The beginning

I wanted to post this so Aneil knows I have begun to write, but this is a couple pages into beginning my exploration through my auto ethnography which focuses on language and my engagement with it. This is a rough rough draft.

I grew up in a typical suburban town in the Southeastern part of Virginia…. (more about my context)

My mother was a reading specialist who worked in an elementary school in the downtown part of the city, where the only thing higher than the illiteracy rates was the poverty line. She went to work every day with children who read dangerously below their grade level, spending hours with phonetic pronunciations in her trailer with the hope that the 6 year olds she worked with would make it through elementary school at the proper reading level. Deeper than this intention, though was her desire to give lower class, black children the opportunity to succeed in a society that was going to attempt to define their lives for them. It was with this passion for language and reading that she brought spelling into my life when I was three years old. I remember sitting on her lap in our rocking chair, while my dad vacuumed our living room, drawing the loopy letters of my name across pages, trying to mock my mother’s big, perfect elementary school teacher handwriting. This opened up the door for my learning experiences.

Language became my intervention into the world around me. I developed a complex syntax and understanding of the world around me because of my ability to speak about anything I wanted to. My father loves to tell the story of how when I was three years I was sitting in my child seat in the backseat of our van and I said to him, “Dad, aren’t clouds just balls of moisture in the sky?” My parents raised me with this passion for learning and always instilled in me two very valuable ideas that I would carry with me throughout my life: I can do anything I want to do and that my education is the most important thing I will ever invest my life and time into. I think these concepts made me a bit more boisterous and arrogant than I should have been for such a young child, but they allowed me freedom, even before I entered school, to challenge the world around me. This firm grasp of language as a way to inquire into the world and astonish those around me had left its indelible mark, and because of that I wanted to succeed in everything I did. I loved to be the best. I remember clearly in first grade, when anyone needed a word to spell the said “Go ask Simone”, and called me the Human Dictionary. Our teacher encouraged us to help each other find conclusions and would never directly tell us how to find the answer that we wanted. So, as we all sat at our desks writing stories on paper that was filled with dotted lines and empty space for us to color the pictures of our imaginations, people would march over to me and ask me to spell words like “first” and I would sound out each letter as though I was answering for a spelling bee. These small moments still stick clearly in my mind because I remember them as ways in which I was able to etch out a presence for myself in the context of my education, my friends, and my successes. I always had the authority of words, literally and metaphorically.

The way in which my command of language grew was not as much through writing, as it was through readings. I spent my childhood blanketed by books of fiction. Because my mother was a reading teacher, the value of books was never lost to me. She not only read to us for as long as I can remember, but she encouraged us to read and made it seem like it was the most exciting thing we could participate in. At the beginning of every summer, we would sail over to the library to participate in their Summer Reading Program. We would enter and receive our blank lists waiting to be filled with the titles of young adults books. My brother and I would check out 20 books each and go home and stack them in the order we would want to read them, while we carefully examined every reward we received for each five books we were able to add to the list.

I can't write, poetry.

I can’t write; poetry

Shadows from the blank light bulbs overhead

Cast words below the cloak of consequence

The conception of Pretext

Thrusting the struggle for words

underneath

Uncovering is uncomfortable

(But)

I am unproductive.

We have smothered luminescence

Only the fragmented color spectrum

Caresses opaque drapes

I long for penetration

Profane vindication

Atonement

Banality lurks behind the façade of permanence

Insidiously eclipsing the glow of creation

E(In)vasion

Even when my mind is fecund

Words are stillborn

Unnoticed in suffocating darkness

Stuart Hall- From last week. I never posted it.

I was reading through Stuart Hall’s article “The Emergence of Cultural Studies and the Crisis of the Humanities” again, and I was struck by two very interesting points. This first was the part where he said “the truth is that most of us had to leave the humanities in order to do serious work in it” (11) He spoke of how, in order to revolutionize the humanities through the field of cultural studies, they could no longer just be interdisciplinary, but instead had to change the methodology when utilizing the different disciplines. “It was never a question of which disciplines would contribute to the development of this field, but of how one could decenter or destabilize a series of interdisciplinary fields” (16). They have to come from the perspective of sociology, anthropology, etc., but instead of seeing how these academic disciplines already contained methodologies and ideas with which to approach culture, they redefined these other fields too. I was thinking about the value of this because I realize, as I take more anthropological courses and engage with these disciplines that a distinctive crossing of academic boundaries is the only way to develop a personal and unique way of thinking on a subject. I think I have realized that instead of looking at how sociology and anthropology serve cultural studies and the humanities, I must instead look at how it is a unique piece, in and of itself, in the composition and understanding of the field.

Even though I have been reading a lot of articles by Hall and other theorists, many of these people have yet to enact a specific situation in which I can fully understand an issue that has been analyzed across different trends. However, in my “Power, Poverty, and Urban Life” class with Ted Lowe, we were given a reading that really struck me. At first, because it was an anthropological study of white poverty from the perspective of a black scholar, but really because he was very aware of his boundary-crossing identity position in the context of this study. He began by discussing his context and said he was going to avoid taking an essentialist stance. In his book, The Color of Class, Kirby Moss realized that he as going to have to constantly be deconstructing notions of identity as he was pursuing his study of white poverty in America. After every chapter of his study, he had a chapter of reflections about how he felt in this context and what he thought he could pull away from in in relation to identity formation and poststructuralist methods of deconstruction. However, I found his approach to be heavily influenced by cultural studies (he even cites key theorist such as Hall in his introduction), which is wonderful because it was an anthropological study and that it what his degree was in. This takes me back to the quote that I used in the beginning about leaving the field of humanities in order to do serious work in it.

The second part that really struck me was when Hall laid out an interesting series of questions that I really felt were in line with the ones that motivate me in my exploration of cultural studies and critical pedagogy. “What are you interested in? What really bugs you about questions of culture and society now? What do you really think is a problem you don’t understand out there in the terrible interconnection between culture and politics? What is it about the way in which… culture is now living through its kind of postcolonial, posthegemonic crisis that really bites into your experience?” (17) Can I answer these questions or even begin to explore them if I spend all of my time in the work of theory in the humanities? I guess this is the problem I am having now. Seeing Kirby Moss engage with the ideas of cultural studies in a different academic discipline is probably a reflection of the influential spread of cultural studies thought, and it seems like in order to make these theories more real I will have to apply them to another area of study also. I have been reading and reading articles about theory, but I think now I want to connect them to critical pedagogy. I want to read Giroux and hooks, but maybe it is time to bridge the gap myself and not just stick to reading the theorist who do it for me. However, I think what will be really important in this context, is also looking at how my position and identity is going to constantly be influencing my approach of cultural studies and critical pedagogy. I want to engage with this in the same was that Kirby Moss does. This is why I think it is so important for me to do this autoethnography, through self-reflection and a slightly fragmented construction, maybe I will be able to better approach the motivating questions above. However, maybe in the same way of his book, I can have an area of interest that guides me. I must have a connecting thread through this autoethnography and I want it to be critical pedagogy. Maybe then I can really practically apply cultural studies and have a greater impact on the humanities.