In their mutually constructed text, Baking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life, bell hooks and Cornel West use dialogue "to make manifest" a "sense of mutual witness and testimony" (1). West and hooks also state that they chose dialogue as the form of this text in order to "think in terms of what forms of writing are more accessible to a mass audience" (3). So there is the sense that although the text contains only the words of hooks and Cornell, readers are meant to have a sense of participation that resembles (at least in some ways) "everyday conversation" (3).

This same dialogue strategy is used by Ian Marshall and Wendy Ryden in the article they produced for the Conference on College Composition and Communication: "Interrogating the Monologue: Making Whiteness Visible." Although Marshall and Ryden do not cite West and hooks, there seems to be a similar sense in this text that dialogue is a way to create a "conversation" in print about a topic (race) that is difficult to address fully -- to both witness and testify to one another's experience. Additionally, as a white female and an African-American male, Ryden and Marshall are working in a form that allows them to collaborate while still maintaining separate subject positions. He speaks from his perspective and she from hers, but at the same time they write together to move towards consensus.*   

Another strategy for the sharing, respecting, and critical use of other texts is posited by Min Zhan Lu in a CCC article, "Redefining the Literate Self: The Politics of Critical Affirmation." Lu adopts the term "critical affirmation" from Cornell West, and uses it to propose a form of literacy: "a literacy which might bring us hope and courage as well as vision and analysis for negotiating the crucial crossroad in the history of this nation" (173). Lu goes on to explain that, "In positing critical affirmation as a trope for literacy, I join others to mark writing, especially personal narratives, as a site for reflecting on and revising one's sense of self, one's relations with others, and the conditions of one's life" (173). Lu's proposal is interesting because it seeks a way to connect academic texts in a more personally critical way. She contemplates the ways that academic criticism can distort, and sometimes destroy the process of "testifying and witnessing" one another's perspectives and attempts to conceive a form of response that balances the affirmation of other texts and ideas with the critical process of analyzing and critiquing those same ideas. The "texts" that Lu seeks to connect are disparate. They are not necessarily produced by individuals speaking to one another. They may, in fact, be produced by individuals who have never met.

In this text, I attempt to use Lu's proposal of critical affirmation to engage in the texts of other scholars like Frankenberg and Williams. However, there is also the possibility of a kind of dialogue, although not so direct a connection as those established by West and hooks or Ryden and Marshall. Others who have read this text have contributed responses, but those responses may testify more to the exigency these authors feel regarding issues of race than a need to respond directly to my stories or ideas. The connection of these texts to my own may come through personal friendships, academic relationships, or possibly even random connections made through the public space of this text on the WWW.

The Testimony of Others:

*Of course, this strategy of dialogue reaches back at least as far as Plato and Socrates, but it seems interesting that the form addresses a need in critical race studies to include multiple voices while searching for consensus. I find West's notion of testimony, and the room it provides for the emotional content of sharing difficult stories to be more persuasive in this context than Plato's concept of dialectic.