Takaki in Review
Berkeley Professor Ronald Takaki's presentation at Hamline Methodist was an especially lively (considering Takaki is 69 years old) extension of his book A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America.
Unfortunately for the audience, Takaki failed to really add anything substantive to what he wrote in the book. Takaki retaught his interpretations of Irish and Chinese immigration for the audience and answered a few questions that failed to leave much of an impression.
Takaki's sense of humor, which did not make an appearance in his book, made the evening more enjoyable by injecting a little more energy into his tired topic. Certainly a revisionist history of minority immigration to the United States would have been edgy and timely if the topic and presenter and had been newer.
The most enjoyable part of the evening was the story Takaki told about how he taught the first African-American history course at UCLA, which was ironic since Takaki is not black. Other than that the evening was a bit drab with the monotony of a tired topic.
posted by Anonymous @ 5:49 PM
5 Comments:
Thanks for starting us off, Rick. Sitting in on a pre-speech press conference with Takaki, and then listening to his speech, I was drawn to his personality, and began to understand better the motivations for his book. I can't agree that the topic is "old." In fact I'm amazed at how relevant his 1993 book is to 2008 (by the way he's publishing an updated version this year).
I want to hear what others think, though, not just on that issue, but your general response. Let's go!
I really enjoyed hearing Takaki speak. I thought he was very entertaining to listen to from "tan toes takaki" to his stories about whooster college. I also learned a lot from hearing him speak, I did not know what epistemology was and I found the statistics about the women who came to America to be insightful as well. Overall I thought he was a really good lecture and I am very pleased to have seen him.
There is no doubt that the book's themes and lessons are relevant now as they were more than 10 years ago. I appreciated the fact that Takaki consistently touched base on the importance and understanding of diversity in our "melting pot" of a society. In his perspective, the American education system has successfully failed at informing children about every ethnicity's history and immigration to the United States. I just think the book would've been way more enjoyable to reading if Takaki had put more of his personality and own objective opinion into the book.
I agree that the book would have been more enjoyable had Takaki written it in more of the fashion of his speech. I was very surprised when this cute little old man came out last Thursday night laughing. He was not at all what I had expected. As stated in class today, I feel that if I had heard him speak before reading his book, I would have felt differently about it and maybe would have enjoyed it more.
I think Abi made a good point in class- I think that I, too, would have approached the book differently had I heard Takaki speak first. What I especially liked about hearing Takaki was that it felt more like he was talking rather than speaking. He could have stood up on the podium or behind the overhead the entire time and given a lecture. Rather, he stood in front of the overhead on almost ground level. Perhaps it was because I was sitting front and center, but the way he gave his speech felt much more personal and I liked it.
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