Proposal: Qualifications & Limitations

Qualifications and Limitations

            My qualifications for this field study include:

Having taken French language courses (101, 102, 201, 202, 211 and 321), I have an intermediate understanding of French.  I will therefore have no trouble getting around as I can read the language and understand simple conversations.  I hope and expect that living in the country will further help me with comprehension and fluidity in the language.

Current enrollment in a Field Study Preparation Course which not only requires continuous research and reading in my chosen interest of study and a honing of that research, but continuous reflection on my chosen project and extensive writing about the preparation I am going through to enter a new culture.  I think many of the topics we have discussed in class including observation, participant observation, and interviewing probes and how to ask questions will all be very helpful, even within an academic setting as I search for answers to my understanding of French culture and how it influenced my subjects.

My completion of my major classes for American Studies which have required me to take particular American Studies courses in the methodology and ‘conversation’ of American Studies which I can apply to my research.  Other course I have taken include an emphasis on African American culture, American culture, and an extensive understanding of American history.  I have also taken a History of France class, which has helped me considerably in my understanding of French culture and the circumstances the African American expatriates I will be studying lived through.

A profound and deep interest in my research: I am not doing this research to further my degree, or doing this research because it has to be done in any way, but because I am genuinely interested in this subject matter.  I think this genuine interest, shared by many of my peers, will help me in my research.

            My limitations for this field study include:

            I haven’t taken any African American literature courses or a course in Jazz, two classes I wish I could have under my belt before embarking on this field study.  I also wish I had a better grounding in Urban Studies, though I know one of my courses while in the field will help supplement my lack of an Urban Studies background.

            I have the bases for being conversationally fluent in French, but I am NOT conversationally fluent in French, something of which would greatly benefit my study.  Whatever I acquire on this study could be largely aided by a more complete ability to converse and read in French.

Proposal: Methodology and Procedures

Entry

            I plan to find a host family that I might live with, who might help me enter some facet of the community in Paris where I might become more acquainted with Parisian-French culture.  Though I will do no formal interviews on French culture, I do expect the interactions and conversations I have to help me better understand the experiences of the expatriates I am studying.  Though I am aware that Parisian culture has changed in the last 100 years, given the length of time French culture has been developing, an hundred years will make little difference in the large scheme of culture, which has its roots in centuries of history.

            Furthermore, I hope to familiarize myself with the city, but particularly the parts of the city where African-American expatriates lived, worked, and socialized.  I hope to visit many areas in Paris with sufficient history and representation of French culture to help me gather a larger understanding of what the French value, and by association what many expatriates would have clung to as their own values.  I believe I will find these cultural insets within museums of art, history, monuments, churches and cathedrals, day-trips in and directly around Paris to important places.

            More specifically, I also plan to attend some of the most directly related areas where jazz and blues have been fostered in Paris, attend concerts, revues or small shows.  By making myself available to these activities, I hope to meet others who share these interests and might be willing to share their experiences and understanding of Jazz with me.

Informants

            I expect my informants to be musicians and writers of the period I study, and therefore will be reading and listening a lot, analyzing their work and my understanding of their work within their historical context.

            Though I don’t want to focus on contemporary Jazz and its modern expression in France, I will not turn down the opportunity to talk to others about jazz, soul, or blues, if they should want to.  In this way, I am sure my opinions and understanding will be altered by what is shared with me, but I do not plan on formal interviews.  If one should occur, or I find it necessary or beneficial, I will be explicit about the work and study I am doing, what part they play in it, and will most definitely share with them, if given the chance, the understanding they have helped me gain.

Sampling and Recruitment

            I will stick to those sources in American and French history and culture, and African-American music and/or literature.  Because my research focuses in history, few of those ‘sources’ will be living informants.  As such, conversations or interactions with living informants about these topics will either be informal and/or consented to.

            If interviews should be necessary or if they occur, I will have consent forms in French and English to help those informants be aware of my work, how they will influence it, giving them access to my final piece so they have an opportunity to be accurately and faithfully represented.  This is not the focus of my research, however, and so I do not expect it to be a time-intensive or significant part of my overall project.

Description of Method

            The methodology I will be using is primarily an American Studies methodology in which I will gather sources to help me with all four facets of the methodology: Textual Interpretation, Archive Building, Institutional Contextualization and Social Theory.  The intention of looking at all four facets of an event, a place, or an ‘artifact’ is particular to the American Studies field, as it is interdisciplinary in nature and seeks to regards facets of American culture more holistically than if one were to look at American culture through history, sociology, economics, or literary movements alone.

            Textual Interpretation will be gathered from autobiographies of the musicians and writers that lived in Paris and recorded their experiences in Paris.  It will include music recordings as well, and may include a close reading of certain areas of the city.  I will use theories of space and place to help me with this type of close reading.

            Archive Building will consist of everything I can get my hands on from an understanding of the city itself, and its history, African American history, but particularly the history of music and jazz, and the history of African Americans in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s.  A lot of this will be history of people and places.  I will glean much of this information from books, but I plan to use the city itself as a guide, as I visit historical monuments, museums that can share particular insights on archeology, history, culture (art, music, etc.) and other influences the city has sustained or inspired.

            Institutional Contextualization will primarily focus on the institution of jazz and its contextualization within the time period, however once one tries to contextualize an institution with regards to a particular cultural artifact—i.e. a song, a painting, a particular building, or a wall of graffiti—its application differs.  As such, my use of this methodology will change in regards to particular artifacts or places.  I hope my understanding of jazz as an institution, particularly in France will be aided by my attendance to jazz concerts in Paris and a better understanding of how the French took in Jazz as their own during and after the 1920s.

            Last, Social Theory plays a big part in American Studies methodologies and the few I will focus on include race, transnational studies, and urban studies.  Again, much of this information will come from reading, however, I will also try to glean information from the culture of Paris that I observe as I become familiar and acquainted with the city, and the cultures that have contributed to its diversity and culture.  Much of this social theory, however, will be taking place within a better understanding of how African Americans were treated in America and a comparison of how they were treated in France.  Since I cannot interview those who experienced the move from America to France during this time, I will have to rely more on history and a strong ‘archive’ to supplement my understanding.
edited 3/6/12

Inquiry Conference

I've been helping at Inquiry Conference--being a Field Study employee and all--and though it's only been one day, attending Inquiry Conference has been a good experience.  It's helped me think about what kind of knowledge I could come away from my Field Study with, and what kind of things I might be able to present to people about the study I do.  A lot of people have field studies that require they ask questions of others.  So far, I haven't gotten around this aspect of my field study.  I honestly want to experience French culture for the purpose of finding out what kind of influence it would have on African American expatriates, but also just expatriates in general.  I'd love to interview people about music, and about their heritage and their history--especially if they're African-American.  But I don't know that I can count on finding expatriates who are interested in the music scene.  I'll be very curious to see if I kind find any french musicians who play jazz to know what they think about the history of the music they play.  But I just don't want to count on finding anyone, and honestly I'm more interested in the history anyway.  I'm interested in Paris, the culture of the city and the French culture in general, and really seeing where it all fits in to my understanding of the expatriate experience.  I feel like a lot of the reading I've been doing lately is giving me a really good idea of what it would have been like.  But I guess what I've been coming to lately is an understanding that no culture operates in a vacuum.  Of course I knew this before, but putting words to it makes it a lot easier to contextualize: we can't teach U.S. History the way we do, because it's ridiculous to think we became what we did all on our own.  We also can't keep teaching a white-washed U.S. History because it's simply not a true history.  I know that if I was really interested in studying black creative history I'd be in New Orleans, or Harlem or something.  I've honestly asked myself why I chose Paris.  But then I have to remember that I'm a multi-dimensional person, too.  And I have interests outside of black creative history.  French, France, writing especially.  And these are things I want to work on while I'm there studying what I'll be studying.

Which is where I'm coming to.  I want to write something.  I didn't want to admit it, because that puts a lot of expectations on me.  But I want to write something while I'm there--something creative, but true.  And why not Paris, honestly?  Why not go to the creative capitol of the world?  Why not listen to the best music ever made? Why not?  Why not?

When I think about writing, I really start to get excited about France.  Honestly, going out and interviewing people is going to keep me locked up inside, afraid.  But going out to experience things for the sake of writing will oddly enough get me talking.  So I need to stop feeling bullied by these anthropologist ethnographers and just be myself.

I love you anthropologists, by the way.  I'm just not one.

"Feeling Bad for No Reason"

I know nothing about music apart from what I like.  I don't even think I could tell you what (and if there is anything) I don't like.  But lately I've been wondering maybe how I can be a little more specific in my work here, studying African-American expatriates in Paris and I've been giving some thought to what got me interested in African-American culture in the first place.

As a kid who grew up in Los Angeles I spent a good amount of my childhood in a car--in traffic.  You know, I'm sure my parents would report different, but I don't really remember minding, and as a child who grew up in a car--in traffic--my favorite pastime of traveling is still listening to music.  I would lie in the back of the van with my ear next to the car speaker while we were in bumper to bumper traffic listening to my dad's mix tapes and the oldies station.  I never got to choose what to listen to, and I don't think I ever expressed preference--except when I complained that the Classical music made my stomach hurt, which by the way is still the case, and my parents would change the radio station.  But there was one song in particular that was played often on KEARTH 101.1 which I have loved and never tired of.  "What's Going On" by Marvin Gaye.  I cried if my father tried to change it.  Alas, when I had no knowledge of skin color, no understanding of race, no preference for one or the other, Marvin Gaye was my first love.

It was years later, probably High School when I found a Marvin Gaye album on my father's shelf and found this song again, and never let it go after that.  My family can vouch for how often Gaye's "What's Going On" album was played in our house that year.  I followed Marvin Gaye straight into the history of Motown, into the legacy that was black music.  It didn't take long to find Big Band from there, and Swing, and Jazz, and for a little while I lost myself in Frank Sinatra, and Benny Goodman, and Artie Shaw.  This, by the way, is a nice place to loose oneself.  But I soon returned to what really got me going.  Duke Ellington and Count Basie emerged.  Then, I continued to pry into the music of African-American culture.  And I was in love again with these voices.  Lena Horne, Billie Holiday, oh, Louis Armstrong, and then I found Fats Waller, Bessie Smith--and I just kept going. Robert Johnson, Josephine Baker.

My sister caught on to the whole thing.  She started listening to some Soul, to some Gospel, and so my family were plunged into the world of African-American music.  I started studying French, and found through a professor here at BYU Ben L'Oncle, a French-Blues singer who I fell in love with.  I came home and stopped listening to anything else, other than this soulful, bluesy stuff that was melancholy and imperfect.  And I was thinking, why is this something I can't let go of?  Why is this something that is so much a part of me that I can't say "I'm going to study African American expatriates" without saying, "You know?  Josephine Baker... Ada "Bricktop" Smith.  And what I want to want is to study the writers, and the intellectuals, but I think I'm going to have to admit to myself sometime that its the collision of France which has always appreciated the melancholic with old African American blues and jazz which has rarely had reason to be anything other than melancholic, that really gets me.

Maybe that gives me a place to start.  I've been wondering--why France?  What's the point in going there?  Who will I talk to?  What will I study?  I don't know anything about music, but could I?  Could I do something right by Marvin Gaye?  Pay  him back for this gift he's given me.  And keeps giving me.

Proposal: Statement of Intent

A. Statement of Intent

            Little care is often taken with American culture by Americans—or anyone else for that matter—but as an American Studies major, I find American culture essential to understanding those who come to the United States, the United States’ place in the world, and the changes that take place routinely within the country itself.  However, there are facets of American culture which are or have been very influential and yet are either rarely studied, or rarely given credence to as a significant part of a whole.  African-American culture is one such part which has altered the United States in astounding ways and yet is rarely given credit within American culture as a whole.

In 2011 I took an American Novels course which gave me a taste for black-American literature, which resonated with me further than the other American literature.  In this class I realized I was beginning to love a culture that was not only in part being lost, but was not being recognized as playing a larger role within main-stream American culture.  The fact that we need an African-American Studies field to augment American Studies is understandable but disappointing to me—American Studies itself should indicate in its every study the presence of black Americans, Latino Americans, Chinese Americans . . . the list could go on.  Separating the races is not a true study of American culture, because America is what it is because of the collision and/or melding of the races.

In 2010 I began studying French, and soon decided I wanted to go to France before I began a Graduate degree.  I wasn’t interested in being with a group of other Americans, since I wanted to be able to practice my language-speaking, but I would have gone any way I could have when I discovered Field Studies and realized it allowed me the opportunity to study my French, but more importantly, meld that interest with my study of American culture.  I fell upon an idea and decided I wanted to study something no one had talked about in my history courses or American Study classes: the African-American expatriates in Paris and how their presence in Paris can or has influenced our understanding of American culture.

I want to live in France for three months so I might be immersed in French culture, much like these American expatriates were, and so I might better understand what elements of French culture made Paris appealing for these Americans.  I do not feel I can understand the black American-Parisian culture until I understand the elements of French culture that brought musicians, writers, painters, and intellectuals out to Paris after the Great War.

            The men and women who I am interested in studying have been written about before, which is why my anticipated results are not a series of autobiographical sketches, so much as a creative linking of these cultures through the people to better understand African-American-Parisian influence on American culture at the time and it’s holdover in contemporary American culture.  I am not interested in new information but rather a new outlook, one that is particularly of the American Studies field and of an American Studies telling.