Serendipity in Rhetoric, Writing, and Literacy Research - Softcover

Maureen Daly Goggin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1607327384 ISBN 13: 9781607327387

Publisher: Utah State University Press, 2018

Synopsis

In the course of research, most scholars have known moments of surprise, catastrophe, or good fortune, though they seldom refer to these occurrences in reports or discuss them with students. Serendipity in Rhetoric, Writing, and Literacy Research reveals the different kinds of work scholars, particularly those in rhetoric, writing, and literacy, need to do in order to recognize a serendipitous discovery or a missed opportunity.

In published scholarship and research, the path toward discovery seems clean and direct. The dead ends, backtrackings, start-overs, and stumbles that occur throughout the research process are elided, and seems that the researchers started at point A and arrived safely and neatly at point B without incident, as if by magic. The path, however, is never truly clear and straight. Research and writing is messy. Serendipity in Rhetoric, Writing, and Literacy Research features chapters from twenty-three writing scholars who have experienced moments of serendipity in their own work--not by magic or pure chance but through openness and active waiting, which offer an opportunity to prepare the mind.

Serendipity in Rhetoric, Writing, and Literacy Research illustrates the reality of doing research: there is no reliable prescription or one-size-fits-all manual, but success can be found with focused dedication and an open mind.

Contributors Ellen Barton?, ?Zachary C. Beare?, ?Lynn Z. Bloom?, ?Jennifer Clary-Lemon?, ?Caren Wakerman Converse?, ?Gale Coskan-Johnson?, ?Kim Donehower?, ?Bill Endres?, ?Shirley E. Faulkner-Springfield?, ?Lynee Lewis Gaillet?, ?Brad Gyori?, ?Judy Holiday?, ?Gesa E. Kirsch?, ?Lori Ostergaard?, ?Doreen Piano?, ?Liz Rohan?, ?Ryan Skinnell?, ?Patricia Wilde?, ?Daniel Wuebben

About this title

About the Author

Maureen Daly Goggin is professor of rhetoric in and former chair of the Department of English at Arizona State University. She is the author or editor of nine scholarly books and several editions of a textbook and a pedagogical book. She is coeditor of Shifting Perspectives and Women and the Material Culture of Death and has written widely about the history of rhetoric, writing pedagogy, gender, visual rhetoric, and women and material culture.

Peter N. Goggin is associate professor in rhetoric (English) and a senior scholar in the Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University. He is the editor of Environmental Rhetoric and Ecologies of Place and Rhetorics, Literacies, and Narratives of Sustainability) and author of Professing Literacy in Composition Studies. His articles on literacy, environmental rhetoric, and writing include publication in Composition Studies, Community Literacy Journal, and Computers and Composition. He is founder and co-director of the annual Western States Rhetoric and Literacy conference, which features themes on sustainability, culture, transnationality, and place.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Serendipity in Rhetoric, Writing, and Literacy Research

By Maureen Daly Goggin, Peter N. Goggin

University Press of Colorado

Copyright © 2018 University Press of Colorado
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-60732-738-7

Contents

List of Figures, 
Stumbling into Wisdom in Rhetoric, Writing, and Literacy Research: An Introduction Maureen Daly Goggin and Peter N. Goggin, 
I. Intersections of Personal and Political, 
1. "Oh, My God! He Was a Slave!" Secrets of a Virginia Courthouse Archive Shirley E. Faulkner-Springfield, 
2. Making Sense of Disaster: Composing a Methodology for Place-Based Visual Research Doreen Piano, 
3. Death, Dying, and Serendipity in the Scholarly Imagination Gale Coskan-Johnson, 
II. Intersections of Personal and Professional, 
4. Fortuitous Happenstance: Serendipity in Archival Research Lynèe Lewis Gaillet, 
5. Pre-Sentence: Researching, Reporting, and Writing Caren Wakerman Converse, 
6. Echoes in the Archives Liz Rohan, 
7. Serendipity and Memory: The Value of Participant Observation Kim Donehower, 
III. Stumbling into the Unknown, 
8. The Serendipity of (Mis)Timing in Research Maureen Daly Goggin, 
9. Setting Out for Serendip: Of Research Quests and Chance Discoveries Ryan Skinnell, 
10. The Art of the "Accident": Serendipity in Field Research Peter N. Goggin, 
11. Reading between the Power Lines: How "Nikola Tesla Corner" Enhanced the Wireless Signals in a Rhetorical Analysis of Electricity and Landscape Daniel Wuebben, 
IV. Methodology and Serendipity, 
12. Prepare to Be Surprised: How Flexible, Methodical, and Organized Research Practices Lead to Serendipity in the Archives Lori Ostergaard, 
13. Playing the Name Game: Exploring Name Variations in Archival Research Patty Wilde, 
14. Serendipity and Methodological Willingness in Team Science Ellen Barton, 
15. The Sunshine of Serendipity: Illuminating Scholarship of Genre (a New Canon) and Generosity (Yes You Can) Lynn Z. Bloom, 
16. Serendology, Methodipity: Research, Invention, and the Choric Rhetorician Jennifer Clary-Lemon, 
V. Trusting the Process, 
17. The Ethics of Serendipity: Rare Events and a Need to Act Bill Endres, 
18. Creating Kismet: What Artists Can Teach Academics about Serendipity Brad Gyori, 
19. Coordinating Chaos and Befriending a Fuzzy Focus: Reflections of a Serendipitist Judy Holiday, 
20. The Strange Practices of Serendipitous Failure: Considering Metanoia as an Alternative to Kairos Zachary Beare, 
Afterword: Serendipity and Ethics in Rhetoric, Writing, and Literacy Research Gesa E. Kirsch, 
About the Authors, 
Subject Index, 
Name Index, 

CHAPTER 1

"OH, MY GOD! HE WAS A SLAVE!"

Secrets of a Virginia Courthouse Archive

Shirley E. Faulkner-Springfield

COME CLOSE, LET ME TELL YOU A STORY

I sat at an old wooden table with Will Book 12 in my hands and parted the tattered pages of the 200-year-old book. As my eyes slowly crept over the exquisite scribble, I saw it.

I had visited the Halifax County Courthouse in Virginia numerous times and read Will Book 12. My investigations into the past had not revealed official evidence of Friday Faulkner's existence. However, on January 17, 2002, I saw his name. I saw "Friday" on the last page of the four-page legal document dated February 9, 1823. Was this serendipity?

I read the line over and over: "with sundry negroes namely Friday ... with sundry negroes namely Friday ... with sundry negroes namely Friday ..." (J. Faulkner 685).

"Oh, my God! He was a slave!" I whispered dishearteningly to myself. My heart dropped to my feet; my blood boiled and heated my entire body; my throat filled with a warm, acidic substance; my tear ducts flooded. Pain penetrated every layer of my skin and tore at my organs. I was paralyzed. I was speechless. Although my intellect and curiosity had commanded ancestral knowledge, my psyche and physique did not welcome the conversion they experienced on that fateful day in the archive of the Halifax County Courthouse.

For six years I had conducted archival and historical research in Virginia, in North Carolina, and on the internet with the mission of unearthing ancestral knowledge, specifically knowledge on my great-great-grandparents, Friday and Rebecca Harris Faulkner. Although their own words went unspoken, each year my extended family and I celebrated their lives and the legacy they germinated for us. The oral history that circulated within and outside my family did not include a slave named Friday Faulkner. Hence, while analyzing the rhetoric of slavery, I posed one question: "Is this the lesson I was destined to learn?" Not only had I unearthed my great-great-grandfather, I had also discerned his role in the development of America and thus of American history. Friday Faulkner was a major character in one of the worst chapters in American history, which reads accordingly: I give to my son Obadiah Faulkner the land and plantation whereon he now lives in Person County, N Carolina with sundry negroes namely Friday and Malinda with all the stock on the plantation with my surveyors [sic] instruments to him and his heirs forever (J. Faulkner 685).

I held Friday in my hands — a life that had been placed on an eleven by seventeen piece of parchment among animals and other commodities; a life that had been directed by a white man who believed people of African descent were unworthy of autonomy, respect, and value as human beings. Reading Jacob's will overwhelmed me because I was uninformed about Friday's past, because I refused to make assumptions about Friday's life, and because I had discovered that my maternal great-great-great-grandfather and his brother were born free.

This is another story:

In October 1999, I visited the Halifax County Courthouse and searched the Register of Free Negroes for any Faulkner. Instead, I found the names "Henderson Lester" and "Elisha Lester" and learned that both of them were born free, a status that was indicative of their mother's status — a free woman: a free black woman? A free white woman? Later, I learned that Henderson Lester was my great-great-great-grandfather, my paternal great-grandmother's father. On November 27, 1848, both Henderson and Elisha A. Lester registered as freemen of color in Halifax County, Virginia (Register of Free Blacks in Halifax County, no. 404 and no. 405). Henderson was twenty-seven years old, and Elisha was twenty-six years old.Though I learned that these black males of dark complexion with curly black hair were born free, their embodied representation of "free" men was unsettling because my ancestors bore the marks of slavery: Elisha "has a scar on his left thumb," and Henderson "had a scar on his left fore finger [and] the same finger had been cut off" (Register). Was the slave-free paradox a false binary for Henderson and Elisha Lester? Given that after the year 1640 skin tone was the primary factor that distinguished a free human being from an enslaved human being, the writer's emphasis on physicality was imperative to my ancestors' status and survival as "free" persons of color in a slaveholding society. Furthermore, according to the 1850 United States Census, 534 "free colored Persons" resided in Halifax County, Virginia. Among a total slave population of 14,452, my maternal ancestors were among the 3.7 percent of free people of color in Halifax County.

After reading Jacob's narrative, I internalized my emotions and thought, "You cannot cry in front of these white people."

This is another story:

I was born into a segregated southern society in 1961 during one of the African American Civil Rights movements when some people of African descent concealed their emotions from the other. In that complex society that conflicted with his ideology, my father pushed explicit and implicit racial lines back as far as he could, retaliating when called "Nigger," retaliating when refused service in public places. My parents thought they had prepared me for my racist society. They loathed the pejorative discourse that was coined for the purpose of attempting to dehumanize people of African descent, which in turn caused my mother to attempt to shape my nascent identity by helping me construct ethos and a sense of pride in myself and my African and African American legacies.

"Words can't hurt you, girl," avowed my mother, who relied on her faith in God for strength and courage to avert the racially inflammatory language our foes hurled at us.

However, when I struggled to chant the psychological maneuver, I surmised that I had been mis-educated. While I remembered my mother's nurturing and compassionate self each time razor-sharp racial slurs cut deeply into my soul and provoked negative emotions, sometimes I retaliated against my antagonists. On January 17, 2002, while in the courthouse, I could not retaliate and my antagonist had not called me "Nigger," but the foreign yet familiar language my eyes had forced my brain to translate hurt me. It was language that perpetuated suppression, oppression, and a sense of racial superiority. Jacob's nonverbal discourse provoked the most visceral response I had ever experienced.

Slowly and meticulously, I elevated my face to the ceiling to fight back the warm, heavy tears that engulfed my eyelid margins. My throat continued to burn. My eyes were as heavy as my heart that lay shattered at the tips of my toes. I felt the vacant cavity where my heart once resided. My body reminded me that my heart had a brain of its own, one that had experienced a psychological impediment that altered my epistemological and ontological positions on my life and my identity. My body yearned for somebody, something — a savior, a voice, answers to the inarticulate questions that were birthed in my heart, not in my head.

I fought back the tears as long as I could. Finally, I escaped and raced to the rest room, avoiding all eye contact. I did not want to look into anyone's eyes, nor did I want anyone to gaze into mine, for I feared the spectator would interpret my thoughts and recognize my new identity.

I locked the door to the small, musky space and cried hot, acidic tears. I cried with grief I had never experienced, not even when my father died. Then, I cried for me. And I cried for him again.

"Why? Why didn't someone tell me? Why didn't I know? Why didn't they fight back?" I moaned.

This is another story:

I was cognizant that my ancestors fought back: they resisted enslavement by using violent, physical methods such as murder and suicide; by articulating anti-slavery rhetoric; and by using other palpable, nonverbal methods. However, white racism was a white revolution that resisted black power by any means necessary, which included shooting, burning, raping, hanging, drowning, poisoning, starving, scalding, and whipping black people.

My ancestors fought against oppression and racism as my parents and I had, and the stream of "Colored" water we drank from segregated fountains exacerbated the daily racial tensions we experienced: that stream ran "deep" and "strong" through me, carving out an immediate connection to Friday Faulkner. I also knew that if my ancestors wanted to survive, as Friday Faulkner had, they carefully chose their battles, weapons, and words, as I had throughout my research and writing processes.

As images from visual and textual depictions of the institution of slavery populated my mind, I reconstructed Friday's life as a slave, comparing his life to my life as a young black female in a racist, sexist, and segregated society. My reflection elicited emotions that were akin to those conveyed by authors of slave narratives who did not initially recognize their destiny. Venture Smith, Frederick Douglass, Mary Prince, Harriet Jacobs, and countless others who deserve mention here told their stories of a blissful childhood naïveté that was suddenly interrupted by a painfully unanticipated reality: captivity. I, too, had been held captive by a dead man who forced me to sit at an old wooden table in a courthouse and listen to his story. In this regard, Jacob Faulkner's legacy haunted and constrained me 137 years after the abolition of slavery: by paralyzing me, by breaking my spirit, and by altering my identity. Not only did the reading of Jacob's will compel me to recall painful, suppressed, traumatic memory and repressed emotions, it forced me to recall language's ability to empower, to disempower, and to construct reality, if only temporarily.

I found "a slave." I could not deny my discovery because Friday's name was etched onto the 200-year-old legal document. I had unearthed an enslaved man, a clearer mental image of an ancestor to append my name, and equally important, I had unearthed the white family whose name I had proudly and naïvely endorsed. I channeled Malcolm X who during his six years in captivity grew so adamant about his lost African heritage that he changed his surname. My mind gradually shifted to my heritage, and I asked: Why, among "sundry Negroes," did Jacob identify Friday by name in this particular section of his will? Was Friday Jacob's trusted servant? Was Friday Jacob's son? Who was Malinda? What did Friday look like?

The succinct yet potent textual representation of Friday Faulkner exposes a harsh depiction of "colored" people, that is, as chattel. Jacob Faulkner linguistically and literally positioned Friday Faulkner among "all the stock on the plantation with [his] surveyors [sic] instruments" (685), thus dehumanizing him. In Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men's Literature and Culture, 1775–1995, Maurice O. Wallace asks: "Who, after all, can deny the endless and unspeakable power of so many desperate white schemes as American slavery, Jim Crow, the lynch mob, urban dispassion, and, most recently, the prison industrial complex to unman (read: dehumanize) the African American male" (2). Wallace's critique of American culture reveals a trajectory of systemic oppressive forces that enable the hegemony to maintain its dominance. Jacob Faulkner's Last Will and Testament, which commanded that his "will be done," solidified Friday Faulkner's forced social identity in the nineteenth-century milieu in which they lived and in my twenty-first-century psyche.

When I interpreted the rhetoric that manifested in Jacob's will, I acquiesced without remonstrance and accepted Friday's legal social identity as a slave, as Jacob's property. Not only did Jacob's will condemn my great-great-grandfather to perpetual slavery, a position that denied him the right and the opportunity to become a whole person or what Arlene R. Keizer calls "an autonomous liberal subject" (29), it also legitimized Jacob as a slave owner and a member of the "white-capitalist, patriarchal system of domination" (25). Therefore, a slaveholder's will — a master narrative — clearly defined and established Jacob's and Friday's binary positions in their nineteenth-century slaveholding society and in the master-slave relationship. Within his legal textual representation of Friday that validates how power manifests itself from the crypt, Jacob conferred his status of owner of Friday to his heir, Obadiah. Ultimately, all the characters in Jacob's master narrative, including myself, were implicated in Jacob's rhetoric, which demonstrates the power of language, how symbols form our identities, and how we take on those representations of ourselves (Bakhtin 1981). Furthermore, I was not privy to my great-great-grandfather's counter-narrative because I was too young, because I did not eavesdrop when it was told, because I was not an active listener when my family told it, or because no one told it. As a result, I did not have a narrative to juxtapose against Jacob's dominant narrative. But nothing could have prepared me for the lesson I learned on that fateful day in the archive when the discovery of my great-great-grandfather became a blessing and a curse.

Similar to the way Malea Powell encapsulates her embodied archival experience in "Dreaming Charles Eastman," I have captured my archival experience among these pages. Powell writes, "My point here is what it feels like to be in an archive not because I think you care how I feel, but to illustrate the ways in which meaning is sometimes held captive by the body and how we have to then walk through story to make sense of our experiences as writers, as scholars, and as humans" (117). Powell also reasons that "some events have to be walked and talked aloud, moved through, told" (117). Powell's affirmation about the link between our physical and psychological selves speaks profoundly to my embodied experience in the archive that rendered me temporarily voiceless, distressed, hapless, helpless, and fragmented.

I never thought finding Friday would hurt so awfully. I had learned; I had suffered, and pain fell upon my heart, and in my own despair, against [my] will, [came] wisdom to use by the awful grace of God (Aeschylus). After I experienced traumatic pain, powerlessness, and a sense of loss, my resurrection resulted only from confronting my immediate pain and my traumatic past, which liberated me. My transformation ceased after I dismantled Jacob Faulkner's interpellation. I had internalized white male supremacist values and attempted to articulate Jacob Faulkner's perspective of black manhood and black personhood, with a disregard for how my great-great-grandfather might have self-identified or defined black manhood and personhood in a slaveholding society.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1607327384
• ISBN 13: 9781607327387
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 296
• Editor: Maureen Daly Goggin