Month: October 2017

Hannah Borenstein

Like Maggie, I also found myself a bit surprised both at the size of the task that Brock, Kvasny, and Kayla Hales set to take on in their paper. The permutations of their analyses – using cultural capital, technical capital, and Black feminist theory discourses – alongside three different forms – seemed limiting in such a small space. Deep readings and extrapolations to other instances, not just in response to the discourse following the Helena Andrew’s article, felt like there was much left to be desired. I do think they opened up an important door to thinking about the emergent spaces in which the deficit models of minority information are upset is an important intervention. However, what I would have liked to have seen them grapple with more, is what happens when stock characters are created, and when capitalist forms of ICT cloud subaltern struggles.

Americannah is the perfect text to explore these questions because, firstly, it engages the question of opening up online spaces for shared experiences through Ifemelu, but also, because Chimamnda Ngozi Adichie, has become such an essential in both literary and popular discourse.

To the first point, I think the importance of online spaces that support Brock, et al’s claim, that “articulation of cultural touchpoints promoting a more diverse set of beliefs will raise ICT participation rates” (1057) is extremely well-exemplified when Ifemelu tries to fix her hair falling out. Curt doesn’t understand or take her sadness seriously, and so she texts Wambui. “Wambui’s reply came minutes later: Go online. HappilyKinkyNappy.com It’s this natural hair community. You’ll find inspiration” (259). What’s telling about this passage is not just what we learn a few pages later – that Wambui is right, and that this website has, for Ifemelu conversations, ideas, recommendations, etc., on how to think about and cope with her hair – but the swiftness of Wambui’s response. Not only does this online world of conversational productivity exist for women unrepresented in mainstream beauty magazines, but Wambui’s ready knowledge and sharing of it indicates that this is a space in which these conversations are already established. Of course Curt, and pretty much all white people, would have no idea that conversations related to black women’s hair would exist, undercutting the notion that various underserved populations are accessing the virtues of the open web (Brock, et al 1041).

However, as Maggie points out, Ifemelu, who we know participates in this online world, passes up an opportunity to make money from her blogging. Because this online world has become so embedded in the spirit of capitalism – when bloggers get a certain amount of visits, or action on their websites, they can turn a profit – we also have to consider how capital can be diverted.

Perhaps I think this through Adichie as a figure because of an article that popped up, of course, on my twitter account just a few days ago. In April Sisonke Msimang’s post on Africa is a Country entitled “All your faves are problematic: A brief history of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, stanning and the trap of #blackgirlmagic” (http://africasacountry.com/2017/04/all-your-faves-are-problematic-a-brief-history-of-chimamanda-ngozi-adichie-stanning-and-the-trap-of-blackgirlmagic/)

The post is basically about Adichie’s rise to extreme fame and the implications of when one person gains such a high level of (cultural and technical) capital that they stand in to be overly representative. Adichie has become, many argue, something of a spokesperson on issues regarding race, feminism, and conceptions of Africa, throughout the years, despite having what many agree are some problematic views (particularly surrounding an issue of an insensitive statement she made about trans-women. While of course alternative online spaces proliferate around such a figure, question of subaltern status must emerge here. This may be a bit controversial and I’ll just leave this here but I do think Adichie is a very particular figure, undoubtedly the most famous we’ve read this semester, but we should be thinking about what gaining a certain level of cultural, technical and economical capital means in the context of this week’s readings.

Microaggressions: Straightforward or Oblique?

Caroline Levine’s article on Americanah presents Ifemelu and Obinze as two characters who learn to defamiliarize themselves from the dishonest and hypocritical social (infra)structures around them. What I’m wondering about, though, is how our own reading practices of a novel like Americanah may prevent us from fully engaging with the de-familiarizing experiences of Ifemelu and Obinze, especially if we haven’t shared those experiences ourselves.

In the first half of the book, Ifemelu experiences a number of disconcerting microaggressions in America. A white guy with dreadlocks tells her on the train that race no longer matters as a social issue; Ifemelu’s first roommates give her snide racialized comments about Africa; the carpet cleaner is hostile when he thinks Ifemelu is the owner of the house she’s babysitting at. In our previous class we talked about the perceived dubiousness or unreliability of microaggressions (i.e. the recipient of a microaggression casting doubt on their own perception), but the point of these racial incidents in Americanah seems to be that they are actually rather egregious: a liberal, reasonably socially aware reader of these passages is in some ways prompted to feel a kind of “shock” or at least a disapproval of what happened, seeing the incident ‘through Ifemelu’s eyes’ as opposed to the oblivious microaggressor. Might the white liberal reader who never experiences microaggressions be trained through this reading experience into a kind of defamiliarization? Or does this reader, in keeping with the unreliable perception of microaggressions, rather cast doubt on Ifemelu’s perception or on perhaps the reliability of the novel itself? I can see a situation where the reader thinks, “These microaggressions are so stereotypical that of course Adichie would put them all into the life of one person so that she can make her point; but we also think it is improbable for someone to experience this level or amount of microaggression within the given time span”).

This kind of reading casts doubt precisely on the “plain language” Adichie uses for her descriptions, associating straightforwardness with a “selectivity” of realist information that distributes attention and resources unequally, in line with Susan Stewart’s critique of realism (Levine, 4). I suppose the suspicion of microaggression could work in line with a Eurocentric modernist reading practice that eschews plain language but likewise fails to defamiliarize readers from deadening habits of ‘color-blind’ perception.

I do realize that I may be invoking this counter-reading without basis, but I also think it is worth bringing up because Adichie’s realism feels in some ways so familiar to us that, from the perspective of modernism, “stereotypes” like microaggressions abound, and as ‘modernist readers’ we are supposed to recognize this stereotypicality and either “make something new” from it (in the traditional modernist sense) or make a performance of it (a la Flarf and conceptual poetry, for example).

Like Maggie, I am also intrigued by Ifemelu’s “automatic blogging impulse“. “>And what seems interesting to me is that, Ifemelu’s blog-writing is, like that of most bloggers on the internet, an audience-oriented activity. That is to say, she writes with anticipation of provocative/inspiring/ amusing effects that her article may generate among her audience, and cares about the comments, so much so that she can clearly recall the number of comments one of her article once received. She is concerned with the readers of her blog, who “had always frightened and exhilarated her”(5). As Rettberge says in his essay, nowadays “the authority of blogs might not to be tie simply to who can write them, but also to who can read them”(48). And Ifmelu’s “automatic blogging impulse” seems to me like an automatic impulse to impress, or even to please.

One of the most interesting scenes I found in Americanah is when Ifemelu glances at a stranger, “surprised, mildly offended, and though it a perfect blog” and she would file it under the tag ‘race, gender and body size (6). I don’t think, according to the story about her life in Nigeria, that “gender”, “race” or “body size” are issues in the culture where she grows up, at least not in the same way Americans speak of them; and as she admits in her blogs, she learns to be sensitive to racism only after she has come to the United States. And what I see here is that Ifemelu is dissecting her experience into something that her audience in America, who are familiar with “issues”, can easily grasp. She may have been accustomed to taking race or gender or body size as lenses to view her life, given her 13 years in America, but still it seems to me that by doing that she is making personal experience into something her audience will be trilled to talk about.

I can’t tell what makes Ifemelu’s blog popular, but I sense in her narrative an emphasis on her identity as a “non-American”. It is actually demonstrated in the title of her blog: “Various Observations about American Blacks by a Non-American Blacks.” And when she says “to my fellow non-American black”(265), it seems to me that she’s not so much addressing her fellow blacks as demonstrating her own identity as a non-American black. And I suspect this is the commercial value that the Letter Magazine sees in Ifemelu’s blog: a foreigner’s perspective. I doubt her blog would be as popular if it was not about observations of the America society. Here’s my imagination of how her blog is read: for American readers, Ifemelu’s blog satisfies their curiosity of how foreigner think of them(“do they envy us?”), or resonates with their dissatisfaction toward the society, and for non-Americans, Ifemelu’s blog speaks for them. But in both cases Ifemelu seems to be reduced to only a perspective, through which people view their lives. And though as a non-American I emphasize a lot with Ifemelu, I feel it kind of frustrating that to be visible and to be heard, you may need to emphasize on your position as an outsider.

Thank you, Abigail, for starting this week’s discussion. I too, found the relationship between the text and the video very interesting. And in my opinion, the situations videos function to enhance a feeling of continuity that Rankine’s lyric evokes. In Citizen, Rankine discusses not scenes or moments of the experience with racism, but the becoming of the experience.

I thought of Henri Bergson’s theory of cinematographic mechanism when I watched the slow motion video of Zidane headbutting Materazzi and saw the instills of it inserted in the printed book.  According to Bergson, the way we perceive the world is similar to the mechanism of a motion picture. That is, we divides the reality into a series of static moments (or concepts), just in the way cinematographers divide movements into a series of pictures. We then splice the moments together and regard the product as a representation of the reality. Bergson argues that this cinematographic approach would not enable us to fully grasp the reality, and we should instead, use our intuition to understand the object of perception.

Though I don’t totally agree with Bergson’s claim that motion pictures are just collections of still pictures, I found his theory inspiring to my reading of Rankine’s Citizen. It seems to me that Rankine is concerned with describing not only the experience with racism, but the continuity of such experience. She tells the whole story of the everyday racism, how it is encountered by black people day by day, instead of depicting the most “racist’ scenes. And in her narrative there is no distinct difference between “racist” acts and “non-racist” acts; racism is a continuity, instead of moments and events that can be seperated from everyday life. For example, she goes to painstaking length to describe Serena’s experience throughout her career, her restraints of rage or the outburst of it, and she points out that “Serena’s behavior, on this particular Sunday afternoon, suggests that all the injustice she has played through all the years of her illustrious career flashes before her and she decides finally to respond to all of it with a string of invectives.” The experience with racism is a continuous process, not one moment or one event. Rankins also says in an interview that  “In the essay on Serena Williams, one of the things I loved about her is that she wasn’t always right. Sometimes she was wrong but it didn’t matter. What was controlling her behaviour was a history of transgressions against her.”  Rankine’ lyrics help us to perceive the experience with racism as something that made up of a memory of the past, a impulse in the present, and a prediction of the future.

And I think this sense of continuity is enhanced more in the situation videos, rather than the disjunctive stills in the printed book. When watching the slow motion of Zidane headbutting Materazzi we can have a feeling that every moment’s experience is connected to that of the next moment and the previous moment. The way Rankin perceive with racism is not to treat it as a concept, but to emphasize (and she encourages people to do so by her use of second person)with the those who experience racism, with intuition. And I think video serve as a good medium to evoke this sympathy and the sense of continuity.