11/12, Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison

My impression is that the Africanist presence in mainstream American literature is rooted more in anti-blackness than anything else. Morrison describes how Americanness is constructed in response to Africanism. A part of this is also drawing from some antiracist ideas, that whiteness is itself constructed through anti-blackness. Morrison goes on to describe how criticism engages in a form of White Talk, especially engaged in color-blindness. She lists a number of works which explicitly engage with blackness and how that blackness is invisibilized by the White Listening Ear (more the White Reading Eye in this case?). I understand this perception of the American literary canon as more indicative of how Americanness (and thereby whiteness) interacts with Africanism than the American literary canon itself. 

Tangent: Storytime. Zora Neale Hurston used Black English in her work. Modernists loved to co-opt Black English for their work. Zora Neale Hurston engaged with a lot of features of Modernism. Zora Neale Hurston was not considered a Modernist then and is only rarely considered a Modernist now. 

Morrison describes the construction of an Africanist presence within a work as a meditation on one's self. I understand this as being the authors' meditation, but that understanding I find somewhat dissonant with my own experiences as a writer. It's a hard statement to argue, though. Writing is inherently a meditation on one's self. When I write, I am expressing myself. Then, how is Morrison's observation here useful then? If my writing is a meditation on myself, how is my writing's construction of an Africanist presence different? Maybe Morrison's idea is useful for de-mythologizing and reading that Africanist presence in texts, a guide for how to understand it and why it shouldn't be invisibilized. But, then, isn't it pretty unconvincing? Why should we then not treat this Africanist presence like any other feature of writing? If it's reasonable to claim that the curtains are just blue, then maybe it's just as reasonable to claim this character is just black, and I think just silly.

Seeing how we read a work by Toni Morrison in which she mentioned Recitatif, that's my resource for today. One of my favorite short stories, and a great mentor text to investigate race in literature.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

11/26/23, "Trends in Literary Trauma Theory," Balaev

 I want to start by saying that I am a fundamentally traumatized person. I don't feel the need to recount any of my traumas to prove that, just trust me when I say this is true.  I understand this essay as characterizing making trauma speakable as a fundamental product of healing. I don't disagree with it, but it must be informed by the fact that its subject is trauma novels. The trauma must be speakable because it has been spoken. However, I feel as though I have recovered from trauma that I cannot speak. I can point towards them (hypothetical ex: reading was made harder for me due to a traumatic experience involving my teacher in 3rd grade and now reading is not harder for me) but I cannot describe the trauma (the hypothetical traumatic experience with my 3rd grade teacher). I feel like many progressives view trauma as unrecoverable from and unchallengeable. I can point at countless discourses or discursive techniques for this, but the one strongest in my mind is "Someon
Read more

10/29/23, Critical Encounter in Secondary English (Chapter 8: Postmodernism)

 I think that this chapter's concerns about the fallout of deconstruction is a little silly. The crisis caused by saying "this text might not have a specific meaning" is a good and important one to spur in a classroom. Britzman writes that deconstruction "called into question the foundations of their personal identities and core beliefs," and I think that exact questioning is essential to critically developing one's own identities and beliefs (125). If I did not constantly deconstruct myself, I would be a worse and more miserable person. To not question the foundations of one's personal identities and core beliefs is both a mark of power - I have to  constantly evaluate how being a trans woman affects how I exist in the world to just stay safe, whereas I do not have to  do the same for being white - and a missed opportunity for growth. I think you could handle introducing deconstruction better. I would like to introduce it further from the end of the sem
Read more

10/1, Critical Encounters in Secondary English

 I first want to speak to this text's (current) irrelevance to me: my student teaching placement is currently focused much more on writing than on reading and the reading within the classroom seems primarily interested in thinking a New Critical approach, focused on the features of writing which students can use within their writing. This is not to say that it is irrelevant to my future career, just mostly irrelevant within my current context. Anyways, I think this is awesome. I want to point out lenses that are missing and can be really impactful to implement in a variety of texts which are also still relatively accessible to students: queer theory, disability theory, theory of hegemony, and technically new criticism but I think that's much more present in the secondary classroom anyways. This is sort of just "hey these schools of thought are always undervalued in general literature classrooms, and this continues to do so" but also books sometimes need to be smaller
Read more