Kathryn Sears—Native
Speakers—2.15.17
My blog
post this week will focus on Maria Eugenia Cotera’s introduction, “Writing in
the Margins of the Twentieth Century,” in her book, Native Speakers: Ella Deloria,
Zora Neale Hurston, Jovita González, and the Poetics of Culture. Cotera
describes the structure of Jovita González’s short story entitled, “Shades of
the Tenth Muse,” which places two women poets from the colonial era in Mexico
and the United States in a theoretical dialogue as if they were sitting the
same room having a discussion. The
structure of Gonzalez’s short story, then, is the structure that Cotera uses
for the remainder of her book as she places three figures, Dakota ethnologist
Ella Deloria, African American folklorist Zora Neale Hurston, and tejana
folklorist Jovita González, in dialogue with one another in order to “illuminate
a multicultural feminist imaginary.”[1] Cotera’s project aims to consider the
possibilities of and create a methodology that is grounded in the convergent
and divergent thinking required to understand and utilize “border texts”. This methodology will be a comparative one,
however, one that focuses on celebrating and incorporating differences between
the literary works rather than forced sense of sameness, thus an erasure of
certain levels of struggle, that befalls the work of so many comparative
analyses. She writes that the short, fictional
endeavors of the three figures in her book are “too literary to be considered
authoritative ethnographic texts and too wedded to ethnographic realism to
conform to the aesthetic norms of literary modernism” and so “these ethnographic
novels have been exiled from both the history of anthropology and classical
accounts of early twentieth-century American writing.” Border texts are created in this way, then,
when they are different enough from multiple disciplines and cannot comfortably
fit into any one spot. In a sense, the
nature of these texts as border texts mirrors the conditions of these three
figures as ‘native speakers’ because of the difficulty traversing the varying
boundaries of their existence as American women of color, academics or
intellectuals, and activists. Cotera’s
project is crucial for its analysis of discursive interventions during the
early twentieth century that illuminate “the complex social locations that they
[Delora, Hurston, and González] (and other women of color intellectuals) occupied
in the early twentieth century.”[2] These social locations, furthermore, are not
much different from those experienced by women of color in the twentieth
century.
Cotera’s book, in the introduction
as well as the subsequent chapters we read for class this week, is innovative
and compelling. Specifically, her
commitment to a comparativist model that is “governed by a coalitional ethos,
Transitory, situational, and always mediated by difference” is important as I
consider my methodology in writing my thesis.[3]
Clarification
Question:
·
Footnote 15 mentions that Delora, Hurston, and
González “bear the taint of co-conspirators in the project to describe and
domesticate their native communities and have even been figured as collaborators
with colonialist discourse.” To what
extent did this shade or effect the reception of their anthropological or
social work as well as their more creative work?
Discussion Question:
·
In comparison to Visweswaran’s experimental
formation, how does a methodology like Cotera’s, and by extension González’s “Shades
of the Tenth Muse”, accessibility into discussions in each of these short
stories?
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