Kindle Notes & Highlights
double consciousness is experienced by any person who does not share the racial, cultural, physical, or sexual identity of her nation’s majority,
YES!
Our sense of being “othered” is essentially relational, as these other selves come into view when witnessed by particular audiences.
The Vanishing Race was a common literary and visual trope in American literature because it excused and encouraged American expansion westward;
the Vanishing Race trope allowed for and encouraged the work of White artists to document the pain, suffering, death, and disappearance of Native peoples:
Racist metaphors negate agency; they require a singular and dehumanizing vision of the raced person,
some metaphors offer the reader more nuance and complexity than others when it comes to depicting people on the page, because some metaphors do not substantiate racist hierarchies and meanings even as they may recognize racial difference.
my identity in America is both seen and unseen, present and absent, native and foreign all at once.
good writing, which shapes characters from figurative generalities while also resisting stereotypes or caricature.
White people do not have to struggle to separate their self-perception from pervasive negative stereotypes of them that are widely and historically held, and also institutionally enforced.
the transcultural or racial hoax is the worst form of cultural appropriation,
If I praise the fake while simultaneously downplaying the work of people of color, I privilege the White writer’s imagination with having a cultural power that exceeds that of the non-White one.
Sadly, fakes are inevitable when we fetishize difference
Authors are encouraged by publishers to present their personalities as extensions of their books, thus authors have also become literary commodities,
If my only response to work that imaginatively fails is to say that the writer is racist or sexist or ableist, that is an attempt to end a more complicated discussion about appropriation by slapping a label
Because the fact is, at some point or other, each of us will be on the receiving end of criticism, and each of us needs the painful opportunity to change.
Calling in. Yes!!
Whiteness can put on and take off masks while the mask remains firmly glued to the face of the person of color.
I hope you can understand the difference between deliberately activated racist speech and speech that engages thoughtlessly in racism; it’s like the distinction between pornography and a story that includes a badly written passage about sex.
the strange reality of people is that they can express both racist and anti-racist ideas, even in the same conversation;
Literary texts, too, move between racist and anti-racist sentiments, and trying to classify a text or author solely as “racist” or “not racist” forces us to make reductive determinations
I have to learn how to confront language that distresses me and not feel my world crumble but solidify in response to it.
Being able to identify that a text contains more than one possibility of reading and critique gave me a greater command over my own imagination.
Morton argues that we might approach reading the work of dead writers we don’t politically agree with as a kind of time machine that lets us walk into the writer’s world,
OMG my masters thesis!!!
By doing this, Morton says, we are not only prepared to see the differences in our beliefs, we might even be able to parse out some of the complexities these writers’ moral failings offer us as readers.
Faulkner’s own opinions about race changed dramatically over his life.
an argument that may strike us now as too conservative, even as Faulkner also showed more compassion and insight into Dilsey’s experience than most other White Southern writers could demonstrate at the time.
Faulkner struggled with racist thinking, in ways that might be both profoundly familiar and unfamiliar to you.
Place Faulkner in this context, and you might gain a more nuanced appreciation for his ideas about the South and African Americans; you can certainly start to see where his ideas about race were both imitative and innovative.
At first, reading through my contemporary lens and values, I could only see it as a failure.
I could see where Hemingway swallowed the Vanishing Race trope whole,
while “Indian Camp” is a racist depiction of Native identity, it’s also an example of how pervasive the Vanishing Race trope once was.
the Native characters in “Indian Camp” don’t teach us anything about being indigenous, but they do teach us a lot about how Whiteness in literature has constructed itself in reaction to its ideas of indigeneity.
Students, perhaps taught The Call of the Wild or “To Build a Fire” in middle school, are stunned to see a well-regarded author like London deploying such racist images, and stunned further to learn that his sentiments were common
London’s story gives my students a context for how to read later writing by Asian American writers around labor, immigration, and even speculative fiction itself.
all texts have both literary and cultural value, and that “value” itself is just as dependent on historical meaning and intertextual connection as much as on aesthetic interest,
My argument around context and cultural studies gets made every thirty years or so, as we readjust our critical understanding of race and representation, and with it our ideas of canonicity and inclusion.
How else will writers like you innovate and expand your representational and publication practices without some critical pressure?
Do you require that authors write socially approved depictions of race, or will you also accept realistic reactions people have about race, which means that at some level there is a value in reading work that expresses racist sentiments? If appropriation can be more than the performance of racial stereotypes and meanings, can you teach yourself to be tolerant of it as a literary practice, while also challenging how some have used appropriation to highlight the socially constructed aspects of racial identity in ways that only benefit the White imagination? In what ways can appropriation allow
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QUESTIONS TO ASK YOURSELF
“The Change” led to a nationwide call for poets and writers to articulate their ideas about Whiteness,
I clearly remember the debate circling Hoagland’s poem when it first appeared, and the ways many writers—White and non-White—tried to defend the poem on the basis of its honesty. “Honesty,” however, was the last word that came to my mind after reading it again.
The speaker’s racist imagery is simply dropped on the page. The poem refuses to interrogate this imagery
Smith’s poem takes a reviled person and uses what has diminished him as a source of compassionate connection. Hoagland, in contrast, seems to have no sense of what constrains him. Hoagland’s speaker’s class and gender are implied but unexamined
Hoagland’s sentiments are casually expressed, and in that, unearned.
“The Change” is a provocation masquerading as an intimate examination of one’s racism,
What had changed, really? And what has not changed? How is it we are continually moving and yet staying in place, both at the same time?
I can use my art to put different ideas and values in contention with one another. Literature offers me the space for dissent, not just thoughtless replication, and it is this complexity that comprises literature’s most transgressive force,
we may find that appropriation helps us to critique the very systems that fail to represent us.
We know what appropriation ethically risks, but what might it also ethically reward?
over time, nearly all texts can be de-authored and de-cultured.
It strikes me that if we dismiss appropriation as solely a colonial practice or the reification of stereotypes about others, we miss how appropriation may reinforce positive values and clarify aesthetics we already hold within ourselves.
perhaps we shouldn’t want to appropriate all symbols, but fight instead to preserve certain objects’ original authorship and context.
