Christina Crawford

Thoughts Post-Midterm

At midterm we had completed our study of the Caribbean and finished our first piece of Indian literature, The Man Who Would Be King.  Looking back it seems as though the class has blazed through texts since that point.  The intertextuality in the classroom became more nuanced with every reading.  Studying literature across cultures gave us a chance to branch out of the texts into many social and economic issues.  Dr. White’s presentation on Demographic Transition tied what we are reading to a modern global concern, and Susie’s presentation on sex slave trafficking took brought awareness of another fraught social issue.  Learning in multicultural classrooms expands our worldview and increases our awareness of the larger world out there.  Stepping out from the shadow of traditional historicism, when we looked at the multicultural works we were able to look past cultural traditions and see the similarities present between the diverse populations we studied.  In texts depicting communities, Train to Pakistan and Things Fall Apart, we saw how those societal groups were entirely at the mercy of change; and in texts focused on individuals, Jasmine and Lucy, we witnessed the inner struggle of women as transnational migrants.  These challenges are so essentially human that they act as a leveling force across any cultural barrier. 

            Going into this class I would say that around ninety percent of my assigned graduate reading has been of texts with a male author.  Dr. White expressed some concern with the difficulty of finding female authored texts to use and that they would be underrepresented in the class.  Kincaid’s Lucy and Mukherjee’s Jasmine were such powerful novels that I was very late in realizing that they were the only books with a female author.  The strong emotions and psychological realism in these texts made the leading ladies the most accessible to the classroom, especially since their voices are so quintessentially modern.  Jasmine’s struggle with choice and ultimate decision towards freedom and happiness is a quintessentially American decision; her need to continually redefine herself is a quest that appeals romantically to the reader.

            Strong female characters were represented, albeit briefly, in each of our texts.  Train to Pakistan had the young prostitute, Nooran, and Jugga’s mother; Nooran and the girl were very much victims of the sweeping changes in the country, but had a soft romantic appeal that balanced a strength that was hard to pin down.  Things Fall Apart depicted a diverse array of strong female characters, we saw: Ezinma, Okonkwo’s daughter who had a strong spirit; Ekwefi, her mother who had run away from a husband to marry Okonkwo; and Chielo, the priestess of Agbala who is also a widow with two children.  Achebe captures a lot of detail and gives the reader a real sense of each woman as central to Okonkwo’s story.  Heart of Darkness has only two female characters: the native mistress and the fiancé.  Conrad spends very little time on the women; the mistress especially is rolled over by the story.  The account of the fiancé closes the novel; I found it interesting when I read that Conrad’s contemporaries viewed her as an idealized example of womanhood.

            Choosing a Research Project this semester presented a challenge; how is the student supposed to pick one project when there is an abundance of exciting topics coming up in class?  I went with a project that appealed to my love of art, and began researching artwork related to the Caribbean novels we had read.  My project looked solely at Lucy and Robinson Crusoe, but I think that the idea of finding representative works for every text is a possibility.  There is a description early in Train to Pakistan where Singh writes about a non-denominational ancient religious sculpture, finding examples of sculptures like the one in the text would be a powerful visual aid when teaching the text.  Dr. White’s course calendar is full of colorful cultural images, and I think they have a huge impact on helping the class get into the world of the text.

            Throughout the semester Dr. White commented positively on the quality of the course discussion; I think that quality can largely be attributed to Americans growing up in a global society.  When I was in 3^rd grade we went to the computer lab, logged into AOL, and messaged with a girl in China.  Along with the ease of global communication, it becomes imperative that people exhibit a global awareness.  Hardly anywhere is left in America where it would be possible to bury your head in the sand and ignore the larger world; and honestly, after the texts this semester it does not appear that small world isolation would be a good idea anyways.  At one time, 10-15 years ago, I could see an argument that “American’s resistance to or ignorance of postcolonial criticism [is in reaction] to this discourse’s development from outposts of the former British Empire and French / Francophone traditions”(Objective 3b).  It seems less likely now, and I would predict that students taking the class in another 5-10 years will be that much further from this breed of prejudice.  Colleges are adopting the “new” canon to more than just literature; students engaged in their undergraduate careers have opportunities to take all sorts of diverse courses organized around independent ideas and not historicism.  As a result of this the World Literature: Colonial and Post-Colonial Studies class is no longer the stand out exception it might once have been.

             That is not saying that this is not a fantastic course, because it is.  In my midterm I touched on contact zone classroom theory, this material is ideal for that sort of classroom environment.  Now that I am graduating and looking to take a place in front of the classroom, there are a lot of lessons to take away from this class that have nothing to do with Literature.  Using art, video, and music to bring the cultures alive in a class working on a multicultural unit is something I hope to model in my own classrooms.  After taking this course there are some interesting avenues for research; suffice to say, I had no idea how much I did not know about the literature of Africa, India, and the Caribbean.  With some free time on my hands I hope to start going back and reading some of the texts my professors have mentioned as ones culled from a course due to time, starting with White Teeth.