Notes from the Field by Anna Deavere Smith

2017 ◽  
Vol 69 (3) ◽  
pp. 425-427
Author(s):  
Kristin Moriah
Keyword(s):  
Anna Deavere Smith

Finding our Feet: On the Road with Anna Deavere Smith

Prospects ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 575-592
Author(s):  
Rena Fraden
Keyword(s):  
Human Being ◽  
Anna Deavere Smith ◽  
The Road ◽  
The People ◽  
On The Road

“We … say of some people that they are transparent to us. It is, however, important as regards this observation that one human being can be a complete enigma to another. We learn this when we come into a strange country with entirely strange traditions; and, what is more, even given a mastery of the country's language. We do not understand the people. (And not because of not knowing what they are saying to themselves.) We cannot find our feet with them.”

scholarly journals Systems of Silence

2008 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tami Spry
Keyword(s):  
Language Function ◽  
Anna Deavere Smith ◽  
Diverse Communities

This essay offers a continuation of the dialogue of desire proposed by Anna Deavere Smith and Cornell West to find a language that speaks the complexity of race while simultaneously creating supportive productive diverse communities. As a white performative autoethnographer, a methodological skepticism of language's ability to represent race seems a critically productive space to speak into this desire. In our racialized copresence with one another, how does language function to perpetuate racial hegemonies, and then, how can autoethnography performatively interrupt hegemonic practices for the purpose of reimagining and repositioning agency? What follows are fragmented responses to that question, refracted critical self-reflexions representing my own struggle to construct pieces of the language that Smith and West speak of.

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