Sam Carter Essay imitated: Resisting Blackmail by Yve-Alain Bois New object of analysis: Development of a young scholar of color VS 290A 11/8/17
Introduction: Resisting Blackmail Any developing scholar of color in an academic institution today, and most particularly at a United States university, faces certain intellectual pressures that require a response. Many maneuver their classrooms silent about the pressures they face, and this silence, though at times interpreted as acceptance or complicity, can also be a resistive response. The pressures I identify here are by no means an exhaustive list; nevertheless, they apply to scholars of color across disciplines and varying research interests. I respond to these pressures, because I ‘[l]ike anyone else, with whatever differences, [...] find some of these pressures oppressive, constituting a sort of intellectual blackmail’ (xi).1 My purpose is to resist these forces that remain at the horizon of my own development as a scholar of color. For it is my contention that if one can anticipate the troubles they may confront, one might do better to prepare and find systems of support early.
Objectivity I will first discuss objectivity, the obligation to be “objective,” for I sense that this obligation imposes itself from the moment a student begins to contemplate a research area of interest. Though a researcher’s positionality, by definition, impacts the research in ways that require critical reflection and discussion, young scholars of color often describe feelings of uncertainty when undertaking topics considered close to their own lived experience. In
Ibid.
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interviews conducted by The Carter Center in its 2006 study of 200 recent graduates, one respondent explained , “I actually loved the research I was doing, but when I presented it, I couldn’t help doubting the rigor of my work compared to say, white dudes studying Asian literature, which is ridiculous.”2 Yve-Alain Bois argues a scholar, embedded in their field of study, doesn’t have access to objectivity because of his very position in a particular field. Still, young scholars of color confront feelings of academic inferiority as a result of their perceived proximity to their object of inquiry. There are multiple issues with the cult of objectivity, three of which I will outline now. One, is the foundational assumption that objectivity is attainable. The second issue is the assumption that objectivity is a desirable goal to strive for, whether attainable or not. The third, and, in my mind most egregious, issue with this cult is that it enables substandard research. The truth is that researchers have a responsibility to analyze the blind spots in their work, and to reflect upon the impact of their positionality on their results and interpretations. Often, it is in these reflective spaces that one finds the most rigorous intellectual work. In this reflexivity, one contemplates the parameters of one’s work. One acknowledges that one’s presence is implicated in the findings. To survey the field and introduce oneself as a scholar is thought to ‘presuppose a certain distance [...] from the object of inquiry’ (xi) that remains fundamentally unavailable to scholars of color, as they understand from the onset of their journey.3 Their presence alone lays bare the lie at the heart of epistemological objectivity. The academic institution cannot, at the same time, acknowledge a history of systemic exclusion and simultaneously claim neutral knowledge
This survey has been invented for the purposes of this assignment. Yve-Alain Bois, “Resisting Blackmail,” in Painting as Model (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), xi–xxx.
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production. In my modest way, it is as a mode of resistance that I offer an articulation of such pressures facing young scholars of color. But there are others.
Binge Reading One of these is hard to resist because it is often considered, beyond a natural part of the academic landscape, an essential component to scholarly success; I will call it binge reading, though the idea pertains to much more than reading. Binge reading is the idea that a mass consumption of texts (and in most academic settings, the scholar is still thought to be formed in this way) leads to a state of being ‘knowledgeable’ or ‘knowing.’ Such a pressure leads many aspiring researchers to insulate their conclusions by iterating the work of another scholar of some standing, either presuming others know the text, or, perhaps more nefariously, enjoying an exaggerated sense of importance. This is a pressure that students of all backgrounds face, but for students of color there are other dynamics at play. Often, for a work to be perceived as adequately ‘rigorous’ in the academy it has be constructed in part using the work of a European intellectual.4 For how many brilliant students have shared their work, only to be asked after by their peers and professors how their work might be stronger with the incorporation of Foucault, Deleuze, etc? As if intellectual achievement is, first and foremost, at the feet of white men who thought before you. Of course, there are other profound problems with this category of blackmail. The entire pressure is based upon the notion that one can ‘know’ or be ‘knowledgeable’ about an object at all, and that it is preferable to be so. ‘I do not know’ or ‘I do not understand’ are like illnesses in
Rigorous being a term used with positive connotations even if, and at times because, it means to the stress of the student. 4
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the academy, the remedy always the same: read more. In The Carter Center’s 2006 study, 67% of respondents reported feeling overwhelmed by their reading requirements. In an effort to establish oneself as worthy in the field, young scholars of color inundate themselves with texts, doomed to failure because, one, one has never read enough, and two, reading those that look like you is never enough.
Class Conformity I will continue with an adjacent point which brings out the third type of blackmail. To put it bluntly, I would stay that a certain notion of ‘respectability’ permeates throughout a young scholar of color’s development. Two things must be signaled: (1) there are behavioral expectations in the academy that are, I argue, direct imports from white upper middle class culture, to which a young scholar of color must assimilate, an assimilation process that weighs heavier on scholars of color who may also be what I will class migrants.5 It is to say, there is an expectation of cultural assimilation, an imposition with racial, ethnic, and classed dimensions. As Saussure asserts in Course in General Linguistics, ‘[p]olite formulas [...] though often imbued with a certain natural expressiveness [...], are nonetheless fixed by rule; it is this rule and not the intrinsic value of the gestures that obliges one to use them’ (68).6 ‘The rule,’ I assert here, being white upper middle class cultural codes. To elaborate, it should suffice to provide a common example that will resonate widely. Code switching is defined in Merriam Webster’s Online Dictionary as ‘the switching from the
I use this term to mean those that transition from one socio-economic status to another, particularly the small group of those who manage upward mobility. 6 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, eds. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, trans. Roy Harris (Chicago: Open Court, 1986), selection. 5
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linguistic system of one language or dialect to that of another.’ During the course of a young scholar of color’s development, they will not only be expected to speak a specific language, but to do at a classed, academic register that is understood as the language of ‘intellectuals.’ This seemingly neutral, ‘polite formula,’ belittles the many languages and dialects that scholars of color must speak to navigate all of the spaces they may occupy. This applies to oral language use in the academy and becomes a more severe rule when concerning written language use. I will introduce the second important thing to signal to conclude: (2) research produced in universities in the United States often reflects this same class conformity. There is a tendency to pathologize or diagnose the poor in academic discourse, or to treat poverty as something out of which one can evolve, bootstrap, or mobilize. This tendency shapes research from the identification of topics and questions. For example, within the field of Media Studies, there is a tendency to read certain black cultural texts as superior to others. An anecdote borrowed from Racquel Gate’s Activating the Negative Image will do for an explication. Gates gives an example from the Melissa Harris Perry Show in 2013, where Melissa hosted a discussion about black representation of television with a panel that included ‘Joy-Ann Reid, managing editor of The Grio, Issa Rae, creator and star of the web series The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, Tonya Lee, author and wife of Spike Lee, and former Miss USA turned current The Real Housewives of Atlanta cast member Kenya Moore’ (617).7 The conversation ‘[fell] back to the familiar default of [...] the politics of respectability’ (617).8 It is worth quoting Gates here at length: Indeed, the politics of respectability cannot exist without disreputable objects against which to define “correct” definitions of racial identity. Historically, such terse and interdependent relationships have obscured proper analysis of those texts deemed “bad objects” in the sphere of Racquel Gates, ‘Activating the Negative Image,’ (Television & New Media, 2015), 617. Ibid.
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racial representation. For instance, in the 1940s, former National Association for the Advancement of Colored people (NAACP) president Walter White famously invoked this binary when he stated that fair skinned, glamorous Lena Horne was a far more prefereable image of Hollywoof blackness than Hattie McDaniel, whose portrayal of “Mammy’ in Gone with the Wind epitomized the types of representations that White and his fellow NAACP officers found particularly degrading.9
Politics of respectability has been part and parcel to academic discourse in a way that is just now being critiqued by scholars such as Racquel Gates and Aisha Durham, and artists like Cardi B and Princess Nokia. I argue that this politics exerts intellectual pressure on the young scholar of color, on the objects they choose to examine, and the way in which they are able to perceive these objects.
Objectivity, binge reading, and class conformity: those are the forces at work within the environments in which I move. ‘At least, those are the forces I am able to recognize and that I regard as the most lethal, the forces against which I target my labor, albeit always implicitly’ (xxix).10 This does not mean that these are the only forces that will press upon young scholars of color or that I myself (and by extension my work) manage to escape the pressures I have here identified. And what is more, resistance at times looks like compliance, which I find just as potent a method. I hope, however, that this disclaimer be seen as part of the point I intended to make in the paragraphs above. I, too, must negotiate the impact of my positionality, including the blind spots therefrom produced. ‘I do hope, however, that enough has surfaced in my perception of the field for my work to [...] constitute in some way a lesson in resistance’ (xxx).11
Ibid. Yve-Alain Bois, “Resisting Blackmail,” in Painting as Model (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), xi–xxx. 11 Ibid. 9
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