Salvaging Historical Subjects through Nineteenth Century Media

• In Event: Narrating History, Narrating Lives

Abstract

Inquiry into the motives of elite African American women require a more holistic treatment of the systems of meaning in which they navigated. Here I argue that such an endeavor treats this community of women no longer physically present ethnographically, and accentuates the degree to which a researcher can only ever interpret the cultural mechanism under study while continually suffering the consequences of how she chooses to situate herself, even among communities gone by.

Author

• Jasmine Nichole Cobb, Annenberg School for Communication