becoming professor

Sometimes as children, as students, we imagine that our teachers have always, from the beginning of time, been teachers. But, I am learning that teachers, like everyone else, evolve. As a second year graduate student, with the help of a course on Pedagogy, I am evolving. I am attempting to create an identity that will hopefully assist others in learning.

To create a teacher identity for ourselves, I think we should begin by remembering the teacher who most impressed (or impresses) us as a student, and emulate them to some extent. Then, we should formulate an identity that is a practical and honest representation of who we are combined with a straightforward presentation of the material. I think students look for honesty and unpretentiousness in teachers; someone who does not portray themselves as though they are more sophisticated or more elite than those she proposes to teach. I think we must humble ourselves, and perhaps, render ourselves worthy of the opportunity to impart what we know, or what we ourselves have learned. I think we must also respect those we intend to teach; respect that they, too, are a human being capable of being taught— capable of learning. Moreover, I think we should respect that they may come to us with their own body of knowledge, their own experiences, that we should value.

For me, I think it is important to represent myself as someone who did not always have the knowledge that I do. Even on a collegiate level, I think students are sometimes awed by the amount of information a teacher conveys, and it’s sometimes easy to forget that the instructor had to start somewhere; that they’ve acquired knowledge and practiced their craft sometimes for many years. Even more, I think it’s important for students to be able to see their teacher as someone who studied, worked hard, for the knowledge they have—and, that if they, the student, work hard, they too, can achieve the same things for themselves.

when horatio was a queen

Perhaps it may be true that our celebrities are more interesting when they have some quirk, some sordid past or some skeleton in their closet that reeks of scandal. I confess. The part of the introduction by Carl Bode that alluded to Horatio Alger, Jr’s. possible secret life as a homosexual, a pedophile even, made me all the more enthusiastic about reading Ragged Dick; imaginably Algers’ most popular novel published in 1868, his target audience being young boys. Oh, the numerous little pieces of bright green post-its marking the places where “gay” seems to leap from the pages, and where I counted the word queer no less than three times.

So, I must say how deflated I was when a colleague pointed out the confession of one Herbert Mayes, former editor of Good Housekeeping magazine. Mayes concocted an early biography of Alger called, Alger: A Biography Without a Hero (1928), and it turns out that he embellishedhis story to include the bit about Alger being dismissed from a Unitarian congregation for his “abominable and revolting crime of unnatural familiarity with boys.” How do we know about Mayes’ brazen prevarication? Ironically, he admits to as much in an introduction to another biography by  Gary Scharnhorst called, Horatio Alger Jr.: An Annotated Bibliography of Comment and Criticism.

Alas, there was no scandals; no deathbed confessions and such. Some say Mayes’ biography boosted Alger’s literature back into the spotlight; that perhaps I would not even be reading him were it not for the stories about his “abominable and revolting crime of unnatural familiarity with boys.”  Would I have as many little pieces of paper sticking out from the edges of my copy had I not began by reading the introduction? It is true, dear reader, that I found Ragged Dick more fun to read when Horatio was a queen.

reconsidering booker t. washington

Washington, 1894. (AP Photo/Library of Congress)

When considering the authors of American Realism, the names most often recognized and most often anthologized are  Henry James, William Dean Howells, Kate Chopin and perhaps, Edith Wharton. Never have I associated Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington with any genre other than that of slave narrative; although his is an autobiography that does indeed focus on the mudane circumstances of  a life with its beginnings in slavery, and at no time does he idealize his existence.  

I am always conflicted though when reading his story, for there are times when he seems almost literally grateful for having been a slave. I have to remember that I sit in a rather sometimes awkward position of comfort by comparison, and would not dare to juxtapose my life to his. As Ishmael Reed reminds us in the introduction to the Signet Classic edition: “Rather than being viewed as an “Uncle Tom,” a “Coward” and an :Accommodationist” …Washington should be judged as someone who, despite his shortcomings, rose from humble circumstances to the building of one of the world’s centers of learning, literally with his bare hands, and training thousands of African-Americans in matters of both the hands and the head.”

I do, however, always walk away harboring a deep reverence for Mr. Washington, and a renewed determination to achieve my goals at most any cost.

changing narrative convention to fit their lives

"Two women and young girl sitting in a carraige". Photo: NYPL Schomburg Center for Research on Black Culture

Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist is the ambitious first effort of Hazel V. Carby. Currently, professor of American and African American Studies at Yale University, Carby’s work exposes and questions the inconsistencies between authentic African American lives and theoretical representations of the black experience. Published in 1987, it follows a succession of novels and narratives discovered and rediscovered in the 1970s and 1980s written by black women, many of which were published before the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 that declared, by executive order, the freedom of slaves. Reconstructing Womanhood is a collection of essays which examines the evolution of black women as authors from some of the earliest existing narratives of the nineteenth century such as The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave (1831) by Mary Prince, to sentimental and transitional novels like Our Nig, or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859) by Harriet Wilson, and to the fiery exposés of writers from the “Woman’s Era” of the 1890s like Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s The Reason Why: The Colored American is not in the World’s Columbian Exposition (1893).

The third chapter of the collection, “‘Hear My Voice, Ye Careless Daughters’:  Narratives of Slave and Free Women before Emancipation,” considers the ways in which the “cult of true womanhood” affected and shaped the narratives of black women writers. In this chapter, Carby examines three specific narratives by black women: A Narrative of the Life and Travels of Mrs. Nancy Prince, Written by Herself (1850), Our Nig, or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859) by Harriet Wilson, and Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). This “ideology of true womanhood,” which feminist and historian, Barbara Welter, discusses in her book Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1976), determined the attributes by which women of the Victorian era “judged herself and was judged by her husband, her neighbors, and society” (Welter 21-41). The fundamental doctrine of this idea maintained that women should possess four key qualities: “piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity” (Welter 21-41). However, it was painstakingly difficult, if not utterly impossible, to maintain ones’ sexual “purity” in a system that allowed for the physical possession of black women’s bodies by white men. And, as an all important feature of an ideology that defined who and what a woman was, black women were consequently barred from the category of “woman”. Carby’s essay thus looks at how this exclusion “affected the ways in which they wrote and addressed an audience” (40). Black women gained narrative authority by adapting literary representations to either challenge the limits of narrative convention, or as an opportunity to make narrative convention conform to the experiences of black women.

Many other narratives might have been included in this analysis. But, while this essay focuses on only three, it is important to remember that it is only one chapter in a collection that does indeed recall many other black women writers from the early nineteenth century through those of the Harlem Renaissance, such as Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston and Nella Larson. Carby demonstrates that the evolution of the black woman novelist is remarkable, multifaceted, and indeed worthy of its own inquiry. It is unfortunate that many of the writers that Carby revitalizes here are virtually unknown to readers of contemporary literature by African American women. And, indeed, it would be interesting to diagram the connections, and perhaps similarities, between our literary foremothers and the sister writers of the 21^st Century.

“africanist presence” in the work of anne rice

Toni Morrison eloquently magnifies the “Africanist” presence” in the works of Poe, Hemingway, Melville and Cather in her monumental analysis of American literature, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. It turns out that white identity is partially constructed through its not-so-subtle comparisons to and descriptions of what it is not: black. 

In Feast of All Saints published in 1979, Anne Rice makes no bones about the spectrum upon which the American literary imagination is built. The “Africanist presence” is unmistakable in this gens de couleur drama played out in 19th-century, antebellum, New Orleans. Her depictions of black southern belles and black slaves are equally sincere, as are her representations of Louisiana slave holders and uneducated, though privileged white men from Virginia. And, her willingness to take into account the fine lines which connected the individuals of that era, (black, white and all those in between), and the laws that yet separated them is appreciated, and duly noted.