Course Blog

Occasion: Our contemporary culture political discourse

Relation to my Thesis: Less of a stretch than it may seem

Request: Not to respond to the politics of the people featured here because that would be both totally besides the point and more than a little ironic

 

I’m not sure about the legality of doing this, but I’m going to lift excerpts from a Facebook argument between someone I went to high school with and one of our teachers. In using this example, I don’t mean to suggest that the arguments taking place in Facebook comments represent the height of our political conversation –pretty much all political exchanges on social media are entirely pointless glorified shouting matches (I only know about this particular example because my friends from high school were making fun of it in a group chat) — but they do represent the average political conversation. More than anything, it’s just an easy example to use and it conveniently demonstrates the more universal points I need to make.

The conversation started when the person I went to school with, let’s call him (she’s actually a “she,” but I’m pretty attached to the pseudonym) Louis Guzman, made a post about the New York terror attack and “open borders” or whatever the fuck. This wasn’t the first time Mr. Guzman had seen it fitting to espouse his beliefs on the social media platform and so very loudly voiced ideological sympathies had been well known to all his Facebook friends for quite some time. Apparently, this latest post so “disheartened” (her words) a former teacher of ours, who we’ll call Liza Minnelli, that she saw it fit to respond to her one-time student, writing a long comment which included the following,

“Since Trump has been in office there have been more deaths due to acts of terror committed by white American men with no ties to Islam than by Muslim extremists. Of course ISIS inspired attacks are terrifying and need to be taken seriously and prevented, but completely shutting down borders or banning people based on their religion is not only unacceptable, its also not a solution. Primarily, because we would still suffer from regular acts of domestic terrorism by white American men, but also because we live in a global world. The NYC attacker was not radicalized until long after he had been in the US and he planned his attack information he got from ISIS online while in America” [sic]

and was capped off with a link to a Vox article in support of her first statement.

Mr. Guzman, not one to be uprooted in his own terrain, responded to Mrs. Minnelli with a comment that featured the following selection of prose,

“However having open borders and lottery visas today without proper vetting can only lead to more attacks that kill not only innocent Americans but innocent humans. It’s not rocket science why Poland and Hungary, European countries with the strongest border control (I believe Hungary even put up a wall) are the SAFEST.. and countries with open borders are suffering the consequences, and even now making their laws stricter. The radical Muslim mantra is to kill any and all in their way. It is preached and imbedded from a young age” [sic — to like the entire quote].

This exchange is so typical as to be almost unsubstantial to the uninvolved reader. To my friends and I, it was worthwhile only as a case study in the political interaction of our peers and I mean to analyse it in a similar regard here. Because, the fact that this sort of thing — people foisting their opinions on one another from across generational, social, and (of course) ideological divides — is so typical is exactly what’s worth noting about it. A sort of conversational complacency has taken place, where the means by which to change the minds of others have become so close at hand that we’ve forgotten why we use them in the first place.

My thesis is about the use of citations in literary criticism and using them to examine the notion that we understand the papers and arguments we read. Part of what really stuck out to me about that topic is the appeal to authority that’s evident in the use of citation. There’s a similar effect at play in the kinds of conversations I’m discussing now, but instead of acting to aid in the argument being made, it generally only functions in those readers who have already accepted the arguments conclusion.

In the example of discourse I’ve referenced, there is one genuine use of citation, but much more prevalent in both posts are what I’ll call “cultural citations.” To demonstrate, I’ll pull out the claims in both Mr. Guzman’s and Mrs. Minnelli’s quoted work,

 

1: but completely shutting down borders or banning people based on their religion is not only unacceptable …

2: .. it[‘]s also not a solution

3: Primarily, because we would still suffer from regular acts of domestic terrorism by white American men …

4: … but also because we live in a global world. The NYC attacker was not radicalized until long after he had been in the US and he planned his attack information he got from ISIS online while in America

5: having open borders and lottery visas today without proper vetting can only lead to more attacks that kill not only innocent Americans but innocent humans.

6: Poland and Hungary, European countries with the strongest border control …

7: … I believe Hungary even put up a wall …

8: … are the SAFEST …

9: … and even now making their laws stricter

10: The radical Muslim mantra is to kill any and all in their way.

11: It is preached and [e]mbedded from a young age

 

While at a glance it may appear that the arguments being made are just assemblages of sentiments, they both feature a great deal of claims with seemingly no support. Here is where the “cultural citations” tie in. Each of those claims is tethered to some Vox or Breitbart article that the authors read at some point in the past and the information gathered therein lodged in their brains as a ‘fact’ (this claim — the one that I just made — functions in the same way. I’m making it based on my own experience doing the same damn thing and then halfheartedly condemning myself for doing so and ascribing the practice to people engaging in hastily-made arguments, assuming that you’ll have done the same and so identify the claim as being universally true).

However, when you do this, there’s a high chance that anyone who identifies your claim as a fact already agrees with your conclusion because they’ve frequented the same sources as you and so likely share your specific political stance.

Furthermore, since someone who doesn’t agree with you will be dubious of your sources, they’ll likely dismiss any claims they don’t identify as being grounded in “proof” and if they do know the source you’re assuming is understood, they’ll likely dismiss it as disreputable (ex: I know exactly what Liza is talking about in all her claims because I’ve made those arguments before, while I have no clue whether or not Hungary “built a wall” because that’s never been a talking point in my circle).

Normally, citations are an author’s way of saying, “you can look this up if you really want to, but trust me, I did my research,” while in the case of “cultural citations,” the author is appealing to some piece of rhetoric they believe their “side” of the debate has already shown to be true — they’re appealing to the authority of arguments they see themselves as already having won.

Just think about how ludicrously pointless that is. In both of the comments quoted above, the author is arguing that they’re right because their claims are all correct.

I bring up “cultural citations” not only to try to improve the ways in which we engage in political discourse, but to examine literary citations via the example. Normally, citations are universally understood to accurately reflect knowledge before being convinced of the argument’s conclusion, but with inherently ‘understood’ “cultural citations,” anyone unconvinced of the argument will immediately dismiss the claims being made due to an ignorance of and/or distrust in their sources. That just leads me to wonder what the experience of reading a piece of literary criticism would be like if I distrusted every citation.

And then I can segue into an example of exactly that.

The perception of gender and what gender entails in multiple aspects is a debate brought up in Judith Butler’s article titled, Gender Trouble. As I will be focusing my research through a feminist lens, Butler’s interpretations and ideas lend a helpful hand to my analysis of East Asian feminine literature. Although Butler presents her argument as gender being a form of construction, her research points out some interesting points on what society deems to be feminine actions and masculine actions. Consequently, it is the outward appearance and the way one puts oneself into society and how one wish to be perceived that ultimately defines gender and each individual.

I will continue to use Yoko Ogawa’s collection of Novellas, The Diving Pool, as my link to my research as I have mentioned it in previous blog posts, and it is the literature that originally inspired by thesis. Femininity, if we are talking about it in the sense of the heterosexual norm, is presented with the idea of having the ability to perform sexual actions with a male partner and presumably be attracted to males. According to Butler, this heterosexual norm is the socially accepted portrayal of the female body and the male body, in terms of outward appearances and presentation to the public. In Butler’s words, one of the “dimensions” of gender identity is “anatomical sex,” which can refer to either the act of sex, or the physical parameters that make up the male and female sexes. Either way, the defining terms of being female and/or male is determined almost completely by the physical and aesthetic.

The first novella in Ogawa’s novel is titled the same as the book as a whole, The Diving Pool, which takes the perspective of a young Japanese High School girl who has an obsessive crush on a boy who is part of the diving team. The protagonist, who is unnamed, fits into the heterosexual female normative as the duration of the novella is engulfed by her intense obsession over this boy. She sits alone in the bleachers during his practice and watches his body and continues to describe it to the reader in detail. The fact that the protagonist is adhering to the norm and as well as putting too much emphasis on physical/outer identity and appearance embeds her in a firm feminist reading and also fits her into the category of anatomical sex in both terms explained above. She is both interested in sexual acts with this boy and sees him as beautiful because of his masculine body.

What is interesting about Ogawa’s first novella is the use of words and imagery that evoke the womb and the woman’s body, further exemplifying the idea of the female body as a sexual object and one that is defined by appearance. When a woman is pregnant, that is also indicative of a sexual act with the opposite sex, and also a clear aesthetic indicator that this individual is, in fact, a female. The beginning of the novella begins with the protagonist explaining the feeling of the pool room as she waits for the boy, “it’s always warm here: I feel as though I’ve been swallowed by a huge animal. After a few minutes, my hair, my eyelashes, even the blouse of my school uniform are damp from the heat and humidity, and I am bathed in a moist film that smells vaguely of chlorine.” (p.3). As the protagonist describes her body parts, we picture each with the idea of femininity in mind, and this will shape her for the rest of the story. Her description of the heat and moisture that stick to her skin remind the reader and seem reminiscent of a womb, and perhaps even the process of giving birth with sweet and bodily fluids making a body feel moist.

Although Ogawa conforms to the identity that Butler is trying to break down, it is an important perspective to look at the diving pool because of the way it is deeply ingrained in telling stories from a protagonist that is also deeply feminine. Ogawa also tends to draw on the aesthetic and how thing, people and situations look and feel, and all come from protagonists that are very alike when looked at through this feminist lens.

When crafting a list of primary resources for my thesis, I hesitated to include Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights due to the fact that Heathcliff, the character whom I considered to be the primary “monster” figure in this novel, is not the conventional type of monster like those depicted in the works of Frankenstein or Dracula; He is undoubtedly a human, develops and maintains a lifelong (albeit twisted) relationship with Catherine, earns the affection of women, and even manages to somewhat assimilate into Victorian society by becoming a gentleman. On the other hand, however, I felt that Heathcliff’s constant status as a “savage” outsider with unknown origins and “a bloodline [that] is unambiguously tainted by color” might enable me to better achieve my goal of viewing the concept and construction of monstrosity through a postcolonial, imperialistic lens (Sneiden 172). For this reason, in order to solidify the value of this novel for my thesis, I determined that it would be in my best interest to gain an understanding of the significance that race had in the development of societal relations and perceptions during the time period in which Heathcliff inhabited England. It is through engaging in an analysis of the culture of England surrounding foreigners, as well as a brief history of slavery in England, that I will be able to truly assess whether or not Healthcliff can be considered a “monster” figure due to his racial otherness, as well as gain a better sense of how I will define a “monster” within my thesis.

As described by Sneidern in her “Wuthering Heights and the Slave Trade,” the people of England in the late 18th and early 19th century had grown accustomed to placing a large societal emphasis on the success of the country’s slave trade and colonial endeavors. Despite the fact that the legal subjection of those of other races ended in Britain upon the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and the emancipation of colonial slaves in 1834, the country’s historical focus on the conquering of peoples of other nations led to the development of a sentiment of racial superiority amongst Englishmen in which “blacks, browns, yellows, reds and non-English speaking Celts were excluded” (Sneidern 173-174). This sense of hierarchy among the English not only placed their own countrymen and race at the pinnacle of society, however, but also undermined the humanity and societal value that Englishmen associated with those of a different race. Often times, the inhabitants of nations that were colonized by England were referred to as “animals” and “savages” that required the civilizing of English intervention in order to be enlightened about the correct way of living (Brantlinger 65). Because these conquered people were almost always of a different race than that of the people of England, the predominately white population of England learned to associate a darker skin tone with a poor, bestial character and an inherent mediocrity. In this way, England’s imperial expansion and colonization of foreign nations served as the catalysts for the people of England to have “a more racist consciousness” and a sense of racial superiority over those of a darker skin color even when the “imperial mission of educating and civilizing colonial subjects in the literature and thought of England” had been achieved (Thompson 186; Viswanathan 2). Ultimately, the civilizing mission of English colonialism not only influenced Englishmen’s relationships and interactions with those of different races, but also caused those persons of different races that inhabited England to be deemed as inferiors regardless of their efforts to assimilate into British culture.

By possessing this more in-depth, historical, cultural understanding, I then used this information to further analyze Healthcliff’s position within the text of Wuthering Heights. While I struggled to find an instance in which Healthcliff was ever termed a “monster,” this cultural context encouraged me to view Heathcliff’s status as that of a hybrid: he is inwardly British due to his upbringing within the country, but is racially and physically foreign. Furthermore, even though Healthcliff recognizes himself as a citizen of England and transforms into a “well-formed,” intellectual man, his actions do not allow him to escape the post-slavery culture in Britain, causing people to always suspect that Heathcliff is an “evil beast…waiting for his time to spring and destroy” (Brontë 107). Like the monster in Frankenstein, it is this societal rejection that causes Healthcliff to eventually carry out the cruel acts that society expects of him, such as inflicting physical and emotional abuse onto his wife. In this way, I believe that I can consider Healthcliff to be a monstrous figure within Wuthering Heights by defining a monster as a figure whose carries out evil acts and who possesses an appearance, often on account of being an “other,” that instills fear in the people of England. Moving forward, I hope to utilize Wuthering Heights in tandem with Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre due to the fact that both of these novels depict foreign persons in England as “monsters” that are never fully equals.

Works Cited

Brantlinger, Patrick. Taming Cannibals: Race and the Victorians. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2011. Print.

Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. Ed. Pauline Nestor. London: Penguin, 2003. Print.

Sneidern, Maja-Lisa Von. “Wuthering Heights and the Liverpool Slave Trade.” ELH 62.1 (1995): 171-96. JSTOR. Web. 07 Sept. 2016.

Thompson, Andrew S. The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the Mid-nineteenth Century. Harlow, England: Pearson Longman, 2005. Print.

Viswanathan, Gauri. Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. New York: Columbia UP, 1987. Print.

 

In the book Nazi Propaganda by Z.A.B. Zeman there is a photo that was taken in Nurnberg Germany, 1935. Nurnberg is located within the southern half of Germany. Looking at this photo (Zeman, 98) I see three German party rally officers walking on the street. Up ahead of them is a trolley and to the left of these three German men are Der Sturmer posters. Der Sturmer was a Nazi propaganda newspaper that ridiculed, mocked, and was anti-Semitic towards Jews. The founder of the Der Sturmer was Julius Streicher who was a member of the Nazi party and did not like the Jews. The Der Sturmer newspaper was up in Germany until the end of the war but at one point the Der Strumer had to be taken down during the 1936 olympics, “All such notices as ‘Jews not admitted’ were taken away from the entrances to hotels and restaurants; Streicher’s newspaper Sturmer could not be bought in the streets” (Zeman, 109). The Der Sturmer was taken down early in the war as they did not want other countries to see the Nazi’s beliefs about other foreign countries.

Moving back to the photo, what makes this picture unique is that these three German officers were just walking by these anti-semitic/offensive posters and for these three men it just seemed like nothing out of the ordinary. This newspaper dehumanized Jews and made Germans perceive them as being inferior to their culture. When viewing this image it is evidently clear to see that anti-semitism and having a hatred towards the Jews was just the cultural norm of Germany during World War 2 (Zeman, 99). The poster itself has two faces on it, one face looks like a skull and in front of the skull face is a man with a serious expression. He also has the same mustache that Hitler had and underneath them is a photo of the newspaper that is written all in German. Additionally, on this newspaper there was a symbol of the Swastika on the poster. The swastika before World War 2 was known as being a symbol of peace but during this war the Nazi’s used the swastika as a symbol of violence and hatred towards other inferior races which specifically targeted the Jews. The swastika became a symbol of Nazi territory so wherever the swastika was located or was in sight, it gave Jews a sense of fear and an unacceptance throughout all of Europe other than Great Britain. While the swastika may have been Hitler and the Nazi’s parties symbol of pride, throughout Europe wherever Jews went to go hide the symbol of the swastika meant Jews should be fearful for their lives.

Not only did this newspaper not like the Jews to begin with, but they also tried to get the German people and the Nazi’s to have more of a hatred towards the Jewish race.  Whenever there was a bunch of interesting or disturbing news that was related to the Jews in the Der Sturmer, this pro-Nazi newspaper would publish it and then send it out to their readers. The Der Sturmer had some, “scandoulous gossip about the Jews also rated high on the priority list-this form of journalism had been introduced by Julius Streicher in Der Sturmer. ‘Ritual murder’, for instance, was hardly perennial; it combined anti-semitism, violence, and sex in equal proportions” (Zeman, 25). Through the Der Sturmer the Nazi’s wanted to brain-wash the German people into believing that all Jews were bad and that murdering other people was just a common and daily habit for the Jewish race.

 

Zeman, Z.A.B. Nazi Propaganda. London; New York : Published in association with the Wiener Library [by] Oxford University Press, 1964., 1964.

 

Lisciotto, Carmelo. “Der Stürmer.” Holocaust Research Project.Org, Holocaust Education and Archive Research Team, 2009.

 

“History of the Swastika.” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

 

Similar to my blog post last week, I’ve decided to focus back in on John Okada’s No-No Boy and a particular archival document that relates directly to the text itself and the main characters presented by Okada. Like mentioned before, the main protagonist in the story, Ichiro, has just recently returned to Seattle from being held as a prisoner of war by the Japanese during WWII, after being forced into fighting on the side of the United States while his family suffered in an internment camp. Ichiro, much like many other Japanese-American men during this time, were physically forced into participating in the war against their own country, mainly for two reasons: 1) to help America win the war through increased manpower and 2) for xenophobic fears surrounding the Japanese people residing in the US at the time. Fighting in the war served as an outlet for these xenophobic feelings that allowed a constant monitoring of these men, and an assurance of their allegiance to the US, and not Japan.

In order to unite these men, and all men who were fighting for the US during WWII, President Franklin Roosevelt issued an announcement that called for a “Brotherhood Week”, extending from February 19^th-February 28^th,, 1943. This Brotherhood Week, pictured above, called on these men to fight as one united front to maintain the freedoms that are made possible because of the longstanding fight the US has put up against the enemy.

FDR starts off by stating that “we are fighting for the right of men to live together as members of one family rather than as masters and slaves”, which seems contradictory from the start. Not only are people, like Ichiro in Okada’s novel, excluded from this resounding “we” (which happens to be repeated three times throughout the announcement), but they are essentially positioned as the slaves forced to work – or in this case, fight – for the masters who lead this country. In the novel, Ichiro would contest the fact that he is a part of this “family” of the United States for a variety of reasons, such as that his family is being held in an interment camp while he is forced against his will to fight in a war – seemingly contradictory meanings to the word “family”, as FDR denotes.

This statement goes on to call upon “the spirit of brotherhood” that these men are fighting for, and ends with a seemingly empty promise to “extend brotherhood earth-wide which gives hope to all the world”. Again, the spirit of brotherhood that FDR talks about is contradicted directly by the troubles that Ichiro faces throughout the novel, the biggest being identity and belonging. Ichiro feels as though he doesn’t belong as an American because of the terms of living he and his family are given by the government, but he also doesn’t feel as though he belongs as a Japanese man because he fought against them (again, unwillingly) and he no longer physically resides there. Because of that, the way FDR ends his announcement with a call to action for brotherhood earth-wide crumbles underneath itself, for there isn’t even a true brotherhood visible within the United States, as Ichiro would argue.

 

One of the guiding questions of my research has been, what role or purpose do the Norse gods serve within the context of the ancient Norse society? Since they are apparently not morally perfect, or even good, it would appear that they are not meant to guide their believers in that way, differing drastically from the functions of the gods or messiah figures in most religions. For example, most theologians would agree that it would be good to live your life as similarly to Jesus as possible (WWJD). However, what if the Norse gods are not meant to guide people, but are just reflections, albeit extreme dramatizations, of the current society in which the believers already live? This idea is supported by their conception of what the universe looks like. They conceptualized a giant ash tree, called Yggdrasil, as the center of the earth. In the center of the tree is Asgard, the home of the gods, who represent order. Traveling away from the center is Midgard, home of the humans. Around the atmosphere of the tree is Utgard, the home of the “ice-giants”, who represent chaos. This conception of the world reflects the real situations of the ancient Northmen and how they live. A typical Viking settlement would have the home in the center, representative of order (Asgard), then the farm surrounding the house, tame but not necessarily as “orderly” as the house (Midgard), and beyond that, the forest, which would be vast and wild, unchartered territory (Utgard).

The gods of Asgard and the giants of Utgard are perpetually at war. This war will eventually end in the doom of the gods, called Ragnarok. This constant war is not presented as a battle between good and evil, but between order and chaos. Therefore, I believe they serve to reflect the Norse/Viking society, which did not necessarily value “goodness” in a moral sense, but did value order, because it was necessary to the continued survival of the clan(s).  The gods did not instruct their believers in a didactic way, but upheld already existing conventions. Georges Dumėzil’s “Tripartite Structure”, as applied to this pantheon, supports that argument. Some questions that spring off of this idea of perpetual war that I can use to guide further research are, what implications does it have that the gods do not even win the war? And is it significant that we know at the start of the sagas that the gods are in fact already dead? Or will die? What purpose does linear time serve to this idea of perpetual war? Are the gods both alive and already dead to the characters in the sagas, similar to how the Christian god is both always present and has already died as Jesus?

Georges Dumėzil studied a range of Indo-European tales and identified a deistic organization that many cultures share. “Dumėzil has sought to demonstrate that the earliest I-E speaking societies of India, Europe, and elsewhere shared a common set of such ‘collective representations’. Most if not all of these early I-E societies, he asserts, were characterized, at least in their earliest known periods, by a hierarchically ordered, tripartite social organization, each stratum of which was collectively represented in myth and epic by an appropriate set of gods and heroes” (Littleton, 148). Dumezil makes the argument that these societies, including the Vikings, possessed a “tripartite ideology” that was able to travel and spread geographically. This ideology refers to a tendency to divide phenomena in general into three related categories. This notion reminded me of the Christian Holy Trinity. For the Indo-European societies that Dumezil studied, (not Christianity) he came up with three overarching categories: the priestly stratum, the warrior stratum, and the herder-cultivator stratum (in descending order of importance). This hierarchy applies in general to all the early I-E societies, but I believe in the pre-Christian Icelandic society, it holds with a few tweaks. For example, the “priestly” function is expanded to include the King or clan leader, represented by the gods Odin and Tyr. It is expanded, not altogether changed, because some sagas will still show the importance of the mystic or the shaman, although the “priest” is usually a “priestess” (called a Völva…) The Vikings add a judicial as well as a mystic quality to the first function. Additionally, the third function, the herder-cultivator, is expanded to include a female fertility function, represented by the goddess Freyja.  That leaves the warrior function, fulfilled by Thor. I believe this tripartite structure serves to uphold the order of the Viking clans, because it makes specific categories for the leaders, the warriors, and the peasants. I will use examples from specific sagas, such as Sigurdr’s Saga, where this structure is particularly evident, to further this argument.

Citation:

Littleton, C. Scott. “The Comparative Indo-European Mythology of Georges Dumézil”. Journal of the Folklore Institute. Vol 1, No. 3. Dec. 1964, pp.147-166. JSTOR

photo source

When I first spotted all six volumes of A Cultural of History of Food on a neglected library shelf, I foolishly thought, “I’m set!” I expected to rely heavily on the volumes to inform the trajectory of my research (i.e. which period(s) I would select for my thesis) and to provide me with the most complete, deep research on its advertised focus, “a cultural history of food.” But I am disappointed in these volumes. Here I focus on volume six, A Cultural History of Food in the Modern Age, a period the editors define as 1920-2000. The chapter titles are promising: “Food Production,” “Food Security, Safety, and Crises,” “Kitchen Work,” and “Family and Domesticity” all relate to the work I am doing on home cooking and cookbooks in periods of infrastructural crisis: the Victorian era (industrializing food production), the Turn of the Century (further industrialization and overwhelming immigration and population influx (Pilcher 27)), WWI, and WWII (both of which experienced crippling rationing and food shortages).

Since this volume’s parameters are 1920-2000, I knew its only overlap with my periods was WWII. But on WWII this volume’s information is meager. “Food Security, Safety, and Crises” and “Family and Domesticity” proved the most fruitful chapters, but even their research related tangentially to mine. They provided context and a broad scope rather than detailed information on wartime interactions with food. In “Family and Domesticity,” Alice Julier sweeps over the crux of food in WWII with statements like, “reformers and government agents promoted [added vitamins to widely distributed foods] after World War I because they worried about the supply of healthy potential soldiers” (150), and the helpful (in that it confirms my own conclusions from examining wartime cookbooks) but boring (because it lends nothing to my research, pushes on no facet of wartime cooking) statement, “As the market was unreliable, canning, preserving, and growing food…were still common place practices, reinvigorated by national propaganda campaigns in World War II…” (154). But this is obvious from any wartime poster; of course citizens relied on their home kitchens during wartime, when embargoes and hostile national relations interfered with trade. I am picking on Julier’s chapter, but all the chapters I read in volume six shared this problem of sweeping over the exciting, probing questions of why citizens ate this way, what the challenges on the home front were with daily eating and providing for families, what health problems emerged from this malnutrition? This volume fails to address the questions its research provokes.

When I read volume five (which I read before volume six), I was bored and frustrated for the same reasons listed above: the research did not provide me with any conclusions about wartime attitudes to food that I could not glean from examining a few wartime posters; it did not challenge my initial assumptions that cookbooks would provide evidence of the frugal, anxious attitudes towards food in WWI and WWII. Volume five, which focused on the “Age of Empire” (about 1800-1920), attended to French and Italian schools of cooking, and Middle-Eastern and Asian countries’ food production modernizing, but very little on Victorian industrialization affecting British food production, which I figured was a notable change in this period. And while volume five focused overtly on non -American and -British countries, which frustrated me because I sought information on Britain, volume six infuriated me for its unrelenting focus on American food, when the collection’s title implies a world-view.

So my sense of these volumes has completely altered since I first encountered them. I originally looked on them as research Bibles, the answers to my wonderment of what the heck I would write a food thesis on. But now that I have specified the periods and nations (mostly British, some American) I am focusing on, I see that much of the volumes are useless to me. Granted, they do provide, as I have said, broad contextualization; they present a starting point. But even anthologies that are designed to cover most “bases” and introduce readers to a subject ensure that they satisfy the questions more probing readers will have. The Cultural History of Food collection fails to do this: the research is too general, then too preoccupied with one nation’s experience; the chapters mention a major focal point (WWII) and then provide surface-level research on it; and the research is so sweeping and all-encompassing that it is rendered minimally valuable.

 

Works Cited:

Bentley, Amy, ed. A Cultural History of Food in the Modern Age. Bloomsbury, 2016.

Bruegel, Martin, ed. A Cultural History of Food in the Age of Empire. Bloomsbury, 2016.

 

 

 

Having chosen to narrow the focus of my thesis to the ways that the concept of monstrosity in 18^th and 19^th century Gothic novels drew upon British imperialism, colonialism, and contemporary xenophobic fear, it has become necessary for me to develop a deeper understanding of Britain’s history in order to engage in effective racial readings of my primary texts. For this reason, much of my research has been dedicated to discerning how to draw parallels between the fictional, monstrous figures of novels and the racial stereotypes that spurned fear and loathing from the British public during this time period. In trying to identify the ways in which monstrous characters reflect the societal notion of the threatening “Other,” therefore, I have utilized my key search terms, such as “imperial gothic” and “monstrosity” in order to discover sources that will provide me with the information I am seeking. Choosing to tackle the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein first due to its lack of more obvious connections to racism and imperialism, I stumbled upon H. L. Malchow’s article “Frankenstein’s Monster and Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain.” This article has not only enhanced my understanding of the various overlaps that exist between British imperialism, racism, and Shelley’s fiction, but, when read in tandem with Shelley’s novel itself, has enabled me to have a new outlook on The Modern Prometheus and its interaction with racism.

I am particularly fond of Malchow’s article because it sets up clear connections between British imperialism and the country’s attitude towards those of other races and ethnicities in the 19^th century. Because British imperialism and Britain’s construction/conception of racial identity and racial hierarchy are fairly expansive topics, I have found it challenging to narrow down my historical research or pick out which works will be most valuable to my thesis. By reading Malchow’s article, however, I have not only gained a more focused understanding of the “Napolenic Era” and Britain’s century-long development of the concept of the “Other,” but have also been introduced to the events and literature that filled Mary Shelley’s world with “both positive and negative representations of the black man…[particularly] in Africa and the West Indies” (99). Furthermore, this article also introduced me to other resources, such as Philip D. Curtin’s The Image of Africa: British Ideas and Action, 1780-1850 and Douglas Lorimer’s Colour, Class, and the Victorians: English Attitudes to the Negro in the Mid-Nineteenth Century, that center on the idea of savagery and monstrosity that shaped public opinion and societal conventions in Britain.

In addition, I was also enticed by this article due to its overall structure and its primary topics of focus. In each section, Malchow emphasizes how the portrayal of Frankenstein’s monster drew on either Britain’s attitudes towards foreigners, the fears and hopes of abolition of slavery in the West Indies, components of the Enlightenment, or “the expansion of the power of British empire over non-white populations in Asia and Africa.” This enables the article to draw straightforward connections between the text of Frankenstein and the development of the racist, Eurocentric perspective (93). For example, Malchow notes that Frankenstein’s hesitation to create a mate for his monster because he fears he will spawn a “race of devils” directly corresponds with the way in which Britain feared having “blacks free from the discipline of the white master [in which they could] …breed like animals unrestrained by decency or prudence” (Shelley 210;Malchow 113). In this way, Malchow’s article not only expanded my historical knowledge, but also gave me the opportunity to understand how to incorporate this knowledge into a textual analysis of Frankenstein.

When I first read this article, I possessed a general knowledge of British imperialism, but had never dedicated a significant amount of time linking the country’s imperialist actions to its impact on British culture and racial perceptions. While I admit that my first reading took a significant amount of time due to the fact that I had to research figures and topics with which I was not familiar, my subsequent readings allowed me to understand how Frankenstein’s monster not only exists as a representation of the racial “Other” in the novel, but serves as embodiment of the racial stigmas associated specifically with blacks by the British public. Frankenstein’s monster, like the stereotyped black of 19^th-century Britain, is portrayed as “wild and dangerous, unpredictable and childlike” with a “dark and sinister appearance” and a lack of parental connections (Malchow 105, 102, 115). In this way, this article has enabled me to uncover how Frankenstein portrays the inevitable inferiority and assumed villainy of non-whites in 19^th-century Britain; Despite the fact that the monster begins with an innocent desire for knowledge, freedom, and acceptance, he, like blacks of this time period, is trapped in a role of subordination and exclusion due to Britain’s patriarchal, color-prejudiced society.

Jessie Redmon Fauset wrote Plum Bun in 1929 after many years acting within the Harlem Renaissance movement as an editor and member of the literary elite, resisting the movement and publishers’ interest in promoting “elevated primitivism.” As Deborah McDowell points out in her introduction to Plum Bun, McDowell says Fauset did not achieve notoriety for the same reason as Nella Larson, Zora Neale Hurston, and so many other women in the movement—their works were dismissed as literal, their nuanced societal critiques overlooked. Unlike Hurston, though, Fauset has still not been fully recognized, and McDowell recounts that when she mentions the author, people ask, “’Who is he?’” Some of Fauset’s criticism of black society is evident in the first two chapters of the novel, and the things its main character, Angela, perceives as her true wants, reveal the effects of socialization on women’s desires and lives. A correlation exists between acceptance of norms as evolutionary impulse that shape the content of lives and the canon’s reflection of the judgements made about black women’s writing.

Colorism shows up almost immediately in Plum Bun when the narrator describes how the light-skinned mother, Mattie, and Angela travel separately from the other daughter and father, who are both dark-skinned. Framed as an effort to move more efficiently, the family effectively segregates itself, and this has a normalizing effect on the daughters. It is impossible to imagine that they and especially Angela would assume segregation is morally acceptable when their parents not only do not decry it, but also practice it within their family.

Not only will this shape the girls’ approach to perceived racial difference, Fauset also uses it to emphasize assumptions about skin tone within the African American population. It is no accident that the darker skinned daughter is paired with the father, suggesting she is more masculine, and prefers Saturday to Sunday, the holy day. Angela is with her light-skinned mother and enjoys doing stereotypically feminine tasks and displaying herself in what she considers glamorous settings.

Another scene is the Sunday routine outlined in Chapter two. Again, segregation acts here when Angela and her sister Virginia split Saturday and Sunday as their individual days. Angela’s day as Sunday, and the narrator says, “She was only twelve at this time, yet she had already developed a singular aptitude and liking for the care of the home, and this her mother gratefully fostered” (Fauset 20). Angela seems to assume that her affinity for the tasks she goes on to describe are natural and genuinely her inclinations. I would challenge that and assert that socialization of gender norms is in action at least within this family. Angela’s mother has a key role in Angela’s adoption of this routine when she “fostered” it.

Angela’s mother, Mattie, is not only the person supporting Angela’s domesticity, but also the little girls model for the way she practices these activities. Fauset writes, “She set the muffins in the oven, pursing her lips and frowning a little just as she had seen her mother do; then she went to the fort of the narrow, enclosed staircase and called “hoo-hoo” with a soft rising inflection,— ‘last call to dinner,’ her father termed it” (Fauset 21). Angela mimics her mother, the same person who models passing for her and her partner in their segregated household. She acts out the physical signs of frustration, “pursing her lips” and “frowning,” as pleasurable, failing to consider her mother’s indicated displeasure with those obligations. Perhaps her mother “fostered” this behavior because she does not enjoy doing all the household work Angela aspires to.

Angela’s believes that her desires are her own, as evidenced by her frustration with going to church. Angela finds herself, “wondering at just what period of one’s life existence began to shape itself as you wanted it” (Fauset 22). It does not occur to Angela that the activities she would choose are also a function of her socialization.  This section, without explicitly saying that internal racism or gender roles are reinforced within African American families, demonstrates it and its effects on the children. The children do not know that their activities are not the natural instincts they believe, but rather the result of lifelong conditioning. This is the same training that critics of Fauset and other women received, which led them to assume their texts were simple denouncements of black men and traditional roles rather than the societal pressures that, when unexamined, force people into lifelong paths. If they choose their own, as Fauset did, their narratives are ignored.

Fauset, Jessie Redmon. Plum Bun: A Novel without a Moral. Beacon, 1990.

Recently, I have written a post for another academic blog on Jean Toomer’s Cane, a novel set in Georgia and the south on the suffering of black community similar to Toni Morrison’s Beloved. The book is written in a blend of prose, poetry, and rhetoric that makes it difficult to categorize by genre. In two sections, it covers multiples stories alongside poems that respond to the images and themes that are contained within them. Some of the most powerful moments of the book such as “Esther”, the story a storekeeper who is fascinated by a black man who returns to her town not as impressive as she once thought. A two-page story, “Rhobert”, also caught my eye as a fascinating image of a run-down, black home in the south. I also liked several poems in the book, including “Song of the Son”, “Reapers”, and “Harvest Song”. In my initial blog post, I connected several themes of the end and death to apocalypse, in that the poem’s images of darkness, death, and ends. But these were shallow close-readings of the images. I titled the piece “The Gentle Apocalypse”. But it is not always gentle. One story, “Blood Burning Moon”, confused me as it was a strikingly violent story of lynching that stuck-out next to my examples. This example was not the exception. My idea of the “gentle apocalypse” was the exception. I addressed Toomer’s use of female objectification, violence, and  brutality in the south toward the end, but I am troubled as to how well I accomplished that.  The goal of this re-reading of both the post and Cane is to pinpoint where I could improve the accuracy in my analytical writing.

 

Some aspects of the blog post had commendable aspects, despite several notes it could have addressed several errors in my writing or expanded my argument. It was a good thought to lead with a definition of apocalypse inspired by Susan Bower’s “Beloved and the New Apocalypse”. Apocalypse is looking into the boundary or edge of one realm to another, while observing both and anticipating change. Despite my definition being worded quite differently,  I realized I should have cited her and explained the quote in more detail. In editing the post, I have added the citation for ethical reasons. I realized this post, while confined to only 250 words, had become blatantly “1-on-10” as Writing Analytically would put it (WA, 207). I mention images in Cane like, “dusk and night” at first, but forget to mention locations of this conversation such as in the poem “Song of the Son” (Toomer, 17). The poem literally addresses, “for though the sun is setting on / A song-lit race of slaves, it has not set;” among other lines that compare the dawn and dusk to an eternal memory of slavery. The example of the story “Esther” in Cane could have gone farther. While it stated Esther changed her, “perspective of the town possibly because she lost her reason to stay”, I failed to acknowledge that this was in reference to a scene where a girl was disgusted to have almost slept with Barlo, a man many years his senior. There needs to be more discussion of how Esther was humiliated into changing her perspective of the town, that her reason to stay was lost due to becoming an object of sexual objectification. Finally, I needed to wrap together how these images of departure, of violence, and of time passing in dusk and dawn, culminates to this definition of apocalypse. This conclusion would further ask how Toomer imagines the future of the South. Any blog post could be tighter and more composed if it recognizes it’s key point or definition and concludes by bringing it to a new stage of questions. Which is what I am about to do right now:

 

Toomer once called Cane a “swan-song of the South” after observing how the black folk spirit of the south fading with the Great Migration. Can Morrison’s Beloved be seen as a text which can converse with Toomer on Slavery? Is this apocalypse of the south also a Slave apocalypse, a South apocalypse. Or both? I favor both as an answer, but I wonder if the two apocalypses should be considered separate epochs.

 

As for my original blog post, how do you think I did with my self-study? Visit the link and let me know what you think.

 

Works cited:

Bowers, Susan. “Beloved and the New Apocalypse.” Critical Studies in Black Life and Culture, Toni Morrison’s Fiction Contemporary Criticism, Garland Publishing, 1997, pp. 209-228.

Toomer, Jean, and Rudolph P. Byrd. Cane: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism. W.W. Norton & Co, 2011.