Читать книгу Constructing the Self. Essays on Southern Life-Writing онлайн

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That the very act of making itself embodies moral values, and thus possesses the power to humanize both the maker and the world at large, is an idea central to Washington’s conception of industrial education and social change. The title of the first chapter of Working with the Hands is “Moral Values of Handwork,” and in that chapter—and indeed the entire book—Washington discusses how meaningful labor is indeed meaningful: it simultaneously engages head, heart, and hand; or put another way, it engages intelligence, morality, and artisanship. In some ways, this three-way engagement is the foundation of Washington’s most far-reaching and subversive tactic for dismantling the racist structures of southern society, far exceeding that of his public advocacy of economic cooperation between the two races.

The insights of Elaine Scarry help us to understand Washington’s subversive strategy. As Scarry discusses in her magisterial The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, the act of making involves a dual motion, one in which the makers of things project their humanity into the artifact and then receive back the creative force of the object. For this reason Scarry designates the artifact as a lever, “for the object is only a fulcrum or lever across which the force of creation moves back onto the human site and remakes the makers” (307). Scarry describes a two-step process in which acts of making carry the makers forward in endless cyclical progression of uplift. The cycle begins, Scarry writes, after