Strangely, for a book primarily concerned with place, I’m not sure I have a very good sense of the Liverpool Nassy Brown is talking about. Is that her objective? Conceptually, her aim is show how place is key in nation/identity/race making, but what about the place-ness of the place? I guess I was just itching for some maps.
At times reminiscent of a literary studies survey, at times reading like a straight history, Dropping Anchor was a different sort of ethnography (and in a way, more “ethnographic”) than anything else we’ve read this semester. Since the Mol, I have an entirely new take on footnotes, and a new perspective on seeing them as a form of parallel text. It is in the footnotes that Nassy Brown says, “I tend to be less reflexive than many anthropologists. At the risk of underplaying the effect of my own positioning on the matters being ‘observed’ and selected for discussion and analysis, I do not think that my subjectivity or the ways that people perceived me really illuminates much—or not to a degree that warrants interrupting discussions about them to talk about me-and-them.” (260)
I found this comment surprising, and that it seemed to close off a very relevant aspect of her work, namely her being a Black American woman conducting this research. There are so many compelling trajectories that are produced by each of these identities: how her Blackness/femaleness/Americanness affected her subjects and spoke precisely to the work she was undertaking; both in various community members’ implorations to “correctly” represent lost histories, and her own racial place-ment in Liverpool. It was in one described personal scene (she was waking down the street with an older White woman, and is (mis)recognized by a young Black woman also walking with an older White woman, presumably her mother) that her theoretical positionings really coalesced for me and made sense, “I felt myself becoming Marien’s daughter in that surreal little moment. I felt myself being made into the ‘local girl’ to whom I was so often likened. Earlier in the chapter, it was the Black mother’s presence that made a seemingly White child Black. Here, it’s the White mother’s presence that made the anonymous Black person (me) local.” The fluidity of race and nation, the feminization of locality, the relationality of internal versus external places all came together in that anecdote.
2 Comments:
At 5:08 PM,
amber said…
Strangely, for a book primarily concerned with place, I’m not sure I have a very good sense of the Liverpool Nassy Brown is talking about. Is that her objective? Conceptually, her aim is show how place is key in nation/identity/race making, but what about the place-ness of the place? I guess I was just itching for some maps.
At times reminiscent of a literary studies survey, at times reading like a straight history, Dropping Anchor was a different sort of ethnography (and in a way, more “ethnographic”) than anything else we’ve read this semester. Since the Mol, I have an entirely new take on footnotes, and a new perspective on seeing them as a form of parallel text. It is in the footnotes that Nassy Brown says, “I tend to be less reflexive than many anthropologists. At the risk of underplaying the effect of my own positioning on the matters being ‘observed’ and selected for discussion and analysis, I do not think that my subjectivity or the ways that people perceived me really illuminates much—or not to a degree that warrants interrupting discussions about them to talk about me-and-them.” (260)
I found this comment surprising, and that it seemed to close off a very relevant aspect of her work, namely her being a Black American woman conducting this research. There are so many compelling trajectories that are produced by each of these identities: how her Blackness/femaleness/Americanness affected her subjects and spoke precisely to the work she was undertaking; both in various community members’ implorations to “correctly” represent lost histories, and her own racial place-ment in Liverpool. It was in one described personal scene (she was waking down the street with an older White woman, and is (mis)recognized by a young Black woman also walking with an older White woman, presumably her mother) that her theoretical positionings really coalesced for me and made sense, “I felt myself becoming Marien’s daughter in that surreal little moment. I felt myself being made into the ‘local girl’ to whom I was so often likened. Earlier in the chapter, it was the Black mother’s presence that made a seemingly White child Black. Here, it’s the White mother’s presence that made the anonymous Black person (me) local.” The fluidity of race and nation, the feminization of locality, the relationality of internal versus external places all came together in that anecdote.
At 9:39 PM,
Jenny K. said…
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