Calling Cards: Theory and Practice in the Study of Race, Gender, and Culture

Introduction: Marking Trails in Studies of Race, Gender, and Culture

Introduction Marking Trails in Studies of Race, Gender, and Culture Jacqueline Jones Royster Only the Black Woman can say “when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.” —Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South A HISTORY OF RESISTANCE AND STRUGGLE In 1892 Anna Julia Cooper issued a bold challenge when she invited her audience to imagine African American women as trailblazers for their race, as intellectual scouts audaciously dedicated to carving out pathways to full participation in American society. Moreover, she invited all to consider that, as those held in lowest esteem, African American women inevitably foretell the entry of their ethnic group as a whole into “civilized” conversations and onto the world’s stage. She envisioned a place where her talents and the talents of those like her (i.e., African American women and men) could have equal authority and agency in the human enterprise of making a better world. Since Cooper’s publication of A Voice from the South, there have indeed been increased educational opportunities for African Americans and other marginalized groups as well. These opportunities have 1 2 Jacqueline Jones Royster enabled formerly disfranchised people of various identities to enter academic circles and participate more actively as well-trained researchers and scholars. We have worked for and claimed the authority to acquire and use academic credentials, and even harder in many ways to do so as ourselves—as racialized, gendered, sexualized, and culturally distinctive human beings, rather than as mirrors, imitators, shadows, or other categorizations that might suggest apparently prescribed models of “academic professional” and indeed “academic work.” Entering this world, however, has not been simple. As evidenced by this volume, over the generations, we have faced challenges on several fronts in the effort to operate with agency, autonomy, authority, professional respect, and also to get the work done that we feel impassioned to do. One hundred years ago, William E. B. DuBois, a contemporary of Cooper’s, articulated the basic dilemma in his often-quoted statement about the peculiar sensation of “double-consciousness,” “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” (The Souls of Black Folk, 5). DuBois brought to bolder relief the longing of African American men for “self-conscious manhood” and the persistent barriers they faced in their desires to exhibit a sense of agency and authority “without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of opportunity closed roughly in his face” (5). While DuBois’s focus was on African American men and the social order more generally, the message is no less meaningful for a full range of individuals in academe (African American scholars included) who have faced the pulls and tares of being both scholar and Other—racialized, gendered, acculturated beings amid discourses where dominant social and political forces are privileged to ignore and disregard us and our work with the same type of amused contempt and pity articulated by DuBois in 1903. Being different with regard to race, gender, and culture, and/or choosing focal points for research, scholarship, and teaching that go against the grain of academic traditions with regard to these same types of factors has been and continues to be a story of resistance and struggle. In 1984, eighty-one years after Souls of Black Folk, bell hooks rearticulated the dilemma for yet another generation as she sought to make a place for the full participation of people who continue to be deemed marginal: To be in the margin is to be part of the whole but outside the main body. . . . Living as we did–on the edge—we devel- 3 Introduction oped a particular way of seeing reality. We looked both from the outside in and from the inside out. We focused our attention on the center as well as on the margin. We understood both. This mode of seeing reminded us of the existence of a whole universe, a main body made up of both margin and center. Our survival depended on an ongoing public awareness of the separation between margin and center and an ongoing private acknowledgment that we were a necessary, vital part of that whole. (Feminist...