2/21 questions by Nikolaos (I will delete off blog if unwanted but just submitting it now digitally)

Nikolaos S-Wilson’s Quotes and Questions

2/12 – from Representations of Whiteness in the Black Imagination

Quotes:

“ So institutionalized is the ignorance of our history, our culture, our everyday existence that, often, we do not even know ourselves.”

“The eagerness with which contemporary society does away with racism, replacing this recognition with evocations of pluralism and diversity that further mask reality, is a response to the terror.”

Questions:

1) If black figures in popular culture encouraged blacks to look to their great past, does that help.  I think of Nas the rap musician talking about the great history of blacks coming from Egypt.  

2) Is the encouragement of black people to seek out books in libraries a good way for blacks to recover their real history?  This was a theory proposed by some literary black people.  

2/14 – from Crooked Room

Quotes: “To the researcher’s surprise, some people could be tilted by as much as 35 degrees and report that they were perfectly straight, simply because they were aligned with images that were equally tilted.”

“Bombarded with warped images of their humanity, some black women tilt and bend themselves to fit the distortion”.

Questions:

If the play for colored girls based off the author Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem makes visible the slanted images that too often remain invisible, as the author suggests, how do invisible images affect black people?  It seems an invisible image would have no effect on a person. 

How can black women go about creating a “new room” that is not crooked?

2/21 – From The Oppositional Gaze Black Female Spectators

Quotes: 

“Only the child is afraid to look.  Afraid to look, but fascinated by the gaze.  There is power in looking.”

“Connecting this strategy of domination to that used by grown folks in southern black rural communities where I grew up, I was pained to think that there was no absolute difference between whites who had oppressed black people and ourselves.”

Questions:

In reference to the second quote I selected, does this not speak then to perhaps a loving or caretaking relationship between slave master and slave, or does it mean that slaves were treated as children and that was demeaning to be considered like a child?

Isn’t it sad that Miss Pauline could be transported by cinema to another world and be happy for the duration of the movie, but “it made coming home hard”?