An imagined reality — talking back to the enlightenment : practicing anti-racist teaching and learning in eighteenth-century British literature (Roundtable)

Abstract

Growing up in a predominately Caucasian school district made me exceedingly aware of my differences from my peers, teachers, and school materials. As a young student, I was encouraged to accept the history that was handed to me. The history that often left me, a Mexican American woman, out of the narrative. What is striking about movements like the 1619 Project is that they work within the realm of lost stories to recon-ceptualize and reclaim a history that has been pushed to the side. The 1619 Project brings awareness to the Eurocentricity of US history because it provides a space for Black activists, writers, and innovators to rewrite the history themselves. Black writers such as Eve L. Ewing create imagined realities that fill in the Black voices and narratives that have been lost throughout colonial history. Ewing’s poem, “1773,” presents a lost dialogue between past and present as it restores Black history.