Black (un)like me: scholar Pabst dismantles stereotypes |
Black (un)like me: scholar Pabst dismantles stereotypes
University of Minnesota
College of Liberal Arts Today
Spring 2002
Judy Woodward
Naomi Pabst (B.A. ’93 summa cum laude, English & African-American Studies) is the intellectual enemy of the stereotype, the easy generalization, and the sweeping statement. As a newly-minted scholar of African-American studies and the history of consciousness, she defines her subject loosely as “what people think of when they say the word ‘black.’”…
…What engages Pabst is what she finds on the margins of the black experience.
It’s a territory that she knows fairly well from personal experience. Although the 33-year-old scholar insists, “I don’t want to reduce what I do to my own experience of marginality,” nevertheless she concedes that, as a biracial child growing up in Canada and Germany, her experience was not typical of conventional definitions of black culture.
But then, her point is that many African-Americans—including black cultural icons—did not have “typical” experiences…
Read the entire article here.
Tags: Naomi Pabst, University of Minnesota