In addition to learning about the history and background of formal oral history education in the US, namely Allan Nevins’ development of the oral history project at Columbia University, this set of readings was most intriguing to me in their discussion of the role of the interviewer and specifically the interviewers’ relationship with their subject. For one, I had to marinate on Nevins’ assertion that a good interviewer possesses a combination of “personality and intellect that is hard to obtain” (34) as well as how an interviewer’s positionality, personability, and overall approach to the subject matter and their subject influences the oral history they co-produce. Most fascinating to me is how the impact of an interviewer, despite being very profound, is not always easily discernible by the listener or reader.
This takes me to Portelli’s discussion of the value of tapes versus transcripts. I was particularly intrigued by the comparison that Portelli draws between interpreting an oral history transcript and doing literary criticism on a translated text. The idea that “the transcript turns aural objects into visual ones, which inevitably implies changes and interpretation” (47) made me return to my own experiences engaging with the WPA slave narratives that were the focus of the illuminating series of Library of Congress articles. Over the past decade or so, I’ve used the WPA narratives in a variety of both personal and academic research projects, but I’ve always only ever utilized the interview transcripts. While I’ve always been aware of the project’s limitations, particularly how “caste-etiquette” likely shaped the responses of previously enslaved informants to their white interviewers, I only really grasped those limitations when I listened to the audio for the first time just last year.
Last fall, the Center for Brooklyn History hosted an evening dedicated to the 1619 Project. A part of the evening of programming was listening sessions of select WPA narratives. Hearing both the conversation shared between the interviewer and informant was incredibly illuminating for me and made real the many ways in which the interviews were both very valuable and also potentially compromised. The tapes revealed the intonation of the interviewer and their skepticism of some of the responses to their questions– all components of the conversation that are completely lost when relayed via written transcript and especially when the interviewer’s voice is erased from the transcript and the oral history is instead presented as the informant’s stream of consciousness.
While the set of Born in Slavery articles discusses the enduring value of the collection and how historians can still utilize them while, as Saadiya Hartman notes, “remaining aware of the impossibility of fully reconstituting the experience of the enslaved,” I’ll be continuing to think about how to acknowledge all of these limitations in my own work that employs these WPA narratives. I’m also thinking, as we turn to our class project, how I wish to present myself as an interviewer in such a way that builds rapport without compromising the quality of the interview and the accuracy of the information that it produces.