Post 1

From this week’s reading assignment, I found Bhabha’s essay, “The Other Question,” to be rather difficult to follow because it touches on a number of different critic’s criticism on various topics concerning colonization, such as: Said and psychosis; Freud and fetishism; Lacan and the imaginary; and Derrida and discourse analysis. Bhabha points out that the main purpose of colonial discourse is “to construe the colonized as a population of degenerative types on the basis of racial origin, in order to justify conquest and to establish systems of administration and instruction” (92). In essence, colonial discourse causes the colonizer (or the white population) to create negative/false stereotypes of the colonized (or black population).

I found Bhaba’s description of stereotyping and his use of Franz Fanon’s story of what it was like to be a black subject in a white discourse to be rather intriguing yet shocking at the same time. Bhabha defines stereotyping as, “a much more ambivalent text of projection and introjection, metaphoric and metonymic strategies, displacement, over-determination, guilt, aggressivity, the masking and splitting of ‘official’ and fantasmatic knowledges to construct the positionalities and oppositionalities of racist discourse” (104). This quote shows the complexities and ambivalence to stereotyping in general.

Directly following this quote, Bhabha cited a brief excerpt written by Franz Fanon that depicts a negative experience generated by false stereotyping of Negro men. In the story, a white boy observes a Negro man quivering with anger when he really is just shivering like any other human being due to the fact that it is cold outside. Nonetheless, (no thanks to false/negative stereotyping) this little boy runs to his momma to tell her that the “nigger’s going to eat [him] up” (104). This story shocked me and gave me more of an understanding to what it must have felt like (and may still feel like in some parts of the world) to be black in a white dominated world. I just cannot believe that many white people actually believed most—if not all—of false stereotypes such as the one portrayed in this excerpt.

In contrast, I thought that Slave Moth by Thylias Moss was very original and entertaining. Up until now, I had never read a narrative in verse like this work, and I have found that I really admire this type of writing. I found this story of the young fourteen-year-old slave girl, Varl (named after her master’s horse who died just as Varl was born) to be very unique and unexpected. I was surprised at the way that Varl confidently interacts with her master, Peter Thomas Perry, and how she has such a deep affect on him that she drives him to rename his town (which used to be named Perrysburg, named after him) Varlton.

Perry performs a reading experiment on Varl simply to see “how well could a black girl do it” (5). He shows Varl a book on moths which causes her to become rather infatuated with the luna larva’s process of creating a cocoon and transforming into a beautiful moth (5). In turn, she starts to create her own cocoon out of cloth and stitches in “powerful muscles of [her] thoughts” (10), and she fits each layer of cloth under her dress. When Perry discovers these layers, he starts to like Varl even more because he is so attracted to oddities. In effect, Ralls Janet (Perry’s wife) grows very jealous of Varl because she sees that her husband pays more attention to Varl than to herself. So, she asks Varl to run away, but Varl refuses to do so. This storyline really caught me by surprise because I never thought that masters paid more attention to their female slaves than to their wives.

I also found Mark Mossman’s essay entitled “The One-Legged Wonder and Other Names” to be very original and entertaining. I admire Mossman’s courage to write this specific essay about his life experience as a disfigured white male subject in a “normal” white male society. He writes how he can be seen as “normal” as long as he is sitting down, but once he stands up, he can no longer pass as a “normal” human being.

At a young age, Mossman received the name “the one-legged wonder” from one of his friend’s fathers by means of overcoming certain cultural obstacles in order to be successful at such sports as soccer and swimming. Mossman states that “naming is an act of cultural management” that fits us “into a different set of parameters” (2).This points out the fact that one-legged individuals—especially those who have multiple disfigurations—are not seen to be talented at sports, for instance. Indeed, newspaper writers repeatedly printed stories about his success as a disfigured athlete, which never seemed to get old to the public.

In addition, he admits to how he made more money than his “normal” brother did selling magazines. He did this by means of wearing shorts no matter how cold it was outside. Shorts accentuated his abnormal appearance and therefore portrayed it to his customers as, “disabled, disfigured, victimized” (5). I am quite certain that his customers who pitied him so probably would not have pitied him if they had knowledge of his “one-legged wonder” reputation.

Even though I found it rather hard to relate, I still enjoyed reading Geeta Kothari’s short story “If You Are What You Eat, Then What Am I?” Unlike the narrator of this story, my parents never told me I could not eat certain types of food (at least that I can remember). Also, I never had the experience of going off to a boarding school in which the cafeteria does not serve food that I am used to and have regularly at home. However, I can relate to the narrator’s concern for forgetting how to cook various Indian foods that are a part of her culture. For instance, since I am part Norwegian, I would love to learn how to make lefsa so that not all tradition is lost in my family.