Author: apatrick

Posted on

3/31 Discussion Questions

How did the presence of the Irish language fluctuate, in schools and in daily/social life fluctuate throughout more recent Irish history (post revival)?

I’m curious about the Bog bodies/ poems and hope we can talk more about them in class.  Is there a  connection between the idea ritualized killings and premeditated political violence? Was it a fascination with the victim status of the people? Do bodies on display as history and science loose their personhood? Is there any connection with the extremely preserved state of the bodies and the narratives of preservation we were discussing last class?

The last stanza of Punishment is really interesting, especially in how it contains the dichotomy of the civilized and the tribal. I’m trying to read how they are being used. Who is the civilized? Who is the tribal? Even when being used to make a point, does this narrative still promote othering and the idea of the “never ready” as the tribal element?

Posted on

Writing Community

I was thinking a little bit about lies after our class on Monday. I wonder if, rather than having a negative connotation, which I think we agreed wasn’t the exact way it was utilized, if calling their stories lies was more a statement of agency over the tale.  Calling it a lie gives the teller ownership and creative liberty to take and change another tale or embellish for your crowd without incurring overt questions of accuracy. As a lie, it doesn’t need to be true, in fact you are directly claiming it isn’t, and it opens up a new realm of creative endeavor and ingroup cultural performance, and maybe even a higher degree of underlying truth and authenticity because of the pressure taken off the storyteller. You are at liberty to pit God against the Devil and have still have Man win for once, and the only one who can tell you otherwise is someone with a better lie.  It creates or maybe was born out of a particular type of exchange, and Hurston’s interactions and lies on the porch stoop seem to have a very different tenor than Synge’s collection of folk tales in The Aran Islands, and play into the community building lying seems to suggest.  

Community, or what it means to leave your community, seemed to be a large part of our readings for the week, but that aspect wasn’t clear to me upon my initial readings. I was more focused on thinking further about these gestures between Hurston and Synge. This community focus, however, and its implications in the Atlantic world, feels like the most direct connection between the two.  Briefly setting aside Synge’s complicated place in the community he observes, both he and Hurston are engaged in attempts at cultural preservation in the face of impending loss. Atlantic travel irreparably altered both the Irish and the native Africans who were taken in the slave trade and the alterations of both were reflections of pain and trauma (though admittedly distinct and different traumas). As we have established in many class sessions, the Irish faced economically mandated migration and deep hunger and the resulting threats to culture and language are what Synge seeks to combat.  Hurston seeks to preserve the stories of her community and their cultural value brought out of the collective trauma of slavery from the changes that Northern migration and modernity were bringing to the American south. The importance of these stories can be read in the tragedy both writers write into their loss. In Riders to the Sea we saw the devastation of a whole family – losing all of their men to the power and pathos of the ocean – and as Synge saw men as the cultural repository for Western Ireland, this significant and hyperbolic loss is particularly tragic.  Similarly in Hurston’s John Redding Goes to Sea there is a man lost to the sea in the wake of a foregone blessing that results in female lamentation and an immense sense of loss.  Beyond the ostensible loss of life in these stories, there is a sense of something larger lost or missing or perhaps misplaced, like a sense of unfulfilled promise or legacy, gone in the swell of the ocean.  Not all is dark and tragic however, because in the loss of the storytellers highlighted in these works, there is gained, this new literature of preservation, that of Synge and Hurston themselves, and a creative endeavor towards conceptualizing peoples and traditions.  Forgive my probable rambling throughout this post, but this is my best way of coming to understand these moments of renaissance as moments of recapturing and piecing together a wholeness through both preservation and new creation rather than an actual rebirth.      

As a final thought, if Renaissance, or rebirth, is an inadequate term to encompass the true spirit and accomplishments of these complementary movements of preservation in Ireland and Black America, is revival a better way to gesture towards the sense of recapturing? Or is there some other term that would truly characterize these eras?

Posted on

3/25 Discussion Questions

Can we relate colorism, as described in the intro to Color Struck, to the Irish in America – the way they were able to access whiteness. Is colorism an attempt by Black Americans to do the same, to  find some better foothold in the ascribed hierarchy, or is there something else that drove it?

What significance do the the final few stage directions in Color Struck have, the monotony of the rocker and the extinguishing of the light?

This question may be more tangential and less directly thematically related, but thinking about Synge and Hurston, what does it mean for drama to be used as a medium of preservation? By nature, drama is meant to be exaggerated and performative.  Does or should that change how we see what is presented or is it different in the case of each writer or dramatist?

 

Posted on

3/23 Discussion Questions

I was curious about the reading of Hurston and comparing her to Synge. Is she an insider or an outsider in the communities she’s writing about? And how does she characterize herself within these interactions, particularly in regards to how her speech differs from the tone of her writing ?

Do either of these categories make her distinctly different than Synge?

My other question was about the significance of the word lie to storytelling.  When Hurston seems to be performing similar preservative work to Synge, finding and capturing folk culture, something predicated on authenticity,  what is suggested by those telling the tales calling them lies?

Posted on

Reclaiming Minstrelsy

This week’s readings were an interesting extension of our conversations about minstrelsy, making a different framework for considering its role in racial history and identity. White people donning blackface and performing their ideas about blackness clearly and overtly comes from racist narratives and a desire for Irish and other immigrants to separate themselves in order to be read as white. Brooks’ ideas about minstrelsy in The Octoroon provided the first complication to this reading, demonstrating the subversive places where minstrelsy actually allows these identities to interact, creating the space for racially liminal bodies.  The racial nuance of In Dahomey takes this one step further. As a piece of traveling theater, it powerfully allowed for a reclamation of black narratives and bodies through an overtly racist medium. 

Williams and Walker factor into themes of exhibitionism and exchange of their era. Getting their start in performing africaness at a world’s fair, they not only demonstrate their cultural distance from the “homeland” they enact in In Dahomey, they also begin to participate in the various ways identity was codified — it wasn’t just minstrelsy on the stage.  Their performance of blackness on stage, however, is meant to serve a distinctly different purpose than the otherness on display at the fairs.  In Dahomey was pushing for a collective artistic agenda, cleverly allowing for empowerment under the guise of debasement or debauchery.  As every creative mind involved in the performance was black, they could take back this medium that was used against them and repurpose it right under the nose of white audiences.  I still have some questions about their enactment about this however, and our discussions of the successfulness of this kind of subversion touched on that. In Dahomey demonstrates the imposition of structures of racism and racial identity constructions that make its subversive elements hard or impossible to read by contemporary white audiences. Does its artistic vision and reclamation of these tropes by cooperative black efforts counteract the continued performance of blackness as an other? As a transitional piece, from our 21st century perspective, I think it can be constructively read both ways — despite the fact that it presents racist tropes of performative blackness, it was a step forward and a form of empowerment necessary to make space for later black performers and allowing them to perform without needing to perform race as well.

Posted on

Minstrelsy and Ritual

Zoe is a fascinating figure to weave into our tapestry of placeless figures, further nuancing the developing concepts of identity and place. Interestingly, Zoe is the first racially liminal body to be a focal point in our texts.  Douglass and Gulliver, though inbetweens in their own respect, both fit more or less squarely into established racial categories. Zoe further complicates these identities by socially and and physically conflating black and white.  As Brooks points out with more overt forms of minstrelsy, the simultaneous performance of these two, ostensibly very disparate identities, forces the interactions of these identities in a way that minstrelsy’s perpetrators didn’t anticipate.  The Octoroon lands squarely on this narrative, forcing audience members to confront what happens when black and white aren’t distinct and yet still tragically irreconcilable. It is this social Catch-22 that pulls Zoe’s character out of the shadow of pure minstrelsy, embodying instead the transatlantic existence. 

It is interesting to think about the activation of the word liminal in the context of these bodies.  Liminality or the liminal space is used in the context of rites of passage as the time after separation, when the individual goes off on their own to undergo the ritualistic change and before reincorporation or integration into society — it is the time of transition.  In a sense Zoe’s change over the course of the play can be read as a failed rite of passage. Her body tells the story of the generational rape of the back female. As she is forced to share her shameful secret at being “the octoroon,” she begins the process of separation from her known white identity and community.  The ritual of the slave auction is the culmination of this stripping of her identity, attempting to place her instead back within the narrative of black females. However, rather than completing the change and reincorporating into society as another black woman to become a possession, Zoe remains liminal, rejecting the description of either identity and taking her fate instead into her own hands and allowing her identity to be read fluidly rather than concretely. She won’t be defined or confined, but the cycle of violence will end with her.

Posted on

Identity, Place and Home

TransAtlantic is a particularly haunting version of Douglass’ time in Ireland, building on academic texts of his time there and Douglass’ own reflections. There is something of the rainy, foggy mythos of Ireland that permeates the text, like the weight and presence of your clothes when they get damp.  Though Douglass feels free there, not chased by people who would place him back in bondage (or very likely worse), he is still heavy — the memory of his burdens, both his own past and his visions for the future of his people, dowsing and permeating his being like the cold of Dublin, the “huddled city.” (McCann, 49)  The juxtapositions of Douglass’ moments of freedom and moments of weight are striking within the text and interact well with one another to create a sense of Douglass’ inbetweenness, as we talked about in class. He cannot be just Douglass. He is not a man for himself. Rather he becomes an emblem for his people and the Irish people, both a hero and a specimen.  In McCann’s text Douglass wonders to himself if he is “just a curio” (McCann, 55) to the Irish, some strange other to be stared at behind glass. In class we talked about how this otherness may have more to do with his Americanness than his race, but even putting someone on a pedestal places them apart, and the Douglass of McCann’s text very clearly feels put on show — or at least that he must tread very, very carefully and always be his best self.  This edge he walks, the line of inside outsider, is key to the placelessness he develops in Ireland and also seems to be the calling card of participation in the Circum-Atlantic. The question of identity, place, and home and how they relate are central to this conception of the Atlantic and it will be interesting to see how other literary figures attempt to find their place in the crossing of that water.

Posted on

Belonging and Society

The point that resonated with me most this week was when we discussed Gulliver’s placelessness and how that simultaneously allowed him to be placed in or participate in the Circum-Atlantic.  Gulliver’s Travels makes sense in the Irish context, particularly with the lens of colonialism.  In the past, when analysing this book, my class placed a lot of emphasis on text itself within the narrative and the relevance of language to the Irish, whose cultural identity is largely predicated on the preservation of their language.  What we didn’t consider as fully was Swift’s identity as Anglo-Irish, rather than monolithically Irish. This nuance of his identity, and the way we conceptualized it in class, makes some of the more complicated or seemingly contradictory elements of Gulliver work for the text. Is he truly the colonizer or the colonized, victimized or victim or rather is he some placeless in-between? These questions of identity drive his constant movement within the text and his inability to reconcile whether he is superior or subservient to the peoples he interacts with.  Thinking about our readings last week, I wonder if placelessness isn’t also a facet of Irish-American identity. 

I was also amused by our discussion in class of production and productivity being good for society. I’m equally as uncomfortable as the rest of us seemed to be with the idea of a wholly unproductive society like that of the Houynhmns, sitting in seeming judgement of all others while doing nothing worthwhile themselves — I don’t think idleness leads to bliss, particularly when that idleness isn’t a break from productive tasks.  Our discomfort with an unproductive society, however, demonstrates the lingering power of the ideas Swift was activating and working with. We can’t conceptualize of a different societal structure because our structure and judgement of what is societally good is so formed by the universal progress ideologies of the Enlightenment. For many in that period, the industrial revolution and the changes it brought were threatening to established ways of life, to folk cultures, and to those who didn’t have access to the intellectual elite.  Swift’s concern about burgeoning modernity and the dangers of a society built on progress for the sake of progress are represented in the Houynhmns’ culture and our inherent discomfort at Gulliver’s adherence to it.

Posted on

On the Basis of Color

The question of “how the Irish became white” really caught me this week.  It brings up and questions the dynamics of difference and the changeability of our cultural categories, highlighting the fallacy of biological race and its ascribed hierarchies.  What particularly struck me was the almost simultaneous ability for the Irish to be oppressed by and yet still participate, seemingly willingly, in these racial hierarchies. Maybe it’s a function of the difference between Irish identity and Irish American identity, but the whiteness of the Irish, particularly in America, seemed to hinge on their assimilation into the hierarchy as a source of labor above that of Black laborers and their willingness to occupy that space.  It underlines an interesting and significant gap in experience between these two groups, groups that are paralleled even as the basis of our course. I wonder how that distinction will come across in the consciousness of the literature we read or if we will sense a change in the literature over time as the Irish became more white. I also think it is pertinent to realize that racial categories are changeable and think about the ways we may or may not participate in those ongoing systems ourselves.  

As an aside, but in conjunction with these ideas about whiteness and who defines these categories, the categories we divide ourselves by phenotypically don’t even make sense.  We ascribe these delineations largely based on skin color groups that don’t even play out in real life. Those whose skin is darker we call Black, when in reality their skin is many varied and luminous shades of brown.  Those who we classify as white aren’t white at all, but shades that range from sand to peach. And so it goes for the other major “racial” categories.  Human skin color, or rather skin tone, is not a binary, but a gradient. Brazilian photographer, Angélica Dass, has a beautiful project called Humanae that points out exactly that.  Taking swatches of skin from photos of thousands of participants, she matches their tone to that of an industrial color index to create the background of their portrait — demonstrating clearly the wonderful variations of human skin and it’s lack of distinct or even similar groups (after all, melanin only comes in black or brown).  Phenotypic populations are no more jarringly distinct than the cultures of the Circum-Atlantic. So even as the Irish “became white” it bears thinking about the categories themselves and how a cultural need for differentiation veers away from what’s actually before our eyes.

Posted on

First Thoughts

Starting this semester, I have a lot to look forward to and think about in regards to this course. A lot of the themes, and even readings, are things I have touched on before in other courses, but I’ve never had the opportunity to piece them together and think about how they form one, or at least several, cohesive and connected narratives. Our first reading in particular highlighted the areas where diverse areas of study come together in the context of this class — where questions of the realities of race encounter those of culture and identity. Consolidation of identity helped to establish the nations and national structures recognized today, particularly those in Europe, where culture was streamlined and homogenized to create a dominant national narrative, often based on idealized folk culture, for strength and stability. In the creation of these cultural mythos’ however, as Gilroy points out, nuance about the realities of culture are lost and groups who don’t quite fit the national model are cast off. The reality of these cultures is much more broad and connected as a result of intertwined history. To ignore the history of cultural exchange is to misrepresent the truth about the transatlantic cultural experience. Investing in a new and more inclusive, less binary and more culturally diverse narrative has powerful potential to allow us to think about the way we construct our stories and histories — and the ways we represent those stories in the poetics of literature and art.