In Geographies of Writing, Nedra Reynolds describes writing and interacting with texts as spatial processes. We are "embodied travelers," situated in terms of physical geography (materially: where am I?) and internal geography (mind mapping: where am I in my thinking?). Awareness of place-moving through disorderly physical spaces (de Certeau's city) with our own practices (Bourdieu's habitus)-is material but also personal/corporeal. "A person's sense of place, while a result of many layered effects, is quite directly related to her body in space."
The spatial makes us aware of difference, identity. So why leap from the spatial to the rejection of identity? Awareness of space is personal (mind mapping). External context shapes (as opposed to negating) identity-which is unstable, full of paradox and irony, socially and spacially situated. Much of the literature on spatial rhetoric uses "post identity" theories, which I think neglects the possibility of understanding identity markers as intersections. Class: intersection of power, geography, occupation, cultural practices-"spatial markers," all. What is more material than foregrounding identity? Place becomes abstraction when we neglect person-in-place.
I've been thinking on these things as I revise an article for JAC (fortuitously, the 'revise and resubmit' letter came days after sending revisions to the piece on my great-grandpa's poetry back to Rhet Review)-an essay that uses intersectional analysis to look at the rhetoric of persons-in-place. The reader reports were positive and helpful and challenged me to justify more clearly why identity markers still matter. Reynolds' book is helping.
The piece uses several Detroit texts where spatially situated persons (Detroit rock-and-rollers) construct identities as intersections. One of Reynolds' central claims is the idea that awareness of space fosters an understanding of difference, "how people respond differently to places depending on race, class, gender, sexuality, or ability." Detroit's somewhat unique in the fact that geographical situatedness is key to what it means to be a "Detroiter." Most cities have the city-suburb binary, but Detroit's version of that component of urban life is mythic (national guard keeping "Detroiters" out of white Dearborn, Coleman Young's defiant stance toward burbs, 8-Mile "border" as icon). Detroiters are acutely aware of space in a way that I think is unique (NYC bridges and tunnels, I suppose). Detroiters' understanding of difference (embodied by class-conscious and race-conscious garage bands, e.g.) is by extension acute and complex.
3 comments:
Your post is one more reason why we need a Detroit Writing Group. Lots of intersection of ideas.
One comment:
When Reynolds notes: "how people respond differently to places depending on race, class, gender, sexuality, or ability," I see this point as a spatialized point - in the sense that it is a fixed space, or identity. It is an identified reading. Is it possible to make space mean something not dependent on race, class, gender? And if the answer is no, then why space? The meaning - like a Detroit meaning which poses the city as only in ruins - feels fixed.
Or, since you note de Certeau, in his most popular piece on space, "Walking in the City," he argues against the "totalizing" look from above. How is race, class, gender not a totalizing look from above?
I ask this not to critique (I have absolutely no objection to what you are saying), but in the hopes of further discussion.
Thanks for the comments. I've moved--again, the spatial lingo--in the last year toward more projects that think about motown (this essay, the piece on Oates at U of D, digging in the Reuther archives for stuff about the Detroit freshman college program during the Depression, maybe something in the future on the labor monument in Hart Plaza), which I think illustrates what Reynolds says about place being such an agent of influence.
Why do those markers have to be "from above"? I mean, you're right--they can become stale, non-generative, answers instead of questions, etc., when academics use them as tropes or--as you suggest in your post today--when they keep us from engaging in production.
But I don't see that "from above" model as being the only way to put identity into conversation with space. We can PRODUCE rhetorics that are material (that foreground space, that foreground sexuality, that foreground class or race or what have you, that foreground persons-in-place). Why space? Because our movement through places MATTERS. Why identity markers? Because who we are bodily/ideologically/personally also MATTERS.
As you are suggesting, I think, anything *can become* totalizing. But I don't see identity as necessarily taking part in that kind of dead end scene. Although, I agree with you that the field's (or maybe the academy's in general) versions of such analysis have been lacking.
Detroit writing group? Heck yeah.
bill,
one book i've always loved is jonathan rabin's "the city" about london in the 50's and 60's, including the kray brothers. what i like is that rabin writes more about feel of the city's segmentation from actually being in the street and describing street culture (williams' lifeworld). a detroit writing group is a great idea.
cheers,
tim
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