Sophie Chase
Week 3 Reading Response
Professor Hobbs: American Identity
January 18th, 2015
Week 3 Reading
Response: Higginbotham, Dang and Ocklemann
Maya Angelou once said, “there is
no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” Although I agree
with her, I would expand upon this in saying that there is no greater agony
than bearing a clear and coherent story in your mind, but not being able to
translate it on to the page. As a history major and lifelong writer I have
always struggled with this step in the writing process. While my thoughts on a particular
topic may be perfectly comprehensible in my head I often struggle to get them
on the page in complete coherence – at least initially. Nothing is more
satisfying than inserting a period at the end of a sentence that says exactly
what you want it to say. I think all the authors we read for today did this
quite successfully. Although the authors used different rhetorical strategies
and utilized different writing styles and research and organizational approaches,
without too much difficulty I could visualize each author’s framework or “road
map,” for the paper. I could follow along with each author’s thought processes and
understand the significance or the “stakes” of each author’s research. Although
I think each paper could be improved for one reason or another, overall I was
quite impressed with these papers and I feel they would be good models I could
look to when crafting my own research paper.
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s purpose
for writing is very clear and I believe she successfully organizes her paper, integrates
her primary and secondary sources, and offers a rich commentary on the issue of
how African American women’s identity is both radicalized and gendered and interacts
with class dynamics and sexuality. She ties each paragraph back to her initial
concern about African American women’s voices not being distinguished as both
African American AND female. Higginbotham does not appear to have a clear
thesis or research question per se, which I found a little bit confusing at
first. However her purpose for writing is clear and she outlines her methodology
for analyzing race and introduces the sources she will delve into on pages 252
and 253. Higginbotham first distinguishes how she will delve into the topic:
she analyzes the construction and “technologies,” of race, race as a
metalanguge (focusing on gender, class and sexuality), and race as a site of
contestation and a tool for oppression. Higginbotham then argues that feminist
theorists, for all they have written about power relations and binary
oppositions, have “had little to say about race” (Higginbotham 251). She
critiques white feminist scholars for failing to differentiate between African
American women’s experience and those of other American women and criticize
them for “homogenizing womanhood” (Higginbotham 251). Higginbotham makes it
clear what exactly her research will add to this gap and clarifies its
relevance to society today: “these issues continue to be salient in our own
time, when racism grows with both verve and subtly” (Higginbotham 252).
Higginbotham
engages with a variety of sources from 18th, 19th and 20th
CE America and uses concrete examples to show where a traditional feminist
understanding of power relations as a simple binary falls short since it does
not give credence to how racial constructions of gender, class and sexuality
can be used to describe or analyze power relations. Higginbotham’s concrete and
profound examples are crucial for her argument, because through them she is
able to clearly show where traditional feminist thinking fails to grasp the
scope of issue. For example in the section “Racial Constructions of Sexuality,”
Higginbotham’s uses primary sources regarding the cases of Catherine Brown and Ida
B. Wells, African American women ejected from “ladies” train cars, to substantiate
her commentary on racial configurations of both class and gender in specific
sites such as segregated railroad trains (Higginbotham 261). Higginbotham also
successfully integrates helpful “key terms,” and definitions other historians
have come up with. They add clarity to her argument when she attempts to define
obscure terms and phrases such as “race” and “race as metalanguage (Higginbotham
253; 256). This makes her argument much
more coherent.
Bianca
Dang, like Higginbotham lays out her “road map” early on and organizes her paper
into several sections. Like Higginbotham, I think Dang also achieves clarity
and coherence and integrates her sources nicely. She also focuses on a specific
person, uses very different types of sources and grounds her paper within the
context of the Civil War and the Reconstruction period. Dang focuses primarily
on Henry McNeal Turner and traces his shift away from the compromise and conciliatory
rhetoric he emphasized during the Civil War/post Civil War period to a far more
radical, and bold call for mass African American emigration to Africa during
the Reconstruction era. Compromise, at least in his mind, was no longer a
possibility “because of the country’s racism’ (Dang 2). Additionally Dang
argues that Turner’s confidence grew during this period and as a result his
change became a “fundamental feature of emigration rhetoric,” that would
challenge the rhetoric of African American activists like Frederick Douglass,
but inspire other historical predecessors like Marcus Garvey.
I think
Dang’s commentary is particularly well done and her voice comes through very
clearly even while maintaining a scholarly tone. I also found the way in which
she divided up her paper to be helpful and I liked that she revealed her
framework for the paper to her readers on page 2. Her integration of little
portions of Turner’s speeches and writings are also well done. She chose “snip-its”
that are just long enough to clarify her point, did not go into unnecessary
detail and often alluded to where she was going to go next with her paper. I
appreciated she was also mindful of the historical context in which these
primary sources were written, published, spoken or read. One example of place
in which I think she does this well is on page 13 where she successfully links
Richard B. Hayes election to Presidency to diminished African American gains in
Civil Rights and thus Turner’s solidification of his support for emigration. In
terms of improvement, I think some of Dang’s paragraphs and sentences were a
bit long and deviated from the initial claims of their overarching paragraph.
One example of this was the paragraph that bleeds over from pages 5 to 6. Additionally
some of Dang’s transitions are slightly awkward, but overall I feel I can learn
a lot about organization and choosing successful parts of primary sources that
I can apply to my own research.
I found Jennifer
Ocklemann’s paper on media representations of the 1920’s “Flapper,” and the
implicit tension within the representation between modernity and modesty particularly
dynamic and intriguing, because she uses an array of primary sources, delves
very deeply into them and provides an extremely rich commentary on each one.
Her approach is obviously different than the previous two authors, because she
chooses to ground her paper in an analysis of 1920s literature and visual and
film sources instead of written sources. Ocklemann begins with a powerful anecdote
and then defines the “Flapper,” which I found particularly helpful up front.
She argues that the “Flapper best captures the tension between modernity and modesty
inherent in 1920s representations of women” (Ocklemann 2). Additionally she
suggests that “modernity” and “modesty” are not diametrically opposed as one
may first assume, but are rather constantly interacting with each other, not on
opposite ends of a single spectrum and must be re-defined with the analysis of
each source (Ocklemann 2).
I think Ocklemann
integrates her primary sources in each of her sections seamlessly. Her strategy
for integrating and analyzing visual sources is particularly helpful to me, because
I will also be working with advertisements and other visual sources in my
research paper as well. I would like to capture the essence of these sources,
just like one would do with a written source. Moreover I felt Ocklemann did a
good job of connecting her entire paragraphs back to her initial claim at the
beginning of each of her paragraphs. I do feel she slightly looses her original
claim about the “flapper” best capturing these tensions in her analysis at
times. I thought this was especially the case in the first analysis
section of the paper where she discusses feminine products of the 1920s. I also felt she could have rearranged some of her
paragraphs at the beginning of the paper. At one point she was writing about “new
woman” of the 1920s and then jumps to describing the set up of her paper. A
transition would have been helpful. She also did not introduce the sources as
well as I would have liked in the beginning of the paper. Overall though I felt
Ocklemann constructed a very engaging and unique paper and brought a very different
perspective to the topic, while displaying a very strong ability to analyze
visual and film sources in addition to written ones.
No comments:
Post a Comment