemporaneously. Freire's ever-evolving definition of conscientização (Willis et al., 2008) was concerning, as a fundamental feature of critical literacy appeared to minimise and leave race and racism Although and Freire were in understanding the of critical consciousness as the of critical literacy, their addressing race and racism were integral to critical literacy. 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