Positionality Practice: Who You Be?

 

Who are you outside of school? Who you be? What cultures, languages, heritages, hobbies, and worlds do you know about that seem to be separated from school? WHO ARE YOU? Your answers to these questions help you carve out your position, or your positionality, in the world. Positionality is where you’re coming from, and where you’re coming from informs who you are.

Gerald Graff, a former president of the MLA (the MLA! The citation style your English teachers are always talking about!), once wrote about the hidden intellectualism of students. For example, he wrote about how, as youth, he disdained school and loved baseball. He explains that loving baseball was educational for him because every time he debated with another baseball fan about his favorite player, or who was going to win the World Series, it taught him how to back up his opinions, present good data, rebut others’ opinions, and other intellectual skills. He called this undercover education “hidden” because it wasn’t seen as academic, but he argued that it was. He believes that students’ outside interests could and should be used to help them learn in-school lessons[i].

Whether you’re into baseball or Hip Hop, Tik Tok or Twitter, you can infuse who you are to help you write better assignments. You can develop a style that honors your hidden intellectual self while growing your academic self. The best part about this is that you don’t sacrifice who you are for school, and you get to teach your teacher something, which any true academic will appreciate.

How to Blend Your Selves into Your Writing

 

There are three main moves to incorporating your selves into your writing:

• Introduce a related part of your hidden intellect to your reader early on
• Define it as best as you can. You don’t always need outside sources to do this. You’re probably already very knowledgeable about your positionality.
• Use this definition as the main principle of an essay or paragraph. Because you’ve already introduced and defined the concept, you can now explain how it relates to the academic topic you’re writing about.

What would bell hooks do?

 

One of the best to ever use her positionality in an academic work is a Black feminist author named bell hooks. In a seminal essay, hooks uses the concept, “talking back,” from her upbringing in the Deep South to develop an argument about why it is crucial for Black women to speak and write as ways to resist oppression (such as racism and sexism). Here’s an excerpt:

In the world of the southern black community I grew up in, “back talk” and “talking back” meant speaking as an equal to an authority figure. It meant daring to disagree and sometimes it just meant having an opinion. In the “old school,” children were meant to be seen and not heard….   To speak when one was not spoken to was a courageous act….And yet is was hard not to speak in warm rooms where heated discussions began at the crack of dawn, women’s voices filling the air, giving orders, making threats, fussing[ii]. (5)

Early in her essay, she introduces and defines the concept and uses personal memories early in her essay to illustrate it. This becomes the dominant theme (or main idea) in her book. In other words, a concept from her culture becomes her thesis. After the introduction, she ties her urge to talk back to her elders to the need for Black women to talk back to patriarchy and racism:

[In] black communities (and diverse ethnic communities), women have not been silent. Their voices can be heard. Certainly for black women, our struggle has not been to emerge from silence into speech but to change the nature and direction of our speech, to make a speech that compels listeners, one that is heard. (6)

You can use these same moves to base your essay or a paragraph on a prominent idea from your culture: Introduce and define it early and use the concept to explain or analyze a text.

So, bell hooks is a professional writer. What can using positionality look like as a student writer?

Student Example

 

In an essay written for a literature course, LPC student author, Blessing Nkrumah, uses her positionality as a Black woman to write a literary analysis about a fictionalized portrayal of Dr. Martin Luther King in the play The Mountaintop. Drawing on the concept of diunital orientation:

Diunital orientation is a concept that is part of the African American culture. Essentially, it is a perspective in which something can be good or bad [or] right or wrong at the same time without contradicting itself. It explains why African Americans are more likely to view issues and concepts as complementary opposites rather than incompatible absolutes. (Brown 562)

Her thesis also includes the concept of diunital orientation, which makes it important and central to her essay: Collectively, these leaders show us that the diunital perspective is a silent partner in the progress of equality or civil rights activism.

You can blend your academic self with your nonacademic self

 Using a term or concept from your nonacademic world can be a small step toward liberating your writing. Remember: Define or describe the concept early on, before using it to explain or analyze. Another good idea, if it fits, is to include it in your thesis which will lead you to building upon the idea in your body paragraphs. The result, after practicing, getting more comfortable, and studying models of writers who insert their swagger will be a more enjoyable, less erasing experience. Periodt.

 Is using a concept from my world “academic” enough? Am I breaking a rule?

 

Admittedly, it makes sense to question our advice to include seemingly un-academic concepts into your work, such as concepts that comes from pop culture, or a phrase from a non-English language that you speak at home. But these things are a part of your culture, so we would urge you to question why you feel they might not be academic enough for school.

We'd predict that feelings of uncertainty come from the way we have been taught about what’s considered “low culture” and “high culture.” Low culture includes things we come across on social media, music, movies, etc., and high culture includes things we learn in classrooms, museums, and certain kinds of films and music. Sometimes, we are made to feel that even our own cultures are “low” in comparison to cultures that have traditionally been praised, which are generally Eurocentric cultures. (People who speak one way in classes and a completely different way when hanging out with friends from the same background can relate).

However, we believe that the separation between so-called low and high cultures is falsely hierarchal, racist, and damaging . There is beauty in differences, and writing that has a refreshing approach is welcome when it makes sense to include different angles, and when those angles offer unique insights to anticipated perspectives. Such a move represents a marriage of academic and so-called nonacademic material. It blends the writer’s real world with the professor and audience’s world. And, it does not erase students’ experiences and knowledge from the college experience.

 

[i] Gerald Graff. “Hidden Intellectualism.” They Say, I Say edited by Gerald Graff, Cathy Birkenstein, and Russel Durst, W.W. Norton and Company, 2012, pp. 380-7.

[ii] bell hooks. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. South End Press, 1989, pp. 5-9.

 

Special thanks to Blessing Nkrumah, a student of LPC’s Umoja Learning Community, former LPCSG President, and scholar, for being a thought partner and contributor to this lesson.