Words in a Room
What We Learn from Political Meetings
One of the many joys of morning walks with my terrier is that I sometimes bump into a friend I met in queer anarchist circles at the turn of the millennium. Over the years our lives have gone in different directions; but we still live in the same neighbourhood, and we continue to meet occasionally through politics or outings with our dogs.
The last time our paths crossed in the park, we were both in the middle of the winter teaching term. We got talking about the demands of preparing lectures. Something my friend said grabbed my attention: “You always have to provide citations. The students want a written source. A book or an article with a title and a page number. You can’t just say, ‘I know this is true because that woman said it at a meeting last week!’”
If I were to add up the hours I’ve spent in political meetings over my lifetime, I might feel more than a little remorse over my misspent youth and middle age. In recent years, I’ve grown increasingly weary, even wary of meetings. They can be dull as hell and give you the feeling of talking in circles while urgent activity is put off. Yet, like the gay bars I have passed more lifetimes in than I care to admit, political meetings have shaped me. They’re not only places for planning actions and campaigns. They’ve also taught me to listen, helped me form and change ideas, and shaped the way I see and act in the world.
I think that’s part of what my friend was getting at when he remarked on the difference between citing a written source and a statement made at a meeting. It’s not just that in the classroom the written statement typically has more status; the very way those ideas are constructed and circulate is different.
The late feminist critic and avid writer bell hooks wrote passionately and wisely about the dangers of assuming that what is written is more sophisticated than that which is spoken. She cautioned against the conviction that words exchanged at home or between strangers on the streets are necessarily simplistic in contrast with the sophistication and abstraction associated with academic writing.
The title of hooks’s first book, Ain’t I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981) is taken from one of the most famous speeches ever recorded at a feminist meeting: Sojourner Truth’s address to the United States Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio in 1851. When she stood to speak, Truth defied the racism and sexism of the white women in the room, whose definition of womanhood excluded Blackness, as well as the white male speaker who deemed women too “weak” to deserve political rights. Truth’s famous retort, “Ain’t I a woman?”, was a defining moment of Black feminism.
The history of the different versions of Truth’s speech as transcribed by journalists and abolitionists in the nineteenth century, and handed down through the generations, is a lesson in the race and gender politics of recording and archiving oral testimony, and signals the importance as well as challenges of placing words and language in their historical context.
hooks understood this all too well. Her brief description of Truth’s speech not only positions it as a response to the arguments of white feminists demanding political rights as well as their white male opponents, but also tries to capture the atmosphere of the meeting in which it was spoken, in particular the whiteness of the bodies that took up and shaped the space in the room at that women’s convention.
Indeed, the words in a political meeting get their meaning not just through the fact that they are spoken – or indeed shouted – but because they are articulated in a particular place in which bodies meet. The transcription of the words of a meeting into a written text to be read and cited tends to flatten out the embodied dimension of a political meeting, its element of performance (something that has been mercilessly stomped out by the zoom revolution of the past three years).
As the example of Truth’s speech shows, political meetings can be spaces where oppressive ideas dominate. Like classrooms, meetings are places where power and privilege operate. Equally, they can be occasions for people who’ve read a lot of political theory and think they’re smart to take over the discussion with their dogma. But where dominant ideology and accepted doctrine are open to interpretation, discussion and challenge, meetings are a space where theory is not only debated but created. We can only capture that process, as hooks insists, if we understand theory as something that doesn’t begin and end with the written word.
To return to the context of the classroom: if students have the impression that nothing counts as legitimate knowledge unless it’s written down and published, that’s because we as teachers have taught them that. The challenge, as hooks the radical pedagogist knew, is to teach ideas, histories, theories and all kinds of texts in their context, to present students with the opportunity to reflect on and learn from different forms of what we might call knowledge production, and most importantly of all, to teach them always to ask where ideas and theories come from, how they were formed, contested, passed on: how they came to be accepted and presented as knowledge in the first place.
Teaching Sojourner Truth’s famous speech might be the occasion, for example, not only to discuss the history of Black feminism in the United States, but also to consider the importance of political meetings and gatherings in generating that movement as a radical opposition to what hooks calls white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. The history of the speech’s different written versions is an opportunity to think about the relationship between speaking and writing in political movements, the different kinds of evidence they offer, rather than presenting them as superior and inferior parts of a hierarchy of knowledge.
It might even help to recapture some of the radical potential of political meetings in a time taken over by the endless tedium of assembling online.
Pen in Fist is written by me, C Lou Hamilton, aka Dr Carrie. To find out more about my activism, follow me on twitter. You can access my other writing, and information on my editing and translating work, on my website. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to Pen in Fist for free here.