Hi Sarah Beth

Mark McCutcheon suggested I might enjoy reading your blog post and he's quite right. I did.

I'm in the LTST637 course he mentioned in his comment, above. In fact, i AM the LTST637 course since I'm the only student this time round. I'm enjoying the material a great deal. And do rather wish I had some student peers to chat with about it all.

So your blog post was certainly relevant to the course material.

One of the things that gets me about the issue of treating Africa like a country is that despite knowing better, I find myself doing it too. I'll meet someone and then later think, "Now, were they from Tanzania? Or was it Uganda? Or Togo? Or..." And that's so maddening because the details of what they told me just slip around in my brain until all I can remember is Africa. 

I think part of the issue is that I have such little real connection with Africa. I have travelled a little on the continent and wouldn't now confuse Namibia with Mozambique, for example. But it shouldn't take visiting somewhere to cement its uniqueness in one's (colonial, colonized, colonizing) mind. 

I try not to get too annoyed with myself. But it is a frightfully stubborn habit of mind.

Julie

Hi Julie! I mistakenly thought LTST637 was individualized study, and I tried to sign up for it to begin in October, of course unsuccessfully. It sounds like I would have enjoyed it. I took ENGL633 (Postcolonial Drama) instead, and I am enjoying that one a lot. It feels like I am getting away with something, just sitting down and reading a play all evening. 

I hear you about "frightfully stubborn" habits of mind -- I like to think supporting individual efforts to break down racist, transphobic, etc. habits can be a part of a community's ethic of caring for each other. But that only helps when we have access to a caring community to begin with. 

Mark's point, that even when we do pay attention to specificity of detail, we are often using place names and political borders created by colonial forces to help them divide up territory, is a good one. I don't think it's a no-win scenario, but it does seem to call for a bit of extra care: maybe by just asking people what they prefer (I already do this with gender, e.g. by asking "what pronouns should I use to talk about you?"). I'm not sure if that is always practical, and it feels a bit awkward as I think it over, but maybe that is just the pressure to be politely colour-blind talking. 

Yes, I don't think it's a no-win scenario either. It's just a no-purity scenario. Every category and name was devised by someone, at some historical moment, and carries layers of meaning.  And we each negotiate all that, as we figure out who we are.

I agree that it feels best when the naming is done by the person or people themselves. I think of being at the Calgary Banff Word Fest this year, where I heard the writer Ivan E Coyote read from her work. And I appreciated how she played with all kinds of gendered markers, from her name to her quite male look & clothes to her preferred pronoun (she). I listened to the audience afterwards, as we gathered our coats and walked to the exit, and people were definitely challenged by that. By what they perceived as dissonance.

So it's about being allowed to embrace dissonance, the complex way we build our own identities across all kinds of possibilities.

But it's not just about individual choice either. We want to share names & categories, to be part of a community too, if not completely defined by it. That's another element of negotiation.

It's interesting stuff, isn't it?

Thanks for talking.

Julie

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