The Gates piece caused me to think the most this week. One phrase that caught my attention and I just can't seem to forget is "The slave narratives, taken together, represent the attempt of blacks to write themselves into being (1897)." I never thought about anyone writing themselves into being. I have heard argument after argument about "race" and "superiority"; but this really is fascinating to me. This made me think about literature in a whole new light.
Doesn't any author try to 'write themselves into being'? That is the purpose of writing, I think. However, for slaves during the 17th and 18th centuries, they seemed to have a lot more on the line. To have to prove their humanity, their intelligence, their 'being' is crazy. But, the irony lies in the next few lines: Accused of having no collective history by Hegel, blacks effectively responded by publishing hundreds of individual histories which functioned as the part standing for the whole (1897). How powerful that is - to make your history known when no one wanted to know it. This ties to Bhabha's essay on page 297, "Foucault stresses that the relations of knowledge and power within the apparatus are always a strategic response to an urgent need at a given historical moment...that the force of colonial discourse a theoretical and political intervention, was the need, in our contemporary moment, to contest singularities of difference and to articulate modes of differentiation."
All of this consistently reinforces what I think: those who have knowledge have power; and once a person has power, he or she has control and can cause positive or negative change. Persuasion is no longer really an art form, but a strategy for survival. Knowledge, especially in this class, is the spoken or written word. If an individual can successfully communicate and convey a message in a particular discourse community, then that individual can move mountains. The perfect audience is only perfect when the speaker knows what he or she is up against. I may not like Derrida, but I do like what Gates included on page 1901, "We must master...'how to speak the other's language without renouncing (our) own.'" Knowledge and power - power and control.
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That idea of writing oneself into existence caught my eye too. I wondered (and still do, I guess) about other groups of people who had to (or have to) legitimize their social or artistic presence by writing TO the dominating class.
ReplyDeleteI guess this is what comp. courses do in a sense, but more in terms of language, not really legitimizing the presence and input of a specfic group of people.
I agree that we do write ourselves into being, if only for the simple reason of getting your thoughts organized and out of your head. This phrase reminds me of the common motto: "I think therefore I am." Same concept.
ReplyDeleteHow important has it become for someone to "invent" him/herself? How else can they do it except by writing, and by doing so, they create their own history. I love it! I need to write myself a GREAT history!
ReplyDeleteYour comment about writing your history 'when no one wanted to read it' is apt for postcolonialism as we sometimes fail to note when we are complicit in the structures we are upholding. Gates notes that "Hegel, echoing Hume and Kant, noted the absence of history among black people and derided them for failing to develop indigenous African scripts, or even master the art of writing in modern languages" (1899). As we are increasingly more critical of our own language and actions, we can recognize how outrageous some of these philosopher's claims are - but we may still unconsciously side with the prevailing dominant forces (i.e. "no one" wanted to read black history, or white Europeans did not want to read black history?).
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