Horner, Lu, Royster, and Trimbur, Language Difference in Writing

Horner, Bruce, Min-Zhan Lu, Jacqueline Jones Royster, and John Trimbur.  “OPINION: Language Difference in Writing:  Toward a Translingual Approach.”  College English 73.3 (Jan 2011) 303-321.

Horner, Lu, et al describe how the intended ossification of language use in the classroom is in direct conflict with the actual usages that intersect in the classroom by way of the average (U.S.) classroom’s heterogeneity.  Though traditionally perceived as “interference”  the authors propose that a “translingual approach” that will serve “as a resource for producing meaning in writing speaking, reading and listening” (303).  Taking up the 1974 CCCC’s “Students’ Rights to Their Own Language”, the authors challenge educators to approach language difference with “an attitude of deliberative inquiry” (304).

The authors begin by outlining two current responses to language difference, explaining that both responses are problematic in that they treat “language and language practices as discrete, uniform, and stable” (307) and herein, they hit upon what must change in order for language practices to work within a translingual approach.  Essentially, language practices must value the complicated ways that language gets taken up and used by speakers.  This understanding of language practice is particularly relevant to the sorts of language policies at work in social/cultural groups; as well, it presents specific ramifications to the ways that writing programs promote translingualism in their administrative, hiring, and pedagogical practices (for students and student teachers).  The end of this article functions specifically to those ends (for writing programs) by offering references to those who are interested in taking up this idea of translingualism in writing program.

Reading Response, Week Twelve

Visiting the CCCC this year, was particularly interesting for me because I was very curious about how this new category—113—would affect the sorts of sessions that were available.  As usual, I spent several days prior to the conventions reading through the searchable program for sessions familiar, unfamiliarly interesting, and helpful, knowing that I would probably end up changing my plans anyway.  It just so happens that one of the most interesting sessions I went to was not a session at all, but it directly relates to the Horner, Lu, et al piece (as well as the others, in some ways) and the  that we read this week.

I will not lie.  One of my favorite things about the CCCC is the publishers’ parties.  I only just discovered them last year, but they are definitely not events to miss for the sheer mass of people (and free food and drink) that you get to take in over the course of a few hours.  They are sort of like speed dating for compies.  This year, Bedford/St. Martins held their party at the historic Turner Field Club house.  After filling our plates with a variety of completely unhealthy fried fare (okay, the food last year at Churchill Downs was better, but harder to get to), Pearl, Beth, and I sat down at a table outside and took in the sight of the green, the massive stands, our comrades.  A few minutes in, we were joined by Richard, a professor at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, originally from London.  This is not unusual at CCCC, being joined by a random academic, talking to people you’ve read and them not realizing you’re completely in awe of their work.  After, asking Richard the expected questions about how awesome it must be to live in Hawai’i, our conversation shifting to Standard American English.  Richard railed against SAE and in his crisp British accent, and I couldn’t help but wonder how he’d sound speaking the pidgin of the native Hawaiian, or code-switching to Cockney or an Irish brogue.  What would happen if he suddenly went country, or hip-hop on us?  I’m not sure, but I really wanted him to do it.  And he didn’t.

Pearl mentioned later that she wondered how he’d have responded if she’d asked how he felt speaking with such a privileged accent, and her question has been rolling around in my head ever since.  I mean, who is arguing for the translingual approach?  Academics.  And that’s a good thing. I agree with the points that come out of Horner, Lu, et al’s article.  There should be champions against exclusion working in institutions that are often the source of exclusion.  At the same time, I have to wonder about how that affects sovereignty.  As I read Lyons’ piece I realized that the tenuous problem of sovereignty is all caught up in how a nation-people gets that sovereignty.  If it can be revised, it can be taken away.  But if that nation-people takes it for themselves, though the path may be all the more rocky, it seems that it would be lasting.  As current uprisings of people claim the governments they want, I’m sure they will encounter similar questions.  It seems that they will have to define for themselves how to achieve some sort of sovereignty that allows for the flexibility of language, for growth, as well as policies that define and in some cases solidify their other cultural practices.

References

Horner, Bruce, Min-Zhan Lu, Jacqueline Jones Royster, and John Trimbur.  “OPINION: Language Difference in Writing:  Toward a Translingual Approach.”  College English 73.3 (Jan 2011) 303-321.

Lyons, Scott Richards.  “Rhetorical Sovereignty:  What Do American Indians Want from Writing?”  CCC 51.3 (Feb 2000) 447-468.

 

Reading Response, Week Ten

This is a late response, so I don’t expect responses, but I do think that the readings for this week, particularly Bazerman and Prior and Shipka have given me a lot to think about in terms of my own project for my dissertation.  A lot of the problem that I have is that I’m overwhelmed by the different types of data that I’ve collected.  I have interviews and their recordings and transcripts; photos and videos of my participants at work; assignments and the resulting projects that come from them; binders of old notes; multimodal presentations.  But I am never quite sure that enough of it represents these people and their lives outside of academia.  The idea of chronotopic lamination (Prior and Shipka) and institutional invisibility (Bazerman) appeals to me because I know that much of what my participants do occurs outside of class, outside of the context of school, outside of institutions. But I feel that I’m not necessarily doing enough to represent that part of the issue of transfer.  I know that these situations exist in the lives of my participants as much as they do mine—for instance, my life with Phillip, roller derby, hiking, my dog and cat, even the occasionally need to sing karaoke, all affect how I think and do my own projects in school—but I’m not sure how to push for this in my project without guiding my participants to voice the conclusions I hope to make.

Prior and Shipka’s transcripts and the ways that they address the possibilities of leading their participants to look at certain things, makes me realize that I’m not alone in this concern:  “We should address a potential question about the methodology: our use of sample drawing to prompt the writers’ drawings.  We recognize that these examples may shape the style and content of participants’ drawings” (185).  In the same way, the questions I ask may have a similar effect; however, it seems this is unavoidable.  Still I wonder, is it enough to acknowledge the possibility and then work against (even if unsuccessfully so)?  Should I acknowledge such successes or failures?  I feel that there the idea of a whole being is important to the development of better research in writing studies (in many studies that examine ways of being and knowing and doing), but acknowledging that fact doesn’t make it easier to do or understand.

At any rate, I have taken away from these readings the hope that my own research will be able to offer the field some new perspectives, even if I have only just managed to scratch the surface of how we might better understand transfer as it relates to everyday literacy practices.

Prior and Shipka, Chronotopic Lamination

Prior, Paul and Jody Shipka.  “Chronotopic Lamination: Tracing the Contours of Literate Activity”  Writing Selves/Writing Societies.  Charles Bazerman and David R. Russell, editors. Fort Collins, CO:  The WAC Clearinghouse, 2003. 180-238.

Prior and Shipka discuss the process of chronotopic lamination, the layering of understanding through time and place, as an area that both CHAT (cultural-historical activity theory) and Writing Studies should examine further to develop new methods of researching/understanding what happens in literate, oral, and graphic representations.  Through a series of interviews and observations with four participants, the authors address how the work that individuals do is layered and occurs in more than one place, is informed by more than one type of practice, and is influenced by both the institutional and non-institutional.   Their examples of layered activity extend from the tasks that participants work to complete to the values, histories, and understandings of what they hope to accomplish.  This layering, or remediation (re-media-tion) is described as dialectical and non-linear, embodied, fusing old and new technologies/practices; furthermore, the complexities of that layering help to explain difficulties that one experiences as s/he tries to express what is thought by oral, literate, or graphic means.

Prior and Shipka explain ESSP’s (environment-selecting and -structuring practices) as methods people use to create physical spaces and spaces in time that are conducive to getting tasks done:  “ESSP’s, the ways writers tune their environments and get in tune with them, the ways they work to build durable and fleeting contexts for their work, are central practices in literate activity. They call for attention to the agency of actors, to the production of environments, and finally to consciousness itself as a historied practice” (228).  While Prior and Shipka indicate that CHAT and Writing Studies can gain from a better understanding of ESSP’s, individuals’ understanding of them can lead to more efficient/effective personal practices as well.

Notes and Quotes

Prior and Shipka discuss the process of chronotopic lamination

Megan Neuman – undergrad student; values word search

–          collisions between Neuman’s values and her teacher’s rejection

–          the teacher doesn’t get it

–          assignment forces her to pretend to value things in ways she doesn’t value

–          “conflict between internally persuasive and authoritative discourse” (213)

–          gaps in meaning, affect, and effort

–          ESSPs

• working mostly at home
• resources
• feedback from friends

Brent Johnson – undergrad student; running, film, assignment

–          making text correspond with message

–          correlation to Vygotsky’s “infusion of sense” (211)

–          ESSPs

• working in his dorm room
• scheduling his work
• door closed
• interactions with friends and family
• music selection

Michelle Kazmer – graduate student

–          comments from professor

–          trauma of being blocked in writing

–          turning “something that sounds chatty into something that sounds academic” (214)

–          “found that changing the tone of the language revealed content issues she had not recognized” (214)

–          “Kazmer’s tale of emotional upheavals and of strategies for recentering herself and her work points to the centrality of affect and motive in writing.”  (214)

–          ESSPs

• structuring time using two-hour blocks, two or three times daily
• moving from screen to print
• coordinating with her fiancé
• notebooks

Melissa Orlie – faculty member, walking as a practice; a lifelong project

–          “struggle to move from her ideas to expression/communication” (210)

–          “struggle to align theory with experience” (210)

–          Qtg Orlie directly:  “I’m mapping an internal world and …bring it out” (210)

–          ESSPs

• setting up her office
• moving out of the city
• “structuring time as well as space” (222)
• creating a sense of well-being
• Sam’s feedback
• walking
• notebooks

206

CHAT model (Leont’ev):  Three levels of activity

Activity1  “the whole” “concrete historical practice” “the total” union/disunion what’s going on Activity2 “the analytical plan” “pulls out the collective and motivated” “durable human life projects”

Activities  “sociohistorically developed”	Motives  “associated” to activities “collective”
Actions  “individual” “driven by conscious goals”	Goals  “conscious”
Operations  equipped	Unconscious Goals

–          sense

–          affect

–          consciousness

“externalized utterances (oral, written, graphic) do not do justice to, do not fully express, the sense or tone that was intended.  Expression then often produces a sharp, disturbing sense of loss and disorientation” (215)

Shifts in semiotics (“multi-sensory…to…linear-verbal” 215)

–          re-media-tion

• dialectical
• nonlinear
• old and new inform one another
• old used alongside new
• “sense of loss in expression” (216)

–          from one representation to another

–          “McLuhan’s analogy of the railway echoes Vygotsky’s argument that mastery of new material and psychological tools leads to a functional reorganization of elementary process that may have revolutionary consequences” (216).

CHAT focused on “psychological systems…or on social practices” (218)

CHAT and Writing Studies should have new approaches for examining sense, affect, consciousness”

“what we do in attempting to isolate ourselves is to situate ourselves in an external environment that is in tune with the mental state we want to attain” (219)

“ESSP’s, the ways writers tune their environments and get in tune with them, the ways they work to build durable and fleeting contexts for their work, are central practices in literate activity.  They call for attention to the agency of actors, to the production of environments, and finally to consciousness itself as a historied practice” (228).

–          CHAT hasn’t examined these issues

–          CHAT and Writing Studies should look at this

Conclusions

_  “…CHAT and Writing Studies could both benefit from a greater awareness of chronotopically laminated chains of acts, artifacts, and actors that are woven together and unwoven in polyvalent moments of being…” (231)

Review: Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional! : Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America

I’ve included a review I did of this book a few years back (for a class) since I mention it in one of my responses.

Book Review:  Robin D. G. Kelley’s Yo Mama’s Disfunktional: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America

Robin D. G. Kelley’s Yo Mama’s Disfunktional: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America offers a black feminist critique of the policies, theories, and practices that have resulted in the conditions of urban America at present.  Using a feminist approach with a Marxist slant, Kelley introduces his argument by calling attention to doctrines like the Moynihan Report. The social and political practices informed by these ways of perceiving culture in America are, at best, problematic or negligent; at worst, they result in a number of the persistent misconceptions that center on the country’s urban population.  Ten years since the publication of the first edition of the book, Kelley addresses the continued relevance of his arguments, originally posed in the nineties.  Though there are a few places where Kelley’s references to statistics are unclear, the book provides thought-provoking reading for any one seeking connections between the nation’s cultural myths, political climate, and governmental influence. Kelley critiques how social theorists and policymakers like Moynihan have concocted a sort of “Yo Mama” joke on the urban population.  Kelley posits that classifying as pathological the condition of urban African Americans is tantamount to an attack on urban mothers.

Kelly’s opening chapter addresses the impact of the boom in social sciences which spawned the field of ethnography.  That “science” of ethnography, in turn has provided society with most of the prevailing stereotypes about black America.  In efforts to authenticate and define the black experience, Kelley demonstrates that many of these “scientists” used little more than hasty generalizations to come to some very widespread conclusions about urban Americans.  He also points out that many urban Americans represent groups other than African American; none of these experiences can be accurately essentialized into singular representations of a cultural existence.  Kelley cautions against the social sciences’ blanket diagnosis (single mothers in broken situations) for problems facing the urban community and also points out those scientists’ failure to accurately depict the multi-faceted representations of the lives of inner-city African Americans.  After addressing what’s been said about the mothers, he then moves on to the youth.

In his second chapter “Looking to Get Paid”, Kelley’s focus extends to younger generations who are challenged to compete in a broken economic system.  Adopting incarceration over recreation, public funding policies left youth seeking out their own entrepreneurial footholds, one which would also either keep those youth either in or out of trouble.  Kelley’s discussion of profitable recreation is realistic, but seems to hold a more grim view than may be necessary, particular in light of his discussion of gender and recreation, as it were.  While Kelley acknowledge male-dominance in the options of sports, Hip Hop arts (included rapping, breakdancing, graffiti art), and gangs, he has little imagination in regards to what female-associated forms of play would prompt financial endeavors.  Beyond double-dutch, which is often competitive but in no way financially lucrative, sex seems to be the only other occupation he observes as offering young females an opportunity to work and enjoy the work.  Actually, in light of his identification of play as highly gender-specialized, the beauty industry would seem to me to be an excellent offering of such profitable play.  Part of what Kelley points out will help youth to more effectively transition into work is the reassignment and redistribution of public space.  Instead of punitive means of directing recreation, Kelley suggests pointing youth towards the development of their talents and skills.

After addressing these generations—mothers and fathers, sons and daughters—Kelley’s second half of the book looks at the development of the ideas that have shaped and inform many of the struggles of urban Americans.  In the third chapter, he critiques the self-help mentality of the Washingtonian moral uplift programs that absolve the political system of responsibility to minority citizens. A primary fault of this type of thinking, says Kelley, is that it fails to apply the same scrutiny to financial help offered to wealthy citizens and corporations, an argument of subsidies versus welfare.  Furthermore, as a result of African Americans (and other minorities) hindered ability to accumulate wealth (in terms of home ownership and the resultant collateral) due to discriminatory housing practices that persisted into the late 1990s, Kelley argues that assistance should be comparably available to all who need it to gain financial footing.  Reaching further back than this idea of moral uplift, the fourth chapter addresses neo-Enlightenment liberals’ attacks on identity politics (politics related to struggles of class, gender, sex, race, and so on) as weakening to universal views of the Marxist class struggle.  Theorists attacking identity politics fail to understand that class is largely determined by identifying characteristics and cannot, therefore, be overlooked, an idea which leads to the summation of his argument:  we must all work together to eliminate all types of oppression, both through work within the community, through labor unions, through higher education, though unified fronts of work and community, and through the elimination of environmental justice.

At the epilogue, Kelley makes a departure from the theoretical to the fictional.  Now, instead of looking back, he is looking forward, into October 2097.  Inspired by Edward Bellamy’s “utopian socialist novel” Looking Backward, “Looking B(l)ackward” takes the reader into the possible future, when urban Americans have been modified so that they may deal with “the rest of society” without experiencing some sort of severe meltdown brought on by the over stimulation of too much intellectual activity.  Though Kelley’s sense of hilarity keeps the audience from missing his sense of satire, the implications of the epilogue clearly demonstrate the magnitude of culture that would be lost if only the essentializing and misrepresenting images were permitted access to the discussion.

Kelley’s representation of culture moves readers away from trying to identify one prevailing sense of what it means to be American in an urban setting.  It is an inclusive perspective that challenges limited notions of both identity and class.  It encourages an understanding of both fact and fiction about urban America from multilateral perspectives.  As well, Kelley demonstrates that the issues faced by these underrepresented classes illuminate threats to the American society at large. He repeats several times the slogan of the Black Women’s United Front:  “ABOLITION OF EVERY POSSIBILITY OF OPPRESSION & EXPLOITATION” (102).  The slogan becomes a refrain for the kind of work that must be done to overcome the position in which the present culture wars place those living in urban America.

Yo Mama’s Disfunktional: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America. Robin D. G. Kelley. Boston: Beacon Press, 2008. 226 pages. $18.00

Reading Response, Week Nine

Admittedly, my “Notes and Quotes” section of the Cushman executive summary is pretty limited.  I think that’s because this week’s reading was the most difficult for me.  It wasn’t difficult because I couldn’t follow what she was saying.  I think I found it difficult to accept some of the conclusions she made based on what she presented to readers in the chapter. I’m trying to figure out where those conclusions all came from, so I’ve been picking through what’s available in googlebooks for answers.

In her preface, Cushman describes identifying with the people of Quayville more than she did with the population of her private college, explaining how she was singled out by her writing and its reflection of her “class background” (x).  On one hand, I can see why it would be good to show how she identifies with the struggles that her participants experience, but I think it sets me up (as the reader) to expect a similar sensitivity to her participants. Later, in Chapter 1, she addresses Bourdieau’s discussion of habitus as a means of understanding situations that contribute to “ideological domination”:

Despite severe living conditions, people consistently act as they do because the relentless repetition of their everyday lives contains the only set of options and possibilities from which they can conceive a better life. In other words, the framework of habitus assumes the idea of ideological domination where people unconsciously, unstrategically, consistently make choices that perpetuate their own living conditions. (8)

I get the impression that habitus is also at work in the text when there are pointed discussions of participants’ choices of Black and/or White English.  I’m not sure if Black and White English are called so here because of how some linguists may identify language or not.  I wanted to understand better how this binary was set up and exactly who fits into it.  I think the real problem that I’m having is with the construction of linguistic difference as Black or White in the eighth chapter; as a result, I’m hoping to better understand the work as whole.  I don’t mean to take her out of context, and I hope to be able to say more about what I understand of her discussion later.  For the time being, I would find is helpful if I could examine my own reactions to the work, but I’m not sure I’m able to filter anything out of the reading in a more useful way.

I’m rambling, but this reading reminds me of a very uncomfortable set of class periods in a linguistic class I took two years ago.  After spending the first quarter of the semester examining the histories of grammatical politics, we had landed on examples of dialects and every example that related to American English was assigned to a region until we got to the monolith of Black English, which apparently is one solid entity, unaffected by influences of region, Diaspora, or native land.  Further, after I and the only other Black student in the class challenged this lumping, we were told that we were simply sensitize because, well, we’re Black.

The thing is, when I’m looking at the representations of linguistic stylings of others groups influenced by the processes of im/migration and Diaspora, I do not find Spanish English, German English, Hmong English, Italian English, Korean English.  I find…English in the process of acquisition.  And I think I’d feel better (though I don’t ultimately assume it matters how I feel), if these distinctions weren’t drawn between me and the other Southern kids I lived with who all kind of talked the same (Southern…we all said ain’t…and so did the British) and thought kids from other places talked like the places they came from (not the color they were).  I don’t want to oversimplify; I know that there are definitely different inflections that come out of all differently hued mouths.  It’s just the lumping I have to resist.  When I met my dad’s friend Tony I was immediately fascinated by what his mouth did with English; Tony is from Korea and learned to speak English in Texas.  He defies lumping.  My cousins from Brooklyn sound more like my family from Charleston than my cousins from Charleston sound like my family from Orangeburg.

I do feel that people are starting to move away from this sort of lumping, but I found it hard to read past.  Especially when I couldn’t quite figure out how Cushman came to many of her conclusions, I kept going back to the way that she lumped language into these two overloaded categories.  Maybe this was the only way to work out the idea of linguistic transfer in these situations.  I’m not sure.  I even found that she lumped values into similar categories, removing from Raejone any independent value of what it means to be a good student; she lumped Raejone and Mr. Villups’s conversation in the same way, as if people from their city wouldn’t have shared similar ways of talking in the first place.

I’m going to have to work on this one a while before I feel I really understand what’s going on in The Struggle and the Tools, but maybe that’s been Cushman’s feeling too; she hasn’t published any other works like this since.

References

Cushman, Ellen.  The Struggle and The Tools:  Oral and Literate Strategies in an Inner City Community. Albany, NY:  State Univ. of NY Press, 1998.

Cushman, Ch. 8, Transfer of Language in Gatekeeping Interactions

Cushman, Ellen.  “Ch. 8”  The Transfer of Language in Gatekeeping Interactions.”  The Struggle and The Tools:  Oral and Literate Strategies in an Inner City Community. Albany, NY:  State Univ. of NY Press, 1998.  169-186.

In the eighth chapter of her longer work, The Struggle and the Tools, Cushman outlines how college hopeful, Raejone, navigates her way through the gatekeeping apparatus of college admissions.  Cushman begins by examining the language skills Raejone used to complete her statement of purpose on her application and then follows Raejone and her sister as they meet with Mr. Villups, the college admissions counselor at State, Raejone’s school of choice.

Cushman describes a bending of semantics in Raejone’s essay, which helps to weave together the values that both the applicant and the college uphold.  She seems to draw a distinct line between those values before she discusses Raejone’s writing, which places them side-by-side:  “In Raejone’s statement of purpose essay, she writes in a fashion that strikes a compromise between what the university values as a good student and what she values as a good person” (171).  Beyond outlining this part of the application process, Cushman also discusses how this young woman’s goals are also challenged by the pressures of her everyday life as a young mother with limited financial and parenting support.  Cushman addresses what happens when Raejone visits the admissions counselor to find out more about majoring in primary education, a major it turns out that the school does not have.  During this interview, which Cushman records, Raejone and Mr. Villups discuss Raejones’ educational goals. Villups pushes Raejone to consider how education will help her meet these goals. Cushman describes this discussion as one in which Black and White English (which I find problematic distinctions) are used by the two speakers to negotiate the applicants aims, aims which are not realized at the end of the chapter due to the social and economic challenges that Raejone faces in her everyday life.

Notes and Quotes

“Simply put, the more experience the individuals have with prestige languages, the less subjective tensions they likely feel when transferring to a dominant code, even when objective tensions are high and the ‘social expectations are greater…that legitimate…language will be used’ (119)” (170).

I’m not sure what is missing from this quote or what is implied by legitimate language.

“The transfer of language can promote social and political equality, and egalitarian ideology often implicit, yet not actualized, in encounters with social service institutions” (185).

Mignolo, Ch. 2, The Materiality of Reading and Writing Cultures

Mignolo, Walter D. “Chapter 2:  The Materiality of Reading and Writing Cultures: The Chain of Sounds, Grapic Signs, and Sign Carriers.” The Darker Side of the Renaissance:  Literacy, Territoriality, & Colonization.  Ann Arbor:  U of Michigan P, 2006.  69-122.

Chapter 2 of Mignolo’s The Darker Side of the Renaissance examines how the shifting reference to writing, reading, the book has been directed by the lens of colonization in such as way as to result in meanings that are imprecise either because they are lost/ignored in the processes of translation and the passage of time.  Beginning with the efforts of 16^th century scholar Alejo Venegas, Mignolo describes how Venegas’s understanding of the word book, “an ark of deposit” presented a complication in understanding conceptions of Mexica writing. This writing, though it examined a number of subjects, was systematically erased as the writing of the devil; only the works examining the movement of time, the development of the Maya calendar, were valued by Christianity/colonization.  Further complicating the notion of writing in these colonized societies was the fact that Amerindian writing did not resemble forms of writing familiar to the Spaniards that colonized these areas.  Mignolo outlines how the semiotic practices of Amerindian cultures were, in part, misunderstood because of the means of production used represent their ideas; here he presents an example of the Peruvian quipu, a textual representation that appeals to the woven or webbed nature of writing.

Mignolo’s examination hinges on conflicting conceptions of writing and reading.  The ways of knowing these cultures adhered to involved different ways of reading words and worlds.  From these disparate worldviews stems the problem of recognizing one another’s different conceptions.  Towards the end of this chapter, Mignolo discusses the stratified speech traditions of the Mexicas, traditions for speaking of/to the gods, about public works, to youths about public responsibilities, and to children about behaviors.  Each of these traditions is rooted in the idea of an elder speaking to a younger, passing on information from one generation to the next.  Though the colonists may have been mystified by the presence of writing in their new countries, our understandings of these cultures and their literacy practices are bounded by Mignolo’s conclusion that, while writing within cultures is universal, the concept of the book is not.

Notes and Quotes

“Material differences across cultures in writing practices, the storage and transmission of information, and the construction of knowledge were erased—in a process of analogy, a fight in the name of God against the devil” (75).

“Venegas’s definition of the book, very much like Nebrija’s celebration of the letter, erased previous material means of writing practices or denied coeval ones that were not alphabetically based” (76).

“Because of the paradigmatic example of writing was alphabetic and referred to the medieval codex and the Renaissance printed book, the Peruvian quipu was virtually eliminated from the perspective one can get about the materiality of reading and writing cultures” (83).

“Acosta’s definition of writing, then, presupposed that a graphic sign (letter, character, images) inscribed on a solid surface (Paper, parchment, skin, bark of a tree) was needed to have writing” (84).

“The Spaniards erased the differences between the two cultures by using their description of themselves as a universal frame from understanding different cultural traditions” (96).

“Thus, the Spaniards and the Mexicas had not only different material ways of encoding and transmitting knowledge but also—as is natural—different concepts of the activities of reading and writing.  Mexicas put the accent on the act of observing and telling out loud the stories of what they were looking at (movements of the sky or the black and the red ink).  Spaniards stressed reading the word rather than reading the world, and made the letter the anchor of knowledge and understanding” (105).

“God’s metaphor of writing, according to which his words are dictated to men, is so well known that we need not press the idea further.  Less familiar to scholars dealing with similar topics are communicative situations across cultures in which agents are, so to speak, on different sides of the letter.  The Mexicas had a set of concepts to outline their semiotic interactions, and their negotiations with the spoken words, written signs, the social roles and functions attached to such activities.  They also had an articulation of the social and religious functions of spoken words and written signs that could hardly be translated to Western categories (e.g., philosopher, man of letters, scribe, or poet) without suppressing (and misunderstanding) their activities, given a context in which the conceptualization of semiotic interactions is based on a different material configuration of the reading and writing cultures” (107).

“Thus, while a society that has writing and attributes to it a greater value than to oral discourse uses books for the organization and transmission of knowledge, a society in which oral transmission is fundamental uses the elders as organizers of knowledge and as sign carriers” (116).

“[L]etters or a writing system that allows for the transcription of speech is not a necessary condition for civilization; illiterate people can have very sophisticated manners, be highly concerned with education and with social behavior.  If, in the realm of technology, there are a number of things that cannot be done without writing, in the realm of human culture and behavior there seem to be no written achievements that cannot be equally attained by speech” (118).

“While the translation of amoxtli as ‘book’ or libro may be correct inasmuch as this rendering offers the best alternative in the English or Spanish lexicon, it is also misleading since it does not take into account the etymological meaning of words and the social function related to those translations in the respective languages. AS a consequence, the ideas associated with the object designated by those words are suppressed and replaced by the ideas and the body of knowledge associated with that work in the lexicon and the expressions of the culture into with the original is translated” (118-9).

“The new forms of storage and retrieval of information are in the process of eliminating our bookish habits.  Soon we will not need to peruse pages to find the necessary pieces of information.  We are already having access to alphabetical and thematic menus from which to obtain what we need.  The metaphor of the Divine Book could be replaced, then, by the metaphor of the Electronic Book, an international data bank in which all knowledge will be contained” (122).

Reading Response, Week Eight

This week’s readings seemed to take me in two different directions. While each of these pieces  seems rooted in historical conceptions of writing, Mignolo and Greene seem to approach them from a more cultural perspective that is connected to the loss of cultural literacy practices while Wells approaches how a cultural literacy practice is fostered.  I do, however, see some connection to this idea of lost cultural literacy in Wells’ chapter when she refers to the medical student Georgiana Young, who erases herself culturally from her text, though I think that may be a result of the fact that she was not examining an issue that was particularly connected to her cultural community.  While I think that, indeed, she may have chosen her topic as a part of her desire to pass (I’m not sure I see passing and crossdressing as the same and am troubled by Walls’ use of the term here), I don’t know that the difference in her writing would indicate a divergent trend; there are only three theses detailed in the section on African American medical practitioners.

I think the idea of surrogation (as Duffy presented it in Writing from These Roots) is powerful in each of these readings.  Mignolo outlines for readers how the Spaniards that colonized Amerindian cultures removed almost all representations of writing, deeming them the work of the devil.  As well, the inability to clearly communicate between the colonized and the colonist resulted in the loss, the forgetting, of a number of practices about which the colonists were ignorant.  In the same way, the influence of Anglo-Saxon colonization resulted in a similar loss by the descendants of those Spaniards as represented in Greene’s work.

Finally, I feel that this surrogation also results from the sort of literacy practices that are fostered by education on the part of those that seek to gain education.  Wells’s illustration of women writing in their way into medical literacy cultures seems to illustrate a sort of self-initiated surrogation.  I supposed too, that each of us has, in some way, grown away from our literacy origins as we move closer to our academic goals, but we are better able to preserve certain of these practices because we are not under the same degree of pressure to adopt someone else’s literacy practices.  Even though I think we experience some level of pressure to gain the literacy practices of academic culture, we have much more support to do so.

References

Duffy, John M.  Writing From These Roots: Literacy in a Hmong-American Community.  Honolu, HI:  U of Hawaii P, 2007.

Greene, Jami Candelaria.  “Misperspectives on Literacy:  A Critique of an Anglocentric Bias in Histories of American Literacy.” Literacy: A Critical Sourcebook.  Eds. Ellen Cushman, Eugene R. Kintgen, Barry M. Kroll, and Mike Rose.  Boston:  Bedford / St. Martin’s, 2001. 234-43.

Mignolo, Walter D. The Darker Side of the Renaissance:  Literacy, Territoriality, & Colonization.  Ann Arbor, MI:  U of Michigan P, 2006.

Wells, Susan.  Out of the Dead House:  Nineteenth-Century Women Physicians and the writing of Medicine.  Madison, WI:  U of Wisconsin P, 2001.

Cintron, Ch. 3, Looking for Don Angel

Cintron, Ralph. Ch. 3 Looking for Don Angel.  Angels’ Town: Chero Ways, Gang Life, and Rhetorics of the Everyday.  Boston: Beacon Press, 1997. 51-97.

In the third chapter of Angel’s Town, Ralph Cintron discusses the everyday rhetorics of Don Angel.  He opens the chapter by describing the means by which Don Angel gets his “papers into order,” framing the process as a resistance against the institutional policies of social management (51).  Demonstrating how Don Angel works to fly below the radar by use of a variety of forms of identification/documentation, Cintron introduces the idea of resistance through the tropes of discourse, consciousness, and self (60).  From that triad, Cintron proceeds to tease out the ways in which Don Angel’s varied use of discourse functions to provide him with identification of another sort.

The three discourses Cintron identifies at work in Don Angel’s life are the viejito, mexicano, and English.  The first, viejito, is characterized as the discourse of Don Angel’s cultural ancestry, los viejitos or the “old ones” and connects Don Angel to the natural and spiritual world.  This discourse also isolates him within his community, labeling him as chero or outmoded (68).  Mexicano, on the other hand, both modernizes his discourse and connects him to the community in two forms: albures (a game of wits employing veiled, bawdy repartee) and slang (employing double-entendres between spoken Spanish and English).  The third discourse, that of Don Angel’s working English, integrates him into the literacy practices of institutions and also avails itself to Don Angel’s linguistic poaching.  In particular, the last two discourses, as well as the processes of documentation and identification occur over both normative and transgressive contexts and, as such, help to illustrate the layeredness of rhetorics Cintron continues to unravel throughout the text.

Notes and Quotes

“I will begin at the beginning, at the moment of birth when one is recorded/inscribed in a bureaucratic culture.  This action sets up future inscriptions in which paper and print—and now a computer’s memory—help to fix at least a part of us” (55).

Cintron, in identifying the means by which the state manages to keep track of individuals, sets up a correlation between the idea of documentation and the discourses that identify individuals and afford them opportunities to resist the state.

“Any portrait of institutional life needs at least two versions: one that acknowledges the curtailment of self-interest but also the furthering of self-interest” (57).

“Don Angel’s false documents and certificates, then, were a leveling of the ability to represent the truth” (58).

This ability insinuates itself into a number of Don Angel’s practices throughout the chapter and hinges on the normative /transgressive, linguistic/socioeconomic natures of his discourse.

“Through the games of albures, Don Angel momentarily found respect as a man of intelligence and words.  His socioeconomic position (as janitor, dishwasher, and most recently nurseryman) made little sue of his intelligence and words, but in a game of albures, more often than not, he won” (90).

The albures remind me of Langston Hughes’ Simple stories.  In particular, I am thinking of Simple’s Uncle Sam, which portrays the black working class through the perspective of one Jesse B. Simple.  Simple participates in rounds of the dozens (signifying) with his friends, and though the ribbing is generally good-natured and does not—at least not in Hughes’ representations—match the raciness of the albures, the function is similar.

“Don Angel’s fragmented discourse, his approximations and appropriations, would go unmeasured because standardized tests cannot measure the overwhelming number of nonstandard routes that also lead to the making of meaning.  But these routes, elusive and almost untheorizable, are also a set of actions by which power and the ciphers that preserve it are momentarily deciphered” (97).

In the conclusion of the chapter, Cintron’s argument seems to illuminate both institutional and cultural sources of literacy sponsorship in Don Angel’s life.