Literary Theory & Criticism
Ideology
The State
Knowledge Production
Centrality of Race
Femininity
The Lived Experience of a Black Man
Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity
Playing in the Dark
Ideology & Ideological State Apparatuses
Domination & Hegemony
Narrative & Social Space
The World & The Home
The State is a Man
Settler Colonialism & Elimination of the Native
Decolonization is not a Metaphor
Paranoid Reading & Reparative Reading
Desubjugated Knowledges
The Race for Theory
Poetry is Not a Luxury
Venus in Two Acts
U.S. Third World Feminism
The Melancholy of Race
Mourning & Melancholia
Performing Disidentifications
Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe
Felt Theory
Brilliance as Radical Resurgence
-The depersonalization of black women in history
-The hypersexualized depiction of black women
-Women and slavery from the dominant perspective
-Using the archive and critical fabulation to fill in blanks in history
-The discussion of reclaiming the narrative of black women in history without reigniting violence
"The necessity of recounting Venus’s death is overshadowed by the inevitable failure of any attempt to represent her."
-Technology & social media, the platform that they offer
-The world of academia and its exclusivity/lack of acceptance
-Internalized homophobia within the LGBTQIA+ community
-Gender in Eurocentric contexts vs gender in other cultures
-Intersectionality within gender, sexuality, and race
-Depersonalization and erasure of non-Eurocentric figures in literature
-Relates back to the idea of the archive
-Western-based school curriculum & history retellings
-The instillation of Eurocentric Christian ideals into colonized lands
-The colonizers as the “refined” and the “heroic”
Mean Little Deaf Queer by Terry Galloway
-How white authors use blackness to drive plot
-Depersonalization of non-white characters, use of them to support white characters
-Edgar Allen Poe & his “Narrative of A. Gordon Pym”
-Use of blackness as a metaphor/literary device for white authors
-Intersectionality and women of color
-How the dominant feminist movements have neglected to take women of color into account
-The societal belief that blackness is associated only with men, and feminism is associated only with white women
-Difference in feminism movement for white women and women of color
-How race and class are often excluded in the conversation of feminism
-Differential coalitional consciousness and resisting a binary view of feminism
-The superstructure relies on the infrastructure to be an economic base
-The superstructure is unable to operate without the support of the infrastructure
-Relative autonomy in superstructure compared to infrastructure
-Laboring individuals are a stepping stone for society to form ideologies
-“Precisely this: that the upper floors could not ‘stay up’ (in the air) alone, if they did not rest precisely on their base.”
-White men have never had any trouble getting others to listen to them
-Women, especially women of color, use poetry as a means for survival
-Women use poetry as a means to be free, as a way to imagine life that they don’t experience
-What women start by writing poems turns into a foundation for real change
-“The white fathers told us, I think therefore I am; and the black mothers in each of us–the poet–whispers in our dreams, I feel therefore I can be free.”
-Paranoid reading is the act of reading suspiciously and looking for information to confirm suspicions
-Reparative reading is reading for enjoyment
-Paranoid reading is anticipatory, looking for issues, expecting them
-In media, paranoid reading tends to be more popular and used to draw attention
-Warns about getting caught up in abstractness and confusion of creating new theories to analyze old work
-Clouds the field by diminishing other work that isn’t new theory adaptations of old literature
-Keeps old Eurocentric work by white men in the forefront of the field
-Neglects the work of non-white and non-male theorists and critics
-Not an event, but a system
-Settler colonialism is based on elimination rather than exploitation of the native population
-The new (colonizers) attempts to eliminate and replace the old (natives)
-Relates to Althusser’s ideas of ideological state apparatuses
-Leads to the suppression and erasure of the native culture, replaced with the colonizer’s culture
-Disidentification serves as a survival strategy for queer people of color in society
-How literature, technology, and media affects marginalized communities
-Dominant culture tends to exclude marginalized identities
-To disidentify is to resist the force of dominant culture
-The author of this memoir talks about her experiences coming out with a disability and as queer
-She experienced a lot of instances where people were desperate to “fix” her deafness or queerness
-She felt insecure about her looks, hiding her hearing aid with a specific hairstyle, because she didn’t feel like she met societal norms of beauty
-She uses her memoir as her chance to define herself in the way that she sees herself, rather than using the terms that society tries to put on her
-Indigenous men disregard the traumas that indigenous women face and the issues that specifically attack women
-Similar to Venus in Two Acts, discussing what needs to be said and reclaiming history without glorifying/romanticizing the trauma associated
-When men stay silent during the abuse of women, it is just as harmful as the abuse itself
-Effective feminism must include all women from all backgrounds
The University & the Undercommons
-The role of black women as mothers and as women has been distorted by the archives
-Black enslaved women denied the experience of being a mother to the children they birth
-Black women have been viewed predominantly as “strong” to the point where they are seen as overpowering to men
-Like how people were making conspiracy theories that Michele Obama was a man — black women are seen as more manly and dominant than other women by society
-Since black women are excluded from the typical narrative of femininity, it allows the opportunity for them to separate themselves from stereotypes and societal gender norms
-Undercommons is the uncanny of the university, it disturbs/threatens the nature of the university
-The undercommons is observed by the university, and let in by the university so the university can control them
-“We don’t bother you, you don’t bother us, you can vent but that’s it,” like the ideological state apparatuses
-Hunger Games reference incoming: University is to the Capitol as the Undercommons is to District 13
-“The undercommons is not, in short, the kind of fanciful communities of whimsy invoked by Bill Readings at the end of his book. The undercommons, its maroons, are always at war, always in hiding.”
The Uncanny
-We can be made uncomfortable by things that are familiar to us in an unfamiliar setting
-The uncanny exists in a realistic world
-Fear of the familiar coming back to us at a later time in our development
-The subconscious creeping into conscious
-"Mr Incredible Uncanny memes" spread on internet, showed character getting progressively scarier looking and unfamiliar as situation grows different than what we are used to
-The term “decolonization” is becoming more commonly used and casually thrown around
-Decolonization cannot be a metaphor because it requires the return of the colonized land to its original indigenous community
-The way these stories of settler colonialism are told affects the futurity of settlers and indigenous lands
-For example, adaptations like Disney’s “Pocahontas” paints settler John Smith as adventurous and heroic, having him form relationships with Pocahontas’ tribe and making him an all-around “good guy”
-Home refers to the place that someone feels safe and assured within society
-“Unhomely” refers to the feeling when the world interferes with the home and shakes up the stable belief system and identity
-The unhomely is disturbing, similar to how the uncanny is disturbing
-The unhomely offers a chance for someone to reevaluate their sense of identity and belief system
-How the heteropatriarchal Western society affects indigenous women in settler colonialism
-The marginalization of indigenous women directly plays into the real deaths of them
-The erasure and death of indigenous women is essential for the success of settler colonialism
-The so-called “reconciliation” that is happening now is a way for settlers to feel “better” about their actions, and think they can move on and forget it ever happened
-Mourning is a more clear and healing sense of dealing with loss, while melancholia is more abstract and harder to deal with
-External societal factors can cause us to experience feelings of mourning & melancholia
-Ideology can affect how we feel these emotions
-How dominant groups have power over other groups within society, an instance that is called hegemony
-The state focuses on dominant groups and represses minority groups with its ideologies
-Dominancy-controlled state = dominancy-controlled ideologies
-The state controls cultural ideologies through media, technology, educational institutions, etc
-Creating an indigenous present freedom through connection to the land & commitment to future generations
-Like in poetry is not a luxury, knowledge about indigenous freedom is produced through writing and looking at lived experience
-Colonist ideas are integrated into Western culture and education
-Racial melancholy refers to the suffering and grief felt in minority racial groups in societies where they experience loss and rejection
-As stated in Freud’s understanding of melancholy, ideologies and external societal factors (politics, religion, education) are driving forces in the feeling of melancholia
-Racial assimilation is in the same sense “unhomely” as in Bhaba’s “the world and the home”
-How an individual’s identity is impacted and changed from racial melancholia and loss
-Media is a constant representation of racial identities and communities for society, whether it’s good or not
-The heterogeneity of a culture is to see the differences within the culture rather than generalize, and to see how different forces play a part in the intersectionalities of identities within the culture
-To see the hybridity and differences within a culture is to look at the roles of class, gender, race and other influences and how they intersect
-White men have set the standard in society for what culture is seen as dominant and what is seen as the other
-Skin color becomes the precedent for what society expects from someone
-The way people act towards people of color, view their successes and characteristics, is a reflection of society’s set prejudices and racist ideologies
How Black Feminists Defined Abortion Rights by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
-Banning abortions doesn’t affect the white women of upper classes, it affects the women of color and working-class women
-Like many other things, abortion is a right that became unattainable for minority groups through legislation by the state
-The feminist movement for equality has different burdens and needs than black feminism
-The removal of abortion rights is less than an issue of choice or privacy, but about equality
The Messy Politics of Black Voices and Black Voice in American Animation by Lauren Michele Jackson
-Similar to Playing in the Dark, black animated characters are used to further the plot, but are not actually fleshed out or even played by black voice actors
-The characters are laced with stereotypes and do not contribute anything positive for representation
-Jackson cites Tiana, the sole black Disney princess, noting that she is a frog for the majority of her movie
The Invention of Thanksgiving by Philip Deloria
-American education doesn’t teach American history with representation of Native communities in the past or in the present
-Native culture is appropriated during American festivities like Halloween with costumes and Thanksgiving with crafts and shows that misrepresent Native people
-The ideas of Native people and Thanksgiving that have been instilled by colonizers remains solidified by the state