The Cultural Onion

Interestingly enough, the two articles by Emily Pauline Johnson and Anna Julia Cooper gave me two ideas about the idea of representation.  The first is on representation itself.  After reading Cooper, I began to wonder whether or not a true representation of a group could ever be achieved in literature. Beyond skin color there are countless little differences and subtle nuances that define a social, or ethnic, group.  There are subgenres to every genre, to the point where it gets hard to distinguish between them.  Cooper uses tribes as an example within the "Indian" stereotype.  This illustrates the point exactly, that there is always a smaller portion of a group that will throw off the stereotype, down to the individual.  I feel like I need to go into further detail, but at the same time I think this pretty much exactly sums up my thoughts on the matter.

The other idea is honestly very poorly put together at the moment, so please hang in there while I try to piece together these thoughts. My very brief, and far less eloquent, summary of Johnson's article is that one cannot truly represent a race, or culture, unless they are of that group.  This made sense to me, because no matter how you try to blend in, how much you study a culture, there will always be idiosyncrasies, rules, customs that are simply closed off to outsiders.  Cooper's essay shows up here as well, with different groups within a larger community.  For example, I recently read an article about the idea of a "true" Southerner.  As a displaced Southerner I wasn't that surprised when reading about how some only consider someone to be Southern if they conform to specific stereotypes (church-going, gun-loving, etc), while others maintained that being born and raised in the South is what mattered.  I wasn't sure how familiar of an idea this was in mainstream, which furthers the idea of closed off aspects of a foreign culture.