Saturday, June 23, 2007
Brown Discussion - 6/22 Meeting
It looks like things are working smoothly as I see the discussion continuing below. If you have any questions, please feel free to email me. Also, to start a NEW discussion (post a blog session), you need to be registered as a contributor. You probably want to title your post (like I did above) as it will be archived by title on the right hand side. However, you can continue to comment without becoming a contributor. If you click on the title of the discussion topic that you wish to comment to listed on the right hand side of the main blog page, it will show the post and all of the comments so far posted to it in a nice, neat column.
Enjoy!
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5 comments:
I agree, though I could not hear all of the discussion! I always learn so much from hearing others' responses. It occurs to me that this is an interesting pedagogical layer as well. Over the years, I've had a real range of responses from students to the emphasis on class discussion in my courses. A lot of them perceive peer comments as a distraction from the main point, which is to learn the true meaning of texts (from moi!). In some cases I think this is a cover story for anxiety that others express about peers "getting things" from texts that they don't see. In the largish (50) lectures I often teach, I find that unless I shepherd the discussions back to some overt kind of anchor to the lecture, students are annoyed and say that the class got off track. If I taught fewer texts, this might be less of a concern for them...but I also feel a huge pressure to introduce students to lots of texts (not because of some belief that all college students should read x, but for various practical reasons I'll explain those at another time). The bottom line is that my students are not always sure of the value of peer comments, whereas I always am! We have a fundamental mismatch in values.
thanks for doing this, Denise!!!!!
I returned to the preface and Chapter 1. The preface begins with our society's worst interpretation of the word brown (dirt; the product of the Spanish conquering the Indians)and becomes poetic with Rodriguez explaining the beauty of the inevitable browning of America(the Anglo girl describing some guy's beautiful complexion as "reddish brown, like a Sugar Daddy bar.") His assumption seems to be that the 'browning of America' is a product of "eroticism" and that, in their self-absorption, the white founding fathers only considered their own impact on the new world and failed to look at the possibly more profound implications that racial co-mingling would have on our society. He celebrates the browning of America as a "reunion of peoples...a harmony, previously unknown" but says it won't be an easy road to oneness since there are those (skinheads, terrorists) who can't stand the thought of "a future that does not isolate them."
Finally, he says this book will discuss his public and private life in terms of race. Do you guys agree with this beginning interpretation? If so, do you think most of the book actually deals with these ideas? i.e. did he stick to his 'thesis'? (the dirtiness of our intermingling, the beauty & harmony of our society's intermingling, the way our intermingling affects his public and private life) Feel free to make fun of me if I'm sounding too teachery:)
First, my thanks to Denise, too, for setting this up.
I think that Martha raised a valuable pedagogical issue in our values (and expectations and ideas) about meaning in/of texts. I, too, feel that discussion enriches and expands the meaning of a text, sometimes by confusing and unsettling my understanding of it, but I embrace it all. Students, or at least a noteable portion of them, tend to see the "meaning of the text" as some definite, discreet thing, and if it's not, they feel that they didn't "get" it (or perhaps that the book is "stupid"). This would be worth returning to in our Wollstonecraft lesson and analysis, I think.
I'm glad that you returned to the Preface, Heidi. To answer your question, I do think that Rodriguez has stuck to his "thesis" as you beautifully summarized it. As I began reading the Preface, I remember being quite aware of trying to get my bearings as a reader, something I think I take for granted in much of my reading since a greater familiarity with texts, as we all have, often makes short work of "getting our bearings" -- anyway, I liked feeling less sure since it reminded me that students probably feel this way with many or most texts.
Initially, I felt that Rodriguez was throwing out so many meanings for brown that he risked rendering it meaningless; still, I had my experience as a reader to call on, and could speculate that he was doing this precisely to make me feel unsure, to provoke me, to destabilize my notions a bit.
The most obvious "meaning" of brown -- skin color -- is the one that we so seldom discuss in real terms. I mean, the girl describing the boy's skin color is really talking about the actual color of an actual person's skin -- that's what I'm calling "real terms." More often, we either don't discuss it or use the reductionist categories (black, white, red, yellow, brown) as shorthand for race. I find it refreshing that younger generations, like this girl, can talk about skin color as a real color.
Thanks for these comments, Heidi and Sue!
You're making me aware of yet another metalevel--if that's the right term--which is that the use of brown in this text is something that changes for the reader over an extended reading experience in which the mind becomes a palimpsest, a manuscript that's had erasures of earlier meanings as new ones are written on it--but the old ones are still hanging around as ghosts or traces. The understanding of a text like this over time is crucial. However, and here I return to my classroom, I know very well that most students read the assignment right before class (when they read it at all). As we discussed in our meeting, it is often essential to read iwth them in class because it's our only shot at letting them experience rereading (and, in some cases, the first reading). However, that consideration and mulling over and RETURNING to a text over time is a variant on that that is crucial. I try, try ,try to incorporate something of that into my course design, so that I remind them to return to page 1 right after they've finished the novel, and do an -in-class writing quiz on how they read it now, or reread, on the last day of class, their own answers to a question like "what is cultural studies" and comment on what they think now.
However, and sometimes I just chalk this up to the lingering impact of chemo-brain (how many years after chemo can I use this???), I forget to do it or think that I've "run out of time" on content and leave all those great plans by the wayside. That's what summer is for--re-anchoring to how we teach:)
So, rereading texts, but also considering a word or phrase and its meanings throughout a text and over a sustained time of reading: That's my other thread. cheers!
Wilkie is Martha--I have no idea how to get it to say martha--sorry!
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