Cinderella Story: A Scholarly Sketchbook about Race, Identity, Barack Obama, the Human Spirit, and Other Stuff that Matters

by James Haywood Rolling Jr.

Overview

Cinderella Story is an experimental autoethnography that explores critical racial issues in America through the media of language and images. Rolling asks, How do words and images-involving stories and paradigms, past and future, perceptions of beauty and ugliness-become flesh? How are they done and undone? In this supple and complex narrative, the author peers deeply into his own life and attitudes, and into the racial images and ideas made explicit by American history as a whole, to sort out fact from fiction in new and ingenious ways.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780759111769
Publisher:	AltaMira Press
Publication date:	03/16/2010
Series:	Crossroads in Qualitative Inquiry
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	263
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

James Haywood Rolling, Jr. is associate professor of art education at Syracuse University.

Table of Contents

List of Figures and Illustrations ix

Acknowledgments xi

Prologue: An Old Story 1

Episode 1 Borderlines 9

Episode 2 Homelessness 23

Episode 3 Origins 39

Episode 4 Breech Births and Cinderella Endings 51

Episode 5 Monsters Deconstructed 65

Episode 6 Figuring Myself Out 89

Episode 7 Messing Around with Identity Constructs 111

Episode 8 Disruptions 121

Episode 9 Secular Blasphemy 135

Episode 10 Propaganda 159

Episode 11 Invisibility and In/di/visuality 173

Episode 12 The Meeting 199

Episode 13 Self-Portrait, with Eyes Closed 203

Episode 14 (Re)Appearances 205

Episode 15 Self-Portrait, with Backlighting 211

Episode 16 The One-Drop Rule 213

Episode 17 Self-Portrait, with Possibilities 217

Episode 18 Epilogue, with New Story Valued 219

Notes 227

Bibliography 249

Index 259

About the Author 263

Editorial Reviews

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 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

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

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

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 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