Posted by Glenn Jackson at Friday, November 11, 2011 8:58:33 PM EST
Kennedy, “Re-membering White Privilege” (http://cccc-blog.blogspot.com/2010_07_01_archive.html
I think that the reason the Kennedy's discussion of /Forrest Gump/ stalled after twenty or thirty minutes is that the questions weren’t very good. I mean, they weren’t all that deep… it’s been an awfully long time since I saw that movie once, but there is much more there than those questions. I don’t think we can dignify racist and anti-racist considerations in this film. It was better than that. I do think that when discussing rhetoric and memory, though, /Forrest Gump/ is a pretty good choice. It shows the way one fictitious character, in a sort of magical realist style, can intervene in and influence all history for his lifetime. In a similar discussion, I might use Rebecca West’s Return of the Soldier, which would take less time to read than watching FG.
Now what do we do with a classroom full of students who could watch that film and think it is a documentary? (It’s a stretch, but I’m hoping they meant it was a documentary of the 20th century, pulling together many significant American events with a single fictional protagonist.) I have an equally mortifying statistic I heard this week: Pregnancy rates went down nationally when the computer game Call of Duty 2 was released. Is it really rhetorical memory if people think FG and JFK are documentaries?
Regarding Royster, "When the First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own":
I think African Americans are usually a cultural group rather than an ethnic group. She’s talking about the double-consciousness in Du Bois, and she talks about it in terms of voice. Du Bois’ voice was carefully considered, but he talks more about mode of address and style. She also talks about Langston Hughes. She is interested in his work, “Not just as simple stories to delight and entertain but as vital players in a transformative process.” I personally like Langston Hughes best in a story like “Salvation,” where he writes like Mark Twain. Shall I think of them both as ethnic voices? Royster wants to “Listen and learn to speak without clenching my teeth.” When she writes in a different and less formal tone, her friend tells her that she has never heard her talk like that, ‘like in your real voice.’ It sounds to me like that person who complimented the author was already speaking very carefully about Royster speaking. I do very much like her last rhetorical question, “What would we say if we valued someone other than ourselves having a turn to speak”? she asks. I would assert that in writing, there is seldom a dialogue. The rule is not “‘you talk, I talk,’” it’s --I, the author, talk.—
I have thought very much in the last few years about non-minorities teaching minority literature. The first trope which bothers me is filing great works full of great words in a minority file. Great literature is great—it’s not merely confessional, it’s not just identity politics. I believe that if the genre we call the “blues novel” was not marginalized as African American literature (or even Kentucky literature, in the case of Gayle Jones) or 20-21st century post-PoMo, it might be taken at face value. Its face value is worth considering. I have always chewed over the situation of a friend of mine here at UK, a dedicated Ph.D. candidate, a white male, who both studies and teaches African American literature every semester. He is most knowledgeable, attentive, and enthusiastic about his work. I can’t help but think he lacks “street cred” when he walks in on the first day—white, male, suburban, and adhering to the words of black consciousness through the eyes of The Man. I can’t forget, though, that he’s not non-black. First he’s a scholar, and second he is a member of the majority. That gives him a certain objectivity on the matter. (Perhaps it would be better if he was a transgender Latino.) As it stands, though, when he walks in to convey his enthusiasm on the first and last days of class, he has a chance to speak as an audience member. He can tell the students that he likes this literature because it’s great, not because it holds some prestige status compared to other works in the minority canon. Maybe it matters that he’s also teaching to a class that’s less than half black. He’s speaking to some of his people about the finest writing from another people. He’s teaching to part of the audience of Hughes and Du Bois and Ralph Ellison, and he’s doing it with a real, arbitrary knowledge that speaks to his identity, not his racial makeup.
I think that the reason the Kennedy's discussion of /Forrest Gump/ stalled after twenty or thirty minutes is that the questions weren’t very good. I mean, they weren’t all that deep… it’s been an awfully long time since I saw that movie once, but there is much more there than those questions. I don’t think we can dignify racist and anti-racist considerations in this film. It was better than that. I do think that when discussing rhetoric and memory, though, /Forrest Gump/ is a pretty good choice. It shows the way one fictitious character, in a sort of magical realist style, can intervene in and influence all history for his lifetime. In a similar discussion, I might use Rebecca West’s Return of the Soldier, which would take less time to read than watching FG.
Now what do we do with a classroom full of students who could watch that film and think it is a documentary? (It’s a stretch, but I’m hoping they meant it was a documentary of the 20th century, pulling together many significant American events with a single fictional protagonist.) I have an equally mortifying statistic I heard this week: Pregnancy rates went down nationally when the computer game Call of Duty 2 was released. Is it really rhetorical memory if people think FG and JFK are documentaries?
Regarding Royster, "When the First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own":
I think African Americans are usually a cultural group rather than an ethnic group. She’s talking about the double-consciousness in Du Bois, and she talks about it in terms of voice. Du Bois’ voice was carefully considered, but he talks more about mode of address and style. She also talks about Langston Hughes. She is interested in his work, “Not just as simple stories to delight and entertain but as vital players in a transformative process.” I personally like Langston Hughes best in a story like “Salvation,” where he writes like Mark Twain. Shall I think of them both as ethnic voices? Royster wants to “Listen and learn to speak without clenching my teeth.” When she writes in a different and less formal tone, her friend tells her that she has never heard her talk like that, ‘like in your real voice.’ It sounds to me like that person who complimented the author was already speaking very carefully about Royster speaking. I do very much like her last rhetorical question, “What would we say if we valued someone other than ourselves having a turn to speak”? she asks. I would assert that in writing, there is seldom a dialogue. The rule is not “‘you talk, I talk,’” it’s --I, the author, talk.—
I have thought very much in the last few years about non-minorities teaching minority literature. The first trope which bothers me is filing great works full of great words in a minority file. Great literature is great—it’s not merely confessional, it’s not just identity politics. I believe that if the genre we call the “blues novel” was not marginalized as African American literature (or even Kentucky literature, in the case of Gayle Jones) or 20-21st century post-PoMo, it might be taken at face value. Its face value is worth considering. I have always chewed over the situation of a friend of mine here at UK, a dedicated Ph.D. candidate, a white male, who both studies and teaches African American literature every semester. He is most knowledgeable, attentive, and enthusiastic about his work. I can’t help but think he lacks “street cred” when he walks in on the first day—white, male, suburban, and adhering to the words of black consciousness through the eyes of The Man. I can’t forget, though, that he’s not non-black. First he’s a scholar, and second he is a member of the majority. That gives him a certain objectivity on the matter. (Perhaps it would be better if he was a transgender Latino.) As it stands, though, when he walks in to convey his enthusiasm on the first and last days of class, he has a chance to speak as an audience member. He can tell the students that he likes this literature because it’s great, not because it holds some prestige status compared to other works in the minority canon. Maybe it matters that he’s also teaching to a class that’s less than half black. He’s speaking to some of his people about the finest writing from another people. He’s teaching to part of the audience of Hughes and Du Bois and Ralph Ellison, and he’s doing it with a real, arbitrary knowledge that speaks to his identity, not his racial makeup.
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