English 305: Postcolonial Perspectives > Daily Class Updates


For Anyone Out There Still Listening:

I'll be looking at final essays & final projects over the next few days. You can get hold of me (or better yet: stop in to see me) after the holidays to find out what I thought of yours.

Speaking of final projects, here's:

Raphael's PowerPoint doesn't live online, but here are some organizations working to end child soldiery:

Thursday, December 15 (Final Exam Period--8:00-9:50 a.m.!):

I'll relieve most of you of your final essays (more on those below), and then we'll provide an appreciative and supportive audience for Beth, David, Derek, Leticia, Nina, and Raphael (not necessarily in that order) as they show-and-tell us about the projects they've been cooking up over the past few weeks. We'll do all this to the accompaniment of coffee and donuts--on the house!

Projectors: I will e-mail (Update, Monday night: have e-mailed) you some slightly more detailed guidelines over the weekend, but the basic message is the one I gave in class: count on taking no more than 10 minutes, including time for comments and Q & A. And think of this not as a presentation of your project, but as a presentation about your project.

Essayists: you'll mostly confine your attention to the texts we've studied since midterm, namely: the dub poets (including individual poems, of course), Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place, Michelle Cliff's "If I Could Write This in Fire," Salman Rushdie's Shame, Mahasweta Devi's "Draupadi," and Hanif Kureishi's My Beautiful Laundrette. (Note that titles of shorter works are conventionally placed within quotation marks, while titles of longer works are italicized.) In strategizing your answers, consider:

  • Which works would be most pertinent or appropriate or fruitful to discuss with respect to each question.
  • In what order it would make most sense, logically or rhetorically, to take up those texts over the course of your answer.
  • Which specific aspects or episodes or passages of those texts you would want to spend time with, by way of illustrating or elaborating your answer.
  • What larger point or thesis you would be developing or supporting or building towards.

You may refer to secondary (i.e., critical or scholarly) texts, if you wish, but that's not required. If you do refer to or otherwise make use of someone else's ideas, then it goes without saying that you should be scrupulous about citing acknowledging them. Formatting? Follow standard MLA Guidelines.

Given what I've seen on Moodle this semester, I have tons of confidence in your ability to tackle these questions.  I obviously hope you'll take them seriously and put some real care and thought into them--but I also hope you won't agonize over them.  The main difference between this exam and your reading responses is that here you're responding to more focused questions, whose answers demand a bit more structure and a bit more polish.  They also ask for a more comprehensive & comparative sort thinking than you've typically done up till now—but not more difficult thinking.  You know the material and you've already got some good ideas about it; now you have a week to review it and think about it through the lenses of these questions. And while I certainly want you to observe the conventions of a well-argued, well-illustrated, college-level essay, I won’t be holding you to quite the same standards I'd apply to a roomful upper-division English majors.  So by all means, take some pride in your thinking and your craft, but remember that you're not building a church. You'll do fine.

If you need to see me before next Thursday, I will hold special office hours during finals week--but please note that I've had to change the Monday hours that I announced in class. My finals week hours are now as follows: M 1:30-2:30, Th 12:30-2:30, F 5:00-6:00, and by appointment.

And finally, in the Better Late Than Never? Dept.: here are some remarks I've been sitting on--and meaning to send you--ever since we gave short shrift to Michelle Cliff. Also: I have at long last augmented that collection of exemplary midterm "short" answers with some samples drawn from our own class.

Postelection Extracurricular Reading Dept.:

For Thursday, December 8 (Day 30):

We'll say a few last words about My Beautiful Laundrette, starting again with Johnny, perhaps, who seems to have "decided where [he is]," to recall Cherry's dictum. (Namely: with Omo. But can what the pair of them have been through ever really be "cleansed"?) I may test your patience with one Last Lecture--or I may leave that till our final exam period (more on that below). But our main order of business will be to have a look at the take-home essay prompts and to collectively brainstorm some strategies for responding to them. (Alt-final projectors: we'd appreciate you adding your smarts and imagination to the collective.) It would be an excellent idea to have on hand all of the texts we've studied since midterm, beginning with the dub poets and continuing through Kincaid, Cliff, Rushdie, Devi, and Kureishi.

Completed essays will be due at the beginning of our final exam period, which is Thursday, December 15th at (ulp!) 8:00 a.m. Come for the coffee and donuts, stay for the public unveilings of final projects. (Projectors: I'll send you a few words about prepping for your presentation via e-mail.)

For Tuesday, December 6 (Day 29):

We'll have a slightly more "intentional" talk about My Beautiful Laundrette (and possibly "The Rainbow Sign"). Our initial remarks & questions today ended up leaning towards how intimate relationships--friends, lovers, family--were affected the by socio-political and socio-economic circumstances that serve as the backdrop to the story (and also how the relationships respond to those circumstances). Maybe that's where we'll pick things up on Tuesday. Remember, too, that I've opened the final discussion forum and posted a few prompts, which you're free to use or ignore--but you may well see some of those questions reappear in class next week, regardless. If you're planning to post a reading response, you'll want to do it by Monday evening.

Much of what we began discussing on Thursday was about something the film illustrates that's equally applicable to our own place and time. Stuart Hall, the Jamaican-born British social and cultural theorist whose name I invoked once already recently (see the update for Day 27, below), had a maxim for it: "Race is the modality in which class is lived." (Here's an analytical application of that maxim in a U.S. context. And here's a summary/commentary of/on the essay in which Hall Introduced it, "Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance.")

Point of information: it's probably more accurate to say that Johnny is not so much a "punk" as a recovering skinhead, even if, with respect to sartorial style, he and crew are slightly ambiguous. The skinhead movement predates the punk movement by quite a bit, but skinheads went through a complex evolution and split into lots of subcultures along the way, some of which overlapped with punks. (The first page or so of the Southern Poverty Law Center's special report on Racist Skinheads covers the origins of the skinhead movement in the UK.)

On the web: maybe you don't have any room left in your brain for the man a friend of mine has taken to referring to as Crumpf (look it up), but if you do:

  • The New Yorker.com just posted a powerful piece by Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie entitled "Now Is the Time to Talk About What We Are Actually Talking About." "Now is the time to call things what they actually are, because language can illuminate truth as much as it can obfuscate it," Adichie writes. "The responsibility to forge unity belongs not to the denigrated but to the denigrators. The premise for empathy has to be equal humanity; it is an injustice to demand that the maligned identify with those who question their humanity." (A couple of weeks ago, its November 21 issue, The New Yorker ran responses to the election by sixteeen contemporary writers, including Toni Morrison, Gary Schteyngart, and Larry Wilmore. I especially like Junot Díaz's letter to a student, "Radical Hope.")
  • As long as I'm at it, here are two more pieces that, in the week or so after the election, spoke to me--and still do: one, Masha Gessen's "Autocracy: Rules for Survival," because it refuses the euphemizing or the normalizing of our current situation; and the other, Dan O'Sullivan's "Vengeance Is Mine," because it writes in fire.
  • And finally, in non-Crumpf news: "Jamaica's Best New Poet Weighs In" (William Logan reviews Ishion Hutchinson's new collection, House of Lords and Commons, in the New York Times [by way of the Repeating Islands blog]).


For Thursday, December 1 (Day 28):

We'll finish watching--and begin discussing, off the cuff--My Beautiful Laundrette.

On the web:

Finally, for those of you who've begun reviewing in anticipation of the take-home final, let me try to address Josiah's question: you should focus primarily on the material we've studied since midterm (i.e., the dub poets forward), looking for points of connection that would link two or more texts, especially in relation to some of the broader themes of the course:  the politics of representation; the psychology of colonization; “development” as a form of neocolonialism; migrancy, exile, & diaspora; the complexity of postcolonial identity; the intersection of gender and (post)coloniality; the relationship between class, capitalism, and (post)coloniality; the value of education & analysis; postcolonial discontent & disillusionment...things like that. It might even be beneficial to return to the "General Introduction" page of the online Course Reader, revisit Chapter 6 of The Empire Writes Back, and/or review terms in Postcolonial Studies: The Key Concepts.

For Tuesday, November 29 (Day 27):

We screen My Beautiful Laundrette. Reading responses will not be due until after we've finished watching the film on Thursday. You'll find the screenplay and an introductory essay by Kureishi, "The Rainbow Sign," in the online Course Reader (all in one large document); please read them over the break and bring the screenplay with you to class. Oh, yeah: the break! It's hard for many of us to feel thankful right now, I know--and the story of Thanksgiving that we were all weaned on is a phony national myth of racial amity that rings especially false right now. But I hope you all enjoy some peace and rest, some good company, and just the right amount of good food and drink anyway.

P.S.: if you want to get a first look at My Beautiful Laundrette in the comfort of your own home, you can either stream it on Amazon Instant Video for $2.99 (it's no longer available on Netflix, sadly) or get a copy from La Dolce Video in Northtown. Contrary to what I said in class, the film is not in the HSU Library's collection--but what you can access through the library is an e-book copy of Christine Geraghty's "guidebook" to the film, part of the Turner Classic Movies/British Film Guide series. (You can read that book online or, if you create an eBrary account while connected on-campus [or through an HSU proxy server from off-campus], you can download a temporary copy onto your own device.)

British English for Americans:

  • Turf Accountant: Off-Track Betting Agent, Bookie
  • Pissed: Drunk
  • Piss Off: Fuck Off
  • Wog: Derogatory epithet for a person of color, roughly equivalent to the N-word (thought to derive from "golliwog")
  • Paki: Derogatory epithet (short for "Pakistani") for any person of South Asian descent, also extremely offensive
  • Thatcher: Margaret Thatcher, Tory (i.e., Conservative) Party politician who served as Prime Minister from 1979-1990. An enormously influential--and polarizing--figure in postwar British history. She and her memory are utterly reviled by those on the left. "Thatcherism," says American academic Bruce Robbins, in a review of a new posthumous collection of lectures by the Jamaican-born British intellectual Stuart Hall, "was not only authoritarian populism; it was a creative right-wing adaptation of the narratives working-class people told themselves about the decline of industrial labor in the late 1970s"--narratives that were frequently, to put it mildly, not "politically correct" ("A Starting Point for Politics: The Radical Life and Times of Stuart Hall," The Nation 14 November 2016).

I will continue to catch up on Moodle bookkeeping over the break, and I may post some additional links here over the coming days, too. Here's a start:

  • Want to read more by Mahasweti Devi? Score a used copy of the short story/novella collection Imaginary Maps from Amazon Marketplace.
  • Crumpf the Cockwomble: The Scots, who know a little something about colonization themselves, heap scorn on The Donald (Quartz.com).
  • The flip side of Kidlat: in "The Faces of Those Who Take Your Call," photographer José Sarmento Matos humanizes call-center workers in India and the Philippines.
  • "Bringing African Books Back Home": Daniel A. Gross on the fledgling online African bookshop, Magunga Books (The New Yorker online 21 November 2016)
  • Shame postscript: in "Derailed: The Troubling Allure of the Underground Railroad" (The New Yorker 22 August 2016), Kathryn Schulz discusses both Colson Whitehead's award-winning recent novel and the current WGN TV show, but she also tries to work out why we present-day Americans are so eager to consume narratives of the underground railroad--whose story, like most things in history, is far more complex than we've been led to believe:
    In the entire history of slavery, the Railroad offers one of the few narratives in which white Americans can plausibly appear as heroes. It is also one of the few slavery narratives that feature black Americans as heroes—which is to say, one of the few that emphasize the courage, intelligence, and humanity of enslaved African-Americans rather than their subjugation and misery. By rights, the shame of oppression should fall exclusively on the oppressor, yet one of the most insidious effects of tyranny is to shift some of that emotional burden onto the oppressed. The Underground Railroad relieves black and white Americans alike, although in very different ways, of the burden of feeling ashamed.

Final Project-ers: if you get me something in draft form by early in the week, then I may still be able to give you some feedback after Thanksgiving, before we return. But in case you hadn't realized: time is running out!

For Thursday, November 17 (Day 26):

Some final shameful words, perhaps. Beginning with a mea culpa: I 'm sorry for handling a fraught moment during Tuesday's discussion...badly. More on Thursday.

We move on to Mahasweta Devi's short story "Draupadi." (Reading responses due Wednesday evening.) You may certainly skip the translator's introduction if you wish, but I think you'll find find parts or all of it useful and enlightening if you make time for it. Same goes for Gayatri Spivak's interview with Devi. All of the above is in the Course Reader. I have just one big, open-ended question for now: in what ways do you think "Draupadi" could be read as a kind of "companion piece" to Shame?

On the web:

    I know that many of us are still trying, in good faith, to make sense of what happened last week—how we got here, what to do now, etc. Jamaica Kincaid would approve, I think; the United States is a small place, too, and its people rarely think globally or historically. I said in my last update (below) that I found a blog post by Courtney Parker West more satisfying than anything else I'd read over the weekend. But I'm going to recommend another piece by Jedediah Purdy, anyway—a review article, written before the U.S. election, of two recent books that attempt to explain the rise of (nativist/racist) populisms on both sides of the Atlantic—partly because it speaks to both Kincaid and Salman Rushdie.

    One of the books that Purdy reviews (What Is Populism? by Jan-Werner Müller) tries to argue that "identity politics" is partly to blame for the rise of rightwing populism, which has reacted to "liberal" identity politics with a more exclusionary brand of its own. But Purdy critiques that explanation: what the right sees as "coercion from liberals," he says, "is to others the most basic protection from bigotry—not being called names, appearing in public without fear of humiliation, approaching (or being approached by) a police officer without fearing for your life. You can’t have a healthy pluralist politics when large groups of people believe that the state or their fellow citizens don’t take their lives seriously." And here's the part that, for me, echoes the final paragraphs of A Small Place: "As long as identity, the fundamental fact of who you are, remains intensely relevant to how the state treats you and whether you are rich or poor, secure or precarious, identity politics isn’t going away."

    Even so, says Purdy (and this is the part that speaks to Shame's analysis of national myth-making), Müller's book is valuable for its examination of "the ways that democracy can misfire on its own terms when the 'rule of the people' becomes a way of asserting that only some groups count as 'the people'"—i.e., when "majorities—or would-be majorities—can make politics a vehicle of self-aggrandizing national myths and exclude and exploit whichever vulnerable groups the myth does not favor."

Elsewhere on the web:

  • Capitalism & colonialism at Standing Rock: the fight over the Dakota Access Pipeline has Benjamin Balthasar thinking, in "Colonies and Capital," about Nez Perce socialist/writer/intellectual Archie Phinney, who "linked the fight for Native American sovereignty with other struggles for racial justice in the United States" at a time (the 1930s) when several other "pluralist cultural and political movements [in the U.S.]...intersected with anticolonial and black nationalist movements."
  • And in "Trump and the Muslim Question," Pakistani-American journalist Asad Haider writes:

    To fight the xenophobia rising with Trump’s election, we must still claim the legacy of [Toussaint L'Ouverture's] insurgent universality, which says that we are not passive victims but active agents of a politics that demands freedom for everyone. The view of a Muslim as the passive victim of an injury, who must be protected by the benevolence of a white liberal, is to be rejected as ruthlessly as the hate speech of Trump.

    In Trump’s America, I am afraid. Because of my name, because of my skin color, I am in danger. But more profound than my fear is my anger. I am outraged not at the risk I experience as an individual, but at the sharpening and deepening of the obscene inequality of the capitalist system, at the daily violence of deprivation that will be visited most harshly on the poor of this country — including the white poor — and at the divisions cultivated among us by fear, anger, and manipulation, that prevent us from forming the collective power that can overcome our subordination.

    I am not interested in allies, in sympathy or protection. I am interested in comrades, of every complexion, who will fight alongside me for a better world.

For Tuesday, November 15 (Day 25):

Another day with Rushdie: the boundaries of shame, the boundaries of fiction, and the boundaries between dreaming and waking. (And the migrants and exiles who cross those boundaries. Oh--and, perhaps, the way we view all of this in shards and fragments.)

We'll put off Mahasweta Devi's short story "Draupadi" till Thursday (although you'd be well advised to read it--and the translator's preface, as well as the translator's interview with Devi--now).

This also means that reading responses for Devi will be due Wednesday, November 16th (I'll open a forum soon--and I'll begin to get caught up on forum bookkeeping, on which I'm woefully behind, over this weekend).

Those of you working on final projects: please remember that I'm looking for you to have some sort of draft for me by the end of the week, before we all leave for Thanksgiving. The further along you are, the more complete your draft is, the more meaningful the feedback I'll be able to give you.

On the web, some reading related to topics that came up at the start of class the other day:

  • Lots and lots of people are talking about the Electoral College (which Raphael brought up); there are even petitions circulating online and in the real world to abolish it. Here's one think-piece, by Daniel Lazare, from Jacobin.
  • Plenty of people are also writing about an issue that Derek raised: the Democrats' abandonment of southern whites (which began at least four decades ago) and (white) Labor's abandonment of the Democrats. Here, from Jacobin again, is Jedediah Purdy on that and related topics.
  • But the best thing I've run across in the past two days addresses a point that Neftali raised--namely, that people of color don't need guys like Daniel Lazare and Jedediah Purdy to explain what just happened. See Courtney Parker West, "On 'Woke' White People Advertising their Shock that Racism just won a Presidency."
  • Finally, because (as you know), I really like writing about music--especially writing about music and politics--here's Hua Hsu's "The Brave and the Strong Survive, Child."

For Thursday, November 10 (Day 24):

Wednesday morning: It's a grim and shameful day in our nation's history, and I don't know what to say. But I'll lead with a slogan associated with the labor leader Joe Hill: "Don't Mourn; Organize!" We can look to the dub poets for examples of how to face down dread; we can call on Jamaica Kincaid and Michelle Cliff to teach us about controlled anger and burning analysis. Woza Albert taught us about raising hopes in the face of despair; Things Fall Apart, about biding one's time, surviving, recalculating, finding new tools for resistance in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds; Saeed, about surviving a surreal reality. I dearly wish we didn't have to turn to Salman Rushdie to learn how to deal with nightmares and vertigo. But on the morning after our country has committed a terrifying act of collective madness--"And so the new barbarism is unleashed upon the world," an Anglo-French friend emailed me last night--it's all I can come up with. I guess I'll try to organize our improvised whiteboard agenda into something slightly more structured, starting, perhaps, with the central question of the containment--and emergence--of "shame."

Because I believe in the power of words to animate and inspire, I've been looking this morning for as much inspiration as I can find. New Yorker editor David Remnick's "An American Tragedy" helps, and so does staff writer John Cassidy's early interpretation of statistical data and exit polls. And if those pieces smack too much of the condescension with which the "liberal media elite" have allegedly dismissed an aggrieved plurality of our fellow citizens, then try this statement by the editorial board of Jacobin, a leftist journal named indirectly for the great Trinidadian intellectual, novelist, political theorist, activist, and cultural critic C.L.R. James (whose magisterial study of Toussaint L'Ouverture and the Haitian revolution was entitled The Black Jacobins).

Elsewhere on the web:

For Tuesday, November 8 (Day 23 - Election Day):

For the love of all you hold dear: Get to your polling place and vote, fer godssakes!

The very smart posts in the Kincaid & Cliff discussion forum may go partway towards making up for our in-class slight of Cliff's fiery piece of creative non-fiction. (Read 'em.) But if you're willing, we can devote some class time to her, too. Otherwise, I may subject you to an e-lecture, just to get my own final thoughts about those pieces out of my system.

Beyond that: at long last, have you no shame? Well, we do...which is to say: we have Salman Rushdie's novel Shame to read, at long last. I've opened a discussion forum with some reading questions/writing prompts. Please have a look, regardless of whether you yourself are planning to post anything to this forum. Some of the links on the Shame/Pakistan & India Course Reader page may not be current; do let me know if you find dead ones..

  • Terms to look up in Postcolonial Studies: The Key Concepts: dislocation, exile, frontier, liminality, national allegory, palimpsest, post-colonial state.

For your leisure reading:

  • Rosa Gilbert, "Erasing Empire" (Jacobin 3 November 2016): more on the bad-minded British.

For Thursday, November 3 (Day 22):

Jamaica Kincaid knows how to get people--as Benjamin Zephaniah might put it--"hot undah de collah." (Etymologically, to be "provocative" means to be able to move people to speak.)

Thursday, let's discover the "world of something" that the precondition for carefree tourism leads to. (And what was that precondition again?) And then let's rejoin Jamaica Kincaid in the library--which, by the way, was finally rebuilt--in 2009--with help from international financial criminal Allan Stanford, an Americano who was profiled in a long piece in the New Yorker that same year, and finally convicted of massive fraud in 2012. (Excerpts from the New Yorker profile, which includes some very juicy quotes from Kincaid, here. Anyone who can parse the layers of irony here gets a gold star.)

And then, time permitting, we'll turn to Michelle Cliff for a slightly different brand of fire-breathing about the lingering effects of colonial history (among other things). (A reminder that Cliff's piece is linked from the Small Place/Antigua and West Indies page of the online Course Reader.)

Extracurricular reading:

And as if you didn't have enough to read already: you might well want to get a jump on Salman Rushdie's Shame, as it's the longest work on our syllabus and not a particularly easy read. (Totally worth the effort, though. Among other things, it's quite hilarious, in a show-offish sort of way.)

For Tuesday, November 1 (Day 21):

First: Nice work, all-yu poetry commentators! (Really. Even if time constraints meant that your poem only got the once-over-lightly, you were still graceful--and smart, and attentive, and articulate--under pressure.) Let's continue dub poetry not just in our minds, but also in class...for a few more minutes, anyway, so that we can properly attend to Mutabaruka as he invites us to internalize the power of the word and implicitly calls us to action. (Catch a fire, eh?)

Speaking of conflagration (as dub poetry often does) and hectored readers: this coming week we take up two "fiery" essays from the Caribbean: first, Jamaica Kincaid's polemic A Small Place, then Michelle Cliff's "If I Could Write This in Fire, I Would Write This in Fire."

Just to clarify: Kincaid's A Small Place is a bound, printed book, whereas Cliff's "If I Could Write This In Fire" is found--with other reading and internet resources, most of them recommended--on the A Small Place/Antigua & The West Indies page of the online Course Reader. (Let me know of any bad links you find on that page.) Reading responses on Kincaid--you're on your own this time; no reading questions--will be due Monday evening, October 31st (ha!); on Cliff, Wednesday evening, November 2d.

If you take a special interest in the issue of "development" in relation to the Caribbean, you might want to track down two films: Jamaica for Sale, billed as "a documentary about tourism & unsustainable development," and Life and Debt, about the type of development favored by the IMF in the Caribbean. (You can find the latter film in the HSU library. Incidentally, the voiceover to Life and Debt employs passages from Kincaid's A Small Place and features music by Mutabaruka.) Another good piece to ponder in relation to this topic is a story from a 2010 episode of This American Life, which examines how Jamaica and Barbados devised two rather different responses to IMF "austerity" pressures.

And speaking of documentary films, here's a belated discovery, available from the "Kanopy" database via the HSU Library:

  • Modern Day Slaves (2010, dir. Ted Unarce), on Filipino "OFWs"--Overseas Foreign Workers

Other links:

 

For Thursday, October 27 (Day 20):

Thanks to the Unbelievables for setting such a good example. Looking forward to hearing more powerful words about...well, more powerful words.

If you missed class today, have another look at these questions, which we're using as a loose framework for a discussion of each poem. (If you didn't miss class, you may still want to refer to them as you continue individually the work you began with the other members of your team of analysts.) On Thursday we'll begin with a few minutes for you to re-group and gather your notes.

Here is the short-answer grading rubric I promised, along with some sample good answers. (Read, admire, and learn.) I may have a few more remarks on Thursday, but if you have any further questions or bones to pick with me about the exam, feel free to see me during my office hours or to make an appointment.

For Tuesday, October 25 (Day 19):

Dub Poetry Fest! (Day 1) Have another look--a close, detailed, painstaking look--at six of the poems you nominated that I decided we should spend more time with next week: "Big Time Gangsters," "Me Green Poem," "Ordinary Mawning," "Mi Cyaan Believe It," "Wat About Di Working Claas?," and "Dis Poem." (Other favorites that didn't make the cut--or never got nominated in the first place? Figure out how you might bring them in through the back door, by finding a convincing way to talk about them in relation to one of the elect.)

Let's use these questions serve as a framework for a more-or-less systematic analysis and discussion of each of those six poems, using what we did with "Siddung" as a kind of model. (Take some notes!) On Tuesday we'll divvy up into teams of analysts, each of which will help us figure out how to "read" one poem.

Web discoveries:

For Thursday, October 20 (Day 18):

We're marking time--sort of. Please re-read (or continue reading) Word Sound Have Power with an eye towards selecting a few dub poems to scrutinize more closely and to discuss at greater length.

We'll start, however, by continuing to look at a poem about looking. A couple of you wrote about the wary gaze with which the speaker of "Siddung Pon de Wall" and Mr. 9-to-5 watch each other in terms of a simmering class resentment; like dub poetry as a whole, you said, this poem is about the "99%" and the "1%." Another way to name their mutual regard, I think, is with a word that looms large in the Rastafarian lexicon: "dread."

Michelle Cliff will have a little bit to say about the fear and scorn--i.e., the dread--with which mainstream Jamaican society has historically viewed Rastas.  Much of Linton Kwesi Johnson's early poetry focuses on the "dread" conditions faced by young blacks in Britain in the 1970s and 80s, and on the "dread beat" that drove their music. Trinidadian literary critic Gordon Rohlehr describes dread as a sense of "brooding melancholy which seems always on the verge of explosion, but which is under some sort of formal control." It is, he says, "that quality which defines the static fear-bound relationship between the 'have-gots' and the 'have-nots'…the historical tension between slaver and slave, between the cruel ineptitude of power on the part of the rulers, and introspective menace and the dream of Apocalypse on the part of the down-trodden." Word.

Links:

You can check the status of your voter registration here: https://voterstatus.sos.ca.gov

For Tuesday, October 18 (Day 17):

Hope that midterm didn't kick your arse too bad... At first glance, it looks like the identification sections (matching and fill-in-the-blank) gave people the most trouble. I'll try to be generous in my grading, and I'll use the top score (before extra credit) in the class as the basis of my percentages.

In any event: breathe a sigh of relief, knock off for half a day, and then get ready for Tuesday, when we drift over to the Caribbean for a while and take up Word Sound Have Power: An Introduction to Dub Poetry. Twenty-eight poems (most with audio), several introductory articles of varying length, and lots of supplementary reference materials. You should read, listen, explore...and repeat, if only because Jamaican English in both its spoken and written forms will likely take some getting used to. Plan to spend a fair amount of time with this text, and get to the point where you can hear these poems in your head. (The italicized title above is a live link, by the way, and you'll find the same link on the course homepage and the Course Reader page. Access Word Sound with the same username and password that you use to get into the Course Reader--the ones on the print copy of your syllabus, NOT your own HSU username and password!)

Moodle forum is open.

Oh--and don't forget to give me your proposals, etc. (see the update for October 13, below).

For Thursday, October 13 (Day 16):

We heard some promising ideas today. By the end of the week, please give me--in hard copy or by e-mail--a written articulation of your proposal, in addition to any impressive websites and/or DH tools that you've found. (I'll collect the latter on a web page.)

The last--and first-- hand-crafted Zwischenklausur (midterm exam)! You may bring your texts with you to refer to for the short (long?) answer portion of the test only.

For Tuesday, October 11 (Day 15):

Digital Post-Colony Braindump! Scroll down to the update for Tuesday, October 4 (below) for a reminder about how to get ready for this session. The short version: come prepared to share a) one or two cool "Digital Humanities" projects you've found, b) one or two tools one might use to build such projects, and c) a draft proposal for a project you think you'd like to undertake. We'll ooh and ahh at the things you've found and give you some feedback and critique to help you refine your ideas. (And we may talk about Thursday's midterm some more, too, if there's time.)

We did sort of a quick-march through Perfumed Nightmare, I guess, but I still feel like we did some good work on it together. (And if you haven't read what your fellow thinkers posted to Moodle this week, then you should. It's great.) Anyway: onward! Progress, my boy! One giant leap for monkey—er, mann-kind.

For my part: I'll confine myself to a couple of postscripts, the first of which takes the form of a vocabulary lesson. First, the Tagalog word for mountain, "bundug." U.S. soldiers in the Philippines-American war heard this as "boondock"—a word that was adopted into English as a slang putdown for any place we regard as an undeveloped, unsophisticated backwater.  (As in "out in the boondocks.")  But in the Philippines, the word has a different resonance:  in the months, years, and decades after 1898, right on up through the present day, "bundug" has been inextricably associated with the guerrillas who fought the American occupation (and later, the American military presence and/or the American-financed dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos).  Of course, this gives "the winds of Amulk Mountain" an added figurative resonance:  one could almost read the "wind" as a metaphor for the fighters who periodically swept down from the mountains to conduct surprise raids.

Meanwhile, you might have noticed that the name I rendered as "Amulk" sounds quite a bit like "amok," another word from the Pacific that was adopted into English as a vaguely racist slur. It comes from the Malay language (the British and Dutch colonized what they called the "Malay" peninsula, which includes present-day Myanmar [Burma], part of Thailand, and the island of Singapore—although ethnic "Malays" are spread throughout the Malay archipelago, which includes Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. These days, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, "amok" is variously: 

1.a. adj. or n. A name for a frenzied Malay. [It crops up in English, via Portuguese, as early as 1516, but the English explorer Captain Cook explained in his Voyages (1790) that "To run amock is to get drunk with opium...to sally forth from the house, kill the person or persons supposed to have injured the Amock, and any other person that attempts to impede his passage." Hence, "amok's" second definition is:].
    b. A murderous frenzy; the act of running amok. [And likewise:]

2. to run amok [means] to run viciously, mad, frenzied for blood. [As English poet Andrew Marvell wrote in The Rehearsal Transpros'd (1690), "Like a raging Indian...he runs a mucke (as they cal it there) stabbing every man he meets."]

According to University of North Carolina professor Tim Marr, the latter phrase actually entered into widespread use in American English via fighting against ethnic Moros resisting the U.S. occupation in the southern Philippines in the early 1900s.

Finally, as I mentioned once in class, I think: Tahimik's film obliquely alludes to the role of what are euphemistically called “guest workers” in the world economy.  Exported labor has long been a major source of income for the Filipino economy:  Filipino workers abroad send home something like $3 billion annually.  And as it happens, those workers are overwhelmingly women (which gives Kidlat's gender ambiguity another resonance), whose families pool together to give money to a placement agency, which in turn puts the woman in a "domestic" position, often with a wealthy family in an oil-rich Middle Eastern country.  Such anonymous conditions are tailor-made for abuse and exploitation, with which the foreign-worker industry is (unsurprisingly) rife:  many women work in situations that for all practical purposes amount to slavery, often including sexual slavery. This situation is not unique to the Philippines, of course. Who will be Miss Foreign Worker 2016?

Links:

  • "A Short History of Zaka the Zulu," a new short story by emerging Zimbabwean writer Petrina Gappah (The New Yorker 26 September 2016)
  • Perfumed Nightmare (with subtitles) on YouTube
  • "Kidlat Tahimik, Father of Philippine Indie Cinema" on Thought Leaders (Bloomberg TV Philippines, 6 April 2016)
  • A slightly different (and more recent) spin on the old "guest worker" story: Rachel Aviv's "The Cost of Caring" (The New Yorker 11 April 2016) and "The Mail" (The New Yorker 23 May 2016), about what some people refer to as "transnational motherhood."
  • The Filipino carabao, or water buffalo, has also lent its name to a somewhat pejorative term for English as it is spoken in the Philippines: "Carabao English," a/k/a "Bamboo English." Read about it here and here.
  • Finally: it may have occurred to you that we're finishing Tahimik's gentle but devastating critique of U.S. empire just in time for the national holiday commemorating the start of European imperialism in the Americas. Do I have a reading recomendation? Yes I do: Marley-Vincent Lindsay's "The Story of Columbus" (Jacobin 10 October 2016).

For Thursday, October 6 (Day 14):

Down below the jump, I've dashed off a few more pointers about prepping for next Thursday's midterm: what it will cover, what it will look like, what it will ask you to do. You should also read over the Update for Tuesday, October 4 if you missed it, as it lays out a mission for you to complete for next Tuesday. But first:

A Perfumed Moodle forum is open; fragrant responses due Wednesday night. If you missed any part of the film (or would simply like to watch part or all of it again), I've put it on reserve at the library under Engl 305. Here are the study questions that I distributed in class last week—along with a couple of short texts au verso that provide some (ironic) background regarding the film's production.

The Perfumed Nightmare Course Reader page is more or less updated--but here are a few bonus items I didn't include:

  • The Editors' Introduction to the April 8, 2008 special issue of The Nation devoted to sovereignty and Hawaii reminds us how "the imperial past has formed the legal scaffolding and geographic backdrop of the imperial present."
  • In the May 3, 2010 issue of The Nation, Koohan Paik brings us up to speed on the U.S. military's plans to "develop" another U.S. colony in the Pacific dating from the turn of the 20th century--the tiny island of Guam--in "Living at the Tip of the 'Spear.'"
  • And finally: in the mid-1990s, there was a flurry of articles in the Western press exposing the near-slavery conditions to which foreign laborers and domestics--many of them Filipinos (or, more likely than not, Filipinas)--are often subjected throughout the Middle East and Southeast Asia. (See, e.g., "Overseas Labor 'A Sad Fact.'") Little has changed since then; remittances from "OFWs" (Overseas Filipino Workers) still account for billions of dollars entering the Philippines economy each year. Here is Jeff DeParle's 2007 New York Times Magazine piece "A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves" (an abbreviated version of which appeared in the daily paper two days earlier). For more context, you may wish to consult Grace Chang's Disposable Domestics: Immigrant Women Workers in the Global Economy, available in the HSU library.

§

Prepping for the Midterm

What it will cover:  all of the assigned (i.e., required) reading and viewing up through Perfumed Nightmare—including, perhaps, some of the basic concepts that I introduced in my lecture on the second day of class.  (You may remember that that lecture was largely rooted in some of the recommended reading on the “General Introduction” page of the Course Reader.)  There may be opportunities for you to show your knowledge of some of the other recommended reading, as well—although you won’t need to avail yourself of such opportunities merely to achieve a passing grade.

What it will look like:  you can expect some mix of multiple-choice, matching, true-false, identification, and/or fill-in-the-blank questions, as well as a couple ofshort-answer questions (and possibly even a long answer question—but no true “essay” questions).  My aim is to compose an exam that the average student can reasonably complete in the space of 75 minutes.

What it will “test”:  well…there’s a limit to what an exam like this can truly examine.  The multiple-choice, matching, true-false, identification, and/or fill-in-the-blank questions will test your knowledge and recall of things that are more or less “objective”: significant plot points, character names, vocabulary, things like that.  The short- and/or long-answer questions are more likely to call upon you to show a degree of familiarity with some of the overarching themes of the class, to demonstrate some interpretive insight regarding the messages of particular books, and to think comparatively or synthetically about how certain topics are treated across more than one text. 

How you should prepare:  review the plots and character names (and names of authors or performers) of Woza Albert!, Things Fall Apart, Nervous Conditions, Saeed the Pessoptimist, and Perfumed Nightmare.  Revisit your own reading notes, lecture notes and class notes (heck--even the Updates Page).  Skim any recommended reading, internet resources, and/or entries in Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts that you may have read.  Go back to your own reading responses—and to Moodle posts by classmates that you found especially moving or insightful. Have another look—or a first look, as the case may be—at the study questions that I posted to each forum.  Do some additional informal writing or “pre-writing” (listing, annotating, questioning, diagramming, guided freewriting) about the texts we’ve studied so far, focusing on what you feel are the important issues in each one and on what you see two or more texts having in common.

If you’ve been intellectually engaged in the class so far and you’ve been paying reasonably close attention and you review diligently, then you shouldn’t be sweating too hard.  I may ask some questions whose answers are not dead easy, questions that require you to think critically. But I won’t try to trip you up with ridiculously difficult questions about arcane minutiae or abstruse abstractions!  Okay?

 

For Tuesday, October 4 (Day 13):

We'll begin discussing Perfumed Nightmare after we finish screening it. (There are about 20 minutes left. Bring your notebooks again--and the study questions I handed out, if you found them useful.)

If you've gone to the front page of the course website, you'll have noticed that the "Final Project" link is now live. (It's a "beta" version, which means I'll be revising it semi-regularly.) You already may have begun dreaming up potential project ideas of your own, but diligently read the assignment guidelines just the same--and consider the ideas I propose there. (I drop a few references to characters from texts we haven't read yet; you'll get those references within a few weeks.)

Here's your mission between now and October 11th: ponder the assignment, ponder your options, and do some exploratory research. In particular:

  1. Dig around in the "Project Showcases" links (bottom of the page of the Final Project guidelines, below the jump) and come up with two examples of what you think are outstanding--or at least intriguing--projects. If it's cool, then tell us what's cool about it. If you wish you could do something like that, say why. (I expect to be adding to those links.)
  2. Dig around in the "Tools/Platforms" links of that same page and come up with two digital tools--tools used to build one the projects above, perhaps--that you could imaging learning and adapting to your own purposes. (I expect to be adding to those links, too.) You could also track down some of the specific tools that Kyle mentioned or demo'd, or do some additional searching on your own. (E.g., "Best infographics tool.") And like Kyle said: watch the tutorial videos, find user reviews, look at the galleries of sample projects built with that tool, etc.
  3. And write up a short proposal of what you might want to do for a final project. You can air that idea, hear others, and get some friendly feedback and critique. (Try to be as specific as you can at this point about your aims and rationale: what do you want to do, why do you want to do it, why would this be worthwhile, and how would it connect to the texts and themes of this class?)

I will post some slightly longer guidelines here about reviewing for the midterm next week.

For Thursday, September 29 (Day 12):

We'll meet in the Library "Fishbowl" (which is technically Room 209, not 208 as previously announced) for a show-and-tell session about "Digital Humanities" (DH). DH is sort of a trendy, catch-all term that encompasses creative ways of doing and/or disseminating research and interpretation, using a variety of web-based apps, platforms, and technologies (not just blogs, websites, and social media, but integrative audio and video; mapping, timelines, and other forms of data visualization; etc.). Librarians Kyle Morgan and Marissa Mourer will give an overview of DH and show us examples of notable undergraduate projects, as well as acquaint us with some of the more common (and accessible, and relatively easy-to-learn) tools used to make them.

I've got some ideas for potential class projects that you could steal, adapt, or transform, and I'll present you with those soon. You may already have some ideas of your own, but hopefully what Marissa and Kyle show us will spark others. If you decide to do a final project instead of a final essay—and I don't think you should finalize that decision until you've sat through this presentation—then I hope you'll consider doing a DH project. (Or, even if your project isn't conceived "digitally," I hope you'll decide to present it using some kind of digital platform.) That's why I want you to begin to get an idea of what might be possible—of the ways of seeing and thinking and comparing and interpreting and contextualizing and presenting that DH enables.

For Tuesday, September 27 (Day 11):

Next: we're jumping halfway across the world, seemingly randomly. But I think you'll quickly see why we're making that move. We'll screen most or all of Kidlat Tahimik's 1977 film Perfumed Nightmare on Thursday--and I expect to start the film at 9:05 on the money--so please do everything you can to be on time, as the first few minutes of the film are significant. Bring a notepad (or an electronic device of some sort) with you, so that you can take notes! I will have some "viewing" questions for you to refer to in class.

Some last words to ponder from The strange occurrences concerning the disappearance of Said, father of ill-fortune, the pessoptimist (that's a more exact and complete translation of the novel's Arabic title):

  • There are lots of multi-lingual puns in this book, some of them a function of the English translation. "Farce," for instance (see p.44), is a genre of comedy that relies on slapstick and improbability. But it comes from the French word farcir, which means "to stuff" (as in: what you do when you make a sausage--like those famous donkey-meat sausages served up by the legendary Kiork, say). Another example: the word "extra-terrestrial" literally means "outside of the land." A synonym for extra-terrestrial is "alien," which literally means "other," but which is also the word we use for "non-citizen." To be "alienated" from something, meanwhile, is to be estranged, distanced, or cut off from it.) In Arabic, the word for "extra-terrestrial" or "alien" is فَضائيّ (fada'ee), while the word for "guerilla" or "resistance fighter" is فِدائيّ (fedayee). (English transliterations of Arabic words vary, and all of them are inexact. Read more here, and compare the Arabic pronunciations for yourself here and here.) So...you decide who it is that's taken Saeed away to live with them underground?
  • "That is the way you always are. When you can no longer endure your misery, yet you cannot bear to pay the high price you know is needed to change it, you come to me for help."
    --The "extra-terrestrial" (or, as he suggests Saeed may wish to call him, the Mahdi [i.e., the messiah]), p. 39. (Cp. p. 159 and pp. 30-1.)
  • "What if this were all true, not a dream or a nightmare? To say that it all contradicted the laws of nature and the rules of logic was no proof that it was not true..."
    --Saeed, pessoptimistically, on the stake, p. 119.
  • Thanks to Tanner for passing along a YouTube link to a stage adaptation of Saeed.
  • I suggested in class that Saeed's "stake-sitting" evokes (among other things) the practice of "staking a claim," which was what men and/or corporations were invited to do in 18th- and 19th-century America, for example, whenever the federal government opened up land seized from Native Americans to white settlement and/or development. There's that word again: "development." How does that relate to the present-day situation in Israel's occupied territories? Try Jonah Walters, "The Settlement Industry" (Jacobin 11 June 2016).

Midterm pointers (it's not too early to begin prepping!): the midterm will cover all assigned reading & viewing up through Perfumed Nightmare (and it may offer you opportunities to display your knowledge of supplemental reading, as well).  There will be a mix of true/false, multiple-choice, matching/identification, fill-in-the-blank, and short answer questions, and you should be able to complete it in the space of 75 minutes.  You can expect it to test a certain amount of “objective” knowledge (plot points, characters, significant speeches or passages, etc.). But the short-answer questions, in particular, will also call on you to show your familiarity with some of the overarching themes of the class, to demonstrate some interpretive insight into particular books, and to think comparatively about how certain topics are treated across more than one text. I'll offer some slightly more detailed advice in the next update.

For Thursday, September 22 (Day 10):

I'll pessoptimistically attempt to structure a more focussed discussion for Thursday.

Here are two recent opinion pieces (from the leftwing journal Jacobin) about US military aid to Israel:

(Here, meanwhile, is the most recent report from the Congressional Research Service.)

And here are a couple more essays relevant to Saeed that I left out of the Course Reader page (because I thought the list of recommended resources was long enough already):

For Tuesday, September 20 (Day 9):

Well, Tambu wound up getting a little short-shrifted today, especially with respect to the question of whether education is a tool of assimilation or a source of "vital nourishment." Keep in mind that she, at least, has received some "alternative" schooling at the hands of her grandmother, who is described as a "great cultivator," and that she also has connections to the "old deep places" of the river Nyamarira--before the land around the bathing spot was developed for commercial and administrative purposes. (Damn! "Development" in this book--there's another topic we didn't get around to! If you'd like to bone up on what "development," in the guise of the global oil industry, has done to the Ibo and Ogoni regions of southeastern Nigeria, you could start with Sasha Shavkin's "Shell Games in Nigeria" and/or Mark Sorkin's "Lessons of Darkness.")

A much different kind of novel in store for next week--loopy, absurdist, formally challenging--although I suppose you could argue that it, too, has to do with mental derangement, in a way.

Even if you know the basic outlines of the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, you may be left scratching your head over this book. But if you don't know any of the basics, then you're liable to miss a lot of references. Over the weekend, as usual, I'll be updating links on the Course Reader page for The Secret Life of Saeed. If you can make time for nothing else, let it be one of the "primers" in the first bullet in the lefthand column. I'll also open up a new discussion forum, with reading questions. (If you've been hanging back from posting to the forums out of sheer inertia, then now's the time to get moving. If you've been hanging back out of timidity, then come talk to me!)

 

For Thursday, September 15 (Day 8):

Nice, shaggy discussion today. We'll come back to Nhamo and move on to the other neurotics on Thursday, and we'll try especially hard to reserve plenty of time to put both Tambu and Nyasha on the analyst's couch.

A reminder: I know that as the semester wears on, it gets harder to find time for supplemental material. Still, the items in the Course Reader can make it possible for you to understand our "primary" works of fiction in ways you couldn't do otherwise.  I especially encourage you to skim the piece by Ngugi that I referred to in class today (the one about the debate over writing in colonial languages--it's on the Things Fall Apart page), as it's pertinent to both Things Fall Apart and Nervous Conditions. What Ngugi asserts about "colonial mentality" and alienation relates rather directly—depends upon, in fact—Frantz Fanon’s explorations of colonial psychology. Both of those pieces inform Dangarembga’s novel in some fairly significant ways: you might pay special attention to what Fanon says about the importance of bodily (self-)consciousness for the colonized, for instance—and (particularly since one of these terms came up in class today) you might do a little research on the concepts of "repression" and "sublimation" in the field of psychology.

 

For Tuesday, September 13 (Day 7):

We begin Tsitsi Dangarambga's Nervous Conditions. I've opened a new discussion forum (with reading questions), and I'll update the links on the Dangarembga page of the Course Reader...sometime soonish. I may also add to this update over the weekend with some final thoughts on TFA. Or not.

Terms to look up (in, say, Key Concepts inPostcolonial Studies): abrogation, appropriation, colonial patronage, comprador, and native/nativism. (I listed those ones last time, and they're relevant to this book, as well.) New for this week: alterity, ambivalence, Fanonism.

On teh interwebs: Okonkwo is an Internet Meme (Meme 1 | Meme 2).

For Thursday, September 8 (Day 6):

We fall apart some more. Today we psychoanalyzed Okonkwo a bit; now let's begin to put his personal psycho-dynamics in in context and in motion: how does our knowledge of Okonkwo's relations with his family and his community help us determine Why Things Fall Apart in Umuofia?

If you're interested, here are some more established Nigerian writers you could check out: Amos Tutuloa, Wole Soyinka, Buchi Emecheta, Ken Saro-Wiwa. And some younger names, many (most?) of them part of the Nigerian "diaspora": Diran Adebayo, Chris Abani, Uwem Akpan, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Teju Cole. (Here, in fact, is a CNN story about younger Nigerian writers. And here's the website of Chris Abani, who will be making a visit to HSU in the spring.)

Finally, an hour-long radio program about "Nollywood" and a companion piece by Emily Witt, "Imperfect Cinemas" (The Nation 7 June 2010).

For Tuesday, September 6 (Day 5):

Monday is Labor Day: Honor labor! (Unless you're flying to Brooklyn for the West Indian-American Day Carnival [also here], in which case you should "grab somet'ing and wave!")

On Tuesday, we'll Woza! ourselves one last time and then move on to Things Fall Apart. I will update links on the Course Reader page for TFA and open a new discussion forum--with some reading questions--soon.

Things Fall Apart deals with a situation at other end of colonialism (historically speaking), where neither the Christian religion nor the English language can be adapted quite so successfully to liberatory ends—at least not at the moment in which the story is set.  Even so, I think you'll see how questions of community spirit and its breakdown also inform the themes of Achebe's novel—as does the theme of "memory against forgetting" (a term from Rob Nixon's essay about Mandela and Messianism).

As always, I want to recommend the supplemental and recommended reading--both the supplemental materials in the Norton Critical edition (which has a ton of auxiliary material: you'll have to browse, then pick and choose) and/or the Heinemann "expanded" edition of the novel (if you have one of those editions), as well as what I've put online in the Course Reader. Any or all of this will give you some historical context for the fictionalized circumstances of Achebe's novel, as well as some biographical background on Achebe himself.

 

For Thursday, September 1(Day 4):

Hope you enjoyed watching the documentary today. I get the impression you'll have plenty to say about Woza Albert!, and I look forward to hearing it (in class) and seeing it (in the discussion forum).

Don't forget about the recommended reading (and other items) in the Course Reader. That 2012 revival of Woza Albert! at Johannesburg's Market Theatre that I mentioned? Here's a YouTube video of a Q & A with the cast. And here's another one, of the play's final scene.

I'll leave you with some food for thought, first from "Harper's Index" (Harper's magazine February 2011):

  • Percentage of the pedestrians stopped in 2009 for random searches in Philadelphia who were black: 71
  • Percentage of the city's population that is black: 44
  • Portion of the stops that didn't lead to an arrest: 11/12

And in "Today's Color Line" (The Nation 24 January 2011), Columbia University historian Eric Foner reported that "[t]he many hundreds of state governors in our [nation's] history include only four African-Americans." Also, "around 2,000 men and women have served in the Senate since the ratification of the Constitution 222 years ago, but only six have been African-American ... [i]n the 112th Congress, which convened on January 5, not one of the 100 senators is black." Not sure how those numbers have changed in the past five years, but I'm not optimistic. As Gary Younge wrote in "The Awkward Truth About Race" (The Nation 9/16 June 2014): in the U.S., apartheid actually seems to be getting worse...

For Tuesday, August 30 (Day 3):

Thanks for sweating out a long and occasionally preachy lecture today. Tuesday, we'll start by watching a BBC documentary about Woza Albert! which includes taped segments of a performance of the play. (In case you were wondering, this is emphatically not a substitute for reading the script of the play itself.) I hope you can also make time for Rob Nixon and the Anti-Apartheid Reader selections, and that you'll be able to check out some of the internet resources I assembled, too. All of these are in the Woza Albert! section of the online Course Reader.

The class Moodle page is now open for business if you want to have a look at the reading questions I've posted there.

Sunday afternoon, I was re-reading an essay by Amy Elias about the place of Critical Theory and Cultural Studies in English departments for another one of my classes. I found a couple of things it said about Postcolonial Studies especially pithy:

[P]ostcolonial theory examines the social mechanisms of imperialism and colonialism, analyzing the relationships between colonizing and colonized cultures as well as new actions and attitudes allowed by independence movements and national independence ... A key idea [in postcolonial theory] is [Homi K. Bhabha's notion of] "hybridity," [which posits] that ... postcolonial identity--and indeed any national culture--is always mixed, always heterogeneous, always in flux. Postcolonial theory [says M. Keith Booker] arises "in a cultural context informed by the attempt to build a new hybrid culture that transcends the past but still draws on the vestigial echoes of precolonial culture, the remnants of the colonial culture, and the continuing legacy of traditions of anticolonial resistance."

(Let me know if you'd like the full bibliographic reference.)

For Thursday, August 25 (Day 2):

  • Re-read the print syllabus and the syllabus addenda and course policies. Make sure you understand everything in both documents, and come with questions about whatever you don't. (Don't make me give you a quiz!)
  • Make your way through as much as you can of the recommended reading in the "General Introduction" section of the online Course Reader. (It's good "foundational" reading for the course, and it will give you points of reference for some of things I plan to lecture about on Thursday.) Have a look at the "General Internet Resources in Postcolonial Studies" page. Thumb through Postcolonial Studies: The Key Concepts and/or Colonialism/Postcolonialism, if you've bought one or both of those recommended texts. (Suggested terms in Key Concepts: anti-colonialism, colonial discourse, colonialism, counter-discourse, decolonization, empire, globalization, imperialism, modernity, neo-colonialism, post-colonialism, post-colonial reading, Third World.)
  • Get a jump on the first few "major" works we'll be studying (Woza Albert!, Things Fall Apart, Nervous Conditions).

Speaking of Ashcroft, Griffith, and Tiffin's Postcolonial Studies: The Key Concepts: I probably won't leave this link up for long, as I'm not sure it's...let's say...strictly "authorized." But someone at Yogyakarta State University in Indonesia has apparently posted a link to the second edition.

Meanwhile, I've discovered some unambiguously legitimate links to excerpts from both the second and third editions of Ania Loomba's Colonialism/Postcolonialism. Good and useful excerpts, I would add, which establish some basic principles and explore some basic terms.

And if you're interested in a free software program to help you organize and annotate all of these PDFs, try

Finally: I won't make Moodle "visible" for a couple more days yet, so don't worry if you can't see Engl 305 on your own Moodle page.

Postcolonial writers in the news:
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