City Comp: Identities, Spaces, Practices

14. Moving to the City: Redefining Literacy in the Post–Civil Rights Era

At a time when composition studies has been buoyed on a tide of rising institutional credibility, many writing teachers may have been puzzled to hear Lester Faigley’s comment, in his 1996 Chair’s address to the Conference on College Composition and Communication, that “it no longer seems like we are riding the wave of history but instead are caught in a rip tide carrying us away from where we want to go” (“Literacy” 32). But Faigley’s comment directs attention to an important reality that is easy to miss among composition ’s recent victories. When measured against the expectations regarding social group mobility that many writing teachers have had for literacy instruction, the strategies that have dominated the work of composition studies over the past thirty years have been, as Tom Fox phrases it, “an unqualifiable failure” (42). Specifically, composition studies has been unable to respond adequately to the social inequities, such as institutionalized racism, that both inspired and derived from the urbanization of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. Yet we cannot simply step back into history and return to past opportunities. Instead, as Faigley concludes in Fragments of Rationality, the highly urbanized, post–Civil Rights context in which compositionists work today demands a new urban agenda for the teaching of writing. But what kind of new urban agenda will it take for composition studies to address effectively the social inequities of the twenty-first century post–Civil Rights era? 216 CHAPTER FOURTEEN Moving to the City Redefining Literacy in the Post–Civil Rights Era Patrick Bruch Before we can begin to answer this question, we must first examine how our strategies for defining literacy instruction as a means to social mobility have backfired and carried us away from where we want to go. In what follows , I examine competing definitions of social mobility that accompanied the urbanization of social struggles in the 1960s and influenced the development of alternative urban agendas in the 1970s, and I consider the effects these definitions and agendas had on composition studies. I then discuss more recent post–Civil Rights contexts in which social group relations and definitions of mobility get written in and on urban spaces. Finally, I describe my own efforts to implement a writing pedagogy that involves students in redefining the nature and role of literacy in the process of social mobility. MOVING TO THE CITY It was funny to see a town made: streets driven through; two rows of shade trees, hard and soft, planted; cellars dug and houses put up—regular Queen Anne style too, with stained glass—all at once. Dryfoos apologized for the streets because they were handmade; said they expected their street making machine Tuesday, and they intended to push things. —William Dean Howells I begin my analysis of the forces that moved the Civil Rights struggle to the cities with this passage from William Dean Howells’s 1889 novel A Hazard of New Fortunes because of its image of urban space as a social text that both writes about and gets written by our lives together. At the time that Howells wrote A Hazard of New Fortunes, urban space communicated the promise of the American Dream. In the city, people could step out of history and into an unlimited future, leaving the past behind and making of their lives whatever their individual imaginations could conjure and their personal capabilities accomplish. Though familiar today, this version of social mobility that is written through and on urban space strikes a discordant note. In the urban Minneapolis neighborhood in which I live, for example, specific spatial practices (ubiquitous “neighborhood alert” flyers and “THIS PROPERTY PROTECTED BY” alarm company lawn signs, as well as the window displays at the corner drug store exhorting neighbors, in red, white, and blue streamers, to “VOTE!”) resist the effects of popular representations that picture urban space as a cage of fear, isolation, and apathy. These spatial practices seem to long for the past rather than the future. When we step into the shared space that speaks to us of our lives together, we want to recall the city of light and progress that Howells describes. Doing so is a way of dispensing with the dark city of deindustrialization, stubborn poverty, and the nagging fear that doing 217 MOVING TO THE CITY whatever we have been doing, only harder, will not transform the underlying causes of our urban problems...