so distracted

I'm trying to formulate my ideas for a presentation I have to do next week. I suspect that the conception of my initially ideas for the presentation were 'fragmented' at best (and here I'm being kind). As a result I can't find the common thread holding my ideas together. To help me I started reading some theorisation around discourses of the African self (thanks LT for engaging me in some mental gymnastics where my brain is screaming "ouch! man I cant freaking do this"). Goodness me - what a distraction - I am being challenging to rethink 1)notions of race, especially the notion of black as being different or in opposition to white, 2)notions of 'African' as being victimized, a wounded subject and culturally unique, 3) how discourses of Africa have always attempted to preserve notions of difference and 4) importantly how the idea of Africaness defined as anything other than black is almost unthinkable. Of course too much of the argument is way above my intellectual ability to understand - although I am imagining a space where I could be part of a reading group debating the arguments being outlined in this paper by Achille Mbembe. How cool would that be?

Anyway onto issues that relate directly to me - well the reason I read the paper in the first place was because I was trying to understand this idea of representation in ethnographic research (again another idea planted in my head by LT - I went to see Inception last night and am now imagining that my brain must have implanted with these crazy ideas because I certainly couldn't have come up with them myself ).

So my thinking about representation in research writing goes - Is there is a way to ensure that the writers meaning is maintained when a text travels from one context to another? How to avoid a decontextualised reading of ones research without 'othering' the context i.e. thus not buying into the idea that research about Africa has to capitalise on its difference to the West to make it interesting or valuable ? Anyway - the idea has been planted, it hasn't come to fruition yet - I suspect it will be one of those ideas that are best left to developed over time - a long time. And still I haven't gotten any closer to resolving my distractions.