Dr. Terri Smith Ruckel - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
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Papers by Dr. Terri Smith Ruckel
No matter how solitary the scholar might feel in braving the sacrifices of time and energy necess... more No matter how solitary the scholar might feel in braving the sacrifices of time and energy necessary to complete a work of this scope, debts to those who sacrificed on the scholar's behalf are always incurred. The first debt of gratitude that I owe is to my husband and then to my family. My work has taken a great deal of time and focus away from them all, and I will never be able to repay them for their support and understanding. Thank you, Ryan, for your constant friendship, love, and encouragement. Thank you, Gary Smith, for being the kind of father and man who makes the word "hero" still relevant. Thank you, Tony, Traci, Taryn, Tiffany, Tricia, Emili, Lane, Raegan, and Lauren-you all were the impetus for me to begin, but more importantly, for me to complete, this academic journey. I also want to acknowledge the support of my dissertation advisor, Dr. Bainard Cowan, whose contagious passion for the liberal arts has only been surpassed by his patience as my mentor. The committee of scholars assembled to help me complete my academic goals could not have been more collegial and accessible: Dr. John
World Literature Today, 2000
World Literature Today, 2001
Anthurium A Caribbean Studies Journal, 2005
In her seminal work, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, Mary Louise Pratt seeks ... more In her seminal work, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, Mary Louise Pratt seeks to "decolonize knowledge" by rethinking "how travel books by Europeans about non-European parts of the world" create the "domestic subject" of Euro-imperialism (6). Published in 1992, Imperial Eyes repeats similar chords struck by Jacques Derrida nearly twenty-five years earlier in "The Violence of the Letter," first published in 1966 by Cahiers pour l'analyse as part of a special edition dedicated to the works of Claude Lévi-Strauss. In "The Violence of the Letter," reprinted in Of Grammatology (1976), a seminal text of deconstruction-Derrida rereads Lévi-Strauss's "The Writing Lesson." The latter is an ethnographic reflection from Tristes Tropiques that describes Lévi-Strauss's experiences with the Nambikwara, an Indian tribe from the Amazon rainforest-a society that Lévi-Strauss represents as "without writing;" an expression that Derrida reads as "dependent on ethnocentric oneirism, upon the vulgar, that is to say ethnocentric misconception of writing" (Derrida 109). He classifies Lévi-Strauss's artful narrative composition as a travelogue: "In accordance with eighteenth-century tradition, the anecdote, the page of confessions, the fragment from a journal are knowledgeably put in place, calculated for the purposes of a philosophical demonstration of the relationships between nature and society, ideal society and real society, most often between the other society and our society" (Derrida 113). Derrida's concern about European-engineered dichotomies, along with his assertion that as an anthropologist Lévi-Strauss "violates a virginal space" (Derrida 113), anticipates Pratt's designation of "contact zones" where "disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination" (Pratt 7). Using Derrida's as well as Pratt's insights about writing/travel writing, autoethnography, and empire, in this paper I explore how Jamaica Kincaid, part of the Caribbean diaspora and a transnational travel writer herself, moves beyond the imperialist methods of a classic ethnographer like Lévi-Strauss, who typically attempts to explain "foreign" cultural systems to the cultural center which empowers that effort. Rather, Kincaid tells stories from the perspective of a tour guide whose sensitivity to the plurality of diasporic experience translates the polyphonic voices of decentered postcolonial subjects for a largely "foreign" audience. In this context, Kincaid becomes what Mustapha Marrouchi calls "the postcolonial writer as missionary in reverse" (6), retelling and often revising a colonial experience as she tours her homeland, "an imaginary land that lives and grows in her memory" (5), or to use Marrouchi's trope, home as Mother Periphery: "Its assault of words, hopes, dreams, and anguish all come together in 1 Ruckel: "To Speak of My Own Situation": Touring the "Mother Periphery"...
No matter how solitary the scholar might feel in braving the sacrifices of time and energy necess... more No matter how solitary the scholar might feel in braving the sacrifices of time and energy necessary to complete a work of this scope, debts to those who sacrificed on the scholar's behalf are always incurred. The first debt of gratitude that I owe is to my husband and then to my family. My work has taken a great deal of time and focus away from them all, and I will never be able to repay them for their support and understanding. Thank you, Ryan, for your constant friendship, love, and encouragement. Thank you, Gary Smith, for being the kind of father and man who makes the word "hero" still relevant. Thank you, Tony, Traci, Taryn, Tiffany, Tricia, Emili, Lane, Raegan, and Lauren-you all were the impetus for me to begin, but more importantly, for me to complete, this academic journey. I also want to acknowledge the support of my dissertation advisor, Dr. Bainard Cowan, whose contagious passion for the liberal arts has only been surpassed by his patience as my mentor. The committee of scholars assembled to help me complete my academic goals could not have been more collegial and accessible: Dr. John
World Literature Today, 2000
World Literature Today, 2001
Anthurium A Caribbean Studies Journal, 2005
In her seminal work, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, Mary Louise Pratt seeks ... more In her seminal work, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, Mary Louise Pratt seeks to "decolonize knowledge" by rethinking "how travel books by Europeans about non-European parts of the world" create the "domestic subject" of Euro-imperialism (6). Published in 1992, Imperial Eyes repeats similar chords struck by Jacques Derrida nearly twenty-five years earlier in "The Violence of the Letter," first published in 1966 by Cahiers pour l'analyse as part of a special edition dedicated to the works of Claude Lévi-Strauss. In "The Violence of the Letter," reprinted in Of Grammatology (1976), a seminal text of deconstruction-Derrida rereads Lévi-Strauss's "The Writing Lesson." The latter is an ethnographic reflection from Tristes Tropiques that describes Lévi-Strauss's experiences with the Nambikwara, an Indian tribe from the Amazon rainforest-a society that Lévi-Strauss represents as "without writing;" an expression that Derrida reads as "dependent on ethnocentric oneirism, upon the vulgar, that is to say ethnocentric misconception of writing" (Derrida 109). He classifies Lévi-Strauss's artful narrative composition as a travelogue: "In accordance with eighteenth-century tradition, the anecdote, the page of confessions, the fragment from a journal are knowledgeably put in place, calculated for the purposes of a philosophical demonstration of the relationships between nature and society, ideal society and real society, most often between the other society and our society" (Derrida 113). Derrida's concern about European-engineered dichotomies, along with his assertion that as an anthropologist Lévi-Strauss "violates a virginal space" (Derrida 113), anticipates Pratt's designation of "contact zones" where "disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination" (Pratt 7). Using Derrida's as well as Pratt's insights about writing/travel writing, autoethnography, and empire, in this paper I explore how Jamaica Kincaid, part of the Caribbean diaspora and a transnational travel writer herself, moves beyond the imperialist methods of a classic ethnographer like Lévi-Strauss, who typically attempts to explain "foreign" cultural systems to the cultural center which empowers that effort. Rather, Kincaid tells stories from the perspective of a tour guide whose sensitivity to the plurality of diasporic experience translates the polyphonic voices of decentered postcolonial subjects for a largely "foreign" audience. In this context, Kincaid becomes what Mustapha Marrouchi calls "the postcolonial writer as missionary in reverse" (6), retelling and often revising a colonial experience as she tours her homeland, "an imaginary land that lives and grows in her memory" (5), or to use Marrouchi's trope, home as Mother Periphery: "Its assault of words, hopes, dreams, and anguish all come together in 1 Ruckel: "To Speak of My Own Situation": Touring the "Mother Periphery"...