Hi, Christopher,
My responses will follow 6 asterisks because we can't interleave in coloured
font.
2009/2/25 Christopher Walker <[log in to unmask]>
> <snip>
> In my country, USA, we have had successions and an increasing
> proliferation of ethnic groups who've gone through a similar process, and I
> think it has made us politically and poetically richer. There will always
> be extremes as well as accommodations in the poets' works as they confront
> their connections to the colonisers, and this will always result in
> extremes
> in response. [JP]
> <snip>
>
> Am I reading you here as saying that the US is, to put it another way, a
> society of previously colonised groups, informed by the cultures of those
> groups? This is obviously true to some extent. But I wonder whether that
> *extent* might not, in fact, be somewhat limited. ******I'd made what
> seems seamless to me, but what may seem a logic-leap to others without my
> explaining it. For some 40 years I've been strongly influenced by
> African-Americans, and the initial writers I read drew reasoned parallels
> between their plight and that of the colonised. This resonated deeply with
> what I'd seen and heard from African-American relatives and friends. It
> also informed my thought that nearly every immigrant group that arrives here
> has 'processed' into the culture in several similar ways. To further
> explain: I've been fortunate to teach students from as many as 15
> different ethnic groups, newly arrived in the USA, in the same class. For
> all that and for having many friends who are recent immigrants, I don't know
> how people in other countries connect with immigrant groups, quite simply
> because I've never lived for long in other countries. Therefore, I'm telling
> what I know only from my own experience as a lifelong resident in the USA.
>
> David Riesman's *Lonely Crowd* is hardly a recent book, but I'm inclined to
> feel his thesis is still valid and that US culture is profoundly
> other-directed. At any rate, it seems to me hugely conformist.
>
> I'd also argue that the US is the dominant power in a process of _virtual_
> colonisation, the skin over other cultures' custard. Again this isn't
> exactly a unique perception on my part. So when you speak of *lazy
> reading*,
> of a sort of radical failure to move from the denotative to the
> connotative - ******I hadn't thought you were arguing, but rather stating
> your opinions which are that the US culture is hugely conformist and that
> the US is the dominant power in a process of virtual colonisation. I can't
> see my country as a non-native might see it, and as I said, I've not lived
> for long periods in other countries; hence, my comments on your opinions
> wouldn't be helpful to you. Other USAmericans may be able to help you.
>
> <snip>
> Whenever a poet [Australian or not] writes about things [flora, fauna] and
> places that I don't know and, more important, can't 'see' [ie have no
> memories from experience or intense reading/viewing], I draw a blank. [JP]
> <snip>
>
> - I read into this (not necessarily correctly) a sort of blanking out of
> other people's subjectivity, their alterity, of the very things that make
> people unknown, opaque, (in)different and unknowable. ******I don't
> understand your sentence.
>
> And yet isn't that bubbling up of strangeness from below, the emergence out
> of subalternity into speech which threatens all of us at times, precisely
> what breaks apart this asymmetrical relationship between the *colonised*
> and
> the chap who sits on his chest, defeating his hopes and/or expectations?
> ******I don't understand your question.
Best,
Judy
>
>
> CW
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