SV Notes: It is On!

Whoa, it’s been a while, hasn’t it? If this blog isn’t placed on the Internet, I would have to shake dust and cobwebs off it. After sending off my draft to my supervisor, my attention may have strayed elsewhere … for about a month. To be fair, it was my supervisor’s request that we would talk it over in June, instead of any time in May, since she was busy with another student. So, I took that as a free pass to chill out and focus on other things. Bad, bad, bad. I did read one or two articles but I’ve definitely slowed down my progress. I was worried about the draft and took a rather cautious standby mode because if she didn’t like any of it or demand a rewrite, my research for that month of May would be in vain right? Might as well put everything on hold first, right?

Well, turns out, she really liked my draft. Actually, she thought the draft was great! That if I kept going and writing on the pace that I was on, I could submit my thesis by the end of the year easily! Now, instead of just a 12-page draft, I am starting on the first chapter of my thesis!

Honestly, this supervisor meeting couldn’t have gone any better than I planned. I had been walking on eggshells for months, dating back to 2016, that I was already willing to accept for another rewrite or going back to the drawing board. And yet, here it is, the green light and I am allowed to power through. Also, when I say “power through”, it is exactly that because I am expected to submit my first chapter, which is about 30 pages, by mid-July. I may be screaming from the inside and it’s not entirely joyful screaming either.

After the initial happiness and excitement have subsided, it just hit me that I have so many things to do. I mean, the sheer amount of reading that I still need to do, let alone the planning and the actual writing itself. Listing down all the things I need to read just makes me go, “I should’ve read this YESTERDAY”. Also, it’s Ramadhan now and I’m fasting so my productivity levels is 70% down. It takes all my energy to read six pages of a journal article. I had to take a nap in between! I don’t know how I’m going to pull this off in a month and yet, at the same time, I already know I’m running out of time. I DON’T KNOW HOW I’M GOING TO DO THIS.

One of the difficulties I’m facing is that my supervisor said that I need to divide my draft under proper subheadings and that is problem because the way that I wrote it, it has a natural narrative flow. So, it’s quite difficult for me to know where one part starts and one part ends. I’m still quite unsure how a literature review supposed to even look like because I feel that everything I wrote so far refer to a ton of other references either way. Right now, I am torn between putting most of the draft underneath “Historical Context” or “Literature Review”. Basically, I don’t even have the basics on lockdown yet and my research is already sprawling all over the place.

Panic sounds about right.

Anyway, so far, I’ve written down a tentative Introduction outline. Keep in mind that I need to write 30 pages which is about 9k words. I’ve only clocked about 3k words in 12 pages.

TENTATIVE TITLE: The Myth-making of the Black Enslaved Woman

1. Research Statement
2. Research Questions
3. Historical Background/ Context
4. Literature Review
5. Theoretical Framework
6. Concepts of Womanhood and Motherhood (not sure if this is the right spot or it deserves its own heading)
7. Basic Outline of Other Chapters

Does this look too long or too heavy? I’ve been looking at dissertations of other graduate students and theirs look very much straightforward whereas mine feels a bit information-heavy. I also feel that my work is touching base everywhere.

Anyway, since this is a Supervisor Note post, I will also include notes from our meeting. My supervisor did give me a very brief outline of what she is looking for in my first chapter, which goes like this:

1. Topic
2. Context (deals with Focus and Scope)
3. Literature Review
4. Theoretical Framework

Not going to lie, this seems a lot simpler. I think I may have a problem in just simplifying my ideas into basic paragraphs? I feel that my thesis would benefit more when I feed the reader with information bit by bit rather than have them clinically packaged in parts. At the same time, I do need to at least write 9000 more words. Am I making excuses? Who knows. I’ll figure it out soon.

Other notes to think about:

1. Look into male slave narratives. This is rather simple because I’ve already checked this out. It shouldn’t be any longer than a paragraph. In fact, I already have an article waiting to be read precisely about this topic. Frederick Douglass, for sure, but my secret prize is Harriet Jacobs’ own brother’s narrative!
2. Conceptualise motherhood and womanhood. This is tricky. I mean, we are looking into packaging concepts from THREE different periods of time: 19th century, mid to late 20th century and of course, 21st century on account that I would be looking into this with my own set of values and ideals. Also, where do I place these information? Under historical context, literature review or theoretical framework? All three? Some of them? I really need to figure this out.
3. While working out the first chapter, my supervisor told me to keep in mind in outlining the third and fourth chapter. These chapters would be the ones analysing the two texts. This is looking way ahead but I guess, “keep it in mind”.
4. Tentative deadline: 15 July 2017. God.

This post has gone long enough. I think the next post would be a TBR post and some Reading Highlights. I HAVE SO MANY THINGS TO READ.

SV Notes: We Might Have a Lead

So, SV Notes is a post where I update this blog and myself on my discussions about my thesis with my supervisor. This particular discussion actually took place more than a month ago so a lot of things talked about may have faded into some parts of my brain where I could never retrieve again. Bad, Atikah, very bad. However, the great news is that I finally got some semblance of a green light. We’re actually moving from square one! This took months of reading, re-reading and reframing my arguments so I’m relieved to have some kind of lead.

However, square two is not as concrete as I hoped. In fact, it opened to more questions and blank spaces to fill, which I suppose is part of the whole ordeal.

1. One of the main things that got brought up is how far my arguments will hold out for the entirety of 30,000 words. It’s true, I have narrowed down a lot of my arguments. I have solid points as I’ve researched a lot to support them. They’re strong arguments but the problem is that it is too narrow and I need a more developed holistic foundation. I need to focus on the big picture first, especially for the Introduction chapter. It is as though I have solidified a portion of a chapter rather than the overall idea of the thesis. So, I need to put down a strong foundation for my thesis first, which means looking at a wide variety of topics that will become the backbone of my thesis.

Initially, I wanted to focus on the concept of motherhood and womanhood among enslaved black women in the 19th century USA. Both Sethe and Linda fit into this scope very well. However, my current findings are too narrow so I need to go beyond these characters and even, novels. This ranges from the treatment of female slaves in the antebellum South to black feminism in the 1980s. Working with two very different time periods is also quite a hassle since it is a very wide scope.

2. Contextualising motherhood. This is a no-brainer since I picked both Beloved and Incidents for a comparison due to the fact that they both show enslaved women dealing with motherhood and the many grey areas that come with it. I also mentioned in my draft: “I aim to explore how the ideals of womanhood and motherhood affect our perception in criticising the characters of enslaved women and interrogate historical findings that may illuminate a more empowering and subversive interpretations of their resistance.” Which brings the million dollar question, which ideals are these? In a way, there are two answers to this but it’s also still quite confusing. For Harriet’s book, I need to look into the 19th century ideals of womanhood and motherhood called “The Cult of True Womanhood”. I haven’t yet checked that out. For Beloved, Black Feminism should easily fill in the blanks. I’m sure I could find the middle ground and find similarities between the two but I’m still a little wary how I’m going to explore two different ideals of womanhood and motherhood from two different eras. Is this the part where I resent myself for picking two novels from two different time periods? MAYBE.

3. My supervisor boiled down my scrambled up points into one sentence, which was incredible. The minute she said it, I was like, “yep, that’s what I’m doing!”. So my thesis aims to capture the black female slave experience by exploring themes such as womanhood, motherhood and identity. This should be obvious to me but again, my strategy has been to find solid enough arguments to convince my supervisor that this is worth looking into. So, my research has been super focused and it worked! But I think what appeals to me with this sort of wider scope on this topic is that I think I can squeeze in more arguments and angles rather than have this super focused look on motherhood and how it affects their resistance against slavery. I’m not even touching these chapters yet. It paralyses me how far I have to go still.

4. Another thing that we talked about is one of my least favourite parts of writing a thesis which is looking into other theoretical frameworks that have been done in other articles and see how they DO NOT work with my thesis. Basically, I have to read everything. I see the logic behind this, that I will be able to know what has been done before and also state why I’m looking at things differently. Still, not a favourite. I already know that Beloved pretty much invented (okay mild exaggeration) the entire field of psychoanalysis and trauma theory. The amount of articles I came across that fall under that theoretical framework … Incidents has less of a pattern. I think she’s just not as similarly valued as Beloved or Frederick Douglass’s narratives. But also, people have a wider range of interpretations for Incidents. They’re probably interested in the interracial relationship between Linda and Mr Sands though.

So far, that is it. Even writing this blog post took me a few days to have it all down. I think seeing it all written up feels incredibly daunting. I feel so overwhelmed by the amount of work ahead of me and yet, I know I cannot simply just walk away from it. Anyway, here’s to more reading.