Author: Mengliu Cheng

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.