Flipping the Coin: Towards a Double-Faced Approach to Teaching Black Literature in Secondary English Classrooms

Critiquing two approaches that English teachers use to teach Black, or African-American, literature in the secondary classroom—one that centralizes races and the other that ignores it—this article proposes a hybrid approach that combines both. This double-faced approach recognizes the culturally specific themes that give the text and the Black author their unique voice while also recognizing commonalities that bridge the text to others—despite the race of the authors. To demonstrate the feasibility of the double-faced approach, the article concludes with an examination of three texts through the lens of this “race both matters and doesn’t matter” perspective.

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Changing English on 6 March 2017, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1358684X.2016.1228442