Major claims:
- In history, literacy is often a stand-in for skin color in attempts to subordinate African Americans.
- There are systems of development for cultural and political support, which have enabled skills and resources to transmit through core cultural values like self-determination, freedom, education, advancement and unity in secular and religious existence.
- African American sponsors were fewer in number but stronger potential for influence, and often tied to mass literacy
- African American literacy sponsors are tied to economic, cultural, political, spiritual and ideological contexts, often couched in a historical struggle to accrue literacy.
- V.P. Franklin
- Jackie Jones Royster
- W.E.B. Du Bois
- Bertha Nixon*
- Frances Hawkins*
- June Birch *
- Stanley James*
- Anita Russell*
- E Lincoln & L.H. Mamiya
- Marcus Garvey
- NAACP
- Jordan Grant*
I've included key peeps from both scholarship and participants because there are several methodological assumptions at work in this chapter:
- the narratives of literacy learning and practice hold valuable information for this particular community because transmission of literacy happens in some "unofficial" ways, thus they demonstrate the importance of taping into those resources
- within these accounts (see the reflection on literacy and money on 127), the constriction of resources and the simultaneous opportunity for literacy learning is apparent, demonstrating the intersection of literacy that comprises the main claim of the book
Brandt claims that her use of edited English is an equalizing gesture, meant to highlight the meaning behind her participants message rather than the message itself. This decision stems, in large part, from her own lack of linguistic expertise in dialect and transcription. I accept her explanation and forthright explanation, but it raises questions of representation: how should participants be represented and what factor influence the choice of how we represent participants? Are there factors that trump others when it comes to ethics of representation?
What does the narratives of this chapter add to her previous explanation about literacy sponsors?
What impact does Brandt's work have on the way we understand African American rhetoric and vernacular from a composition and cultural rhetoric standpoint?
5 comments:
Great post here Amber. I want to take up your question of "What does the narratives of this chapter add to her previous explanation about literacy sponsors?" I found this particular chapter especially useful considering what some of us have been reading about in Adam's Social Histories of Rhetoric course. I think that the way Brandt illustrates the sponsors as the A.A. church and the civil rights movement dovetails well with what we have seen in Katie Cannon's study of Isaac Rufus Clark's homiletics course. As Brandt and Cannon note, the church - as the single institution not governed by white supremacist interests for much of the A.A. experience - has served as a site of resistance. The literacy cultivated in that space is unique in its subordinated - and simultaneously contesting - position.
I wonder, considering your next question (What impact . . .), what other spaces that have served marginalized groups in culturing resistance might also yield specific literacy practices? Though her study was different as it didn't concentrate specifically on literacy (and it investigated a working class, white majority), Julie Lindquist's A Place to Stand seems like another great ethnographic piece that traces the forms of expression in particular spaces. I know, this paragraph is a bit off topic.
All that being said, I wonder what other spaces folks haven't investigated in creating literacy narratives of resistance. . . and I wonder if the economic forces that Brandt claims shape literacy practices among the majority (Agrarian --> Manufacture --> Information) are always just for the majority. Obviously in the A.A. experience this wasn't the case, but what about other marginalized others?
Forgive the spelling errors! :-) - justin
good questions and response. Since Justin tackled your latter questions, I'll think about your first one. I think that transcription is a huge issue in interview/ethnographic research. What did she gain or lose in not transcribing the way people talk seems to be the gist of your question. As you say, Brandt makes an equalizing gesture--she does not capture pronounced differences in speech patterns. She has regularized and standardized the speech. She does not indicate pauses or umms (as do some ethnographers) either in addition to difference in language use (variety). I think her choice is tied to her desire to narrativize literacy in relation to lives, the stories of the people acquiring and engaging literacy and "trading" it. I think that her choice makes sense within her framework and methodological choices. I also think that a white researcher who speaks and writes standard English capturing the speech of working class folks, black folks, recent immigrants has to think through her political and ideological choices (we all do). I think Brandt's choice allows her to avoid some baggage she would have to carry if she quoted what she transcribed without standardizing it.
The standardization of English in transcribing is an interesting concern. On the one hand it seems to be taking away from the individual's mode of expression. On the other hand (and perhaps more slippery) if we accept literacy as a commodity or something that can be traded then consider it in terms of currency. So that if when interviewing the 4 generation literacy legacy group Brandt uses $1 language aka standard edited English (because that's what they use) and then interviews "others" using $.01 aka urban vernacular (because that's what they use)then don't we inadvertantly put those at risk of being dismissed (or cheapened)? I know "cheapening" wouldn't be the intended outcome and I also believe that Brandt's audience should be able to avoid making such judgments but that is difficult to determine. So in the context of her study (this is not to give a pass to all studies) I feel like her choice was justified. This is a hard thing for me to say or admit...primarily because I wish whole heartedly that the hierarchy did not exist but it does and if we told our students that any venacular is accepted in any situation we'd be misrepresenting the truth...even if it is how we believe it "should" be.
Your first question here made me think about the different versions of Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I a Woman." Our only knowledge of this text is what had been transcribed by her white audience members. Some versions choose to represent her speech more "authentically" while some make attempts to clean up her language and pronunciation a bit. Here we run into questions about the transcriber's own ends in capturing the speech. In the "authentic" version, is the transcriber accurately capturing the speech or is she exaggerating the differences in literacy in an attempt to represent Truth as the Other? Which version better represents reality and which version attributes Truth the most agency? I'm not sure that any of this is really relevant, that's just what it made me think about. :)
Class discussion:
Not just what is she asking, but where is she locating these questions
*def of literacy pg 5
historical/cultural materialism
broad definition of literacy: 1) all encompassing, 2) doesn't label and place literacy in a hierarchy
also gives credit to appropriation and creativity of people using literacy for their own means
networks of survival
writing done in institutions more memorable in other manifest forms
individual sponsorship vs institutional literacy or even individual vs collective
who get an amount of space and why?
why did she choose to not represent things like the Hmong importation for diversification...what motivates that choice?
question of choices...keeping some people lives joined, others separated, how people are represented and when
success of white guy and failure of Mexican-American demonstrates bad choices potentially
What is gaze of the researcher in the interview? What is the role of affect in the narratives she is creating?
literacy= moral, civil, commodity, personal responsibility
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