Subject Position(s): Rejecting Rhetorical Manipulation and Delimited Situation

In the title track to their “coming-of-age” album Futures, Jim Adkins of popular American alternative rock band Jimmy Eat World repeats, “Hey now, the past is told by those who win.” To the victor go the spoils, and apparently a large portion of those spoils include the ability to write off the histories of the oppression of other ethnic groups and cultures as subsidiary and inconsequential. They simply do not fit the tale of progress that Western civilizations have worked so hard to write. However, Georganne Nordstrom describes the creation of this reductive narrative as a form of rhetorical manipulation that seeks to elide difference and dissidence to position colonization as a form of salvation from a lack of civilization. “Such rhetorical manipulation of the historical record in mainstream Western discourse,” Nordstrom writes, “has resulted in the production of a specific picture of Native Hawaiians and the immigrant laborers brought in to work the plantations as passive, content, and welcoming of the civilizing agenda of the benevolent colonizers” (117). The rhetorical manipulation imposed by the “victors,” then, downplays the counter-narrative of struggle that underscores most perpetuated stories of progress.

When Meghan and I went about constructing our visualized discourse analysis of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, we found it relatively easy to deconstruct the speech based upon the heuristic presented on the blog (Transtextual, Contextual, Intratextual), but we could not so easily discern indigeneity emerging from this analytical paradigm. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “indigenous” originated in the mid-17^th century and comes from the Latin “indigena,” which translates to “a native.” Thus, for us, indigeneity came to naturally entail struggle, diaspora, and oppression as natives across the globe have been historically marginalized in their own lands, languages, and cultural practices.

In Sirleaf’s speech, we noticed moments when Sirleaf would directly address or position herself as speaking on behalf of her fellow Liberians; however, this practice did not necessarily alert us to presences or absences of indigeneity, largely due in part to the nature of the speech itself. As discussed in class this week, the Nobel Prize—even the acceptance speech itself—seemed to function as an ideology product, making the speech and the whole event seem staged, scripted and performative, a disingenuous narrative part of the larger disingenuous whole narrative of peace and progress.

However, like all progress narratives, there was an underlying tale of struggle—of displacement, of subversion—that we were able to bring back to the surface when we applied a different lens through which to analyze Sirleaf’s discourse. This lens, one of subject position as defined by Jacqueline Jones Royster in “When the First Voice You Hear is Not Your Own,” allowed us to notice Sirleaf’s indigeneity in her refusal to stay still, to occupy one position on the stage and to address one audience. “Using subject position as a terministic screen in cross-boundary discourse,” according to Royster, “permits analysis to operate kaleidoscopically, thereby permitting interpretation to be richly informed by the converging of dialectical perspectives” (29).

Using subject position as our analytical framework for “mining” for moments of indigeneity as they appeared in Sirleaf’s speech, then, we were able to notice subtle disruptions to the narrative of progress that ideology products attempt to impose upon international instances of war and peace and, consequently, indigeneity. For example, Sirleaf pushes back against the traditional meanings associated with the Nobel Peace Prize and the Nobel Laureate, positioning herself and the award as a symbolic reflection of peace, but not in the way that one might wish for her to. She does not simply reflect peace. She reflects the struggle for peace.

The award, then, has not been given to Sirleaf, but to all of Liberia, Yemen, Africa, and anyone across the globe who is struggling for peace. The award, which usually symbolizes what has been accomplished and—particularly—what has been accomplished by one individual, as a result of Sirleaf’s subversive subject position, symbolizes what still needs accomplishing. Sirleaf and her fellow recipients are not static characters in the plot of a Western narrative of progress. The story is not finished; Sirleaf’s story is not finished. Peace has not yet come to Liberia, to Yemen, or to Africa, and no award can make that happen.

Furthermore, the two other positions that Sirleaf occupies on the very restricting stage of the Nobel Prize lecture subtly subvert the nature of the event itself, as she invokes the past recipients of the award as a lineage to herself as a recipient and enacts a form of Burkean identification with women across the world who are struggling for peace. In both positions, Sirleaf claims for herself a different history, a different narrative. She writes a history that does not delimit conflicts and progress, but instead extends the stationary staged event beyond its physical location.

Moreover, it is not just Sirleaf’s inability to stay still that evokes her indigeneity, but it is also her inability to be delimited or situated, by the constraints of the event and the ideology product of the Prize itself. Maps do not offer accurate representations of Earth’s lands not only because they cannot achieve perfectly correct proportions, but also because they draw such neat lines of demarcation between locations. Western progress narratives have painted indigenous peoples as accepting of these enforced boundaries, but, again, these narratives elide competing narratives of subversion and contestation that are much more emblematic of indigeneity. As Sirleaf occupies her three main positions, then, she changes her language—the audience she addresses and her use of figurative language.

Furthermore, as Meghan and Mikaela have pointed out, Sirleaf also plays a lot with the chronology of her speech, referring to past, present, and future in “non-Western” ways. To that point, in many Postcolonial works of literature, narratives are often told “a-chronologically,” with less attention to the placing of events and more attention to the events themselves, sometimes the repetition of these events to give them more emphasis and to force readers to keep re-seeing them in new lights.

Sirleaf addresses her past, Liberia’s past, and the history of the Nobel Peace Prize, but she does not do so to focus on what has been accomplished. She does so, instead, to argue for what we might call continuous improvement—in Liberia, Yemen, all of Africa, and everywhere. In doing so, she rejects the narrative of progress that ideology products attempt to impose on indigenous cultures, narratives which say, “You’ve made it! Now, we’re going to ‘save’ another country!” Sirleaf rejects the Nobel Prize’s final period, replacing it with a comma, a breath that sets up a continuation to the narrative.

Now, this might not be what Sirleaf intended at all. Our lens of subject position may not have provided the correct framework to analyze Sirleaf’s discourse. However, I think Royster’s “kaleidoscopic” framework allowed us to “visualize” Sirleaf’s discourse within a healthy contact zone, a discursive space not defined by the drawing of borders themselves (especially given the multiple positions she occupies on stage), but by the recognition of the collision of borders and boundaries that not only calls them into question, but sees them as transmutable and transportable.

If we were to go back and do this assignment over, I would push heavily to provide something similar to what Ashley, Andrew, and Stephanie did. Our approach privileged multiplicity in subject position, so it’s ironic that we offered only one map. I liked being able to see multiple representations, multiple schemes of delimitation that challenged the codified, Western narratives of definition, demarcation, and progress. Like our visualization, their approach may not have been correct, but they achieved a level of thoroughness that we did not in their extremely hybridized approach. Data can be mined and visualized in so many ways. Thus, it is important to not just present one projection of the data and, consequently, position it as the only projection of data.