Below are my responses to this week's readings! Sorry for the monster post.
Higginbotham, “The Metalanguage of Race;” Barkley Brown, “What Has Happened Here”
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham and Elsa Barkley Brown both identify a problem inherent in the study of feminism, or women’s study: by focusing so strongly on the experience and voice of a single, under-represented identity group, these studies risk eliding, ignoring, or even losing the differentiations and the disparate identities within that group. Women’s studies lumps all women into a single group that has had “women’s” experiences—regardless of the fact that women come from all different classes, races, ethnicities, religions, and sexual orientations. Regardless of their disparate backgrounds, these women are defined solely by their gender, and, in many cases, the only women’s voices that are heard are those of elite or middle class educated white women. The issue that both articles recognize is the “noise” that results from such a frenzy of these different identities, even within a single category.
These authors both seek to address how modern feminist studies deal with this “noise,” and the problems that result from the ways in which modern scholars deal with—or ignore—this “noise.” Higginbotham in some way sets up Barkley Brown’s article, defining the kind of “noise” that occurs within the group of “women,” and examining how scholars have exacerbated problems by alternately trying to address the “noise” or sweep it under the carpet—she deftly incorporates the works of such thinkers as even Bakhtin in laying the foundation for this problem. The primary example of dissonance that Higginbotham addresses is the discrepancy between the experiences of white women and black women: the modern study of feminism or gender in many ways imposes the experience of white women onto black women, assuming a common experience because these groups are both women. But there is no question that black women and white women have had radically different formative experiences, both historically and in the course of each individual’s lifetime. Black women’s studies, it seems, is a completely different discipline from white women’s studies—which has long been the norm. But Higginbotham problematizes that division even further: black women are no more a single united group than women are. Differences in social status fragment black women into even smaller cross-sections, and it is both ignorant and presumptuous to treat black women as a single block with a common experience. Higginbotham ends by calling for a conscious problematization of the studies of groups we take to be minorities or under-represented: in many cases we are in fact eliding their true identities in favor of blanket truths.
Barkley Brown picks up from where Higginbotham left off: she recognizes this “noise” and the dissonance it causes. But Barkley Brown argues that this dissonance has led to such a fragmentation of women’s studies that, for instance, the study of elite white women and poor black women no longer resemble each other in any discernible way at all, leaving “vacuum” spaces in between, and leaving us to assume that we experience society, our lives, and our identities in isolation. Barkley Brown does not wish to eradicate this “noise,” but wishes to incorporate it into our understandings of women’s studies as a whole, or racial studies as a whole. Barkley Brown demonstrates this dissonance largely in generalities: black women in the intercity, in general, find themselves out of work because jobs have moved out of urban centers. White women, in general, tend to follow those jobs and work in the private sector. Clearly Barkley Brown has done research to discover these trends, and clearly she has researched the historiographical trends in women’s studies, but any acknowledgment of that research appears only in her extensive endnotes. Barkley Brown’s conversational tone mirrors the somewhat problematic simile she employs to frame her argument: unlike a structured, formal piece of Classical music, it mimics a jazz piece in its informality and conversational tone. But where good jazz acknowledges that its foundation lies in classical music, Barkley Brown chooses to sideline the traditions of scholarship that preceded her in presenting her discussion of the problem of “noise” in gender studies.
Atha Fong; “Ma Rainey”
Atha Fong writes with two great advantages: a fluid prose style and a clear understanding of the corpus of Ma Rainey’s work. Both of these allow her to craft an argument that is easy to follow and well-substantiated by examples from Rainey’s life and works. In her introduction, Fong offers a meticulous and extremely helpful but possibly pedantic prospectus of her argument and its structure, even going so far as to outright explain, “this paper is also in conversation with the more general analyses of race and gender in Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s ‘African American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race’ and Darlene Clark Hine’s ‘Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West’.” But other than a brief summary sentence of Higginbotham’s and Hine’s discussion immediately afterward, Fong makes little overt reference to these articles’ more theoretical analyses.
That being said, Fong offers a very cogent discussion of Ma Rainey’s success, and the reasons for and factors in her success—she discusses the traditions of Rainey’s predecessors and the contemporary context that allowed Rainey to come to the limelight. This paper is a case study, and a very successful case study, but it is not the kind of theoretical analysis that Fong hints in the beginning that it might be.
But this case study, detailed and well-researched though it is, verges on panegyric. Fong reinforces with extremely thorough and vividly descriptive detail the ways in which Rainey was successful, talented, and popular, and the reasons for her success and popularity. But it is only as an afterthought that she acknowledges that Rainey may have in fact served to reinforce racial stereotypes—which is a question that lurks in the back of the reader’s mind for a long time before Fong tangentially and dismissively addresses it.
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