Dan Ruprecht
History 209S
Week Three Reading Responses
On Higginbotham
The
language of race is powerful, both as a means of reinforcing and deconstructing
racial hegemony. In “The Metalanguage of Race”, Evelyn Higginbotham lays out
the complications and problems of historians and writers in general when trying
to talk about the intersections of different identities, particularly in the
case of African-American women. The central concern of the essay through its
three parts—defining the construction of race in its historical context,
explaining how race functions as a metalanguage to further re-construct class,
gender, and sexual identities, and exploring how racial language can be
liberatory in black culture—is to complicate or problematize popular historical
generalizations that combine and thereby reduce the varying experiences of
black women into one hypothetical type.
The
essay breaks into the issue with a short discussion of modern feminism’s
deficient treatment of the conditions of black women, and particularly white
feminists’ mistake when assuming a “homogenous womanhood.” From there,
Higginbotham draws on the framework provided by contemporary American historians
as well as philosophers and prominent African-American writers and
intellectuals in order to explain the delusory nature of “race.” Further, in
pointing out the gap in the historiography regarding the experience of
African-American women, or the generalized histories that try to align black
women to “all women” or “all blacks” (when those two topics usually mean “white
women” and “black men”), Higginbotham brings up a number of other thinkers and
writers to explain their works’ deficiencies.
Once
Higginbotham explains how the language of race is both immensely powerful in
shaping our understanding of every other cultural identity as well as devoid of
inherent meaning (i.e. completely constructed), she takes upon the
responsibility of clarifying how that same racialized language was used by
African-Americans, and black people all over the world, to fight against their
stereotyped identities and liberate themselves. To accomplish this,
Higginbotham cites the early twentieth-century Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin,
who conceptualized “double-voiced discourse:” how language can and is
re-constructed by its different users, in this case to empower black people
(albeit after accepting the tenability of racial distinctions) in the face of
white oppression. In this section of her essay, Higginbotham works not only to
explain but also to provide ample examples of the concept in American history,
and in doing so addresses the most complex issue that she brings up: how the
racial language of “black power” or “black nationalism” simultaneously work
against the language of white superiority but also within its confines. She
complicates the theory to fit with her central idea by showing how the
re-constructed language both liberates black communities and obscures subsections
of those “imagined communities.” In other words, while the re-construction of
racial language was a means of protest against white hegemony, it tended to
silence the voice of black women who were subsumed by a monolithic, generalized
“black homogeneity.”
On Jennifer
Ockelmann
It
is easy to describe the flapper of the 1920s, the evolving “modern woman” of
the day, in contradistinction to established Victorian norms of womanhood, but
to so pit modernity and modesty against one another is to oversimplify the
issue, argues Ockelmann in “Don’t Fuss, Mother, This Isn’t So Fast.” The essay
analyzes a series of menstrual pad advertisements, a couple popular movies
about flappers, and a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald to conclude that the
modest/modern dichotomy is too simplified and generalized to be useful. A more
accurate depiction of flappers must needs show the tensions in their lives
between their new and traditional affects, as well as how the new is, in some
ways, a continuation of the old.
While
the analysis of primary sources are her own, Ockelmann uses contemporary
historians to help draw the background of her essay, explaining the cultural
norms that she plans on discussing and the worlds that the women inhabited. More
briefly, secondary scholarship provides the context for her Ockelmann’s
exploration of the primary sources. The major success of Ockelmann’s essay is
the accurate complication of a dichotomy that we almost take for granted. In
other words, she effectively proves her thesis that there is more going on here
than we assume.
However,
this essay could be much improved. The argument almost proceeds without saying;
it would be similarly simple to prove that every historical dichotomy which we
have constructed is more complex than our generalization. The question remains,
though: is it still useful to describe flappers against Victorian norms? Ockelmann
does not ask the question, but the answer seems likely to be a yes—of course
there is more going on, but the characterization we’ve created is useful in explaining
why flappers were so radical.
Regarding
the structure of her essay, the introduction is confusing. We get a solid hook
to begin, a story that introduces her topics and captures our attention, but
the next couple pages of background ought to be heavily edited to prioritize the
necessary information. After the transition into her first section, “The
Creation of the Modern Woman,” Ockelmann lays down more background information
and context for her discussion, leaving the reader wondering when we are going
to get into the examples that she brings up. The section feels like a continued
introduction, and further delays the source analysis to the very bottom of the
fifth page of the essay.
Once
that analysis comes, however, it is thoughtful and exhaustive. While I would
have appreciated a more nuanced discussion of each topic (does use of a pad
necessarily equate to modesty, or can there be other reasons for the desire not
to be bleeding? Does marriage automatically signify a desire to be modest in The IT Girl? How does a literary
analysis relate on different levels to a cultural, or anthropological
analysis?), Ockelmann effectively proves her point.
On Bianca Dang
Dang
draws the reader in with a quote introducing her story’s protagonist, Henry
McNeal Turner, and the issue at hand, the question of emigration in the
postbellum era. With an idea of what we’re getting into, we effortlessly follow
Dang’s concise introduction, providing briefly the necessary information about
Turner as well as a bit of historical context for her main concern: the shift
in Turner’s thinking from compromise during and immediately after the Civil War
to emigration as Reconstruction fails. The intro hints but never explicitly
connects Turner to a larger shift in African-American thought, and then plunges
into analysis of Turner’s words during the Civil War.
After
employing Eric Foner’s words to set the scene, Dang focuses on Turner’s own
rhetoric of compromise during the Civil War to begin her narrative of change in
his thought. Like Ockelmann, Dang pulls from contemporary scholarship mainly to
contextualize her analysis rather than to argue against. Most of that analysis,
however, is explanatory rather than argumentative. Dang clarifies and explains
Turner’s thoughts, contextualizing them with the world around him, but does not
make a striking historical argument. She does answer the “so-what” question, in
that she accurately situates Turner’s rhetoric into a tradition of Black Nationalism
movements, but the essay is not driven by a strong thesis and thereby fails to
achieve what it could.
No comments:
Post a Comment