Description:
Dear Charles Dickens, Love, South LA tells the story of how students at Foshay Learning Center, a public school in South Los Angeles, studied Charles Dickens as part of their AP English curriculum, and how, in that journey, a fellow traveler emerged: the city itself. Jacqueline Jean Barrios confronts the cultural challenges that big canonical books pose to new generations of readers. Instead of erasing the differences between Dickens's implied audiences and his current ones, Barrios demonstrates how youth can serve as the visionaries who bridge the gap.
Brief description: Jacqueline Jean Barrios is assistant professor of public and applied humanities at the University of Arizona. She co-leads the Urban Humanities Network and directs creative place-keeping initiatives centered on the historical, cultural, and environmental resilience of the Borderlands. Barrios lives in Tucson, Arizona.
Review Quotes: "As public discourse swirls about the 'death of the humanities, ' Barrios offers a striking and convincing case for the transformative work that happens when communities come together to engage a text. . . . Dear Charles Dickens, Love, South LA provides a beautiful and urgently needed example of what the public humanities can and should be . . . and the ways that urban spaces can become vital laboratories for literary study."--Ryan Fong, founding codirector, Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom