This
week’s readings were very insightful in regards to positionality and praxis. Through Dr. Ulysee’s chapter “Caribbean
Alter(ed)natives: An Auto-Ethnographic Quilt”, she discusses the nuances of
being an ethnographer. Ethnography is
more than just imposing your gaze upon a group of people whose circumstances
you hope to improve through the work you produce. It’s about interrogating that
gaze, and acknowledging that there is also a gaze imposed on you by the
community you are seeking to help. It is very easy and naïve to romanticize
your position in relation to the people you are interacting with. If you are
not careful, you can compromise the relationships needed to further your
research, and also thwart possible components of your research that you may not
have considered initially. I observed this firsthand this past summer.
During
my stay in the Dominican Republic, I had the opportunity to visit a Dominican Batey
(former sugar workers town). Dominicans of Haitian descent reside there in
penury with little to no support from the State. Any aid they acquire is
usually generated through various community projects, or student organizations
that are willing to donate. Upon entering the batey I had no idea what to
expect. I knew that we would be exposed to a vulnerable population, but I was
ambivalent to the implications of that experience. We were also instructed to
pay attention to gender norms, and to act accordingly so that our behavior does
not warrant negative attention. When
entering the batey, my concerns were assuaged by the presence of the children
who bombarded us. We were introduced to a number of people, and expected to
interact with them, but most of the time we stayed with the children. Now I am
sure you are thinking to yourself “What’s wrong with interacting with the
children?” Those were initially my
sentiments as well. The children were cute, entertaining, and loved to be the
center of attention. We obliged a lot of their requests to take pictures of
them and play with them, and in our minds we were being good ethnographers because
we were interacting with the population we were gathering information on.
Unfortunately our naiveté almost compromised the relationships that we were
supposed to be establishing. Dr. Shoaff explained to us that in only paying
attention to the children, we rendered the women in the community invisible. We
initially could not fathom why the women were so off-putting, but we failed to
realize the way in which they perceived us. Even though our intentions were to
meet the women and learn about their experiences, our actions showed that we
were only invested in playing with the children. Had we not been under the
supervision of Dr. Shoaff, the consequences of our behavior could have
compromised our entire project. From that experience I learned that as an
ethnographer it is impossible to see yourself as separate from your environment.
Your positionality as an ethnographer directly affects the work you produce.
Dr.
Violet Eudine Barriteau’s sentiments on the relevance of Black feminist theory
were also very helpful. Because I use a Black feminist epistemology in my own
work I was already familiar with a lot of the information presented, but for
some reason I never considered it in relation to transnational issues. It could
be that my ideas on Black feminist scholarship needed to be interrogated, which
is precisely what this article did. I usually associate Black feminism with the
experiences of Black women from North America, but it’s so much more than that.
Black feminism as a framework seeks to challenge ideas about race, gender and
class collectively as opposed to believing that the needs of Black women can be
met by just focusing on facet of our oppression. The fact that a Black feminist epistemology can
be used to speak to the experiences of any woman in the Black Diaspora is
exactly the reason why it should be a framework used more frequently and not a
space of dissonance in the academy. It is
the epitome of feminist praxis because lived experiences are crucial to this
framework.
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