{"id":65,"date":"2005-09-20T23:53:31","date_gmt":"2005-09-21T03:53:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/?p=65"},"modified":"2005-09-23T20:52:52","modified_gmt":"2005-09-24T00:52:52","slug":"bell-hooks-colson-whitehead-and-essentialism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/2005\/09\/20\/bell-hooks-colson-whitehead-and-essentialism\/","title":{"rendered":"bell hooks, Colson Whitehead, and Essentialism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Without a doubt, we didn’t come even close tonight to saying everything that could be said about the bell hooks article and its relationship to The Intuitionist<\/em>. Keeping in mind that I didn’t pair these two texts to be read as a call and response, I still think they speak volumes to each other, even if only implicitly.<\/p>\n

One of hooks’ most salient observations is that "there is a radical difference between a repudiation of the idea that there is a black ‘essence’ and recognition of the way black identity has been specifically constituted in the experience of exile and struggle" (par 11). <\/p>\n

In other words, recognizing the common lived experience and shared history of a group of people (in this case, a shared history of slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, discrimination, profiling) does not necessarily equal "essentializing" these people or their experiences. To use a word that came up in class, it doesn’t necessarily equal a cliche<\/em> to present a black man whose aspirations have been foreclosed because of the color of his skin. What looks like a cliche, others would call the truth, steeped in lived history.<\/p>\n

The more I think about it, the more I think that The Intuitionist <\/em>does honor the widely varied experiences of blacks without resorting to essentialism. (This is not to say that I don’t think the novel doesn’t fail in other regards.) Part of my thinking here has been influenced by another book I’m reading, An Education in Georgia<\/em>, by Calvin Trillin. This book is a firsthand account, published in 1963, of the integration of the University of Georgia in 1961. In Trillin’s book the first two black women to attend the University of Georgia recall instances of isolation, rejection, and invisibility that sound eerily like Lila Mae’s experiences at the Institute. <\/p>\n

Of course, we have to recognize that even if Lila Mae undergoes struggles that mirror the real world, she is ultimately only a character in a heavily allegorical novel and not a real person. She is a literary representation. This recognition calls for nuance and perhaps a slight tweaking of our vocabulary. To this end I want to draw your attention to the two different meanings of the word "representation." The postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak points out in "Can the Subaltern Speak" that representation can mean both speaking for someone (as in politics) and re-presenting something (as in art or literature). Spivak uses two German terms (because the meanings have separate words in German) to distinguish between the two: vertreten <\/strong>(speaking for someone) and darstellen <\/strong>(re-presenting something). It’s the difference between proxy versus portrait, between presuming to speak for someone and presuming to depict something artistically. <\/p>\n

As we consider The Intuitionist <\/em>(and any text in which voice, identity, and authenticity are at stake), we should keep in mind this critical difference between the two types of representation, examining how literarily rendered (or cinematically rendered) "voices" both do and do not "speak" for the experiences behind the voices.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Without a doubt, we didn’t come even close tonight to saying everything that could be said about the bell hooks article and its relationship to The Intuitionist. Keeping in mind that I didn’t pair these two texts to be read as a call and response, I still think they speak volumes to each other, even … Continue reading bell hooks, Colson Whitehead, and Essentialism<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-65","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reflections"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}