*marking article on race and nerdiness*

[robin_anne_reid]

I have to find time to learn these new online bookmarking programs--after the encyclopedia is done, that will be my new project! Until then, a quick link to mark a linguistics article gakked from The Language Log on "nerdiness" as a racialized category (superwhite or hyperwhite behavior). The link only goes to a summary, but I'll order a pdf file from Interlibrary Loan if my university's fulltext databases don't already link to it!. (Also wonder how gendered that term is--I remember some complaints about past memes on nerdiness or geekiness that skewed more toward math/science geekiness and not humanities geekiness, which emphasizes gendered group geekiness)

This has got to fit into the growing debates on constructions of race and racism in fandoms.....

ETA: Since I'll be reading this paper at a conference in England to an international audience, I've realized (thanks to the comments) I might need to give some background on the peculiar "American" (I put it in quotes because it's actually the U.S., but part of this imperial notion of ourselves as a nation has been claiming the whole continent) ideas of culture/race/language/self-perceptions, especially the "talking white" and "wiggers" debates:

http://sitemaker.umich.edu/356.pitts/ogbu_theory_

http://www.socialwork.uiuc.edu/people/faculty/blackJanCarter.html

http://blog.lib.umn.edu/perry032/impossible/spring_reading.html

http://www.hawaii.edu/satocenter/pace/14-book%20report.htm

http://www.news.uiuc.edu/gentips/02/07white.html

http://astro.ocis.temple.edu/~ruby/aaa/matt.html

ETA the second: Thanks to cryptoxin who gave me this link!

Race, Sex and Nerds: from Black Geeks to Asian-American Hipsters by Ron Eglash, a 2002 piece.

Comments

Re: Stupid question

[tournevis.livejournal.com]

American racial politics make absolutely no sense to me.

Re: Stupid question

[robin-anne-reid.livejournal.com]

Got a great link from another commenter you might enjoy taking a look at: http://www.rpi.edu/~eglash/eglash.dir/ethnic.dir/nerds.dir/nerd.htm (Black Geeks).

American racial politics....well, it's hard to compare across cultures, and the complex mixture of economics and irrationality in any oppressive hierarchy makes little "rational" sense, but I do have the sense that there is some extra layer of something in U.S. racial discourse (perhaps it's that extreme irony of the rhetoric of *freedom* and *democracy* that we tout that came into existence, Toni Morrison argues, only because there was an enslaved group to help "define" those concepts). If I were to recommend one book you might enjoy, it's Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination in which she concisely and beautifully explores the literary-historical explorations of race the United States (arguing that "whitness" was defined only in contrast to "blackness"). And being by Morrison, the prose is a joy to read.

Re: Stupid question

[tournevis.livejournal.com]

Noted