Charting Relationships Between Text and Analysis, Indigieneity and Power

As noted in class, I found this task somewhat difficult, but perhaps it was unnecessarily so. Thinking we had to generate up our own categories, Mikaela and I worked much more inductively in our analysis, allowing Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s Nobel lecture to guide our reading. As a result we came up with somewhat general rhetorical categories that fell on a spectrum of concrete to abstract. We saw the idea of identity as being the most abstract since it connects Sirleaf to broad categories of individuals and gets us far beyond the immediate context of the Nobel Lecture. The most concrete category had to do with intratextual details of rhetorical devices; by focusing on the speech itself, we were trying to remain only within the parameters of the speech with this category. Finally, in the “middle,” were audiences; this category joins the speech with identities, as her repeated invocations of different audiences show how the speech is working within multiple identity spaces. With these three categories in mind, we speculated how the different audiences and identities were related to Sirleaf’s expression of indigineity.

With the opportunity to redo the assignment, I would definitely stick to the traditional categories of discourse analysis: transtextual, contextual, and intratextual. These at least provide a deductive scheme that could be a little more rigid, but I think we also have to recognize that there is some slippage in any type of categorization. What made our analysis of the speech difficult is that while we were trying to illustrate abstract categories, we had to rely on concrete information from the speech. I mean, that’s the nature of analysis, but I think since we already had the sense were on shaky ground with our categories, this leap from concrete to abstract became more apparent in this exercise. Making transtextual claims based on intratextual evidence requires us to do some research and make assumptions about what a text is doing, so there was a lot of second guessing of our generation of categories and subsequent analysis.

Our visualization suggests that while Sirleaf expressed her indigeneity in some regards, she also ventured away from it. Inasmuch as indigeneity is connected to one’s experience or expression of being “native,” Sirleaf’s speech seems much more concerned with using minimal expressions of indigeneity and elevating them to concerns for women, concerns for the continent of Africa, and concerns for human rights everywhere. Thus, it was somewhat difficult to find indigeneity in a text that minimizes it. However, I recognize that is more than likely a constraint of the genre. The acceptance of a Nobel is a ceremony with a lot of pomp and circumstance, so you wouldn’t necessarily expect there to be heavy expression of indigeneity given the context. In fact, I think it would be quite the remarkable deviation if someone made indigeneity the focal point of their acceptance. However, this raises a question for me about the relationship between indigeneity, location, and authenticity. On the one hand, we can frame the question in terms of genre “how indigenous can a nobel lecture be?” Not very. But we might also frame this question in terms of indigeneity: “how indigenous can you be while in Sweden accepting the Nobel prize?” And there can varying degrees in the situation, but I want to suggest that one answer might also be “not very.” Perhaps my point here isn’t exactly clear, so let me try to rephrase: If you’re winning a Nobel Prize, you’ve been vetted by powerful people, probably even becoming a member of the elite yourself. As such, you might be getting further away from “indigeneity” as it relates to colonialism. We often frame indigeneity as being on the disadvantaged end of a power structure, so becoming a Nobel laureate works against that conception. That isn’t to devalue Sirleaf’s contributions or acceptance as much as question the nature of the relationship between indigeneity and power, and the necessary collusion with power to subsequently empower indigenous peoples.