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“I Just Keep Talking” brings together wide-ranging and pointed essays by the author of “The History of White People.”
From the opening sentences of her new collection, “ I Just Keep Talking: A Life in Essays ,” historian Nell Irvin Painter addresses readers in a voice brimming with knowledge, clarity and, most delightfully, confidence. As she writes, it would have been a terrible thing had she died young, “during the full-blown era of White-male-default segregation, discrimination, and disappearance that wound down only yesterday. I would have disappeared from memory, just another forgotten Black woman scholar, invisible to history and to histography.” And poor readers would have been deprived of her droll wit and self-assured wisdom.
It’s no small thing that in an era filled with grievances based on injuries that are sometimes profound and often perceived, Painter makes it clear that she has not come to this memoir to reclaim a lost or damaged part of herself. She recounts her response to an admirer who once inquired about what she did for healing. “‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I’m not broken.’ Not broken, but on occasion frustrated, indignant — self-righteously — pissed off with cause, often exhausted, but mostly and permanently grateful for the people who have protected me, mentored me, supported me over so many decades.” This is an invigorating introduction, full of certainty and strength. Painter has moved through her professional life always knowing her worth, never doubting her intelligence and believing that those who might refuse to listen to her insight would be lesser for their decision.
Perhaps it requires a historian to fully grasp the importance — or at least the impact — of telling one’s own story with a certain brio. Painter, 81, is an esteemed historian retired from Princeton University who studied painting later in life, including at the Rhode Island School of Design. (She wrote about that experience in an earlier memoir, “ Old in Art School .”) The essays in “I Just Keep Talking,” which reflect upon the meaning of “Whiteness,” our understanding of enslavement and the power of nuance, among other subjects, are accompanied by her artwork, which sometimes amplifies her words and sometimes stands in their stead. It is a beautiful book. But its power ultimately rests in the sentences, not the pictures.
In some cases, Painter turns her attention to long-ago history, such as the legacy of Sojourner Truth. She informs readers that the 19th-century abolitionist and women’s rights activist did not utter the most famous phrase attributed to her: “Ain’t I a woman?” If Truth had, in fact, asked the question, Painter says, society’s answer would have been “no.” The answer not only would have reflected the circumstances of the times but would have undercut the way in which Truth understood her power and the skill with which she used it.
The Truth sketched by Painter, in an essay from 1994, is more complex than the one who has been reduced to a misattributed slogan. Truth eschewed the trappings of intellectualism and freedom as used by orator Frederick Douglass, and built her “public persona to establish that what had happened to her — her enslavement, rather than her reason — lent her a unique wisdom.”
Painter’s assessment of Truth is searing, sad and deeply revealing to a lay reader. Truth understood a reality of her time, which is that “in the eyes of most nineteenth-century Americans to be both memorable and woman at the same time simply was not possible. Black women’s individual experience had either to be reconstructed as something emblematically Negro — that is, as enslaved — or to be erased.”
As always, understanding our history means understanding ourselves. We carry our history with us: what we’ve learned in textbooks, what has been burnished in familial oral histories and what has been prettied up by politicians. Painter reminds us of history’s complications and subtleties. She encourages civilians — not just activists or academics — to ask all the pertinent questions, even the uncomfortable ones or those that are contrary to our individual politics and preferences.
What did slavery do to those who were in bondage? But also, what did it do to those who enforced it? Painter is insistent in her refusal to cave to the “national hunger for simplifying history.” She is a dogged corrector of the public record. She has even included in this book a letter to the editor she had published in the New Yorker in 2022, in which she carefully disentangles Truth from the famous slogan.
Painter does not limit her sharp critiques to distant ancestors and abolished institutions; she considers still-vibrant personalities and more recent upheavals. She takes us back to the Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas in 1991, during which Anita Hill, in the pre-#MeToo era, testified to Thomas’s sexual harassment of her. Painter highlights the way in which Thomas forced Hill into the role of spoiler of circumstances that were not yet a fait accompli.
“In a struggle between himself and a woman of his same race, Thomas executed a deft strategy,” Painter writes. “He erected a tableau of White-Black racism that allowed him to occupy the position of the race . By reintroducing concepts of White power, Thomas made himself into the Black person in his story. Then, in the first move of a two-step strategy, he cast Anita Hill into the role of Black woman as traitor to the race .”
Painter continues: “The most common formula expressing minority status is ‘women and Blacks.’ As the emblematic woman is White and the emblematic Black is male, Black women generally are not as easy to comprehend symbolically.”
The racial and gender dynamics that were evident during that 20th-century Shakespearean drama continue to resonate in this century. Black music mogul Sean Combs faces accusations of harassment and violence by women over whom he wielded power. Thomas remains a controversial figure, facing scrutiny over his ethics on the bench and questions about potential conflicts of interest . And Hill has become a revered standard-bearer of a new generation of women who have spoken their truth under daunting circumstances, including Christine Blasey Ford during the 2018 confirmation hearings of Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh.
History simply refuses to remain in the past.
Painter is also the author of “The History of White People” (2010), an exploration of how and why certain individuals were sorted into that racial category. Its sweeping audacity left some observers bemused, not by what it said about our construction of race but by the skin color of the woman who wrote it. Painter has swagger. And in this memoir, she takes advantage of all the privileges of a historian to take an arm’s-distance look at a people, not just those who look like her . She explains Whiteness and how the concept politically evolved during the presidency of Donald Trump .
Whiteness had always been the default, the standard against which all others were measured. Social and political acceptability were based on how closely one hewed to the White ideal. To claim Whiteness as an identity, however, was problematic, because those who did so were white nationalists and supremacists. They were members of the Ku Klux Klan. White pride was a political hand grenade.
“What the time of Trump does for us now is make White Americans visible as raced Americans, as raced counterparts to Black Americans. Long-standing assumptions — that only non-Whites have racial identities, that White Americans are individuals who only have race if they’re Nazis or White nationalists — those assumptions no longer hold,” Painter writes in an essay from 2018. “I’m turning the glass around to focus on what living in a slave society did to non-Black Americans and to the society as a whole.”
Painter puts muscle and heart into history so that her readers can easily, but thoughtfully, draw the lines between past and present. Her history is inclusive, not in a pandering or self-consciously correct way, but because her artful telling of it is full of complexity that’s both beautiful and bracing.
“Once we can write the words ‘trauma’ and ‘slavery’ in the same sentence, we will have enriched our understanding of slavery’s human costs, for enslaved, enslavers, and bystanders,” she writes.
In her memoir, Painter offers an intellectual history of herself, but also a history of us. We’re lucky that she continues to talk. What she has to say can help us more fully understand ourselves — but only if we’re willing to listen.
A Life in Essays
By Nell Irvin Painter
Doubleday. 418 pp. $35
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Essay on the Origin of Languages (French: Essai sur l'origine des langues) is an essay by Jean-Jacques Rousseau published posthumously in 1781. Rousseau had meant to publish the essay in a short volume which was also to include essays On Theatrical Imitation and The Levite of Ephraim. In the preface to this would-be volume, Rousseau wrote that the Essay was originally meant to be included in ...
Here are five of the oldest and most common theories of how language began. 1. The Bow-Wow Theory. According to this theory, language began when our ancestors started imitating the natural sounds around them. The first speech was onomatopoeic —marked by echoic words such as moo, meow, splash, cuckoo, and bang .
The origin of language, its relationship with human evolution, and its consequences have been subjects of study for centuries.Scholars wishing to study the origins of language must draw inferences from evidence such as the fossil record, archaeological evidence, contemporary language diversity, studies of language acquisition, and comparisons between human language and systems of animal ...
Title: An essay on the origin of language, based on modern researches Author: Frederic William Farrar Release Date: July 10, 2020 [EBook #62598] Language: English Character set encoding: UTF-8 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ESSAY ON THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE *** Produced by Turgut Dincer, John Campbell and the Online Distributed ...
- "[A]n analysis of the physical structure of visible gesture provides insights into the origins of syntax, perhaps the most difficult question facing students of the origin and evolution of language . . .. It is the origin of syntax that transforms naming into language, by enabling human beings to comment on and think about the relationships ...
Essay on the origin of language (which is cited here). Herder especially argued that. human language was not God-given, and that it started in animal communication (p. 94). Like Lucretius, he ...
We simply don't know how language originated. We suspect that some type of spoken language developed between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago, well before written language (about 5,000 years ago). Yet, among the traces of earlier periods of life on earth, we never find any direct evidence or artifacts relating to the speech of our distant ancestors ...
5 Present Issue. This special issue provides an interdisciplinary view on contemporary language evolution research. It opens with two articles, those of Nathalie Gontier and Francesco Suman, which address epistemological issues concerning the relation between theory of evolution and language origin research.
This volume combines Rousseau's essay on the origin of diverse languages with Herder's essay on the genesis of the faculty of speech. Rousseau's essay is important to semiotics and critical theory, as it plays a central role in Jacques Derrida's book Of Grammatology, and both essays are valuable historical and philosophical documents.
Translated and with Afterwords by John H. Moran and Alexander Gode. This volume combines Rousseau's essay on the origin of diverse languages with Herder's essay on the genesis of the faculty of speech. Rousseau's essay is important to semiotics and critical theory, as it plays a central role in Jacques Derrida's book Of Grammatology ...
Recommended Translation: 'Essay on the Origin of Languages,' in Rousseau: The Discourses and other early political writings, ed. and trans. by Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 247-299.. Rousseau's Essay on the Origin of Languages (Essai sur l'origine des langues) was first published posthumously in 1781.. Rousseau wrote that he had originally intended to ...
In the concluding chapter (20) of the Essay, entitled "Relationships between Languages and Governments," Rousseau's model of ethical origin is given a communal (and political) context; southern societies where a general can address his entire army in public are favorably compared with unfree northern societies where language is private and might just as well be written as spoken.
On the origin of language: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essay on the origin of languages; Johann Gottfried Herder, Essay on the origin of language ... Essay on the origin of language by Moran, John H., edt and trl; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1712-1778. Essai sur l'origine des langues. English. 1967. 1n; Herder, Johann Gottfried, 1744-1803. Abhandlung ...
Essay on the Origin of Languages. June 2020. DOI: 10.1017/9781316584804.005. In book: Rousseau: The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings (pp.257-310) Authors: Jean-Jacques Rousseau ...
The contributions to this volume reflect the state of the art in the renewed discussion on the origin of language. Some of the most important specialists in the field - life scientists and linguists - primarily examine two aspects of the question: the origin of the language faculty and the evolution of the first language. At stake is the relation between nature and culture and between ...
In his Essay on the Origin of Language, Herder focuses on language as the specifically human trait that distinguishes humanity from all other species on the one hand and the creator of human differences and diversity of cultures on the other hand. The crucial issue for Herder's aesthetics of language is the reception process whereby a ...
Internet Archive. Language. English. x, 176 p. ; 21 cm. Reprint. Originally published: New York : F. Ungar, 1966. Includes bibliographical references. Essay on the origin of languages / Jean-Jacques Rousseau -- Essay on the origin of language / Johann Gottfried Herder. Access-restricted-item.
Speaking, writing and reading are integral to everyday life, where language is the primary tool for expression and communication. Studying how people use language - what words and phrases they ...
An essay on the origin of language, based on modern researches, and especially on the works of M. Renan by Farrar, F. W. (Frederic William), 1831-1903. Publication date 1860 Topics Renan, Ernest, 1823-1892, Language and languages Publisher London, J. Murray Collection americana Book from the collections of
The gene was discovered in Britain in the late twentieth century. The gene affects our ability to understand and produce language, it causes speech defects. This particular gene doesn't enable us to talk but there is a chance it allows speech to develop. 1.4The Invention of writing The medium of Language is speech.
The origin of language is a mystery that may never be completely solved. But it's clear that language is an important part of what makes us human. It helps us connect with others and has allowed us to build everything from cities to the internet. Even though languages are always changing, the need to communicate is something that stays the same.
This essay about the influential work "Common Sense" by Thomas Paine in 1776. It explores how Paine's plain language and direct arguments mobilized support for American independence from British rule. By appealing to the collective conscience and aspirations of the American people, Paine ignited a revolution that reshaped history.
ABSTRACT Histories of the early modern artificial language movement have focused not unreasonably on a series of ambitious, seventeenth-century language planners who set out to design 'real characters' or 'universal languages'. However, there were also practitioners working in fields like music, mathematics, and chemistry who likewise aspired to develop new, more systematic ...
Dr. Chan is a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of M.I.T. and Harvard, and a co-author of "Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19." This article has been updated to reflect news ...
This political isolation has combined with existing masculine norms to push a worrying number of boys into a kind of resentful, semi-politicized reclusion. The statistics are starting to feel like ...
Essay winners: Juneteenth lets us remember nation's past while striving for better future. Correction: Erin Mauldin is an associate professor at the University of South Florida. Her name was ...
On June 14, 1885, Bernard J. Cigrand, an 18-year-old Waubeka native teaching at Stony Hill School, put a flag in his inkwell and assigned his students an essay about what the flag means to them.
Addeddate 2023-10-12 00:45:27 Identifier rousseau-essay-on-the-origin-of-languages-dartmouth Identifier-ark ark:/13960/s27hmtt86w8
The Pentagon Papers were top secret government documents detailing US involvement in SE Asia from WWII to 1968. In 1971, a former government employee leaked portions of the 47-volume study, which revealed both miscalculation and deception on the part of US policymakers, to The New York Times , which began publishing articles about it.
Review by Robin Givhan. June 12, 2024 at 3:30 p.m. EDT. Nell Irvin Painter, whose new book is "I Just Keep Talking: A Life in Essays." (Dwight Carter) 8 min. 16. From the opening sentences of ...