Anisha Nandi
As a freshman at U of M, I took a sociology course in which we required to write response papers each week. For our sixth paper we had to write about our cultural identity. I wrote about my identity within the confines of the assignment prompt and never felt as if it reached its fullest potential. My multicultural identity is something I feel so strongly about and so the idea of rewriting this piece was appealing.
I modeled my piece on this piece in The Michigan Daily.
For my gateway writing minor course we had to repurpose a piece of writing and this one immediately came to mind. With
my restrictions thrown off, I
finally had the opportunity to
polish and refine this piece.
Repurposing & Remedation Reflection
My multicultural identity has been something I have always been proud of yet something largely unexplored in my writing. Being that both writing and my background are two integral parts of my identity, I think it is surprising it has taken me up until this class to fully explore my heritage through a reflective, writing project. My original source text was a sociology essay I wrote my freshman year. We had reflective papers due each week and while I rarely put a great amount of time, effort and thought into each one because of their frequency and sometimes forced topics, this one was different. I really thought about my multicultural identity and what it meant to me. The piece I produced was one I was proud of but one greatly restricted by the constraints and requirements of the prompt. For example, our thesis had to be a question and creative prose in the essay was not necessarily encouraged.
When we were told to revisit a piece for a repurposing project I found that this piece would be perfect. I was still deeply engaged in the topic, although no longer restricted by the essay prompt. I delved into the piece and let my creative tendencies reign supreme. I ultimately was very happy with the paper that was created. I learned a tremendous amount about my own insights into the piece after writing this final repurposed essay. Although there are parts I can still improve on (as with all writing), I think the core ideas and style I wrote in were much more true to myself and belief. The next challenge was in deciding how to remediate this repurposed essay.
At first I thought I would use my footage from some of my Trinidad trip and elucidate more about finding my own roots. The more I explored this idea though, the more I realized that I wanted to start to reach outside of myself. I learned so much about my own cultural heritage throughout this piece but I saw a great imbalance on campus. Not enough people in my opinion had the same opportunity to value their multicultural identity. I then thought it would be more valuable to explore this curious phenomenon of often disregarding one’s background in college. Even though college I supposed to be a time to explore one’s self, I found that many were only looking to their present and future and not to their past. The interviews I conducted were fascinated and I learned much about people’s nature, background and approach to their own identities. It was most intriguing to have people open up to me once I shared my own background.
The idea to create a video was a natural progression for me as I do video work outside of class, but not in this capacity. My video work is mainly news oriented but I have always wanted to do a feature piece such as this one. I modeled my repurposing piece off of a statement piece in The Michigan Daily so it was natural for me to watch videos posted by my feature and arts peers on staff and see what creative videos they had created. I learned about pace, rhythm, tempo and flow of a creative video dictated by interviews by editing and scripting this piece. It truly was a wonderfully clarifying and rewarding process.