Constructing a cultural identity is as easy as mastering the nuances of a foreign language while traveling to the country of its origin on an eight-hour flight. There are gifted individuals among us who may be able to carry out this task in less than eight hours. Fortunately or not, they are few in number. For the rest of us, the process of constructing our cultural ‘selves’ is the journey of a lifetime, struggling to position/inscribe ourselves within a culture that is no longer (re)presented as monolithically uniform.
I have always been interested in the relationship language and memory partake on in the making/unmaking of narrative ‘voices’, especially if their ‘historical counterparts’ had been denied existence, had been ‘shoved under the rug’ so to speak. In view of that, it seems to me that both hooks’ narrative technique and Whitman’s poetic dictum ask of their readers to question persistently the presence of a selfhood and its positionality inside an individual, within a community, amidst a social practice, or in a text. Their writing beckons us to investigate further how ‘gender’ and ‘race’ as latter-day social categories shape language and memory, how they influence a subject’s discursive life, how they help ‘bear witness’ to the construction of a self. One of the reasons why I decided to journey with the “Genders in America” seminar at the University of Leeds' School of English is tied in with my own understanding of this evocative process; namely, I would like to continue investigating the correlative link that exists between ‘engendered language’ and ‘racialized memory’, particularly when a subject’s social life cannot be clearly conveyed.
In that regard, I wonder how successful the cultural ‘translation’, ‘(re)claiming’ of a silenced self could be once it becomes an integral part of the public’s narrative? What are we to make of its (the silenced self’s) re-done identity? How do we approach its study?
Examining one’s own history and tradition in isolation only produces additional endocentric theories of ‘the self’ and ‘the nation’ (that the self belongs to), something that no scientist of the past creating in the present for the future should concede to. America has long been perceived by the outsider’s inwardly gazing eye as a human ‘melting pot’, a place where different races, various ethnic groups, are to experience a liberated life in a constant pursuit of private and communal happiness. America does exhibit the demographics of a fairly rounded (re)presentation of the world’s races, ethnicities, classes, gendered identities. And it may, therefore, be perceived as the perfect battlefield for their redefinition and refiguration, particularly when the case of gender and race is at stake.
Conversely, the solidification of this myth has been challenged by recent American Studies scholarship which rejects its contextual fundamentalism, proposing instead a demystification of the ‘shared culture’ image, so that once marginal/insignificant/irrelevant voices carry out the now dehierarchizized and denaturalized investigation of the ‘national culture’ as a fragmented whole. Working within/through separate trajectories of American Studies scholarship, Houston A. Baker, Ramón Gutiérrez, Kevin J. Mumford, K. Scott Wong, George Lipsitz, Barry Shank, Mark Hulsether, José David Saldívar, to name but a few, deconstruct the traditionally accepted notion of America as a unified, monolithic national culture. Their theoretically informed studies evaluate the intricate relationships existing among landscape, people and technology in the American experience, ascertaining the importance for continuous re-assessment and re-development of these relationships and their subsequent relational effects within American Studies scholarship as it, in turn, strives to engage in in-depth analyses of culture concepts and culture studies. In this respect, hooks’ work of historical recovery and Whitman’s verses of engendered nationhood offer the scholarship a revisonary way to approach the study of America’s ‘fragmented nationhood’; to (re)claim silenced voices is to be in a world where academic predications connect with separate human experiences, while at the same time weaving out a fluid nexus of relations and transactions that actively engage their subjects.
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