Gates, Foucault and Heilbrun

The most important claim I think Gate made in his introduction was that non-literacy has historically dehumanized blacks and other minorities.  The quotes from all the Enlightenment theorists drove home the fact that these people genuinely believed in the sub-humanity of racial minorities due to the fact that they were unable to write.  Writing was seen as the pinnacle of human reason and therefore any race that had not created a uniform system could not be nearly as developed.  This rang too close to Foucault's idea of power and discourse to not comment.

This is a direct correlation between the two ideas.  Those who have the ability to speak within a discourse have the power.  The Anglo-Saxon majority controlled and opressed the racial minority but not allowing them to transcribe their thoughts and criticized them for it.  Modern society would look at this as a tragedy and say thank god we've moved past that, but modern society consistently illegitimizes the language of racial minorities.  Non adherence to the "correct" form of English is a sign of unintelligence.  What has happened is we have substituted one dehumanization for another.  The same can be said about feminist writings.  In Heilbrun's Writing a Woman's Life she talks about strict forms that women were supposed to adhere to when writing autobiographies.  Any deviation from convention was rejected as poor writing and therefore illegitimized.  What occurred was not an actual feminine writing form, but a psuedo-style based on adherence to male dictation.

The control of the form of language lead to the control of the discourse and therefore power.  A good case study of this is the example of Sojourner Truth from our Agent/cy unit.  The transcription of her speech into southern black dialect allowed her white audience to render her words illegitimate due to the "childish"nature of it.  Through this anger of her speech was removed and it's original potency was lost.  The nature of power in discourse is its ability to illegitimize other non-canonical aspects that are in proximity with it.  Discourses can then in turn dominate other discourses by undercutting their ability to make impactful statements.  In the case of 19th century slaves.  They were prohibited from creating a history and even from entering into the discourse of reason and Anglo Saxon Ideals.