The problem I have with consolidating my ideas is that most of my blog posts have been pretty close together in both purpose and content. Looking back, I’ve been gathering examples of American racism showing up in Ulysses. While this is a topic I am interested in for a final project and while I think there is enough content worth delving into, I’m worried that consolidating may be the opposite of what I need to do.
Essentially, I’ve only analyzed the presence and instances of racism, looking at the history and context behind the blackface performances or the racism contained in the newspaper advertisement. The problem is, with the arguments I’ve been constructing in my blog posts, I feel as though I’m setting myself up to write an essay about American racism that uses Ulysses as an example, not as much about racism and blackness in Ulysses. I’m thinking instead of consolidating, I may need to go back and look more at the context surrounding these instances of blackness and think about how they function within their place in the novel, instead of simply pointing them out and analyzing where they may be coming from in the real world. Additionally, I think it would be beneficial if I could make more of a claim about the characters interacting with these images of blackness instead of merely providing a background explanation of them.
Circe has given me the chance to begin to analyze and make a claim about Bloom’s attitude toward blackness and his own subconscious racism. With the instance I analyzed in my blog post from Tuesday, I was able to make a claim that Bloom’s thinking of the minstrel performance in a fit of jealousy over Molly’s interest in Black men is a demonstration of his using racist images and ideas to build himself up. It is one thing to think that this is his only idea of blackness, but another to consider that he purposefully uses this image to degrade the black men he imagines her being with. My goal is to dig back into the context around examples from past blog posts to develop more of an idea of characters’ relationships to the images of blackness rather than doing a project on the historical context surrounding the images.
