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-17th 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.
