Whiteness in “Ms. Marvel” and Tahereh Mafi’s “A Very Large Expanse of Sea”

As you know, I typically choose a few new texts to teach each semester, mainly so I can expand my knowledge on topics that I may not be familiar with. I do it to educate myself as much as to educate my students. This semester, for my Multiethnic American Literature class, I chose to include Tahereh Mafi’s A Very Large Expanse of Sea and I selected to use G. Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphona’s Ms. Marvel: No Normal again. As I work my way through these texts again, and specifically back to back, I started to see a lot of connections that will benefit my students. During our introductions, one teacher said that they had not read Mafi’s novel yet, but that they have it in their circulating library in class. Students constantly check the book out, so the teacher does not have the opportunity to read it. The fact that the students continually read the book indicates, as well, its impact on them even when the teacher does not teach it.

Today, I want to look at some of these connections, focusing on the ways that these texts challenge ideas of whiteness. Reading each text, I’m reminded of Toni Morrison who, in Playing in the Dark, wrote, “In this country, . . . American means white, and Africanist people struggle to make the term applicable to themselves with ethnicity and hyphen after hyphen after hyphen.” Reading Ms. Marvel…