Читать книгу Bodies That Work - Tami Miyatsu - Страница 11
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When I studied at KCL in the fall of 1987 was when I first came across Toni Morrison’s works. The Bluest Eye and Beloved were a shock to a Japanese international student majoring in English literature—someone who went to England to learn more about romantic but tragic Victorian novels. The discussions about incest and infanticide soon drove Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and George Gissing out of my mind. Some research questions, which remained unanswered in class discussions, haunted me even when I went back to my country. I was probably too immature (or naïve) to confront these “life” problems. When I returned to college as a graduate student after several years, I majored in American literature, instead of English literature, to grapple with the questions that lingered in my mind from in my younger days. I again asked myself what Pecola had died for and wondered whether Sethe’s “thick” love had worked. To seek out answers, I pored over fiction and nonfiction on “modern” American slavery and its tradition—that is, racism in the United States. In the classroom, I still ask my students the same questions about Toni Morrison’s works, letting them realize how different each answer can be.
Born to Japanese parents in Japan, I am not what is called a “native” researcher, but I have felt a mission to explore African American men and women since I read Toni Morrison’s novels at KCL. Some critics—for example, in ←xv | xvi→anthropology—problematize whether a researcher is a “native” in the field of his or her study. They warn that a “native” or “indigenous” scholar will bring an insider’s prejudiced perspective to research because of his or her position of close affinity. However, as anthropologist Kirin Narayan argues, knowledge is what is “situated, negotiated, and part of an ongoing process,” along with personal, professional, and cultural associations: “Writing texts that mix lively narrative and rigorous analysis involves enacting hybridity [personal and professional], regardless of our origin.”1 Any research, I believe, cannot escape such enacted hybridity.
Bodies That Work is the product of more than 20 years of a “non-native” scholar’s research. My advisor, also a scholar of African American studies, is likewise not a native researcher. However, in her office, we shared progressive African American women’s joy and pain and lauded their efforts to survive, both literally and metaphorically, despite the difficulties that they faced. As a researcher, I feel that their problems are also our problems. A concerted effort of anyone, native or non-native, academic or nonacademic, is required to challenge the hate and prejudices that remain rife in every part of the world.
Note
1. Kirin Narayan, “How Native is a ‘Native’ Anthropologist?” American Anthropologist 95, no. 3 (September, 1993): 682, https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1993.95.3.02a00070 (accessed May 31, 2019).
