For this week\u2019s class I read Vanessa Valdes\u2019 article \u201cthere is no incongruence here: Hispanic Notes in the Works of Ntozake Shange,\u201d in which she argues that Shange uses the Spanish language and Hispanic imagery to promote a more inclusive picture of the African Diaspora. Valdes believes that Shange challenges her audience\u2019s idea of the diaspora and pushes for a \u201cmore ample definition of blackness,\u201d (Valdes, 133). This essay resonated with a discussion I had in another class where we spoke about the \u201cweight\u201d that the English language holds in literature and poetry (Valdes, 132). In this class we are reading Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie\u2019s Americanah<\/i>, in which she italicizes the words in her novel that are not in English. I feel that when an artist writes in English but italicizes words from different languages it automatically others that language and the people who speak it. The very act of italicizing a word makes the letters look foreign compared to everything else. Of course it makes sense to let the reader know that a certain word is not English and therefore may need to be translated, but it makes English seem like the only acceptable language. As English speaking people we often expect and assume that books will be translated into English or written in English, and that any foreign word will be made clear and glossed for our convenience. In my other seminar my professor described the English language and English speaking people as greedy, which I think is somewhat fitting. As English speaking people (especially if it is your first language) we as a whole refuse to be made to feel foreign by the presence of other languages in our texts. I think it is unique and highly intelligent how Shange not only uses Spanish in her poetry, but also never feels the need to qualify the language with italics. Shange places English and Spanish on the same level by refusing to differentiate between the two languages. Valdes explains that \u201cShange\u2019s readers should be able to read and understand both languages and acknowledge the viability of both, for both narrate the black experience in the Americas,\u201d (Valdes, 132).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For this week\u2019s class I read Vanessa Valdes\u2019 article \u201cthere is no incongruence here: Hispanic Notes in the Works of Ntozake Shange,\u201d in which she argues that Shange uses the Spanish language and Hispanic imagery to promote a more inclusive picture of the African Diaspora. Valdes believes that Shange challenges her audience\u2019s idea of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,57],"tags":[9],"class_list":["post-215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogposts","category-student-blogpost","tag-language"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=215"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":216,"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215\/revisions\/216"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}