What do you see in Malcolm X?

Really, what do you see from your own perspective?

Renee at Womanist Musings wishes Malcolm X Happy Birthday by sharing his eulogy delivered by Ossie Davis. Samhita Mukhopadhyay at Feministing wonders "Where would we be without Malcolm?" and advises readers to "check out Grace Lee Boggs on knowing Malcolm X, Adrienne Maree Brown on the application of Malcolm's teaching to building power in communities around violence and Melissa Harris-Lacewell on the legacy of Malcolm X." Anna Clark at Isak remembers "Happy Birthday, Malcolm ... and Brown v. Board of Education" and gets readers looking at various posts and essays.

Zettler Clay for Clutch Magazine remembers "his rescinded views towards females" in the post "Malcolm X and Black Women: Struggling For Closure." (My biblioblogger friends are silent. And my rhetorician friends are just as mute. That says a lot, doesn't it? But Linda López McAlister had trouble remembering those rescinded views towards females when she viewed Spike Lee's biographical film when it came out 16 and a half years ago: "In the last few days--in this order--I heard a talk by the white radical lesbian separatist philosopher Mary Daly, saw 'Malcolm X' and heard a talk by black feminist theorist and cultural critic bell hooks. . . . One thought that kept occurring to me as I was watching Malcolm X give his speeches was how much his separatist rhetoric and Mary Daly's separatist rhetoric had in common. . . . And maybe, if I hadn't heard bell hooks yesterday, I would have come in here today and given a review of 'Malcolm X' that focused more on the cinematic elements of the film and what Black liberation struggles and women's liberation struggles have in common than on the troubling overt misogyny of the film." And maybe, if you remember, you were listening to somebody, from your own perspectives, when you watched the Spike Lee motion picture remembering the life of Malcolm X.)

And maybe, if you were at the Brooklyn Museum between October 31, 2008–April 5, 2009, you would have noticed history in art from your own perspective. What would you have made of "Carrie Mae Weems's Untitled (Man Smoking/Malcolm X), 1990, which explores human experience from the vantage point of an African American female subject"? The work by Weems was part of "Burning Down the House: Building a Feminist Art Collection . . . an exhibition . . . [the title of which] refers to the idea of the 'master’s house' from two perspectives: the museum as the historical domain of male artists and professed masters of art history, and the house as the supposed proper province of women." Go back, look again, at Weem's photo as you frame it. What do you see in Malcolm X?

beyond logic: language and discourse

"A particular language, of a particular culture, in relation to a particular person with [her or] his particular history constitutes an implicit theory for that person . . . . [T]he observer [whether a cultural insider or an outsider] universally affects the data and becomes part of the data."
--Kenneth Lee Pike,
Linguistic Concepts

"Using subject position as a terministic screen in cross-boundary discourse permits analysis to operate kaleidoscopically, thereby permitting interpretation to be richly informed by the converging of dialectical perspectives."
--Jacqueline Jones Royster,
"When the First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own"

When we come to language, to discourse even, too often our temptation is to assume (as with Aristotle) that we ourselves are objective with no need to change because of anyone else.  Or we may read something written by someone like Aristotle or Saint Paul translated into our own language so (dynamically equivalent to their Greek) that we begin to think they've written to us or have something to say that sounds like Nature or nature's God so that to deviate from that would make us natural deviants, or something.

Here are three anecdotes from my experience to begin to illustrate.  One's a boring linguistics study; another is a poignant story from my doctoral studies in rhetorics and feminisms; and the third is from my work in adult language learning:

1

We don't always say what we believe:

As a linguist, I have used on occasion a technique for teasing out preferences and prejudices of people towards languages and speakers of those languages. (The technical name is the "matched-guise procedure" as developed by Wallace Lambert and Richard Tucker to get at attitudes in Canada towards speakers of French and English respectively). In one case, I was interested in how learners of English as a foreign language (in their own countries) might have attitudes towards native speakers of English (outside the learners' own countries). So, on a direct questionnaire, I asked scores of EFL learners, "Where is the best English spoken?". When the vast majority of this group declared either "the U.K." or "the U.S.A." - then I played for them tapes of native speakers of English talking about a benign topic. And then the EFL learners rated the speakers they heard in terms of intelligence, friendliness, clarity of speech, and so forth. (The guise, or the trick, was this: The English speakers were actors I had hired to speak in various varieties of the language. They talked using American English, they talked using British English, and they talked using other Englishes as well.  These actors, by putting on the different Englishes, had managed to fool not only all the members of the British Club in Dallas but also all of the professional linguists who listened to tapes of the actors played at a nearby US university as well). Here's the other bit of detail; all of the EFL learners were ethnically Chinese (from China, from Taiwan, from British Hong Kong, from Singapore, from Malaysia, and from Brunei). They'd all read or been told by someone that the best English was spoken in the USA or the UK.  (Aristotle and Saint Paul were not the ones who wrote the facts about the location of the best English, but someone or another on the Voice of America or the BBC had discussed the nature of good English within earshot of the Chinese listeners - and hearing they had believed).  Not surprisingly, all of the EFL learners from former British colonies (Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei) declared that people in the UK used the best English. But to my great surprise, this same group unanimously and anonymously did not rate English speakers from the UK nearly as high as they rated speakers from the USA. In other words, those persons of Chinese ethnicity raised in and around British school systems (and more likely to listen to the BBC than to VOA) were predisposed to public praise of the "Queen's English." And yet privately they betrayed a preference for the American superpower style of the English language.

The observer, the listener, may say they believe one thing but will, at times, contradict their statements with a more profound, more deeply hidden belief.  What is "objective" for these observers?  And are they being honest in the first place, or more honest in the second instance of confession?

2

We often want the privilege of hearing authoritative canonical texts as applying to us, especially when they authorize us to speak about those "others" whom the same text silences naturally:

Just weeks into "Composition Theory," in my first semester of doctoral coursework at Texas Christian University, the prof assigned Jacqueline Jones Royster's, "When the First Voice You Hear is Not Your Own." The essay is a call to scholarly subjectivity, to willingness to use one's own voice (and voices) when speaking about one's scholarly interests.  It's also a call to those who study and speak about groups of people they themselves are not members of.  For example, a white male scholar may write with some authority about black women who may not be as scholarly.  Royster, the author of the essay, researches and teaches using various voices.  These voices include those of the (1) expert in her discipline and of (2) the subjects she studies in her discipline. Her discipline is English studies, with particular focuses in rhetoric, composition, and literacy studies.  One of Royster's books she has titled, Traces of a Stream:  Literacy and Social Change Among African American Women.  By now, you may have guessed she's a researching, published and teaching scholar.  And you may have realized she's African American, a woman in the stream of the group that she studies.  Well, in the course I was taking, the prof had asked the class to write a response to Royster's essay.  And the prof had asked me to read my response aloud to the class.  To respond to Royster's essay calling for subjectivity, I had written some of my own story.  And, at the end of my response, reading aloud unrehearsed as instructed, I began to become emotional, because I was (in part) acknowledging a mentor whose sexual orientation is different from my own and was acknowledging his passing after nine faithful years with his partner, who had two years prior, died of AIDS.  My mentor died of AIDS too, so I was trying to read what I'd written of the influence that this former boss of mine had had on me.   And how his partner's death and his own dying had figured, also, into his enduring influence.  I could hardly read as tears edged their way past the mop of my own fingers on my face.  But to my great surprise, another student in the class took great offense.  He'd read (he said) that discussions of homosexuality (when our class was reading on race) was inappropriate; that my reading of my own paper was maudlin; that the professor by calling on me did not know how to profess; and that, frankly, Jacqueline Jones Royster was sentimental, unobjective, and ironically exclusionary.  (The reactionary classmate marched off to the English Department chair and filed a formal complaint.  He also sent an email to Royster, demanding that she clarify how his white male voice was any less valid than hers.  Unfortunately, and this is one of the lessons for me in all of that:  the dominant white male had heard from someone - maybe Aristotle, maybe Saint Paul - that his voice was objective, and was to be heard.  But, of course, as much as Aristotle taught objectivity to his elite Greek male students, and even though Paul urged λογικὴ or "logike" of some of readers (first Jews then Greek), my classmate seems to have understood this as applying directly to himself.  The Nature of Reality as Written was firm, and firmly coldly objective - to think otherwise would require a change or a mess of changes within oneself.  (And it was too close to qualifying exams for that nonsense).

3

We can't always predict how much change (and how quickly and how sustained) our subjective experiences will effect.

Every once and a while, those of us working in the university level program for learning English as an additional language will meet remarkable learners.  "Sasha" is one of the remarkable ones.  Having studied no English prior to arriving in the USA from her Eastern European home, she needed only 6 weeks to become proficient enough in English to pursue a degree program full-time using that new language only.  For most people beginning in English, it takes from 9 to 12 months to do what Sasha did in a month and a half.  Sure, we experts in language learning and acquisition and teaching gave all the students our best.  But what made Sasha do remarkably and measurably better than her classmates?  She fell in love.  And she would only speak in English with her new friend (and would only correspond in English writing with him).  She fell in love with her textbooks and the multimedia surrounding them too.  She'd read books that had been translated, sometime variously translated, into English from her Eastern European language.  She'd compose poetry, in English, English as she was growing to know it.  She'd speak with a flawless American English accent the last time I saw her, four years later at her undergraduate graduation before she left again for home.  She was an adult human convert.  (I did my best to get my staff of instructors to get the other English students paying attention to Sasha and her learning.  Based on all of our expert learning and research about language acquisition and learning, how could we have predicted what she did and who she was?  What's love got to do with it?  There have been other Sasha's and not all with a first language that's IndoEuropean.  And it sometimes is love of music, and love of dance, and love of sports, as much as love of that boyfriend or girlfriend that seems part and parcel of the deep change.  But really, what's love got to do with it?)

biblical schmiblical

I'm stealing the title of Suzanne's post Biblical schmiblical and urging you to read it.

Now my Jewish neighbor tells me last night at sundown that he and his wife have had to go to three different stores in Fort Worth, Texas USA (the buckle or a major loop of the Bible belt) to look for kosher. The Walmart and Target managers both apologized, and the latter explained, "The demographics just don't allow us profitably to stock these items on our shelves anymore." And my friend just laughs that he's going to have to open his own store, "because that little section of passover preparations at Albertsons is just, well, it's just little." (I joked that we really should have voted Kinky Friedman as Governor of this Lone Star State. And I started thinking about whose book this Bible of our post-Christian nation really is).

Every Bible translator who is not a Jew would do well to read Jacqueline Jones Royster's little essay, "When the First Voice You Hear is Not Your Own." Of course, Royster is not a Jew. She's a different minority - with a majority of experts about her and about her kind all around her: she's African American. She's also a woman. A double minority. And she's also a scholar, an expert on African American women and their literacy practices. She doesn't say that you can't be an expert on African Americans if you're not African American. She doesn't say that you can't be an expert on women if you're not a woman. (She doesn't even say that you can't be an expert on literacy if you're not literate!) But she does tire of hearing others who are not her and are not her "kind" speak as if they are her and are her kind.

This is exactly the kind of tiresome affront bible bloggers and bible translators and bible experts who are not Jews can be to the Jews. I don't care if you know something about the New Testament because you're Christian (and one of the goyim). Now, I'm ranting. Read Suzanne's post, and read Jacqueline Jones Royster's essay. And, if you like, read my feminist rhetorical translating of the Jewish sexist text we call Numbers 5:1-4. I'm reading as a complete outsider, listening in, overhearing, eavesdropping, listening not just to the author's intent (not just to the authors' intents and not just to the other translators' intents) but also listening (as Krista Ratcliffe says Aristotle wouldn't) - listening with intent. Suzanne and Jacqueline and my friend having to visit three stores to prepare his family's passover are all suggesting subjectivity trumps Aristotle's aim for stand-offish and stand-above and stand-abstractly objectivity. The subjective personal counts more and counts for more than anything an objective expert on the bible can explain to you. "But but but it's Biblical!!" biblical schmiblical

How She Has to Learn Hebrew

Mary Douglas, anthropologist, opens her essay “Why I Have to Learn Hebrew: The Doctrine of Sanctification” with the question “Why?” (HT John Hobbins). Hers is an excellent question, but I also want us to come around to another: “How?”

First, let’s talk about her “Why?” question. We’ll use some technical anthropological and linguistic jargon. And I do apologize for that to readers who are on the outside of this kind of “academic” culture, and even the subcultures of anthropological linguistics and second language learning and acquisition.

Second, let’s talk about “How?” How can she learn Hebrew?

I may just mention how we work with adults learning English here at Texas Christian University. I might as well say something about how I learned English, Ebonics, and Vietnamese as a child; and Indonesian, Japanese, Greek, Hebrew, and Cherokee as an adult. The most challenging language, by far, has been “academic English.” Let me speak some of that a bit now before getting to the fun “How.”

First, here’s how Douglas begins with why. She starts in with a personal non-academic voice to begin her academic essay:

In her old age, my grandmother started to learn Spanish because she wanted to be able to read Don Qixote in the original. My father was derisive: She was giving herself airs, it was absurdly ambitious, she was too old to learn a new language, and so on. Now, here am I, at an even more advanced age than she was then, preparing to learn Hebrew. It is crazy; at least my grandmother had a good basis of Latin and French, but my linguistic qualifications are weaker. It will be painful and a failure; why do I want to try?

Douglas uses the essay, in part, to explain to other academics how she’s after the system of thought constructed in Hebrew by the Hebrews for the cultural notion, or doctrine, of what we technically call “sanctification” in English. She goes on: “If I knew Hebrew, I could read the whole of the Pentateuch to see if the words that have been rendered in English as . . .” and “I might find a gamut of different Hebrew terms that have been gathered together by being rendered in terms of . . . where a nuanced range of words distinguishing sacred from profane, hallowed from unhallowed, consecrated from secular, may be more accurate.” In summary, the “Why?” is to get at the accuracy of English renderings of Hebrew words which have been constructed in a system of Hebrew thought and culture. Douglas’s suspicion, her hypothesis from her position as a Hebrew language outsider, is that “sanctification” assumes the binary at least of “sacred from profane, hallowed from unhallowed, consecrated from secular.”

Now, before we get to the simpler question of “How Douglas can learn Hebrew,” let’s continue with more anthropological and linguistic and academic questions. Here’s one:

How can Douglas test her hypothesis about the binary nature of a Hebrew notion from her own position of observing outsider?

Here’s how. Douglas has to work out her own binary splits imposed by academic culture. (I’m tempted to say something about Aristotle here but will hold off). First, there’s the non-academic / academic split. For example, Douglas has that non-academic voice in the first paragraph of her essay, which sets her up to talk in her academic voice for the rest of the essay. Second, there’s the objective / subjective split. In other words, as an academic at large, she has to hide in some places where she really stands as an academic—she has to pretend objectivity. For example, when writing of a particular English word to note that it “does not prejudice the interpretation” of the Hebrew words, Douglas adds: “Needless to say, this reading would make a lot of difference to feminist complaints against sexist prejudice in the Bible” (page 157). Do notice that Douglas feels no need to say, at this point, whether she is a feminist who has had a feminist complaint.

Academic culture does not smile on subjective feminists or their complaints. But Douglas does get to take her subjectivist position publicly in the Academy. Here’s how:

Douglas is a professional learner, an anthropologist who is a field worker, an ethnographer, an observer of human behaviors that include language as part and parcel of cultural systems. Nonethless, she does not have to be always an “objective” observer. In fact, it is widely acknowledged (and was even protested by anthropologist Marvin Harris) that she took an “emic” and not an “etic” approach to understanding others’ cultures and languages. She is a contructivist. She admires Nelson Goodman and writes an essay to include in a book she co-edits in order to honor Goodman. And in another book Implicit Meanings, she gives this definition that acknowledges that and some “How” language is learned: “Language, for example, learned and spoken by individuals, is a social phenomenon produced by continuous interaction between individuals” (page 52).

We should wrap this up (this jargon laden discussion I mean), and get on with talking about “How Douglas has to learn Hebrew.” But let me interject a couple more things. First, the “emic” and “etic” terms are coinages of linguist and anthropologist Kenneth L. Pike, who used the former term (emic) for the subjective and insider perspectives, and the latter term (etic) for more objective and outsider perspectives. Remember, Douglas used the subjective and insider perspectives in her field work. She and Pike both loved Nelson Goodman. Pike loved to paraphrase a statement from Goodman’s book, Ways of Worldmaking. It goes like this: “What we need in our learning and our knowing is ‘Radical relativism within rigid restraints.’” Now, I should add one more little technical thing. Pike strongly believed, and he wrote in Linguistic Concepts, that “One approach to studying language emphasizes that man [or woman] as a user of language affects the nature of the units of his [or her] language. His [or her] reactions to language become part of the data for the study of language, because described expectations of his [or her] reactions are part of the definitions of the structure of language.” I don’t know if Pike and Douglas ever met. But I think she would agree with him when he says, “the observer universally affects the data and becomes part of the data.”

(Pike, I have said elsewhere, uses a “How” that is similar to the afrafeminist methodologies of Jacqueline Jones Royster; click here to enter another jargon laden subculture).

Second, then, let’s talk about “How?” How can Douglas learn Hebrew?

Is how Douglas learns really as unfortunate as she predicts from the outset that it will be? Remember, she says: “my linguistic qualifications are weaker. It will be painful and a failure.”

This is quite an astonishing self-assessment and prediction, if it’s not hyperbole. But I think Douglas knows going in that “the observer universally affects the data and becomes part of the data.” In other words, she’s going to change Hebrew by learning it. Of course, she must change too.

There’s no law that tells her What she must learn to “learn” Hebrew.
There’s no enforcement officer forcing her to Do certain drills or exercises a certain way.
There’s not even a living speaker of ancient Hebrew to negotiate with her various meanings.
Rather, there is a good bit of listening, hypothesizing, observing, reading, did I say guessing, failing, and hurting she must do. She may listen to texts and she may read living and dead experts. But she cannot stay the same person and still learn Hebrew. The how requires adult human conversion to one profound degree or another.

Now this is completely different from how Noam Chomsky and Stephen Krashen conceive of language acquisition. (Should we throw Plato and Aristotle in with these guys?) Those men aren’t really after change in the learner so much. No, in fact, they tend to say things like “competence” in “language” is innate. It’s so “natural” that the “natural approach” to “acquisition” really doesn’t require a “teacher.” The deep structure of “language” can be abstracted out and then reapplied to any situation in “performance.” I could go on, but we are doing the academic speak again, and Robert de Beaugrande has this wonderful published article in which he does that so much better. (The article talks a little bit too about how “emics” and “etics” and other things Pike talked about really do help you learn language faster and better. You have to be willing to go places, and talk to people or listen actively, and to get your hands dirty, and to fail, and to change yourself from your own subjective position.)

So I’m going to be a little clever here to get us to imagine better language learning. I’m going to stop for now by quoting Pike. (But do you see what you are doing? You are looking at little bits of alphabetic English on a computer screen or printed page. Really, do you see what you are doing by “reading” so subjectively, so amazing.) This is Pike’s kind of language learning, and it’s the “How” that I’ve learned by and that learners here at TCU best learn by. It is the kind of learning, subjective life changing observing, that Monty Roberts used to learn the language of horses. It’s how Mary Douglas learned cultures, and even the Hebrew language. It is ambigous and humble.

Pike says this (and pardon the academic speak—it is you reading after all):

“In a shared physical-social environment, a person can learn to speak a language without an interpreter. This implies the presence of a shared capacity to learn cross-culturally and to transmit names, social structure, and worldview.”

He is not saying that there is no teacher needed in acquistion that is natural. No, he admits to the pain and the possible failure in such learning. He is saying that the learner is the teacher in the “shared physical-social environment.” Pike is saying that such learning . . .

begins with intersubjectivity, with people working together; but in addition it ties people and things into a package as a starting point. It thus rejects the possibility of starting with abstract minds without reference to the physical world. And, similarly, it rejects the possibility of beginning philosophically with the minimum units of the physical world which may be inaccessible to us in terms of common sense experience. So our [learning] experience is important as being possible—and it delays the necessity for the discussion of ultimate starting points if they are to be stated in terms of presuppositions from mechanism, theism, pantheism, animism, or other postulated sources. It begins with the possibility and relevance of human behavior in physical context. (He elaborates more here in Conviction 1.2.)