Jenny Brewer

10 December 2011 

The Experience and Products of Colonial-Postcolonial Literary Studies

            I think I came into this class with a fairly wide experience of multiculturalism in America.  My childhood home was located in what is now known as Houston's “International District.” This means that my playmates were more likely to have surnames such as Patel or Nguyen than Smith or Jones.  Entering their homes to play was like traveling to another country, sometimes--with exotic cooking smells in the air and grandparents still speaking their native tongue. I have much the same experience today when I visit my partner's mother, who lives in Houston, but retains her citizenship and properties in Nuevo Laredo--and with whom I communicate in very slow Spanish.

            Therefore, I have anecdotal knowledge of the immigrant experiences of my friends and family, but until this class I really had no feeling for the lives and cultures they had left behind.  Because of the demographics of my primary and secondary schools, Train to Pakistan and Jasmine were probably the most compelling of the texts covered in the second half of our class.  As a child, I never wondered how and why my neighbors had come to live here, but the two texts we read about India have given me some insight into the cultural and economic forces that may have been at work in their lives.

            Our Indian texts served well our course objective of bringing “classic literature of European colonialism and emerging literature from the postcolonial world into dialogue.” In each text (“The Man who Would be King”, Jasmine, and Train to Pakistan), protagonists confront an “other.”  Dramatic insights into the perspectives of colonizing and colonized writers can be gleaned from their treatment of these “others.” In “The Man who Would be King,” Billy Fish is the only native who actually rates a name of his own.  In Jasmine and Train to Pakistan, however, the “others” are fully-fleshed characters, with agendas and tragedies all their own.  Without using the intertextual method, this insight--among others--would have been easy to miss.

            I especially enjoyed exploring issues connected to our second course objective: “to theorize the novel as the defining genre of modernity.”  Novels comprise ninety-five percent of my recreational reading, and I encounter many people who consider fiction frivolous and bereft of educational value.  Our course texts and my research project in narrativity have proved incontrovertibly that this is not so.  The weekly lectures on the real history of the regions and peoples we have studied show that the assigned texts are taking us to real places and through real experiences.  My research journal helped me to understand that narrative is perhaps the most effective way to convey cultural information, because narrative works on deeper levels in the hearts and minds of its readers than does simple expository writing.

            I noted in my midterm the tendency of American curricula to use multicultural literature to promote tolerance through pluralism and cultural relativism.  This approach does not take advantage of intertextuality. American curricula usually treat multiculturalism as a “unit” of its own, reading selected “world” authors and seeking only to teach that it is “okay to be different.”  This prevents students from seeing the dominant culture as playing any kind of a role in the history and conditions of other countries and speaks to course objective three, as it partially accounts for Americans’ difficulties with colonial and postcolonial discourse.

            Writing the midterm gave me an opportunity to delve deeper into our course objectives. Ultimately this led to my research project on narrativity, as the exploration of narrative was, for me, the most compelling of our course objectives. However, the idea of American cultural resistance to the image of itself as colonizer was a close second choice, so I was happy to read Keaton Patterson's research journal on American imperialism, and Lisa Anne Hacker's account of her experiences teaching multiculturalism in a Christian school. These projects showed how cultural objects such as novels can just as easily close the reader's consciousness as raise it.

            I feel that the insights I have gained into narrativity are the most personally valuable outcomes of this class. This seems obvious, considering the subject of my research journal, but the journal only provided about half. These insights were gained in equal part through the experience of learning to read intertextually, the excavation of unsuspected assumptions, the discovery of truths contradictory to American cultural narratives, and my classmates' insights into the potential for narratives' subversion to the agenda of the dominant culture.

            It was no surprise to me that my graduate degree plan contained a multicultural requirement, and I accepted that as a “good thing.” However, even in this acceptance I had no real concept of its value.  Our culture and economy are becoming more information-centered each second, it seems. In this age of partisan sound-bite journalism and sensationalized “reality” television, critical skills are crucial. The constant stream of messages we receive contains shocking generalizations, cynically edited to produce very specific feelings alternating between gratification and indignation.  Eli Pariser’s TED talk on the “Filter Bubble” (www.thefilterbubble.com/ted-talk) shows us how the Internet can make us more ignorant even as we consume ever-increasing amounts of information. Without knowledge of the history and context of the ideas, events, and personalities presented across every medium, American minds are ripe for exploitation by disingenuous elites. Classes such as this one guard against such depredation, and teach us skills that are rapidly increasing in importance as our society evolves.