Thesis Workshops

Reblogged from Writing a House [English 113]:

The thesis is the foundation and the cornerstone of your argument, so today we want to make sure before you turn in your paper, you have a working thesis.  We will be workshoping everyone’s thesis and/or outline.   The first thing you need to do, is look below and see what group you are in.  You will post under the blogpost for your group. Post your thesis to that blog site.  You should at least post your thesis.  You may also post an outline and/or a first paragraph. Then read the other posts in …

Movements: what it do?

I don’t even know what I am trying to write here today, but I’ve been derelict, and I need to get deeper into this first chapter. So my goal here is just to generate some questions:

 

Movement and Making Do

I have become in the last year or so very interested in De Certeau though I must admit it is hard, as much  as I am excited about his focuses on everyday practices, his distinction between strategies and tactics, and “making do”- it is hard not to wonder how it is he that he gets all the shine for something it seems that black women writers (and I have no doubt other women and writers) have been highlighting.  It is hard not to look at the quilt as a theoretical aesthetic  and practical (tactical?) intervention upon strategies that would both leave so many with not enough to be clothed and warmed and yet at the same time propose to know what is trash and disposable.

I have been lately become though very interested in De Certeau’s jesuit background.   It offers me another way of thinking about his wondering wanderings?  about the distinction between his everyday and his practices  and say those of Alice Walker’s mother and daughters in the 1944 short story “Everyday Uses”.   As much as De Certeau might see the tactics and practices as the art of escaping without going anywhere . . . I think that he is preocuppied with movement, physical in particular, and with going somewhere.   I would dare say that what De Certeau really brings to the idea of everday practices, bricolage, and making do is an emphasis on movement.    It is Harriet Jacobs who escapes without going anywhere.  It is De Certeau who suggests that it is just as good to go somewhere without escaping.

It is under the nuanced relationship between this seemingly simple inverse that I think we can begin to understand the complicated relations that exists in and because of children’s movements in the 19th century.  In particular Between The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn we can see that Tom while Jim needs to escape, so does Huck even if he doesn’t go somewhere,  Tom is constantly imposing a highly risky and at times obnoxious but perhaps also important narrative (at least to Twain) that going somewhere without escaping is just as necessary, perhaps more realisable…

I don’t really know what I am talking about, but the questions are thus:

What is the relationship between Moving and Making Do?

How do literary children’s movements and repurposing speak to this relationship?

If Moving and Making Do are as essential to black life as they are to child play, what do we make of Twain’s iconic Tom and Huck whose play is always against and intertwined an antebellum tension of slavery and fugitivity?

Another question that goes ahead of this is one that comes up all the time in dance studies, which is how do we notice, talk about, account for movement?  That is to say part of what I think is interesting is movement qua movement.   We define movement so often in terms of travel and spatial crossing where the transgression of space becomes the key emphasis … but what of the experience of movement itself?   This is a hard question dance studies  tells us (especially according to Helen Thomas in the introduction of Dance in the City a collection of essays on meanings, encounters of dance in urban space).  Dance is embodiment, but to read dance and talk about it one must acknowledge that dance is not just in the spectator or the analysis or even in the individual dancer or the choreographer; it is a play between bodies; it is excessive …. and as Thomas reminds us …. “it is not writing.”    I am interested in movements qua movements as being about something other than travel or the kind of mechanical process of getting from here to there.   THis is not to say that destination and place aren’t important.  Certainly it matters which direction Jim and Huck are going on the river, but I guess I want to say (like Daphne Brooks and others in performance studies) it might also matter that Jim turns and twists and bows a certain way …

I don’t know   . . . still thinking

Lessons From Class

So I’ve been gone awhile from my blog, and I wish I could say that was because I was off busily writing my dissertation. Truth be told I’m finding this dissertation thing immensely scary no matter what anyone says and the plethora of other obligations I have is doing nothing to help me face that fears. I have been however writing mini blogs not quite as related to the topic of movement as I’d like, but I’ve been writing nonetheless on the blog I facilitate for my students.

I’ve been learning a lot from teaching, both about teaching and communicating but also about some of the interests that thrill me the most. I’m going to try and put down some of the latter and perhaps a little of the former in this blog.

1. To get carried away is to get all caught up in a movement.
In physiological terms this is not hard to see. If carry something away with me, I must pick it up, find some way to keep it upon my person so that as I move it comes with me. And I must move, travel even for if I pick it up and go nowhere I have perhaps held it, arguably carried it, but not carried it away. To get carried away is to get caught up in the movements that you are both in by wya of the being carried in but that is also not yours. You are not the captain.

But what I have leaned with my students as they have looked at Kanye Wests’ repeated depictions of his own getting carried away, at Equiano’s conversions, his passionate reveries, at the countless moments of melodrama and sentimental tears in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, at Mark Twain’s child character’s propinsity to lose themselves in the fear and amazement of what had started off as their own play but seems to have a life and powers of its own. We talked too when we read the Awakening about Edna’ nee for Madmeselle Resz’s playing about how Edna is taken away by the movements of Reisz playing, of Chopin’s Chopin. When we got to Toni Morrison’s Jazz, it was perhaps even easier to see a relationship between jazz music, the fury of passion, the city’s energy and designs, the pushing rage of daily race violence carried the characters in movement about the city, in the hunt, in the dancing and dancing, and in the movements of jazz music. But as Alice Mansfred shows us, she who tried very hard to never be carried away, all those elements ready to make topsy turvy of a dignified and positioned subject were also there in the drums that sound the movement, the march on fifth avenue. To get carried away is to get caught up in a movement, and it stands to reason that getting caught up in a Movement cannot be wholly independent of getting carried away, and certainly not of care.

Indeed Equiano and Stowe were literally a part of abolitionists movements. Chopin though not as explicitly is all bound up with the transcendentalist movement that came before her as well as in various relations to women’s rights movements. The Ntozake Shange novel we are currently reading is also deeply rooted in The Black Arts Movement and the Civil Rights Movement.

2. There may be gendered components to various types of movements and getting carried away.

I am not sure, but one fo the things that repeatedly came up in my class was Kanye’s “Touch the Sky”. We began to think about Touching the Sky, Transcendentalism, efforts to travel to the Moon as modes of getting carried away that all bound up with the individual, with being the singular (best), Touching the Sky is bound up with nobody being able to touch you. This model of transcendence as configured in single movement upwards, a shooting, launching, rocketing outwards seem to be an amazingly masculine movement. Phallic allusions aside, though they are not in any shortage in the touch the sky formulations of these texts, to touch the sky is a movement that requires the shedding of everything else. Because it is a movement up it is always breaking through gravity and cannot save some minimal items carry anything that would load it down. As Chopin’s Edna shows us this upward movement that requires a singular travel for one and no ties becomes a problem for women with children and/or the possibility of having children The children were carrying Edna’s souls into the depths of a kind of slavery because in addition to literally carrying them, they need he to care for them. Travel to the moon or rocket travel, which is always the epic travel of Odysseus and Achilles, great heroes that follow immortality into death does not work when you have dependents that need you imperfect and mortal but nonetheless alive.

Okay I’ll stop for right here today and pick back up on lesson’s from class in another post.

Project Update # 5 :: Learning to Walk

Hey Everyone,

So I’ve been off my blog for almost two weeks now.  It’s been a combination of being sick and putting all my effort into applying for fellowships.  LOL  So  basically what I have below is a version (no money part) of my proposal.  Let’s keep in mind that the chapters … are really tentative, which is why I put them in italics here.  I more or less don’t know what I’m doing but … I think the spirit of it is in this proposal, which makes the experience of applying fellowship not so bad even though I didn’t get nominated.

 

Learning to Walk: Movement in 19^th Century American Constructions of Children

My dissertation seeks to reposition the recently reinvigorated field of Child Studies away from a discourse that views the child as a static site of study.  I intend to call attention to representations of children as moving and makers of movements.  In the exploration of evolution, psychology, and education, scientists and scholars have, since the mid 19^th century, spotlighted the child as both the control variable (for we all share having been a child) and as a location for study (since in each child’s development we witness once again the whole of man’s evolutionary history).  Working with Darwinism and Enlightenment ideas of the child as tabula rasa, G. Stanley Hall, Alexander Chamberlain and others framed children as a distilled sample of humanity.  Studying children was, for them, tantamount to entering a doorway to the house of the human.  Within that threshold, scientists could not only uncover knowledge about the race’s past, its inner workings, and the type of education that might shape its future, but it could also minutely define, and thereby police, who and what could and could not take up residency inside the house as human.

Despite radical changes in the sciences and humanities, the narrative of the child as a site of study persists especially (and ironically) among cultural studies scholars interested in tracing the strands of national, colonial and postcolonial enculturation.  The child, as a seemingly nonresistant sponge, has become for cultural studies scholars the ideal place to study dialectics, structural myths, colonial indoctrination, and tensions between learned and “natural.”  From Susan Honeyman’s explicit discussion about mapping childhoods to Stephen Brahm and Natasha Hurley’s conceptual understanding of the child as a “site” for national imaginings of sexuality, this idea of the child as a cartographically knowable and occupy-able location persists in the rhetoric, method, and the conclusions of these works.

As I read for my preliminary exams, I was struck by how, despite this inclination to conceptually treat children as static, 19^th century narratives seemed preoccupied and mesmerized by the image, sound, and feel of children moving.  The six chapters and conclusion that comprise my dissertation will attempt to explore this tension more deeply by engaging in close and careful analysis of how these narratives implicitly and explicitly depict children’s movement.  More particularly I juxtapose literary narratives with narratives produced by reformers, scientists, and educators.  In addition to charting genealogies of influence between these various writers and writings, I historicize these comparisons within the rise of industrialism and progressive reforms concerning family, education, and children.  While the latter emphasis on reforms most explicitly centers its discourse around the child, I argue that the rhetorics of progress, futurity, and education that arise in tandem with the modern industrialized America are reflected in, as well as shaped by, the scientists, artists, educators, and political voices so often concerned with America’s newness and the readiness of her children for tomorrow. This dissertation will illustrate that even as industrialism rises and modern ideas of tracking and tracked development become ubiquitous, representations of children (increasingly placed in narrow spaces, machines, and tracks) continue to illuminate space and capture the literary imagination by way of their capacity to move, physically and emotionally.

My research understands an exploration of movement as entailing three primary considerations:  First, building on Liselott Olsson’s idea that learning to walk is “about the joy of increasing [the] body’s capacity to move through joining [the] body with other bodies and forces”, this project insists that studying representations of child movement demands studying representations of child embrace/touch. By feeling out, pushing, clinging, climbing, manipulating, etc., the child hooks, transforms, gets carried, and moves.  Secondly, focusing on embrace and joining bodies, my exploration of movement considers the invalid child as capable of movement. As Karen Sanchez-Eppler and scholars addressing sentimentalism have remarked, the sick child moves by way of an affective touch, a jointing and articulation of spiritual bodies that prompt physical/emotional relationships of care and carrying. Finally this project maintains that child movement, which is also a joining, a studying, and a growing, requires conversations about space and the permeability of even seemingly impossible boundaries.  The literary child can bring author and readers into spaces and existences that normative adults presumably cannot imagine, let alone inhabit.  This is to say that Pearl (The Scarlet Letter) goes into the dark forest and up to the scaffold.  Tom and Huck (The Adventures) take us into the caves, rafters, and absurdly small closets.  All three take us affectionately and excitedly to the “black man,” to the seemingly dead, and the fugitive.

Following the introduction, the first half of the dissertation will consist of three chapters exploring the years between 1850 and 1880. This period, steeped in the Victorian “cult of childhood,” brought together romantic notions of child innocence with enlightenment notions of children as lacking and needing to be educated into rational, self-reliant individuals. In the first chapter, I attend to how in The Scarlet Letter and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, even as adult characters voice a need for Pearl and Eva’s respective disciplining and education, they are awed and helpless by the otherworldly quality of these children’s movements.  This simultaneous otherness, worldiness and divinity fuel the respective novels with hope and a practice of illimitable possibilities.  In the second chapter, I focus on black children, specifically Stowe’s Topsy and Harriet Wilson’s Frado.  Looking at the rhetoric of the American Sunday School Organization’s warning against circuses and narratives of American child performers, this chapter analyzes Topsy and Frado through the lens of race, gender, performance, and a taboo, albeit spectacular, kind of contortionism. The third chapter brings these insights about racialized and childish movements to Mark Twain’s iconic representation of boyhood in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. This chapter considers how constructions of the child intersect, influence, and are influenced by constructions of the constrained (under Slavery and Jim Crow) black body, which despite the sociopolitical and physical strictures imposed upon it was nevertheless still seen as excessive and wild in its movement.

The second half of the dissertation chronicles the intense rise of industrialism and developmental science (1880-1910) throughout which literature, pamphlets and even images depicted the child in factories, tenement houses, doorways, street homes, rows of orphanage beds, and crowded school lines.  In chapter four, I focus on how, like Topsy and Frado, these cramped children, shrouded in their own dark corners, continue to move and, in doing so, illuminate the expansiveness of the small compartment of the industrial machine and the everyday practices of growth within the modern space. Chapter four boards the narrow and imprisoning space of the train car as it juxtaposes the kidnapping of a young white country girl and the kidnapping of a very fair southern daughter “exposed” as a slave.  Keeping in mind the establishment of Railroad Standard Time and the proliferation of immigrant and indigenous children trained by trains to work on farms in the west or attend Indian boarding schools in the East, I reexamine respectively Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie and Francis Harper’s Iola Leroy’s kidnappings within a discourse that questions the relationship between training/education and movement and the persistence of growth and sociality even within the constraints of modernity. Revisiting the child contortionist, the fifth chapter explores the child as (and inside) the machine in Jack London’s “The Apostate” and Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw.  The chapter references the rhetoric of progressives against child labor, anxieties about proper education, and the nostalgic lament for the disappearance of the pastoral child.  Understanding the shelter of blackness to be a recurring theme throughout these portrayals of moving children, the sixth chapter returns more explicitly to the relationship between race and child movement. I attempt to understand Stephen Crane’s “The Monster” in light of the monstrous possibility of a black child that moves and grows.  Using responses to Plessy vs. Ferguson and Charles Chesnutt’s novel The Marrow of Tradition as a historical frame, I contrast the playful affinity with the train displayed in the white child’s movements and the horror of the trained Negro’s unregulated movements. 

This study of movement in representations of the child is a study in America’s many lines of flight.  It is the space where escape and fugitivity meet manifest destiny, where playing hooky meets marching in militia lines.  It is not a tracing of the liminal or peripheral as an already established and fixed place, but it is rather a study of the black space where the bottom of a foot meets earth, which is a space neither separate nor occupy-able. It is the joint and articulating space of encounter, the place of respiration that gives breath to the excessive growths that movement begets. To study the movement of children, those whom the institutional design of society attempts to capture and make still, is to go into deep woods, become black, animal and machine.  But it is also to see these things not just as a nexus of properties imposed on the child by way of a degraded notion of childishness, but rather, it is to experience this constellation of qualities as practices worth joining and moving into.

 

 

The Child is …

Yes it’s time to define terms!

What do we mean or at least what do I think I mean when I say “the child” or “childhood” or “children”? In the last post I discussed the ways in which scholars focusing on “the child” or cultural discourses about the child have tended to look at or speak of the child as a “site”. But if I have learned anything from my reading and listening thus far is that if the “child” is a site it is not a site fixed in a particular location nor is it a site fixed with the same adornments. If “the child” (and I believe they also mean subsequently that “childhood) is a site, then it is something between the room of requirements and an invite-only play party, never in the same place, always equipped with some new set of furniture, props, and tools…. and specifically it is in a place where only the invited know and with the fixtures that the invited needs. [and at the moment, I am more inclined to say it is chilhdood that is such a site (perhaps even always under the refuge of blackness)  but the child is a kind of old car that goes in and out of the garage.]

So even when we look at the definition of child in the dictionary (to say nothing of the precarious legal definitions of a child) we see a kind of floating free for all: Just a quick look at Dictionary.com, which is not as extensive, as say the OED would be, reveals eleven entries under “child”. I will not list them all because it is not necessary to list them all to see a certain degree of uselessness in the definitions:

1. a person between birth and full growth

2. a son or daughter: [the example that follows] All my children are married

3. a baby or infant.

4. a human fetus.

5. a childish person.

We can stop here. The first definition perhaps seem standard though already in it we can wonder “when does one arrive at ‘full growth’?” and “What kind of growth are we talking about?” Even biology which seems to most declarative in its defining of the stages of life has not been consistent throughout time. A short while ago development was marked by the end of physical growth spurts, so that women were generally grown by 18 or 19 and men by 21 or 22. And now we know neurologically that the front temporal lobe is not done growing until around the age of 25 or 26. ** But while I make quibble with the definition of “full grown” let us not also assume the apparentness of what “birth” means or when “birth” happens? Perhaps biology might be more consistent on this point, but biology has not always been the reigning conceit and nor is it the only influential narrative now. When we start to look at the problematics of “bare life” in Agamben or
similar distinction in Hannah Arendt and the different but not so different notions of social death we can see that being born or begotten as it were does not and has always meant that one has been born into the world where the world is defined by the social and the state. This is why children must be presented or “come out” and to a degree this is why children are Christened. The mere fact of having been born does not mark one as having a birth [an idea that as Anna Mae Duane suggests in her September 2010 article in American Literature is particularly important between Douglass’s first narrative and his second, in terms of his significantly increased attention to his childhood in his second narrative].

But let us move on now to definitions 2-5. Even if we hold off on the politically contentious entry # 4, how is it that a child can both be an infant and someone between birth and full growth (unless of course full growth commences after infancy)? How is it that “child” can be a son or a daughter (to make it a highly gendered term), and that one is a child even after full growth, even when they are older, even when married, and presumably even when they have kids and their kids get old? And then, as if what it means to be a child wasn’t broadening so much to mean everyone, a child is anyone who
is childish? Does the inverse of this apply, are people who are not childish not children? Can those between birth and full growth be not children? The number and combination of questions I could put forth here could go on and on. The point is that “child” is, as far as I can see, a relational term.

As such I may talk about children, and by children I will mean “real” children, not just the idea of the child or the constructs of childhood. However it is unlikely that I will refer to the individual child. Individual children are not childs; they are people (not that children are not also people, but the individual child is just that an individual). This is not a definition of terms or how I will define it. For that check out the next post. But what I hope to communicate here is that the child is something one can only be in relation to others. Part of the allure of talking about the child, is that to talk about the child is always to sound a resonance of the self if not in inclusion than by inverse implication.

Project Update #4 “the dark forest between them”

Still trying to figure out what my research question(s) will be. Here is where I am at especially as I think back on my last couple of posts:

General: Well some important themes/topics for me seem to be: assemblage of parts; dark forest; childhood as myth and space; bodily movement and train motion; getting carried away; and though i haven’t talked much about it, I realized that I’m obsessed with “cessation of breath” at least in my creative writing.

Question that I seem to be toying with:

What is the relationship between “the child” and the machine? For the purpose of the following response I’m going to go ahead and just narrow this question to

What is the relationship between the 19th century American construction “the child” and industrial America’s favorite machine, the train?

At least at the level of metaphor I feel that my last couple or five posts have been leaning at a response to this question that would say “the dark forest”. The relationship between “the child” and the train is the dark forest. I mean several things in this articulation:

1) Both the construction of the child and the construction of the train are designed for the eventual instrumentalization (read dominance) of the forest. This is to say the child or its childhood space and form is crafted so as to produce or regulate the production of the industrious adult citizen, who will either by factory, farming, or business make use of America’s natural resources literally and metaphorically her forests. The train too has been constructed not to link metrapole to metrapole or to bring all of the nation into one center as it did in England, but rather to go out and out and to access and harness the natural resources of the land. It is at least partly by way of the train that the successful child will help tame nature.

2) However part of the mechanics of the design of both childhood and trains have an uncanny relationship to nature and the forest. The child via the science and myth of recapitulation and romantic tradition is at one with the garden and the primitive. The child is both the original and the last inhabitant of the forest. The train though it is the emblem of American industrialism and human progress shows up everywhere in writing and recorded responses as so machine that it somehow becomes nature again. Being personified in all types of ways as a belching creature with bright eyes and a scream, the
train is a monster not taming nature, but nature’s furry and power all risen up into a “black cylindrical bod[ied]” monster. The train at night is indistinguishable from the dark except for maybe to describe it as the rushing dense matter of night.

3) In a very real way then the child and the train that are mean to aid in deforestation, farming, processing lumber and other goods are also valuable if not intimately and aesthetically attractive because they bring the rest of society closer to the virginal, the untouched, and inaccessible-the dark forest. This dark forest is always at once the real
forests and natural reserves that fuel America’s industrial growth and the dark forest that appears so often in 19th century literature and that D.H. Lawrence speaks of as the wholeness of the soul, the very wholeness of the soul that Ben Franklin and his propagation of an American perfectionism and industrious individual freedom does not according to Lawrence allow. Constructions of the child allow adults to revisit or reimagine the otherwise no longer accessible wild forests of their youth. The train brings artists, travelers and the likes further into spaces they would have never beheld. It opens up space for the imagination to consider the forest as a space that does not only just define the periphery.

4) The train and the child have a more literal connection historically in terms of labor. The forest always being there, the child on the train in 19th century America is all bound up with labor and severing kinship ties for market ties whether it be as a street children selling penny candy or songs or orphans being shipped to farms or indigenous children to boarding schools. Again the forest is always there in these narratives sometimes being
the destination and sometimes the point of departure, but more often than not it is markers of the landscape in flight, of places the child can never touch.

Everybody Loves Kids: Children as Symbolic Sites and Political Cache

Let’s continue this discussion of the child as a site, but let’s think about the way in which scholars have described this site or its function.

It is nothing new that  since the early 1900s, the image of the child and of children have had some symbolic cache in US public arena.  In large part the area of cultural studies and American studies that has risen up around the child in the last ten years has largely focused on children’s political symbolism, their importance to the republic.  Perhaps the most cited among these studies is Karen Sanchez-Eppler’s whose Dependent States provides a mix of close readings and intense archival work.  Sanchez-Eppler thinks about the narrative expectations of the child figure and child voice in various 19th century texts.  As the play on “Dependent” in the title suggests, Sanchez-Eppler suggests that idea of the dependent child, who by their innocence and weakness had the power to boost morality and push one to morality as well as suggestive of a promising tomorrow became integral to the republic’s understanding of itself.

Caroline Levander’s Cradling Liberty focuses more on the narrative construction of children in American literature and how the child works to communicate certain ideologies of race and psychologies of race.   Even the articles in The American Child: A Cultural Studies Reader link the construction of the child to antebellum/pro-slavery/pedagogies, to fodder for progressive reform, class and labor struggle, and ontological specimens for the study of psychological and evolutionary development.

Even scholars not explicitly discussing children remark that children having a value laden place in the popular imagination often times become the cite that epitomizes particular political dynamics.  Lauren Berlant identifies the sympathy and sentimentalism bound up with a history of child saving has come to its most vehement expression in the value assigned to the fetus.   The fetus she says identifies all of the helplessness and objecthood that we want in our burgeoning (but not quite yet) subjects.

T.J. Lears’s No Place for Grace  also recognizes that changing notions of the child or rather changing notions about the constellations of symbols that the image of the child calls forth are essential to the narrative of American literary development in the 19th century.   He points out how  “By midcentury, middle-class children were no longer ‘fostered out to relatives or wet nurses.  Unlike their colonial predecessors they stayed increasingly at home, shielded by their mother from the market’s corrupting influence.”  146  But that  “…toward the end of a century of capitalist expansion the image of the sickly-sweet child pervaded popular novels, plays, and poems. … As familiar definitions of selfhood and maturity became less trustworthy; childlike traits became more alluring.” 146

There exists a great deal more scholarship that intersects or links up with what is being called Child Studies.   The recently established interdisciplinary PhD program at Rutgers University is nominally known at Child Studies.  This Child Studies though should not be mistaken for the turn of the century child studies which more or less saw itself  as scientists, particularly scientists of psychology who were explicitly arguing for the benefits of psychological studies on children.

What I think is interesting here is that we see child as both a political site but as a political site precisely because of its relation to myth, childhood and the image of “the child” being so constructed of and in myth and then in turn producing myth give the image of the child a particular mythical charge that makes the child an especially interesting site, where there is both all the official narratives of societies makings that are to be fine tuned in childhood to make a proper adult and then also there exists in the space of childhood and the movments of the child all its dark imaginings that must be left there in childhood.

Childhood as a Site

You’ll forgive me, but the below post was mostly written in the Spring in preparation for my exams, but I want to return to this discussion of childhood as a site, as a spatial designation.  In part I want to return to it because I have since found even more examples to confirm the thoughts beginning to be expressed below.  But more importantly I  have been thinking through my metaphors which thus far I throw out at random for my convenience (well not randomly but not systematically either).   I have thought about childhood as a machine.  Childhood as a transitional housing narrative.  Literary children which are in the novelistic world one and being with literary childhoods as vehicles and machines and spaces of movement and exploration.  I have also talked about Childhood’s children as crafted by Scientists as being thresholds or doorways of a sort.   All of these metaphors bare some relation to space though vehicles are a different kind of space, a space that mechanically cuts through space, and is constantly changing through its particular relationship to place.

At any rate what I hope to show in this place is that I am not the only one.  I want to articulate what I see as the prevalence of thinking about childhood in spatial terms.  It is so popular it almost begins to seem like a natural part of the rhetoric or discourse on childhood and children.

I want to think about the importance of mapping and space in contemporary scholarship that takes the child as its object and/or methodology.  Susan Honeyman and Jacqueline Rose (and Michael Chabon too, though more overtly nostalgic than critically) explicitly address the child as a space, and particularly childhood and childhood (literary and artistic) culture as constantly offering the opportunity to map both itself and also adult worlds and cultures.  However even scholars who do not explicitly talk about the childhood as a generative spatiality and children as markers of that space, still in setting up their argument, tend to find recourse in a rhetoric of place and mapping.   In her monograph, Suffering the Child, Anne Mae Duane remarks that

The metaphorical reliance on childhood in philosophical, legal, and literary engagements with the New World made the child and intense site for this sort of creative thinking.  Put simply, the child was both familiar enough and malleable enough to map new meaning on frighteningly novel situations.”  (Duane 9 emphasis mine)

Similarly in the introduction to The Couriouser  Steve Bruhm and Natasha Hurley frame the intellectual thrust behind the collection of essays by explaining how “[u]topianism follows the child around like a family pet.  The child exists as a site of almost limitless potential (its future not yet written and therefore unblemished)” (xiii)  In the introduction to the Child Culture Reader, Jenkins highlights similar contemporary configurations of child as a space, point first to Hilary Clinton’s 1990s campaign slogan “the child represents our ‘bridge to the twenty-first-century’” (Jenkins 4).  And then to scholar James Kincaid’s articulation of the child

As a category created but not occupied, the child could be a repository of cultural needs or fears not adequately disposed of elsewhere. . . . The child carries for us things we somehow cannot carry for ourselves, sometimes anxieties we want to be divorced form and sometimes pleasures so great we would not, without the child, know how to contain them. (quoting Kincaid 4)

Kincaid is interested in the child as a concept that even as it seems to refer to, often has little to do with “actual” children.  Still his notion not unlike Clinton’s “bridge” places even the concept of the child not so much as an object of study, or an object of address, but as an instrument (lens, microscope, telephone, or record) for playing and studying some other object.

To some degree this notion of the child as a instrument for study is connected to the theoretical stance regarding childhood that undergirds much of cultural studies on children.  This is the belief that the child is, if not an empty vessel or a tabula rasa per say, they are never the less a persistent foundation or core of the individual and society.  This theoretical stance is perhaps best articulated through both The Well of Being [David Kennedy] and Theorizing Childhood [James, Jenks, and Prout], projects which also articulate themselves as an exploration of the space in and around the figure of the child and discourses of childhood.   Kennedy’s analysis hopes to uncover “the possibilities that inhabit the interstices” between adult child relation and the intersubjectivity between adults and the child within as well as inscribe a school space that would be able to “min[e] their depths” (xii). James, Jenks, and Prout even more explicitly “explore some of these spaces” in which we think about and narrate childhood in order to “ma[p]” the “emergence” and “interconnections from within the recently established arena of the new social studies of childhood” (3).  In as much as there may be no “real” children here, the issue is not so much that the language and recourse to cartography may colonize the child as much as it is that discourse on/around the child becomes itself a colonizing and regulating tool of the norm and deviant others.

Literary representations of children in nontraditional adult spaces remind us that children are not sites, but subjects that take up, fill, and manipulate physical, intellectual and imaginative spaces (which are arguably always one in the same).  These representations though at the same time suggest that while children are not paticular sites per say.  [They are not static.  They are not any more or less empty, unoccupied, or inhabitable than any other Other.]  They are however depicted as intimately related to the ground, to things, landscape,[1] and other beings in a way that casts them as among the scenery as a thing in the closet or under the bed or hauled off in an adults arm.  They represent what in an interview with Sylvére Lotringer, Jean Baurdrillard describes as “a strategic position of the process of becoming-object,” which he says, “is clearer when you think of childhood. The child always has a double strategy. He has the possibility of offering himself as object, protected, recognized, geared as a child to the pedagogical function; and at the same time he is fighting on equal terms. At some level the child knows that he is not a child, but the adult does not know that. That is the secret” (Forget Foucault 94).

Part of the special appeal of children in 19^th century American literature with its obsession on being both youthful and progressive, is precisely this bothness of object and subject.  The child is both object and burgeoning subject.  To say burgeoning is to allow for the adult and institutional view of the child as being not-yet-made, as being in an uncanny and mystic space where we can expect some not sustainable inhabitation of object and subject.  When the child grows up some collective one (voiced in religious, legal, scientific, and social texts) will have to become either a subject or an object.  But no one has told the child in any way that can change them that they are only burgeoning.  The child in this literature especially (but children all the time) walk around, assert desires, opinions, wants; they manipulate, hold sway, and make things and happenings, which is to say they always already assume some fullness of subject-hood.

This object-subject identity makes the child doubly attractive and frightful.  As an object the child offers all the possibilities of being moved and departure (what Glissant calls “the consent to no long be a singular being”, to be a part of the landscape, the ground, to be lost in the story, the game, the collective imagination, to be an extension of the mother not just by the umbilical cord and the breast (which are never featured in 19^th century American literature) but by the kiss, the hand, and tears.   Yet at the same time as the potential for expansion and other worlds excite the narration, the atmosphere of 19^th century America is fraught with an anxiety about distinguishing between humans and animals, between humans and things.  When enslaved labor, commodities talk, escape, have children, make things and so on, they threaten the line between object and subject.  The child’s propensity to be object carries the threat and vulnerability of losing its promise of future and humanity; of being not only set adrift on a small raft over many possibilities but having to be particularly adrift on the Mississippi in fugitive kinship with “nigger Jim”.

Similarly as the burgeoning subject, the child carries the exhilarating promise of normative future and progress.  It is why Tom despite all his delinquency is not seen as a degenerate but rather as a future lawyer.  It is why Jo loves her boys (never mind her girls) to be boys.  Yet at the same time this burgeoning subjectivity is scary especially since just as the child’s literal growing threatens their relationship to space, a threat that very often seems to get communicated as a threat to an access to space.  This threat is most intensified in depiction of black children in spaces. The sense of the impending suffocation is strong in Douglass in the closet as well as Frado in the impossibly small room.  (Though I won’t talk about it in this response, it’s worth noting that the theme continues well into 20^th century African American literature with Annie Allen’s room becoming smaller and smaller and Beloved’s swelling to such proportion that first the grave and then the house [and memory alongside these] cannot contain her.)  But this attention to child’s ambivalent object subject orientation within (impossible) childhood spaces is prevalent in depictions of 19^thcentury American white children.  Jo’s boy’s as both violent threats to the integrity of the house and integral domestic objects strewn about, infusing the home with its vital energy to the domestic space to Ragged Dick littering the street with his unpropitious body even as he is himself a model self employed capitalist subjectivity.

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[1] For more on children as objects in a landscape or a still life, see Bill Brown’s discussion of James’s wary attraction to John Singer Sargent’s The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit in A Sense of Things chapter 4.

For more on children’s oneness with the ground and objects see both Winnicot’s sections on transitional objects in Reality and Play and the discussion of children learning to walk as an exploration and merging with the  ground akin to people becoming one with the waves as they learn to surf by Liselott Mariett Olsson. (Prologue)

More on Myths and Words that Forget Themselves

The trick of the myth, which seems to be what makes it so attractive to ruling figures, is that it neither “hides” nor “flaunts” but rather “naturalizes” the signification it produces. . . “[the myth] is this compromise”  between revealing the structure of the signification and intentionally occluding it (129).  Consider the following three excerpts on (respectively) myth, archive, and cinema:

1. Roland Barthes states that “Statistically, myth is on the right.”  He goes on the explain that “It takes hold of everything, all aspects of the law, of morality, of aesthetics, of diplomacy, of household equipment, of Literature, of entertainment.  Its expansion has the very dimensions of bourgeois ex-nomination.  The bourgeoisie wants to keep reality without keeping the appearances; it is therefore the very negativity of he bourgeois appearance, infinite like every negativity, which solicits myth infinitely.” 149

2.  After introducing the notion of “archive” with a look at the Greek “arkhe” and its connotations of “commandment” and “commencement”, Derrida  explains that “The concept of the archive shelters in itself, of course, this memory of the name arkhe.  But it also shelters  itself from this memory which it shelters: which comes down to saying also that it forgets it. There is nothing accidental or surprising about this.  Contrary to the impression one often has, such a concept is not easy to archive. One has trouble, and for essential reasons, establishing it and interpreting it in the document it delivers to us, here in the word which names it, that is the ‘archive.”  (second page of “Archive Fever”)  But Derrida continues, illustrating how the arkhe  that is forgotten in the light of the “arkheion” meaning to shelter, is closely related to the “archon” to the governing agents in the Greek society, those who housed the public documents.

3.  In “The Ideological Effects of the Cinema,”  Jean Baudry argues by way of Althusser that “Cinematographic specificity thus refers to a work, that is, to a process of transformation.  The question becomes: is the work made evident, does consumption f the product bring about a ‘knowledge effect’ [Althusser], or is the work concealed?  If the latter, consumption of the product will obviously be accompanied by ideological surplus value.  . concealment of the technical base will also bring about an inevitable ideological effect.” (287-8)

In all three of these passages, there is a discussion on the way the naturalizing of the myth makes it functionally valuable for the bourgeois and the ruling middle class.   If it is the good reader (that is interpreter of the myth) that recognizes that the myth is the compromise between hiding and flaunting, then we might recognize the archons in whose dwelling spaces the documents that make up the archive reside, as being myth makers, good interpreters of signs, symbols, as recorded in the documents.   Let us not forget that Barthes’ magazine cover is itself now an archived item.  I have no doubt that there are others making similar such arguments, that the ideological, mythological, narrative or argument that puts itself forward also “shelters” (Derrida)  itself byway of a kind of forgetting that renders it current expression, the one available for “consumption” (Baudry) seem as if it is natural or that is as if it is itself the representation of its own ontological moment.

 

Okay now let’s also consider the following:

In Mary Antin’s  The Promised Land, the protagonist having assimilated into Amerian culture remarks even remarks about the early pains of that assimilation:  “I felt the pang, the fear, the wonder, an the joy of it. I an never forget, for I bear the scars. But I want to forget–sometimes I long to forget  . . . It is painful to be consciously of two worlds.  The Wandering Jew seeks forgetfulness.” (Bolaki citing Antin 22)

I bring up this passage because I am interested about the role of forgetting itself in the myth’s capacity to neither hide nor flaunt.   What I want to suggest is that something like living or dwelling happens in this space by way of the forgetting.  It is not like living because it is not living or because it is a lesser living, but it is like living because living is not reducible to not hiding and not flaunting.  This is to say there is life in the hiding and in the flaunting but there is a space between that just goes about, and this is where myth goes. Myth is in the space of the forgetting and becoming, it is a part of the architecture of this space.  It is what promises rest to the ” Wandering Jew.”  This we already knew.  I mean we knew already or we have been told already that the American Dream, American Freedom, American Individualism are all myths.  It is part and parcel to the ethnic and immigrant bildungsroman to make blazingly apparent that this America is a myth.  But what I am hoping to suggest here is that myths live, they dwell.  They are not just a story told and bought, but they are truly as Barhes suggest a language that breathes and constructs understanding.  They are as Baudry says a mechanism that “works” in the space of the not hidden and the not flaunting.

This notion that myth lives, works, dwells, and stirs fascinates me.  I think it is important because yes I want to try and articulate childhood as a machine constructed on and producing myths.   But in all honesty I am fascinated and I find something worth keeping in even the blatantly troubling myths of recapitulations.   While there may be more bathwater than baby here, I don’t want to lose even the smallest of lives.

Project Update #3

So I’ve thought about the notion of a dissertation blog a lot lately.  On the one hand it has been wonderful having a place that is so focused on me being academic with an audience.  By “academic” here I mean scholarly in a strict and focused sense.   But when I think about the kind of scholar I want to be (and I dare imagine am already becoming) no such space exists.  I was so blessed to read in  the Minor American Poetry series this past weekend, and I will read again for the Carborro poetry festival on Oct 15th (shameless plug),  and in preparing for these readings, I realized what I am always realizing which is that my interests are fluid and whatever it is that drives my curiosity is something that expresses itself in multiple fields and mediums.  Thus it seems rather dishonest to just have a strict dissertation blog as if any of the thinking I’m doing about dark forest an children and machines and the roar of trains is contained within this register of expression.

Don’t expect poems because well that just makes me nervous to put my own work up on blogs (but who knows), but I do think I want to talk more about random musings, what’s going on in the class I”m teaching in my department.  Perhaps  maybe I’ll include a dream or two!  At any rate when the dissertation blog comes to a close, I want it to be an account of the fullness of my academic growth which must inevitably manifest itself in a number of rhetorical and performative registers. So let’s see what happens. . . .