Spring Break
Preface
Stephen Pasqualina
Issue date: 1/16/08 Section: Fall 2007
One of the terms I've assigned to this collection, the "other," begins to take shape in John Carpenter's essay "Fulfilling the Book: Shakespeare, Music, Identity, and Kwame Dawes' Requiem." Carpenter examines the irony of the other when he describes John Black/Blancke, a black African trumpeter of the early sixteenth-century English court, as "an individual paid to make music that represented others and consequently helped construct a culture in which, as early modern accounts of blackness tell us, he would have been deemed an outsider." Here Carpenter is speaking of the methods always-already undertaken by the other in constructing both its own subjectivity and the multifaceted power of its external oppressing force (which, at times, becomes internalized). Carpenter's essay asks us a critical question: how might we preserve cultural difference while "reinforcing commonalities"? Or, to return to the historical image painted in his essay's opening, how might we elevate John Black/Blancke to the heights of a notable historical figure, to share a home with his Renaissance contemporaries, while not compromising his unique agency, while not erasing difference? How can he, a figure marginalized in the writing of history, be included in an expansive frame whose canvas paints his otherness as "another"?
Carpenter's historical example, along with his more theoretical question of how to weave difference and commonality into a democratic setting that resists cultural universality or totalization, recurs in several other pieces. The piece that follows Carpenter's is concerned not specifically with blackness but with American identity and imperialism, another sub-theme reintroduced by Robert Fanuzzi, Peter McLaren, and Nathalia Jaramillo. In "Ethnic American Literature and its Discontents: Reflections on the Body, the Nation," Maria Zamora critiques popular sentiment regarding American identity formation. She writes, "That which has been rhetorically understood as 'exterior' has continued to produce interior meaning" (17). Like Carpenter, Zamora gives form to a marginalized body embedded in identity formation, this time illustrating the ways in which excluded cultures dominated by U.S. ethnocentrism help shape what is envisioned and accepted as American culture. These first two essays point toward problems of monolithic representations of disparate entities, and grapple with the problem of incorporating the other into an imagined whole, all while acknowledging the problems in undertaking such a project. Here the frame advocates commonalities among disparate subjects, but is careful to call into question that project's potential for homogenizing its subjects.
Carpenter's historical example, along with his more theoretical question of how to weave difference and commonality into a democratic setting that resists cultural universality or totalization, recurs in several other pieces. The piece that follows Carpenter's is concerned not specifically with blackness but with American identity and imperialism, another sub-theme reintroduced by Robert Fanuzzi, Peter McLaren, and Nathalia Jaramillo. In "Ethnic American Literature and its Discontents: Reflections on the Body, the Nation," Maria Zamora critiques popular sentiment regarding American identity formation. She writes, "That which has been rhetorically understood as 'exterior' has continued to produce interior meaning" (17). Like Carpenter, Zamora gives form to a marginalized body embedded in identity formation, this time illustrating the ways in which excluded cultures dominated by U.S. ethnocentrism help shape what is envisioned and accepted as American culture. These first two essays point toward problems of monolithic representations of disparate entities, and grapple with the problem of incorporating the other into an imagined whole, all while acknowledging the problems in undertaking such a project. Here the frame advocates commonalities among disparate subjects, but is careful to call into question that project's potential for homogenizing its subjects.
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