Week 8 Breakout Activity
Step 1
Locate words, phrases, language, etc. in the following paragraph that you do not know the meaning to or of; locate their definition online using this link to the OED from Emory’s Woodruff Library, or from another reputable source online, and hyperlink ([Command + K] or right-click and select the chain button) the word or phrase to its explainer. (For instance, if you do not know what “symbolic paradigms” means, try to find a source that does and link it within the paragraph.)
Step 2
Locate what you think the “main point” of the paragraph is and bold the relevant sentence(s). Locate what you think is analysis, evidence, or examples supporting that main claim and underline/italicize it.
Step 3
Rewrite the paragraph in your own words underneath the paragraph rewrite section. The text is difficult, and paraphrasing will be difficult. Focus on trying to “reword” what Spillers is saying rather than trying to figure out what she “means” (we’ll work on that together in the discussion section).
Step 4
Add any additional images online, materials, hyperlinks, embedded videos, sound-clips, evidence, etc. that might help explain some of the paragraph. Think of this part as creating a digital collage.
“Though among the most readily available “whipping boys” of fairly recent public discourse concerning African-Americans and national policy, ‘The Moynihan Report’ is by no means unprecedented in its conclusions; it belongs, rather, to a class of symbolic paradigms that 1) inscribe ‘ethnicity’ as a scene of negation and 2) confirm the human body as a metonymic figure for an entire repertoire of human and social arrangements. In that regard, the ‘Report’ pursues a behavioral rule of public documentary. Under the Moynihan rule, ‘ethnicity’ itself identifies a total objectification of human and cultural motives — the ‘white’ family, by implication, and the ‘Negro Family,’ by outright assertion, in a constant opposition of binary meanings. Apparently spontaneous, these ‘actants‘ are wholly generated, with neither past nor future, as tribal currents moving out of time. Moynihan’s ‘Families’ are pure present and always tense. ‘Ethnicity’ in this case freezes in meaning, takes on constancy, assumes the look and the affects of the Eternal. We could say, then, that in its powerful stillness, ‘ethnicity,’ from the point of view of the ‘Report,’ embodies nothing more than a mode of memorial time, as Roland Barthes outlines the dynamics of myth [see ‘Myth Today’ 109-59; esp. 122-23]. As a signifier that has no movement in the field of signification, the use of”ethnicity” for the living becomes purely appreciative, although one would be unwise not to concede its dangerous and fatal effects” (Spillers 66).
Paragraph Rewrite
‘The Moynihan Report’ is used as a scapegoat to identify humans with their ethnicity. This binary opposition is used to compare the ‘white’ and ‘negro’ families. Ethnicity is established as causation to the situations for both groups. This invalidates the ethnic developments made over time by keeping a constant meaning for ethnicity based on the visual appearance of others.
Collage
“Under the Moynihan rule, ‘ethnicity’ itself identifies a total objectification of human and cultural motives — the ‘white’ family, by implication, and the ‘Negro Family,’ by outright assertion, in a constant opposition of binary meanings.”
Definitions