Sarah DeLaRosa

Yours, Mine, and Ours: Combining Colonial-Postcolonial Literature Studies and Contact Zone Theory in the American Classroom

            A few short years from now I will have fulfilled my academic requirements to receive my Master’s degree in Literature and I will take my place at the head of a classroom. One class I would like to teach would be a college-level literature class in colonial and postcolonial studies, and to do so following contact zone theory. I believe that the contact zone classroom is a natural fit for a colonial-postcolonial literature curriculum. This particular combination of subject matter and classroom style could drastically change the way American students study and view not only literature, but their own and other cultures as well.

            Mary Louise Pratt is the foundress of the contact zone theory of classroom organization. She outlined her ideas in “Arts of the Contact Zone,” which she published in 1991. Pratt defines contact zones as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other” (4). To implement contact zone theory in a literature classroom, material from multiple backgrounds and disparate points of view should be studied. Personally, I plan to center my colonial-postcolonial, contact zone style literature course around novels (though other genre and media work wonderfully as well as, and in conjunction with, novels) and link them to other novels or alternative media works. Novels progress and grow through narration and dialogue between characters, revealing multiple opportunities for an author to share their own point of view and those of other people. I believe that this genre is perfect for a contact zone classroom because a novel provides countless instances of cultures meeting with one another, be they different religions, different nationalities, different sexual orientations—any two (or more) distinct points of view. These separate points of view can then be studied beyond their novels by introducing related works. The possibilities are endless: Puritan sermons alongside Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, literature from all angles of the abortion debate, or alternative media works treating the same issue such as the 1963 film “The Great Escape” with the novel of the same title by Paul Brickhill and information on the World War II prisoner-of-war camp Stalag Luft III from Wikipedia.com.

            Literature from a colonizing culture read alongside the literature of the culture being imposed upon as the colony is another fitting example. The study of colonial and postcolonial literature is a topic perfectly explored by the contact zone classroom. The boundary between the colony and the postcolonial space left afterwards is the meeting place where two or more cultures negotiate each other and we can witness those interactions through their literature. With the novel being an excellent way to propel a contact zone classroom, and colonial-postcolonial literature understood as a type of contact zone, it follows that the novel is an ideal genre for colonial and postcolonial literature studies because of its ability to present disparate points of view and integrate many types of references to support and explain those views—in this case, the views of the colonizer and the colonized.

            Jamaica Kincaid’s novel Lucy (1990), a story about a girl from the West Indies who moves to America, makes subtle references to the painter Paul Gauguin and William Wordsworth’s poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.” A contact zone classroom would recognize these allusions and explore them more fully to create a dialogue and form a bigger, more complete picture.

            Towards the beginning of the novel, Lucy explains that she had been made to memorize a poem about daffodils for the British-style girls’ school she attended in the West Indies. Lucy insists that she hated the poem and, after having recited it before a large audience at school she says that she “dreamt, continuously it seemed, that [she] was being chased down a narrow cobbled street by bunches and bunches of those same daffodils that [she] had vowed to forget” (Kincaid, Lucy 18). Lucy’s patroness Mariah cannot understand Lucy’s hatred for the yellow flowers, and Lucy muses that “it wasn’t exactly daffodils [that she hated], but that they would do as well as anything else” (Kincaid, Lucy 29). Lucy explains that the daffodils were part of “a scene of conquered and conquests,” and tells Mariah that “at ten years of age [she] had to learn by heart a long poem about some flowers [she] would not see in real life until [she] was nineteen” (Kincaid, Lucy 30).

            With the reference to Lucy’s school, Queen Victoria Girls’ School, and the focus on the daffodils in the poem, it seems right to assume that the poem Lucy was made to memorize is “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” about a field of daffodils as they are seen by William Wordsworth, a popular English Romantic poet. The poem’s British origins are again confirmed by Lucy’s description of her hatred for it as being a matter of conquest, as her homeland in the West Indies was colonized by the British Empire. The fact that Lucy was made to memorize, in elementary school, this British poem about flowers she did not even recognize is a direct effect of her country’s having been a British colony. Treating this instance as a contact zone, where Lucy’s culture was being forced to meet with Wordsworth and daffodils in a British-influenced school, we can understand the true history beyond the novel as we look more closely at who the poem is by and what it is about.

            We can also widen our experience and understanding with the mention of Gauguin in Lucy. Mariah thinks Lucy will identify with the French painter Paul Gauguin because he had left his home and family to paint abroad. Gauguin had had “a comfortable life with his wife and children, but that did not make him happy; eventually he left them and went to the opposite part of the world, where he was happier” (Kincaid, Lucy 95). Lucy says that “immediately [she] identified with the yearnings of this man; […] finding the place you are born an unbearable prison and wanting something completely different […], knowing it represents a haven” (Kincaid, Lucy 95).

            The novel does not name Gauguin himself but the details it gives are ones from his life, and several editions of Lucy are published with Gauguin’s Girl With Fan printed on the front cover, supporting the general assumption. If we were to look at Gauguin’s work from the time he spent in the tropics and around Central America, we would notice his use of bold colors and the primitivist style he championed at once celebrated and subjugated the people of those countries, the main subjects of his paintings. Gauguin and many of his European contemporaries were fascinated with these recently or yet-to-be emancipated colonies in an extremely patronizing way. They viewed the natives, like the ones in Gauguin’s paintings, as primitive and erotic people. Lucy’s identification with Gauguin is incredibly superficial; yes, they both left their unsatisfying homelands for something less familiar, but Gauguin was imposing his European ideas and understandings on the people just as any colonizer would to a colony. By looking closer at Kincaid’s reference to Gauguin in Lucy, we can glean more of the history that Lucy comes from and create a larger sense of understanding.

            Jamaica Kincaid also published an essay called “A Small Place” (1988) about her homeland of Antigua in the Caribbean. When studied with Lucy, these two works by Kincaid reveal a clearer picture of her life and the reality of postcolonialism in the region. Kincaid gets very personal in her essay; possessive of “the Antigua that [she] knew” (“A Small Place” 92). She seems to protect this remembered version of her home from her reader, who she assumes is an outsider. She exhibits a lot of anger toward the English who colonized Antigua and claiming that “everywhere they went they turned it into England; and everybody they met they turned English” (Kincaid, “A small Place” 92). English street names, English holidays at school, English-style government—all forced upon her Antigua because it was taken as an English colony. This same sentiment is expressed, in a smaller way, in Lucy with the Wordsworth poem that she was instructed to memorize. The English culture was imposed upon many Caribbean nations through colonization, and Kincaid shows us the injustice of that history throughout her works. “Have I given you the impression that the Antigua I grew up in revolved almost completely around England,” Kincaid asks in “A Small Place;” “[w]ell, that was so” (94).

            Another example of studying colonial and postcolonial literature in a contact zone classroom can come from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719). Along with reading this novel of an Englishman stranded, but surviving very well, on an island in the Caribbean for nearly thirty years, we could look at the true story of Alexander Selkirk, the man the novel was based on. Researching Selkirk would show us the history that Defoe must have been familiar with to create his novel and the many surprising similarities—along with countless exaggerations, but references all the same—between Selkirk’s story and Crusoe’s. Websites such as “The Empire Writes Back: Post-Colonial Caribbean Literature” (http://faculty.pittstate.edu/~knichols/colonialindex.html) contain a wealth of information, theory, and responses to colonial literature, including Robinson Crusoe. More recent literature referencing back to Robinson Crusoe could also be studied, to gauge the reactions of people who came after; Derek Walcott’s “Crusoe’s Island” (1965) is one.

            Beyond the title, which is an obvious reference to Robinson Crusoe, Walcott’s poem “Crusoe’s Island” makes several allusions to Defoe’s novel. At the end of the fourth stanza Walcott compares his own fears to Crusoe’s fear of his shadow while he was on the island, afraid that there were other, more dangerous, inhabitants. Walcott then describes Crusoe’s resilience and extreme loneliness:

            Upon this rock the bearded hermit built

            His Eden:

            Goats, corn crop, fort, parasol, garden,

            Bible for Sabbath, all the joys

            But one

            Which sent him howling for a human voice.

            [………………..]

            Craftsman and castaway,

            All heaven in his head,

            He watched his shadow pray

            Not for God's love but human love instead.” (29-50)

At the close of the poem, Walcott mentions “Friday's progeny, / The brood of Crusoe's slave, / Black little girls in pink / Organdy, crinolines,” (102-5) walking along the beach in his homeland of Trinidad. This Caribbean poet is writing more than two hundred years after the novel he references to describe and explain his feelings; a British novel about an Englishman assumed to be stranded in the very place where Walcott lives centuries later. Much of the Caribbean, as it has already been mentioned, was colonized by the British Empire, including the island of Trinidad. There are several meetings of cultures in this example of contact zones: An Englishman (Defoe) writing a novel about an Englishman (Crusoe) who is stranded on an island in the Caribbean (apparently Trinidad), a British colony; and a Caribbean/Trinidadian man (Walcott) writing a poem with several references to a novel written by a man (Defoe) from the country (England) that colonized his region of the world (the Caribbean). Walcott is writing back, speaking back, to Defoe, using Defoe and appropriating his work to build his own postcolonial piece.

            All of these examples of contact-zone-style colonial-postcolonial literature studies would work well in virtually any classroom. By measuring novels against each other, against their internal references, and against other works referencing back to the novels, a more vivid history is established. We receive more from our readings if we can connect them to each other and use them to negotiate each other. In a colonial and post colonial literature class, conducted in a contact zone manner, we grow in our understanding of colonizer and colonized; and of the past, present, and future as it pertains to those two cultures. This kind of learning is especially valuable in an American classroom.

            To our country’s own detriment, and thanks to our ignorance, the typical American classroom teaches ‘high literature’ from ‘the canon’ of literary works—the ‘Classics.’ The majority of these texts are older British novels, with some American short stories thrown in, written mostly by highly educated white upper class men (a vestige, perhaps, of our own British-colonial history). I personally mean these works and their authors no offense; I enjoyed the works of authors such as Hawthorne, Dickens, Salinger, Shakespeare, and Poe. However many students are uninterested in these pieces of literature, or feel disconnected from and overmatched by them. American students often do not even consider trying to relate to the literature or understand it because these canonical works seem to stand independent of our global history and humanity.        

            This is where the contact zone, in conjunction with colonial-postcolonial studies can help—by teaching a class centered around a few classic novels from the administration-prescribed canon and filling in meaning and understanding with related literature, such as the examples mentioned above. The goal is to create a dialogue between the pieces and the cultures and time periods they represent. A colonial-postcolonial class can offer students literature by writers from Mexico, Iran, Quebec, Ireland, and Turkey, along with a few regulars from England and America—voices of the colonizers and the colonized. A contact zone classroom can utilize novels, song lyrics, video clips, poetry, newspaper articles, short stories, and nursery rhymes—anything to help illustrate the cultures being discussed. Together, a contact zone, colonial and postcolonial literature class could reinvigorate classic novels for our American students and show them sides of history and humanity they have never before seen. 

Works Cited

Kincaid, Jamaica. “A Small Place.” The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. Eds. Ashcroft,

            Griffiths, Tiffin. Routledge, 1995. 92-94.

---. Lucy. New York: Plume, 1991.

Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Professing in the Contact Zone: Bringing

Theory and Practice Together. Ed. Janice M. Wolff. Urbana, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English, 2002. 1-18.

Walcott, Derek. “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.” Online Texts for Craig White’s Literature

            Courses. 05 Oct 2009             <http://coursesite.cl.uh.edu/HSH/Whitec/LITR/5731copo/readings/walcottcrusoesislan      d.htm>