Charles Colson

9 December 2009

Incremental Additions

    One of the reasons that I enjoy teaching English to speakers of other languages is that I have long found the “other” fascinating.  My fascination with other cultures, other time, and other places led to my study of geography and history and the resulting familiarity with world history supplied useful background for this past semester’s readings in multicultural literature. Study of the selected novels, personal research, and classroom presentations have enabled me to make connections with existing schema, adding layers of complexity and nuance to my understanding of the world.

    Building on historical knowledge with literature’s richness of the personal and the particular has helped me to better imagine and understand the experiences of the other.  Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan painted a portrait of life in a small village with all its class and religious divisions that showed me not only the visceral intensity of the strife in partition-era India, but helped me see the humanity of those involved in a tragedy of continental proportions.  It offered more information about Sikhs than I’d learned from having one as an ESOL student.  Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart depicted not only the social customs of tribal life at the inception of colonialism but the traditional world view and perceptions.  Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine telescoped the colonial-postcolonial change process into the life of one Indian woman who offered an outsider’s view of my own North American culture.  I began to understand what it must be like to come to the United States as a refugee.  The European colonial world view portrayed in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was familiar in a way, yet “other” in its dehumanization of the very black Africans the colonizers in their idealism proposed to enlighten.  Nevertheless, I was able to imagine the utter strangeness of the other to the colonizing mind.

    While I knew something of Britain’s empire in Africa and India, my research posts gave me the opportunity to connect literature from Spain’s former New World empire to wider postcolonial studies.  I found that the colonial representative does not always dehumanize the other but, on occasion, makes efforts to understand.  Latin American indigenismo was such an effort to appreciate indigenous cultures through the novel’s dialogue and narrative.  Interestingly enough, it seems bounded at both ends of the historical continuum by narrative: the description of the conqueror in the early years after the encounter; the autobiographical testimonio of the indigenous individual in the present.  I found that magical realism was not just a style of the Latin American literary “boom” of the 1960s and 70s but, as it manifests such postcolonial characteristics as hybridity and binarism, center and periphery, or coupling of the realistic and the fantastic, it is alive and well in the novels of former British colonies such as Australia and Canada as well as those of contemporary Latin America.

    Writing my midterm gave me the opportunity to connect broader historical movements with the development of the novel as a genre.  With little undergraduate coursework in literature before entering LITR 5731, I had not been aware that by definition, the genre combines the fundamental representational modes of narrative and dialogue.  Due to Max Weber’s work, I knew about the concurrent rise of capitalism, Calvinism, and the printing press.  Ian Watt noted the growth of a reading public and added “individualism” to the mix.  His thoughts helped me put the colonial Robinson Crusoe and the postcolonial Lucy in dialogue with one another to see how the element of individualism is fundamentally present in them the former and has become a major part of the protagonist’s character in the latter Content from lectures and student presentations enriched the “layering effect.”  Information from the web-enhanced lecture on Negritude, for example, was almost all new to me.  The condensed imagery of poetry helped me connect the United States to postcolonial thought through the experiences of black men.  The addition of filmed novels (The Man Who Would be King, White Teeth) was helpful in that, in addition to dialogue, they provide a visual narrative of sorts.  Historical elements, familiar or not, may be more intuitively apprehended in film than in the print version of the story.

    Though much contemporary American awareness of the world comes through film, in many instances movie adventure or romance takes center stage or the director relies on stereotypes rather than historical accuracy.  Our country is large enough and powerful enough that some citizens have felt they did not need to learn about the other.  American ignorance of the larger world feeds ignorance of postcolonial criticism.  Literary fiction can supply some of the background needed to understand postcolonial issues, especially when the story appeals to the universal aspects of human experience in the context of particular historical events and foreign geographical settings.  Ambiguity over our own colonial status contributes to American resistance to postcolonial criticism.  Many have accepted the myths of the American Revolution propagated by popular films.  Many more are ignorant of the hegemony by which American cultural and economic imperialism are sustained.

As a result of studying colonial and postcolonial novels in dialogue this semester, I have begun to think about possibilities for applying the material in my own teaching.  In teaching American history, I may be able to clarify colonial and postcolonial issues.  In teaching English to speakers of other languages, I will have more understanding of their backgrounds and appreciation of their cultures.  I have only begun to imagine how I might teach freshman composition by incorporating multicultural literature.