Re/Presentation & A Suggestion

Cooper & Johnson both speak for their respective cultural groups when they claim misrepresentation by the majority. Through literature especially, both the black woman and the native american (“Indian,” Johnson used ironically) woman have been either flattened or entirely voiceless. Specifically women are discussed in this week’s readings because they are the most unrepresented or misrepresented people groups in art and literature, women of color even more so. This is an effect of a selective majority who historically (and so habitually) hasn’t “quite put themselves in the dark man’s place,” and so cannot accurately present them through art (Cooper 380). 

Taine’s point of view on race, mentioned in Henry Gates’ Writing Race & the Difference it Makes, was that it was a specific experience one had that could not be due to any other factor. To him, race was “a source of all structures of feeling and thought,” that made a person who they were all around (Gates 3). If that’s the case, we can then imagine that an author who means to re/present a character of another race in literature cannot do so correctly. Cooper and Johnson claim that this is true, because they’ve both found serious flaws in Western authors’ presentation of women of color in their work. 

Race as a trope “of ultimate, irreducible difference,” is an excuse for misrepresentation and one that has negative, violent consequences. Gates realizes this, and goes on to say that the use of formal language as means to differentiate between races is the use of signs that guide a population’s actions (Gates 6). The signs are historical perpetuations of language that are passed down by the majority generation after generation, so what would need to be done, then, is to engage in a redefinition of signs that are instead re/presented by the minorities themselves. This would begin a new perpetuation, if accepted by the majority (as I think it is being), that tells truer stories about people of color in literature, and present them more accurately, instead of through a lens assuming a character of color the "Other."