English-Language Literatures and Social Justice: Critical, Decolonial, and Praxis-Oriented Perspectives

Abstract

This article approaches English-language literatures as social practices that unsettle inequality and re-educate attention to difference. Through critical readings of Toni Morrison’s Recitatif, Chinua Achebe’s Dead Men’s Path, Seiko Tanabe’s Josee, the Tiger and the Fish, H. Melt’s Every Day Is a Trans Day, and Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, it examines how narrative voice, embodiment, temporality, and performative form foster ethical encounters between literature and social justice. The discussion engages Young (1990), Butler (1990), Muñoz (2009), Garland-Thomson (1997), Davis (1995), and Lugones (2008), in dialogue with Critical Applied Linguistics. It argues that aesthetic strategies—from ambiguity to the choreopoem—function as methods of critique rather than ornament. Each section offers critical-reflective questions, originated in my praxiologies, that invite readers to experience reading as an act of listening, responsibility, and coexistence. The concluding remarks reaffirm literature’s unfinished power: an ethics of attention and imagination through which the world keeps moving beyond the full stop.