Counter Storytelling through Graphic Life Writing

In a 2014 op ed for The New York Times, award winning children's book author and illustrator Christopher Myers (2014) wrote that young people view books as maps. According to Myers, children "create, through the stories they're given, an atlas of their world, of their relationship with others, of their possible destinations." In this article, I focus on how auto/biographical picturebooks written and illustrated by people of color and Indigenous peoples offer students alternative landscapes within which to see themselves. As writers and illustrators tell their coming of age stories in text and image, they call attention to alternative landmarks, lead readers to previously undiscovered locations, and provide a new mapping of familiar experiences.I introduce the term graphic life writing to refer to the construction of a life story through image and text in forms such as the picturebook or comics. The term graphic captures the combination of visual images and verbal text and highlights the content of these texts, which, like other "challenging" picturebooks, may include disturbing images (Evans, 2015) The specific focus of this article is on racialized and Indigenous women's girlhood experiences of school in autobiographical and biographical picturebooks. The framework of critical race theory (CRT) especially the concept of "counter storytelling" in word and image (Delgado, Stefancic, Liendo, 2012; Solorzano Yosso, 2009) guides the analysis of three examples of graphic life writing that center on the intersections of race, ethnicity, class, and gender.1 Texts include Duncan Tonatiuh's (2014) biography of Sylvia Mendez and her family in Separate Is Never Equal: Sylvia Mendez Her Family's Fight for Desegregation, Ruby Bridges's (1999) memoir Through My Eyes, and Christy Jordan Fenton and Margaret Pokiak Fenton's (2013) coauthored auto/biography When I Was Eight. This article proposes graphic life writing as one way to incorporate diverse books into the curriculum (Aleman Aleman, 2016; Brooks, 2008; Coffey, 2015; Yosso, 2002) and argues that CRT is an especially important frame for analyzing children's texts because its "critical and cultural critiques provide literary interpretations contextualized within multifaceted and often racialized macro systems" (Brooks, 2008, p. 37) In the texts considered here, CRT draws our attention to the racialized macro system of schooling.Critical race theorists maintain that racism is mundane and everywhere rather than aberrant and sporadic. As David Gillborn (2015, p. 278) points out, "critical race theorists argue that the majority of racism remains hidden beneath a veneer of normality and it is only the more crude and obvious forms of racism that are seen as problematic by most people." Children's picturebooks hide beneath the "veneer of normality" and often reproduce implicit and explicit misrepresentations about Indigenous peoples and people of color that, because of their repetition across time and media, seem unremarkable. In sum, "storytelling is racialized, gendered, and classed and these stories affect racialized, gendered, and classed communities" (Solorzano Yosso, 2009, p. 138).Graphic life writing by and/or about traditionally marginalized groups allows educators access to previously unheard stories as well as alternative images that counter the status quo; these texts revise and refute stereotypes found in children's literature and other cultural texts. Graphic life writing, then, arises as a powerful medium for representing diverse realities, for creating a culturally specific curriculum, and for exemplifying how to fight institutionalized racism (Delgado Stefancic, 2013; Delgado et al. 2012; Taylor, Gillborn, LadsonBillings, 2009).Counter storytelling is a particularly helpful concept for theorizing life writing in picturebook form because counter stories emerge in image as well as in narrative. A counter story is defined as "a method of telling the stories of those people whose experiences are not often told (i.