I
think Dang’s habit of writing concise, straightforward sentences is one of the
most prominent strengths of the piece. Her interpretations of Turner’s words
are quite clear as she often will follow a passage of Turner’s with her own
sentence-by-sentence commentary on her understanding of his writing. This
allows the audience to follow her thinking and stay better connected to her
greater argument that Turner’s tone and belief started in one place and evolved
to another. This passage is an excellent example of that approach.
“His
description of African American intentions as kind and friendly supports his
assertion that African American had better hearts… His declaration that "We want them
free," also suggest that Turner was using this speech as a way to alleviate
white ….” (Dang 7,8)
Perhaps
inherent to the nature of such clear writing is that the sentences at times
felt lacking in structural variety – but that is a small complaint in exchange
for very clear argument and analysis.
What’s really interesting and effective
about this paper, I think, is how convincingly Dang argues that Turner provides
an excellent example of a tangible individual response to historical
atmosphere, which developed from post-war hopefulness to Reconstruction
disillusionment. Certainly history classes concerning the American 19th
century explain the political changes in
the post-Civil War era but getting the change to hear Turner’s account of the
disappointment of black people in white America’s response to emancipation is
incredibly powerful, and further reinforces those voices today that call for
racial justice.
One question I left with regarded Dang’s
interaction with other writings on Turner; she does excellent primary source
analysis that makes her argument convincing but makes only two or so references
to secondary writers on Turner. I was curious to know about whether her reading
of Turner is consistent with most other historians’, if it was novel, et cetera
– perhaps that was outside the scope of the paper, but that was one dimension I
about which I was left wondering.
Ockelmann’s
choice of using entertainment items as her primary sources seems especially
fitting not just for the reason Ockelmann gives. She explains that her sources
are ideal because they provide archetypes of the flapper and proliferation of
media is inherently linked to this story. I think it’s also true that like any
trend or idealized image of femininity, the “flapper” was at least one part
collective imagining of womanhood, and therefore fictional stories are all the
more appropriate.
Her writing flows incredibly well –
the analysis is clear but also not structured repetitively. I am especially
impressed by her nuanced treatment of the contradictions present in the movies
she discusses. On the one hand, there is a seemingly empowered female character
who can charm men, exercising some degree of power via feminine wiles. On the
other, there is a regulation of the acceptable approaches to female sexuality:
Genevieve must be girlishly pretty rather than “vamp”ishly sexual, and Betty
has to fervently deny advances in addition to flirting with her love interest.
A particularly interesting concept
that Ockelmann handles is that of the transience of sexual appeal. In all of
these stories, the female protagonists struggle to maintain, cultivate, manage
and display their sexuality in acceptable ways – there is a pervading sense
that it is almost impossible to pin down how one gets “it”, and how one avoids
losing it. Ockelmann’s effectively argues that in the 1920s maintaining sexual
appeal was inextricably linked to being hard-to-get and inherently still modest.
Ockelmann handles this subject exceptionally
– the dichotomy but also interaction between modernity and modesty is perfectly
explicated in her examples.
Higginbotham’s piece is incredibly
powerful, especially so because it still rings true today. It begins with a
discussion of feminism and the limitations (and lack) of its intersectional
exploration; 24 years later, as it seems feminism has established a space in
the “mainstream”, similar criticisms to those Higginbotham made of the
scholarship of 1992 continue to bear true of today’s mainstream feminism and
its tendency to be white female-centric.
Higginbotham’s piece is bolstered
immensely by the evidence she offers to explicate that race, gender and class
do not affect a person individually, but instead combine in various
permutations. Her assertion that the subgroup of race subsumes other social
relational groups (namely gender and class) felt intuitively compelling and
correct to me upon reading it, especially when she points to that very dynamic
that to explain the white-centric nature of feminist writing. Her mention of
Sojourner Truth’s famous question of black womanhood perfectly demonstrates the
historical fact that in the racist language of American law, white womanhood
and black womanhood were categorically
not the same in the not-distant past. These examples evince her thesis – which
I read to be that feminism fails part of its purpose when it discusses
pan-womanhood with no considerations of other identities – fairly
incontrovertibly.
What I found more difficult to understand
write away was the term “metalanguage” – perhaps because I am unfamiliar with
it. I think its meaning became more clear in examples of the loaded nature of
certain words; Higginbotham offers the example of “ladies” versus “women” when
discussing the intersection of class (sometimes conflated with race) and gender.
I am curious to look into what exactly that word typically means to perhaps
gain better understanding of parts of the piece.
To my reading, her point about the
temptation to make identities monolithic and generalizable on page 256 is the
crux of this piece; I think she rightly points out that while observing the realities
of different intersections of identity is vital to understanding history, it is
also vital to take into account that every person’s story is different, even
from those stories belonging to people with whom they share identities.
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