| The Digital Post-Colony (Final Project) | |
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Beta Version 0.1c (last update: 31 October 2016) So: it’s time to start thinking about a final project. If you’d really prefer to stick with something familiar, then you may write a traditional final (take-home) exam, choosing from among a list of questions I provide. All of these questions would ask you to write a 7 to 10-page formal essay discussing several of our texts in relation to one another and in relation to some shared issue or theme. I would distribute the exam on the last day of regular class and it would be due one week later, during our scheduled final exam period. But if you'd rather, you can opt to do something more unconventional: an individual or collaborative project (no more than 3 people to a group, please) that expands the issues of this course to other forms, other texts, other contexts. Your project might incorporate text, performance, video, music or audio, visual or graphic art, web-based media, or some other medium I’m not thinking of right now. Here are some ideas that you could borrow, adapt, tranform, or steal outright:
Now: these are by no means the only possibilities for a non-traditional project that would engage the issues of the course and draw upon its readings. You could write a stage play or the transcript of an imaginary interview featuring characters from different works. E.g.: put on a “Revolutionary Tea Party” and invite Nyasha, Jamaica Kincaid and Zuluboy (or Saeed, Kidlat and Sufiya Zinobia); have Tambu and Nwoye meet and fall in love at a formal mixer; get some other characters to hook up at an international conference on Progress and Development, etc. Or you could address theme X in the style of author or character Y, making necessary adaptations for a different medium: e.g., compose a dub poem (à la Benjamin Zephaniah) or a piece of creative non-fiction (à la Michelle Cliff) in the voice of Okonkwo or Babamukuru that expresses their own frustrated/fragmented sense of identity. Write a dirge in the style of “Ordinary Mawning” rooted in Nervous Conditions. Imagine (and/or stage) a few scenes from a performance piece by Percy & Mbongeni set in Humboldt County. Put together a parody tourist brochure or a polemical essay, written in the voice of Jamaica Kincaid, that elucidates the relationship between local (i.e., North Coast) realities and imperialist history. Construct a work of visual or graphic art (a painting, a comic, a collage, a map, a sculpture) that actually advances an argument, a commentary or an analysis, albeit in some non-expository way. Need a slightly more straightforward option? Okay...
Your work might take the form of a web page or a blog or an Omeka exhibit; it might incorporate timelines, maps, data visualizations, word clouds, slideshows, Spotify playlists, or any number of digital assets. It might also take the form of a film or video (or, if that’s impractical in the time available to us, a screenplay and story-board for a film or video); a blog or a multimedia diary; a podcast or radio program (think This American Life); a print or web-based “zine” comprised of interviews, film reviews, poetry, artwork, analysis & commentary on current issues, etc. Don’t embarrass yourself by taking on something that’s clearly beyond your talents and abilities. But don’t be unnecessarily timid, either: chances are that a risk—even an overreach—will pay off. Just keep in mind that this ain’t 7th grade, and a cheesy poster or diorama that you slap together with little effort or forethought won’t cut it. Whatever you do should involve at least as much intellection, insight, and creativity as a good essay. We all want to see something that’s smart, engaging and high-quality—the result of creative thinking, hard work and/or good research related to the issues involved in this class. If the nature of your piece is substantially non-prose, then it should be accompanied by a (minimum) one- to two‑page discussion/analysis/artist’s statement. If you work collaboratively, you’ll obviously need to agree on some ground rules about your responsibilities to one another and achieve consensus about what constitutes an equitable division of labor. But I’ll also ask each member to turn in an individual statement evaluating their own participation. Overviews/Introductions to DH:
Project Showcases:
Tools:
One more late addition--a project whose potential I couldn’t quite figure out until recently. It’s maybe not quite as daunting as some of the other projects I pitched above. Let’s call it “Spotifying Postcolonial Literature.” Back in July, I read on M. Lynx Qualey's Arabic Literature (in English) blog about a pilot DH project dreamt up by a Columbia grad student called "Spotifying Arabic Literature." Nice concept, I thought, and promising--but in practice it seemed sort of thin and vague and undemanding. (I'm so critical.) Looking for similar assignments that required a bit more intellection, I stumbled upon something called "The Mixtape Assignment" by an instructor at Occidental College. Somewhat better conceived, but I still wasn't sure how we would adapt it for our purposes in a lit class. And then I found Largehearted Boy, a blog devoted to the intersections of literature and music, in whose Book Notes series "authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book." So far, LHB has persuaded over 1000 authors--including some pretty big names--to take part. The main Book Notes page contains links to three spans in the series' life: 2005-11, 2012-14, and 2015-present. (There's also a link to the blogger's favorites.) One of the most recent entries in the current series, David Lida's Spotify playlist for his One Life: A Novel, is really good. So is Raja Alem's Spotify playlist for her novel The Dove's Necklace. Different authors adopt different approaches to constructing their playlists, but for my money, the best ones—and the ones most pertinent for our purposes—are those that construct a “soundtrack” to the book in question: they find songs that somehow relate to or comment on a pivotal moment in the plot, that express what a character is feeling in some critical episode, or that address the book’s themes in a “meta” sort of way. In other words, they use the choice of the piece of music as an interpretive act. But what if you, rather than the author, performed a similar series of interpretive acts on one or more of our texts? Imagine different variations on the theme: maybe you would come up with a playlist that features a song representing each major work. Better yet: a playlist with 3 or 4 songs for each of 3 or 4 books. (Of course, just as the authors on Largehearted Boy do, you’d have to explain and defend the appropriateness of your choices.)
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