In Cinderella Story, James Haywood Rolling, Jr. introduces us to an intricate collage of embodied experiences and aspirations, hopes and redemptions, afflictions and possibilities. Wow, what a fantastic visual read! With every turn of the page you will imagine Rolling sketching meaningful narratives of Black lives with broad strokes and fine lines, and we are left with an intellectually nuanced ... Read moreiteration of a textured imagination of Blackness that many of us will resonate with so deeply so as to consider it Truth. Perhaps what is most refreshing in this book is Rolling's self-reflection as a Black male. Privileging the reader with self-portraits drawn by the author, Rolling reminds us without cliché that each of our lives is a tremendously personalcanvas. Unlike most books on identity that theorize without location, Rolling invites us to see identities as real transformative spaces we inhabit daily. He helps us to remember that just like he and his family, we all not only come from a place with aphysical address like 1260 Lincoln Place, but we also continue to inhabit spaces and places that are designed to offer a profound sense of security, agency, self, position, and most of all home. In this book, Rolling unabashedly takes on issues of race a
Ronald L. Jackson II, University of Cincinnati and editor of Critical Studies in Media Communication James Haywood Rolling, Jr.'s Cinderella Story is a powerful, richly nuanced, evocative work; a stunning and brilliantly innovative pedagogical and theoretical intervention. This new book provides ground zero—the starting place for the next generation oftheorists who want to write their way through and across the theoretical, methodological, and interpretive implications that result when voice, identity, family, presence, and writing are made problematic. A stunning accomplishment. This brilliant inter-textual model of performance autoethnography charts new territories of inquiry.
Norman K. Denzin, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign It is said that the past can't be changed, but that history can. In his rich rendering of the limits imposed on African American individuality, James Haywood Rolling, Jr. reveals radical new ways to see beneath socio-political history using an educational process of re-visioning and re-interpreting human identity. Drawing on his remarkable talents as a scholar, cultural critic, artist, and teacher, Rolling positions the arts as the form of inquiry most able to open up the learning spaces needed to respond critically and creatively to the fluid times of Obama nation. Rolling is a thinker who acknowledges that educational policy and practice of the most profound kind is always a work-in-progress that blurs lines as it erases and enables at the same time.
Graeme Sullivan, Teachers College, Columbia University James Haywood Rolling, Jr.'s Cinderella Story is a powerful, richly nuanced, evocative work; a stunning and brilliantly innovative pedagogical and theoretical intervention. This new book provides ground zero—the starting place for the next generation of theorists who want to write their way through and across the theoretical, methodological, and interpretive implications that result when voice, identity, family, presence, and writing are made problematic. A stunning accomplishment. This brilliant inter-textual model of performance autoethnography charts new territories of inquiry.
Norman K. Denzin, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign In Cinderella Story, James Haywood Rolling, Jr. introduces us to an intricate collage of embodied experiences and aspirations, hopes and redemptions, afflictions and possibilities. Wow, what a fantastic visual read! With every turn of the page you will imagine Rolling sketching meaningful narratives of Black lives with broad strokes and fine lines, and we are left with an intellectually nuanced iteration of a textured imagination of Blackness that many of us will resonate with so deeply so as to consider it Truth. Perhaps what is most refreshing in this book is Rolling's self-reflection as a Black male. Privileging the reader with self-portraits drawn by the author, Rolling reminds us without cliché that each of our lives is a tremendously personal canvas. Unlike most books on identity that theorize without location, Rolling invites us to see identities as real transformative spaces we inhabit daily. He helps us to remember that just like he and his family, we all not only come from a place with a physical address like 1260 Lincoln Place, but we also continue to inhabit spaces and places that are designed to offer a profound sense of security, agency, self, position, and most of all home. In this book, Rolling unabashedly takes on issues of race and representation, but does so in a way that forces us to not only grapple with how race contains us, but how despite its social apparatus we might be transformed.
Ronald L. Jackson II, Editor of Critical Studies in Media Communication and author of Scripting the Black Masculine Body in Popular Media Show Less