Autoethnographic Analysis Of Our Time By Mary Louise Wideman
An Autoethnographic Analysis of “Our Time”
The 1960’s were a time of civil revolution for the black community. The civil rights movement was in full swing and the black community was determined to find their own identity. The antagonist to the civil rights movement was the association in the American imagination of black people with ugliness, danger, and deterioration because black life seemed to stem from the urban ghetto – the polar opposite to the “square world” of the white man. Some people living in these areas held a very different world view than those abiding by the norms of society. In this world, all the glamour, praise, and attention go to the slick guy, the “player”, or the “gangster” because they represented rebellion against …show more content…
Mary Louise Pratt describes an authoethnography in her work, “Arts of the Contact Zone:
A text in which people engage with representations other have made of them…Autoethnographic texts are representations that the so-defined others construct in response to or in dialogue with those texts (ethnographies) … [T]hey involve a selective collaboration with and appropriation of idioms of the metropolis or the conqueror. These are merged or infiltrated to varying degrees with indigenous idioms to create self-representations intended to intervene in metropolitan modes of understanding…Such texts constitute a marginalized group’s point of entry into the dominant circuits of print culture.
Essentially, there are two key characteristics of an autoethnography. First, they present a view that is contrary to the views about the subject held by others and engage in some conflict with such misrepresentations, creating a “contact zone. Secondly they also may incorporate the use of fused foreign and domestic idioms so as to better communicate its viewpoint or depiction. Both of these elements are more or less used in Wideman’s text to some
The 1960’s were a time of civil revolution for the black community. The civil rights movement was in full swing and the black community was determined to find their own identity. The antagonist to the civil rights movement was the association in the American imagination of black people with ugliness, danger, and deterioration because black life seemed to stem from the urban ghetto – the polar opposite to the “square world” of the white man. Some people living in these areas held a very different world view than those abiding by the norms of society. In this world, all the glamour, praise, and attention go to the slick guy, the “player”, or the “gangster” because they represented rebellion against …show more content…
Mary Louise Pratt describes an authoethnography in her work, “Arts of the Contact Zone:
A text in which people engage with representations other have made of them…Autoethnographic texts are representations that the so-defined others construct in response to or in dialogue with those texts (ethnographies) … [T]hey involve a selective collaboration with and appropriation of idioms of the metropolis or the conqueror. These are merged or infiltrated to varying degrees with indigenous idioms to create self-representations intended to intervene in metropolitan modes of understanding…Such texts constitute a marginalized group’s point of entry into the dominant circuits of print culture.
Essentially, there are two key characteristics of an autoethnography. First, they present a view that is contrary to the views about the subject held by others and engage in some conflict with such misrepresentations, creating a “contact zone. Secondly they also may incorporate the use of fused foreign and domestic idioms so as to better communicate its viewpoint or depiction. Both of these elements are more or less used in Wideman’s text to some