Activity 4
Prompt
How do you engage in reading a scholarly secondary source? Taking advantage of the opportunities for multimodal presentation on a webpage, examine your reading practice and show others how you do it, using the example of one or more of the assigned book chapters written by art historian Bridget R. Cooks: the Humanities Core Handbook chapter “What’s Wrong with Museums? African American Artists Review Art History,” the academic book chapter “Back to the Future: The Quilts of Gee’s Bend,” or the exhibition catalog essay “Intricate Illusion.”
Who do you think is the audience for this scholarly work, and what features of the text reflect its rhetorical purpose? How do you identify the central scholarly claims made and key terminology used? What do you do when you encounter words or proper names you don’t recognize? How do you note the way the author analyzes primary sources, uses information from other scholarly sources, and responds to other scholars’ arguments or interpretations? Which references spark your interest in reading more?
Record and share your best strategies for reading secondary sources strategically: How do you make annotations? Do you use Google Drive or Adobe Acrobat or some other application? Do you print out the reading and mark it up? Do you write or type notes on a separate page or document? What do you annotate? In this demonstration, make use of visual communication as well as text, and be sure to include a full citation, in MLA format, of the excerpt. Keep in mind that posting an entire book chapter online would violate the author’s copyright! Be respectful of other scholars’ work, and select only short passages as illustrations.
Before submitting the URL for this assignment, be sure to “publish” the changes to your site, then copy the link, which should have the form https://sites.google.com/uci.edu/yoursitename/pagename.
Chosen Passage: Back to the Future: The Quilts of Gee's Bend
(Note: Citations are in bold)
Initial Reading: Methodology
I use Adobe Acrobat to annotate my PDFs which is available for free for UCI students using the process found at https://www.oit.uci.edu/services/end-point-computing/adobe-software/. For non-UCI students Acrobat can be obtained at: https://www.adobe.com/acrobat.html.
My first step whenever I read anything in Humanities Core is to make comments (whose icon is circled in red in the below image) summarizing parts of the page in my own words so I can understand them better and look back at key parts by looking for certain comments I made. As you can see the yellow comment icon each corresponds to a comment on the right side of the screenshot. Out of respect for copyright, the words for these 2 pages are removed in the screenshot (Cooks 136-137).
Additionally if rather than a section I wished to comment or emphasize a specific part of the text I would use the highlight tool (circled in yellow in the above image) on Adobe Acrobat as seen in the image below (Cooks 146).
The highlight text is also useful for defining words I don't know since it allows me to put a comment on the highlighted text with the definition in my own words, and sometimes if necessary a link to an image which shows what the word looks like as seen in the image below (Cooks 149).
Initial Reading: Interpretation
Usually my initial reading's interpretation is for organizing the passage or reading so that I can understand how it logically flows. The interpretation is good for explaining the work to others, but I would never use only my initial interpretation for an essay because of how it relies mainly on summary.
"Back to the Future: 'The Quilts of Gee's Bend'" appears to be an informative piece for a general audience of Americans or anyone interested in the history and interpretations of the exhibition piece by William Arnett. The five subsections help achieve this purpose by helping organize the information and cover all aspects, from its history to the artistic interpretations, of the quilts for the reader. "Looking for the Real, Discovering Gee's Bend" (Cooks 138) focuses on the origin of the quilts and how they were collected and who organized the exhibition. "In the exhibition—Defining Quilts as Art" (Cooks 140) is by far the largest section and focuses on the art pieces themselves, the pictures in the exhibition and how they gained a new meaning from their original detached descriptions, the meaning they meant for the women of Gee's Bend seeing their work being labeled as art for the first time, and pictures of the quilts. "Bedbugs and Miracles" (Cooks 150). represents "the challenge of deciphering the meaning of the quilts in the art world" (Cooks 152). "Joy on the wall" (Cooks 152) talks about how the quilts were an extension of the Christian faith of the women who made them. "The Difference It Makes" (Cooks 153) acts like a conclusion by summarizing the cultural significance of the quilts from Cooks' perspective.
Subsequent Readings: Methodology
While in most cases an initial reading is sufficient for getting a grasp of the text before a lecture or seminar, if I needed to fully understand a passage or write an essay about a passage, I would use more of the following techniques:
Since my main concern in subsequent readings is to understand the background and references that Cooks makes, I start off looking at the footnotes or in this case the "Notes to pages." I found the most useful footnote to be the last one on page 191 where Cooks separates her perspective from other scholars like Sally Anne Duncan which I put in the image below. Footnotes are especially helpful for translated or older works like The Republic.
Next, if I were building an interpretation I would start doing different types of annotations that focus on the rhetorical strategies of the article. Additionally, in the below image (Cooks 145), I not only pointed out the rhetorical strategies but also how they tied to the overall purpose of convincing the readers that the images from the FSA/OWI photographs were not necessarily designed to promote sympathy for the families. Having the explanation allows a more seamless transition to an essay format since you essentially tackle the evidence and explanation portion of any paragraph, even if I might reword or elaborate on some parts here or there.
Additionally, I like to look at as many outside sources as I can in subsequent readings to help familiarize myself with the material. One source I found very helpful was PBS's NewsHour on Gee's Bend which had a mini documentary-like feel and showed videos of Gee's Bend as well as interviews with the quilters and their families. It helped me visualize a lot of what the text is talking about as, for example, I didn't realize how small Gee's Bend was until seeing it in the video and how poor the community was even after the exhibition at $12000 median annual income. It also makes me realize how small of a story one article can tell. What's missing is how especially during the pandemic a lot of the people of Gee's Bend lost their work and didn't make as much money from the quilts as you'd expect given how famous they are. One person PBS interviewed did set up a successful digital store, and there are organizations designed to help employ people of Gee's Bend, but my main impression of that video was that a lot of the people who make the most money off the art and the organization are white people. It's white people that are the heads of the museums displaying them, it's white people who own the fashion industries that use Gee's bend designs, and it's white people that model them on the runway, so it feels almost like superficial progress, but the people of Gee's bend still appreciate the opportunity that was given to them regardless.
The final factor that helps with building a subsequent interpretation is time. Rereading this work 2 weeks after having covered helps put it into perspective after understanding how Cooks does her close visual analysis as well as the context of Lewis and the photographs that Carrie Mae Weems did art pieces about.
Subsequent Readings: Interpretation
Here is a sample of what a paragraph of a rhetorical analysis essay interpreting Cooks' piece would look like:
Cooks recognizes counterarguments for keeping the FSA/OWI photographs context-free as well as uses diction for the purpose of arguing her perspective on why there should be context to the photographs. She says "Nor am I ungrateful for the accurate additional identification information about who is pictured" (Cooks 144). By using the negative of diction like ungrateful with "Nor am I ungrateful" she reminds the reader that she values the photos and effectively refutes counterarguments centering around the value of the photos. She later mentions that her argument is to explain the "stiffness, fear, and resistance of the faces of many of the people imaged" (Cooks 144) which is then followed by a paragraph of visual analysis of the image. The structure of this paragraph and the following paragraph combined with diction like the emotions they felt on their "faces" helps clue the reader into doing visual analysis with Cooks.
If this was a research paper, I would also include a couple of sentences about Lewis' works which mention context on how many black people were non-consensually photographed in half-nude pictures in order to support polygenesis racial theories (Lewis 305). Similarly, the photos in that passage were probably taken to the discomfort of their subjects, and were likely done for asserting some outside political statement on black people without giving a voice to them.
Additional Help
I included a helpful youtube tutorial for navigating Adobe Acrobat below.
Bibliography
Cooks, Bridget R. “Back to the Future: ‘The Quilts of Gee's Bend.’” Exhibiting Blackness African Americans and the American Art Museum, University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, MA, 2011, pp. 135–191.
David, Jackson. “African Woman.” Pixabay, 10 Dec. 2019, https://pixabay.com/photos/woman-african-people-black-girl-4685862/. Accessed 12 Jan. 2023.
Eguia, Bego. “Flower on Textile.” Pixabay, 22 Aug. 2014, https://pixabay.com/photos/quilt-cozy-home-charming-peaceful-716838/. Accessed 12 Jan. 2023.
“Famed Gee’s Bend Quilters Are Now on the Runway and Online.” YouTube, PBS, 26 Mar. 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QdGxVXPCME. Accessed 31 Jan. 2023.
Hunter, Candace. “Quilts.” Pixabay, 13 Apr. 2015, https://pixabay.com/photos/quilt-cozy-home-charming-peaceful-716838/. Accessed 12 Jan. 2023. (Banner Image)
Lewis, Sarah Elizabeth. “The Insistent Reveal.” Barbash, Ilisa, et. al. “To Make Their Own Way in the World: The Enduring Legacy of the Zealy Daguerreotypes.” Journal of American History, vol. 109, no. 3, 2022, pp. 685–686., https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaac410.