On rhetorical tone

January 11, 2007 at 11:09 am | In h-dawg's book club, the forg | 5 Comments

Shannon Cain, Executive Director of Kore Press, just published a review of Color of Violence: the INCITE Anthology on the Kore Press blog. Overall I found it a thoughtful, succinct review (can I get a shout-out for brevity?), acknowledging her own problematic position as a white woman reviewing this volume:

…I feel a morose kinship with those early pioneers of the domestic violence movement, the white women whose groundbreaking work in the late seventies and early eighties sparked a massive social consciousness-raising around the issue of relationship violence and created fundamental shifts in the way law enforcement, health care and social services recognize and deal with battering. Kinship because a generation ago it was perhaps their own privileged ignorance that allowed the social justice ethic of that movement—which we are reminded in the introduction of Color of Violence had been largely authored by women of color, particularly Black lesbians—to all but disappear from the antiviolence organizations of today. We are now stuck with a “movement” that long ago lost its radical social change edge. It has transmogrified into a network of government-funded social service charities, emergency room procedures that medicalize the issue into one-size-fits all policies, and laws that often land the victim/survivor of abuse in the criminal justice system alongside her abuser.

One of her criticisms of the book, whose central premise is that ‘the state—in the form of law enforcement, medicine, criminal justice, “national security,” and even nonprofit social services—is complicit in the continuation of violence against women of color’, is the difference in presentation:

While I admire the diversity of experience and viewpoints in Color of Violence, the volume’s refusal to set a rhetorical tone was difficult to take. A transcript of a woman’s wrenching oral storytelling is set side-by-side with what appears to be an excerpt from another contributor’s PhD thesis. The end result is that editorial cohesion is sacrificed; the volume has the feel of having been assembled by committee.

Obviously, not having read the anthology myself, I can’t comment on its tone, uneven or otherwise. However, I have heard similar complaints raised before about anthologies that go for the ‘mixed approach’ — MLA-style essays bumping up against personal narrative or even transcribed slam poetry — which often focus on minority literature. (I’m having a total blank for titles right now — can somebody help me out? QD? ) Anyway, I’m wondering if this particular criticism — about ‘even tone’ — doesn’t have some unexamined assumptions, or a tricky (academic) bias that Cain hopes to avoid. When presenting underrepresented voices, what might we lose in our quest for coherence? Anthologies are so fraught with difficulty, anyway, with their unavoidable ties to producing and maintaining canons, and I suppose there are always some challenging and productive rough edges that will get smoothed over. In a volume like the INCITE Anthology, is this complicated further?

5 Comments »

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

  1. I haven’t read the anthology either, which makes it difficult for me to say for sure, however I think you’re right about the unexamined assumptions.

    I think the desire for cohesion may be a matter of (academic, cultural, etc.) taste or familiarity, among other things. For me, sometimes a jumble of tones, voices, diction levels can be exciting. It is also a pretty accurate representation of our language itself, which is made up of words from so many language pools. Particularly, English is mixture of “low-class” Anglo Saxon words (like “room” and “pig”) mixed with with the “upper-class” French words (like “chamber” and “pork”) all mixed together.

    Anyway, yeah, I don’t think it necessarily has to be any more jarring to read an anthology like the one described than it is to surf the web.

    Comment by Jane Awake — January 11, 2007 #

    Reply

  2. I think academic reality often turns this into a more pragmatic choice between including the mixed voices in anthologies and not being able to justify incorporating any grounded voices at all in the classes where most readers are…

    It sounds like a really interesting book though. Reminds me that I’ve been thinking about the idea of abuse a lot. Like, more than just the problems of a clearly defined type of violence for POC, but how the construct of “abuse” inherently assumes a set of oppositional conditions beyond the individual relationship that a rational survivor would recognize as different. As such, there’s a clear line drawn between the abuse that can affect everyone individually and the systemic power dynamics that get marked off with other names like racism, and the conceptual divide is hard to jump when it probably shouldn’t be.

    but I’m way off topic.

    Comment by namaroopa — January 12, 2007 #

    Reply

  3. Jane, I liked your point about the varied sources for the English language that I just posted a video on Hawaiian pidgin. Well, that and I’ve meant to post it for awhile.

    namaroopa:

    I think academic reality often turns this into a more pragmatic choice between including the mixed voices in anthologies and not being able to justify incorporating any grounded voices at all in the classes where most readers are…

    Can you elaborate a bit on this? Do you mean it’s a pragmatic choice to have consistency of tone over mixed voices? I feel like you’re onto something here. As for your thoughts on the conceptual distinction between individual/systematic abuse, I’d like to talk about that too… maybe one of us can write a post on it?

    Comment by petitpoussin — January 15, 2007 #

    Reply

  4. Oh, not what I meant, actually. Garbled sentence. I meant that keeping the ridiculously mixed tone of a jargon-laden theory chapter followed by a personal narrative may be a necessary political choice in order to simply get non-academic voices into university courses (the biggest audience for published anthologies). At least in the social sciences, it’s very much not taken for granted that all texts have scholarly value, and faculty might not be allowed to, say, include a huge number of course readings that are primary narratives, or may not be able to justify highlighting qualitative/field-based “research” rather than material written in a quantitative pedantic tone – which is a serious methodological-alignment war in my field over how to represent social reality as much as it is a literary choice. So in the spirit of “your writing is your [actual social] self…”

    I’m not a bitter pragmatist, though.

    Comment by namaroopa — January 15, 2007 #

    Reply

  5. [...] Other bloggers talking about the Color of Violence: A Canadian Lefty Petitpoussin [...]

    Pingback by Women of Color Blog » What Does a WOC Movement Look Like? — January 27, 2007 #

    Reply

Leave a comment

XHTML: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <pre> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

Blog at WordPress.com. | Theme: Pool by Borja Fernandez.
Entries and comments feeds.