Each week, I try to bridge my own understanding as a sociologist/social scientist with the traditions of English literature. This is something I'm interested in doing for my own interests, but also as we move to being more interdisciplinary. Race is a subject that is incredibility interdisciplinary because so many aspects of the identity are tied together and Blackness is so massive that it would be impossible to fit into one small cup of a discipline.
This is a long way around to the point I want to make this week when thinking about Zora Neale Hurston. First, she's my most favorite social scientist, but she's also important to literature through her work of Their Eyes Were Watching God. For the first time this summer I heard one of the students I was working with refer to it as an ethnography, I immediately scoffed at the idea since I've always known it as a fiction book, but I started to interrogate why I was so put off by the idea that it could be true or attempt to ignore the fact that the book has pieces of truth from her work as a field researcher. This unique blend of ethnography and literature seems to be something that we can look into further since so many of the people we have read about (both musicians, including Kendrick Lamar, and writers) often blend themselves into the work in which you don't really know how true or how false something is. As long as the point gets across, does it matter how storying is unique for blacks in America? In sociology we have this thing about getting to the truth as closest as possible, to the point that I have been interested in observing the FB/Twitter of my respondents, but the "truth" of whether things happened and how they happened may not be the story and instead the way people speak about their experiences need to be a major point in how I write up my own fieldwork. -Candice C.R.
One thing I keep going back to in response to last week’s reading and our discussion is Kevin Young’s assertion that “Rather than try to capture true speech, Dunbar uses both Standard English and black vernacular to question any poem’s relation to language” (104). This idea fascinates me. On the one hand, I’m drawn to the idea of language being used as a form itself, and how Young likens it to the use of meter in poetry—nobody speaks in meter the way nobody speaks in dialect. The artificial nature of both are intertwined. This has been pretty much the basis for how I’ve taught freshman comp this year, having my students look at poems that blend language and how that blending of language works formally, hand-in-hand with the content. This assertion also seems to be a sort of remedy for how Young notes “Dialect denies the sly, understated, submerged, and shifting qualities of actual African American vernacular” (100). It answers the question of whether Dunbar’s use of dialect fails to represent the actual speech of Black folks in America by stating that this was never really his intention, but rather that Dunbar’s goals were formal (this also brings back our discussion on Hughes’s reading of his own work, bringing up the possibility that he doesn’t read the dialect on the page because it’s an artificial speech).
However, I’m wondering about what the implications of this statement are. If Dunbar isn’t interested in trying to represent African American speech on the page, then what are the implications for the people his writing is ultimately going to represent, the “lowly” people that Young evokes numerous times in this chapter? One of the powers of poetry is that it constitutes a form of representation. If Dunbar is using dialect as a formal tool, how is that representation complicated? Surely, as Young points out, as much pressure should go on readers contemporary to Dunbar to realize his use of dialect, but at the same time does Dunbar risk further taking a voice away from people who don’t have one as opposed to giving it to them?
I keep thinking about Mary Lou Williams and the essence of Williams that Yona Harvey channeled in her poetry, and I keep thinking about the (black) female artist and the levels to which that identity has been occluded or unrecognized in history—or at minimum overshadowed by their male counterparts. I look forward to learning more about that in classes to come. I realized that my mental image when I think of the words blues and jazz is defaulted at images of men. It is so interesting to think about the resultant rhetoric surrounding Kendrick’s performance versus Beyonce’s and the different ways in which we discuss their respected artistry, and thus their activism. For my midterm project I focused on male-identified queer artists in contemporary black music, and I’m looking forward to continuing to challenge the visibility of all players involved throughout the semester.
I am also interested in vernacular and the role of class (intellectual privilege) in the making of outer representations of vernacular linguistic values. When I was an undergrad at the National University of Mexico (UNAM) I read Ivan Illich’s "Vernacular Values.” (http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Illich/Vernacular.html) Illich attempts to establish historiographic references, narrative lights, to look at the vernacular experience. As suggested by Malcolm, I will go back to Dunbar to try to find an intellectual encounter between the afro tradition and the hispanic one. I am more interested in facilitating, or finding, inter-ethnic encounters than in narrating heteronormative modernities. That is how an immigrant thinks and feels!
Since our last class I've been reflecting more on blackness & boundaries (aesthetic, disciplinary, binary, what-have-you) and the affordances different genres of thinking/working can provide. In some ways these concerns are old-hat; in other ways they seem central to the questions which have been recurring in class. What can vernacular do that dialect can't? What can a poem on the page do that a poem read aloud can't? What can Young's project do that Harvey's can't? And, of course, vice-versa.
This emphasis on representation's “how” (rather than its “what”) is fitting. “Blackness,” as an object of study within these last few classes, has been largely aesthetic (the visual splendor of Beyonce and Kendrick Lamar) and process-oriented (storying, the act of...). That is, it's a continually molded/renewed entity that is most legible where it's most stylized (Kendrick's Afrimpton) or reproduced (Beyonce's evoking of the Black Panthers). Because I believe blackness is itself a “how,” this is the mode of analysis I prefer. But I've been thinking about the thinkpieces (ha) produced in the wake of Beyonce's video/performance, as well as the ones I imagine exist or nearly existed about Kendrick’s, and wondering what differentiates that type of genre and labor from our own. It's a question whose answer seems obvious, and yet I imagine that answer, as well as the affordances we’d claim this boundary allows us when interacting with blackness or “black art” specifically, might surface differently across the disciplines of our class.
Post-Class Response I’m still really interested Young’s idea of storying as a way of connecting literary art forms. As I was working on my midterm project and looking at hip-hop (more specifically rap) across various locales of the African Diaspora, one common discussion I observed related to the ways in which rap lyrics originate from the West African tradition of oral stories. If we consider storying as a way of embellishing truth to connect to a more universal feeling of black displacement within literature, then, rap serves as a prime example of how storying is communicated through musicality. One thing I noticed while listening to music from other countries (such as Canada, Ghana, Senegal, and South Africa) one word was universally used: “nigga.” Initially I was intrigued by its place within the various lyrics as the term has close connotations with African American culture. But, then, in thinking about the way in which storying is aesthetically useful through engaging with history, perhaps in using a black vernacular like “nigga” serves as bridge throughout the Black Atlantic experience can communicates a larger, internationally woven story.
Each week, I try to bridge my own understanding as a sociologist/social scientist with the traditions of English literature. This is something I'm interested in doing for my own interests, but also as we move to being more interdisciplinary. Race is a subject that is incredibility interdisciplinary because so many aspects of the identity are tied together and Blackness is so massive that it would be impossible to fit into one small cup of a discipline.
ReplyDeleteThis is a long way around to the point I want to make this week when thinking about Zora Neale Hurston. First, she's my most favorite social scientist, but she's also important to literature through her work of Their Eyes Were Watching God. For the first time this summer I heard one of the students I was working with refer to it as an ethnography, I immediately scoffed at the idea since I've always known it as a fiction book, but I started to interrogate why I was so put off by the idea that it could be true or attempt to ignore the fact that the book has pieces of truth from her work as a field researcher. This unique blend of ethnography and literature seems to be something that we can look into further since so many of the people we have read about (both musicians, including Kendrick Lamar, and writers) often blend themselves into the work in which you don't really know how true or how false something is. As long as the point gets across, does it matter how storying is unique for blacks in America? In sociology we have this thing about getting to the truth as closest as possible, to the point that I have been interested in observing the FB/Twitter of my respondents, but the "truth" of whether things happened and how they happened may not be the story and instead the way people speak about their experiences need to be a major point in how I write up my own fieldwork.
-Candice C.R.
One thing I keep going back to in response to last week’s reading and our discussion is Kevin Young’s assertion that “Rather than try to capture true speech, Dunbar uses both Standard English and black vernacular to question any poem’s relation to language” (104). This idea fascinates me. On the one hand, I’m drawn to the idea of language being used as a form itself, and how Young likens it to the use of meter in poetry—nobody speaks in meter the way nobody speaks in dialect. The artificial nature of both are intertwined. This has been pretty much the basis for how I’ve taught freshman comp this year, having my students look at poems that blend language and how that blending of language works formally, hand-in-hand with the content. This assertion also seems to be a sort of remedy for how Young notes “Dialect denies the sly, understated, submerged, and shifting qualities of actual African American vernacular” (100). It answers the question of whether Dunbar’s use of dialect fails to represent the actual speech of Black folks in America by stating that this was never really his intention, but rather that Dunbar’s goals were formal (this also brings back our discussion on Hughes’s reading of his own work, bringing up the possibility that he doesn’t read the dialect on the page because it’s an artificial speech).
ReplyDeleteHowever, I’m wondering about what the implications of this statement are. If Dunbar isn’t interested in trying to represent African American speech on the page, then what are the implications for the people his writing is ultimately going to represent, the “lowly” people that Young evokes numerous times in this chapter? One of the powers of poetry is that it constitutes a form of representation. If Dunbar is using dialect as a formal tool, how is that representation complicated? Surely, as Young points out, as much pressure should go on readers contemporary to Dunbar to realize his use of dialect, but at the same time does Dunbar risk further taking a voice away from people who don’t have one as opposed to giving it to them?
I keep thinking about Mary Lou Williams and the essence of Williams that Yona Harvey channeled in her poetry, and I keep thinking about the (black) female artist and the levels to which that identity has been occluded or unrecognized in history—or at minimum overshadowed by their male counterparts. I look forward to learning more about that in classes to come. I realized that my mental image when I think of the words blues and jazz is defaulted at images of men. It is so interesting to think about the resultant rhetoric surrounding Kendrick’s performance versus Beyonce’s and the different ways in which we discuss their respected artistry, and thus their activism. For my midterm project I focused on male-identified queer artists in contemporary black music, and I’m looking forward to continuing to challenge the visibility of all players involved throughout the semester.
ReplyDeleteI am also interested in vernacular and the role of class (intellectual privilege) in the making of outer representations of vernacular linguistic values. When I was an undergrad at the National University of Mexico (UNAM) I read Ivan Illich’s "Vernacular Values.” (http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Illich/Vernacular.html) Illich attempts to establish historiographic references, narrative lights, to look at the vernacular experience. As suggested by Malcolm, I will go back to Dunbar to try to find an intellectual encounter between the afro tradition and the hispanic one. I am more interested in facilitating, or finding, inter-ethnic encounters than in narrating heteronormative modernities. That is how an immigrant thinks and feels!
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete
ReplyDeleteSince our last class I've been reflecting more on blackness & boundaries (aesthetic, disciplinary, binary, what-have-you) and the affordances different genres of thinking/working can provide. In some ways these concerns are old-hat; in other ways they seem central to the questions which have been recurring in class. What can vernacular do that dialect can't? What can a poem on the page do that a poem read aloud can't? What can Young's project do that Harvey's can't? And, of course, vice-versa.
This emphasis on representation's “how” (rather than its “what”) is fitting. “Blackness,” as an object of study within these last few classes, has been largely aesthetic (the visual splendor of Beyonce and Kendrick Lamar) and process-oriented (storying, the act of...). That is, it's a continually molded/renewed entity that is most legible where it's most stylized (Kendrick's Afrimpton) or reproduced (Beyonce's evoking of the Black Panthers). Because I believe blackness is itself a “how,” this is the mode of analysis I prefer. But I've been thinking about the thinkpieces (ha) produced in the wake of Beyonce's video/performance, as well as the ones I imagine exist or nearly existed about Kendrick’s, and wondering what differentiates that type of genre and labor from our own. It's a question whose answer seems obvious, and yet I imagine that answer, as well as the affordances we’d claim this boundary allows us when interacting with blackness or “black art” specifically, might surface differently across the disciplines of our class.
Post-Class Response
ReplyDeleteI’m still really interested Young’s idea of storying as a way of connecting literary art forms. As I was working on my midterm project and looking at hip-hop (more specifically rap) across various locales of the African Diaspora, one common discussion I observed related to the ways in which rap lyrics originate from the West African tradition of oral stories. If we consider storying as a way of embellishing truth to connect to a more universal feeling of black displacement within literature, then, rap serves as a prime example of how storying is communicated through musicality. One thing I noticed while listening to music from other countries (such as Canada, Ghana, Senegal, and South Africa) one word was universally used: “nigga.” Initially I was intrigued by its place within the various lyrics as the term has close connotations with African American culture. But, then, in thinking about the way in which storying is aesthetically useful through engaging with history, perhaps in using a black vernacular like “nigga” serves as bridge throughout the Black Atlantic experience can communicates a larger, internationally woven story.