Author Archives: Jeff Allred

some tips on the annotated bibliography step

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I just wanted to reflect briefly on your “simple bibliographies” and include some tips for the next stage. I was really pleased with the work you did, collectively, and wanted to call attention to a few exemplary bibliographies that shine a light on different aspects of the craft of research:

  • Saida‘s has a great discussion of the way her topic mutated as she went digging for materials. There’s kind of an art to keeping one’s mind open while searching/reading, looking for ways to refine or revise the direction of the topic or argument, and Saida pulls that off here nicely.
  • Dora’s uses a range of different databases and gives a nuanced description of her search strategy.
  • Adriana starts with a suitably “weird” topic–the role of food and eating in TBE–that requires some out-of-the-box searches and sources. So if you are also plowing new ground, she gives a good example of how to proceed.

Pro tip: steal each other’s stuff! Of course I don’t mean this in the sense of plagiarism as you start to actually write, but recognize that research can be collaborative (and should be). Stand on the shoulders of those who have dug in the same or nearby fields! Many of you are working on, say, incest in Ellison and/or Morrison. So in addition to doing searches, comb through the blog posts of peers and see who found something useful that you didn’t find! We scholars who do this for a living do this all the time…

Tasha, “Lullabye”

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Just discovered this incredible track by Tasha, a Chicago-based singer-songwriter, that reminded me of Yancy’s reading of Pecola. At the end, Yancy makes a “reparative” move: rather than just interpreting what Pecola (and the text in which she is suspended) means, he asks a different question: what would it take to heal the damage that the discourse of whiteness has inflicted upon her. His answers are various but involve both study and, somewhat unfamiliarly for academic discourse, love and nurturance. This track really captures this latter, and one can easily imagine it issuing from the mouths of Yancy, Morrison, or Claudia with some decades of retrospect.

Extra bonus: She’s playing at Bowery Ballroom next week for the student-friendly price of $15. Enjoy:

Lullaby

Listen to Lullaby on Spotify. Tasha · Song · 2018.

 

two relevant pieces from recent articles

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As y’all get ready for the midterm, here are a couple of short pieces I’ve been meaning to share that show the ongoing relevance of some of the early-to-mid twentieth-century texts we’ve been reading. First is a piece from the New York Review of Books that reviews Korean-American author Wesley Yang’s recent collection of essays, The Souls of Yellow Folk. As you’ll see, it riffs on Du Bois’s idea of “double consciousness” from the perspective of 21st century Asian American life, thinking about many of the same issues we’ve been talking about around the specular construction of race (i.e,. how race is “produced” through socially constructed ways of looking).

Second is an article from the philosopher George Yancey, who often writes about race for the New York Times. We’ll be reading his analysis of The Bluest Eye in a bit. This piece brilliantly reframes the debate about “blackface” that’s resurfaced with great urgency around the revelations that, well, the entire white political leadership of Virginia spent all of college and graduate school wearing black shoe polish. Rather than focus on the obvious fact that these acts distort blackness, Yancy moves upstream and asks why white people, or maybe better, whiteness itself depends on blackface even while disavowing this dependence.