February 16, 2017 - 23:36
February 16th, 2017
Our discusion about Frederick Douglass's narrative has stayed with me throughout the week. The part of the discussion about the distance between the writer and the written self was particularly interesting. It reminded me of Timothy Mitchel's 1991 text, Colonising Egypt. The text describes the birth of museums from World Exhibitions and provides a historical analysis of the western gaze. Colonising Egypt has a chapter that focuses on the experiences of an Egyptian delegation sent to Europe in the 19th Century. The text describes how the delegates could not avoid being transformed into exhibitions while walking through Eueopean cities. People would stare at them as if they were artifacts.
In the text, Mitchel also describes how the western gaze maintains its authority and "objectivity." At World Exhibitions, glass enclosed exhibitions were used to display nonwesterners and their cultures. The glass helped define the oppositional positions of the observer and the observed. When displaying "others," early curators also paid attention to detail in order to create the belief that the audience was seeing an honest representation of said culture/peoples.
While reading Douglass's narrative, it felt as though the continued commodifcication of his body and life story was responsible for the distance between Douglass as the writer and his written self. To fight for the freedom of others, he had to sell himself again. Douglass's narrative focused heavily on detail to establish authority and prove its validity. All of this resulted in a version of a self that had been translated for white audiences. I find it difficult to reconcile the idea that in order to "speak to power," one must cooperate with or assimilate to the very same hegemonic structures that are working against them. Is that radical? Was it radical for June Jordan to have written down and taught Black English, a traditionally oral language? Why change the form and prescribe to White standards in order to prove that the language is just as sophisticated and complex? How do we recocile the ways we work with and against oppressive structures?