Arlette Ingram Willis is a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction. Her scholarship includes examining the history of Black literacy across the African Diaspora, exploring pre-service English education, and applying critical theories to literacy policy and research. She is a past president of the Literacy Research Association (2014-2015), and the National Conference on Research in Language and Literacy (2008-2009).
Session Description
Acclaimed historian, Slyvannie Diouf (2019) observes that more than one million literate West African Muslims, and, an unknown number of literate non-Muslim West African people were among the 12.5 million African people captured or kidnapped, enslaved, and transported to the Americas. In this presentation, the lives of lives and literacy of five African Muslim enslaved men: Ayyuba Suleiman Diallo (Job Ben Solomon) (1701-1773), Ibrahima Abdur Rahman (1762-1829), Omar Ibn Said (c. 1770-1864), Salih Bilali (1765-c. 1850), and Bilali Mohammed (c.1770-c.1857), analytically are examined to understand the role of literacy that pre-dates their enslavement as informed by African cultures, ethnicities, histories, languages, and literacies in the Senegambia region. Of special interest is a recent acquisition by, the United States Library of Congress, the Omar ibn Said Collection, as it includes the autobiography of Omar ibn Said, the only known autobiography written in ancient Arabic by an African enslaved man. Africanist and Islamist scholars valorize his resilience as an African Muslim man who remained faithful to Islam under anti-Black racism, the horrors of chattel enslavement, and attempts at Christian conversion. The autobiography dismantles prevailing assumptions about people of African descent as sub-human, without culture, history, intellect, language, or literacy. It also revolutionizes what we know about the history of literacy in the Americas by drawing on sources and resources written by people African descent. As such, their knowledge, insights, and understandings help to exposes the pervasiveness of White supremacy; and unveils the roots of deliberate anti-Black literacy laws, policies, and practices.