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Student Midterm submissions 2015 (2015 midterm assignment) |
LITR 5831 World Literature |
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Caryn
Livingston
29
September 2015
Part
I: Web Highlights
Evaluating the Importance of What We Have in Common
The relationship between the self and the other has so far been a major
focus of this class, as colonial writers describe their encounters with people
from other cultures that are seemingly not at all like their own, and as
postcolonial writers describe living in a world in which they have become in
many ways the “others” in their own homelands. Students in previous courses
explored this relationship and how we might think about it in a postcolonial
world, though there was little agreement among perspectives. The major point of
conflict between the essays involves how to address the uncomfortable truths
involved in the colonial experience of viewing other cultures as inferior, with
one student opting to focus instead on what makes all people similar, one
student prioritizing undoing the Western whitewashing of our colonial past, and
another demonstrating that both colonizer and colonized sometimes view the world
through the “self-other” lens.
Lisa Ann Hacker’s “An Honest Perspective: Bringing Colonial and Post
Colonial Writers into Dialogue in the Christian Classroom” goes beyond an
exploration of literary texts into advocating for a combined approach of
literary and historical documents when exploring the colonial and postcolonial
experiences. A historicist approach to literature is an interesting concept that
is unfortunately rarely incorporated into either history or literature classes,
most likely because there are already so many documents to explore that fit
directly within the discipline of the respective class. As Hacker points out,
examining where literary characters fit within a historical context provides a
greater understanding of both, and can address the Western idealization of many
European colonizers’ goals. For example, “The parallels between Crusoe and
colonizing nations such as England and Spain will help students see that the
explorers who came to The New World were not acting only as ambitious
individuals, but as representatives of nations influenced by entitlement and a
desire for wealth that benefitted both themselves and their home countries.”
Hacker also emphasizes the necessity of bringing colonial texts into
dialogue with the postcolonial, specifically by not totally rejecting a
curriculum that whitewashes the less savory elements of colonial culture for the
descendants of the colonizers. Though on one level such texts seek to justify
colonial history, on another they “could be seen as correcting or undoing
Western hegemony by actually defending it.” In other words, such texts can be an
excellent starting place for a discussion of views on colonialism and a bridge
to examining views of the colonized.
In “We All Belong: Inclusion in a Multicultural Literature Course,”
Jessica Peterson takes a different approach to the same theme of introducing a
postcolonial viewpoint to the classroom. Peterson focuses on inclusion of texts
from other cultures without focusing on differences. “Inclusive study of a
variety of texts fosters more acceptance and a shift to perspectives of
tolerance, rather than a focus on class and culture tensions and prejudices,”
she notes. While addressing cultural tension and prejudice in a classroom is an
admirable goal, Hacker’s approach of identifying those that exist and beginning
a dialogue between texts of the European canon and postcolonial texts seems to
be the more useful, if also more uncomfortable, approach. Peterson’s approach of
ignoring potential differences between cultures in favor of concentrating on
similarities seems to merely seek to redefine the “us” in the “us vs. them” or
self and other paradigm to include those writing from the postcolonial
perspective. This approach leads to the risk of attempting to assimilate
postcolonial cultures and voices into Western culture, rather than trying to
accept and acknowledge difference without automatically labeling it as inferior.
Amy Shanks touches on the problem of assimilation in her essay “The Self
and the Other Conflict.” As she points out, in Jamaica Kincaid’s novel
Lucy, the American family Lucy lives
with attempts to deal with Lucy’s differences by ignoring them. They ask Lucy to
think of herself a member of their family, but when their differences in
experience emerge, “The family soon realizes that Lucy ‘seemed not to be a part
of things’ and she is referred to as the ‘Visitor’ (13), revealing the
employer’s slip into a counter-perception of Lucy as the ‘other’ in reaction to
her behavior.” The “counter-perception” analysis in Shanks’ essay is
particularly revealing and interesting, as it implies that Lucy has first viewed
Mariah and her family as the “other.”
The imagining of Lucy, a postcolonial narrator, as the “self” the reader
identifies with is interesting, as most readers from the United States are not
used to identifying with a postcolonial character and seeing a white American
family as the “other.” In Shanks’s essay, Lucy as the “self” is compared with
Robinson Crusoe as the “self.” This comparison suggests that regardless of
differences in culture and experience, the self-other view is entirely
subjective, with either identity being applicable to both parties in any meeting
of cultures. It seems to merge the disparate views expressed in Peterson’s and
Hacker’s essays, by acknowledging how easy it is for all humans, regardless of
their respective differences in power, to either assimilate or dismiss what is
different from them.
II.
Essay
American Postcolonial Perspectives: Being Comfortable With Being Uncomfortable
Postcolonial literature is fascinating in that one of its primary
objectives is to offer a response, or in some cases a rebuttal, to what we tend
to think of as the literary canon—that is, to much of the literature written by
English men that deals with people and places that are not English or England.
What makes it a fascinating discipline is the same thing that also intimidates
some people as they begin to explore the discipline. When white Americans or
Europeans read Heart of Darkness,
Robinson Crusoe, or even The Secret
Garden as children, we identify with protagonists whose cultures and lives
are similar to our own. Their dealings with people who are different from us are
things we can often relate to from our own lives. However, postcolonial
literature challenges us to take on the viewpoint of a narrator whose life is
different from our own, and who may feel a great deal of hostility toward people
like us. We are used to seeking out similarities between ourselves and others
when we wish to identify with them, but postcolonial literature challenges us to
accept what makes us different without declaring that either way is superior to
the other.
The narrator in Jamaica Kincaid’s “A Small Place” is one that may
contribute to a reluctance of Americans to embrace postcolonial criticism.
Though the United States itself did not colonize Antigua, it is one of the
settler colonies of the country that did. Most U.S. citizens have nationalistic
pride derived in part from our split with Britain during the American
Revolution, but we still tend to identify more with Britain than with most other
nations, as we share a language and many traditions. Our shared language and
traditions do come under fire in “A Small Place,” as Kincaid condemns both the
English language as “the language of the criminal,” (94) and slavery, a shameful
tradition shared by both England and the U.S. America’s past as a nation of
slaveholders puts us uncomfortably within the sights of Kincaid’s criticism,
which is not necessarily aimed at us but is aimed at the same behavior American
citizens have been guilty of. She criticizes this past with the strongest
language imaginable, imagining herself destroying what the profits of slavery
built. She asks, “Do you ever wonder why some people blow things up? I can
imagine that if my life had taken a certain turn, there would be the Barclays
Bank, and there I would be, both of us in ashes. Do you ever try to understand
why people like me cannot get over the past, cannot forgive and cannot forget?
(93). Such a statement is particularly chafing to many Americans, who would like
to see our nation’s past sins forgiven and forgotten, especially by the
descendants of those who bore the brunt of those sins. Kincaid’s claim not only
that she and people like her do not want to forgive and forget, but cannot, is
challenging to America’s sense of nationalistic pride in what was also built
through slavery.
Kincaid’s novel Lucy is
similarly capable of forcing another viewpoint onto its readers, especially when
read in dialogue with Daniel Defoe’s
Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Crusoe
presents its readers with an Englishman with whom to identify, a mysterious
island for him to explore and to be wary of, and nearby natives who participate
in horrifying and barbaric activities and rituals. The protagonist Crusoe, who
flees a comfortable life in England against the advice of his parents, must
overcome his environment primarily through his devotion to Christianity, and
through that devotion is provided with a faithful native servant to convert and
befriend and, eventually, escape.
Crusoe frequently focuses on his superiority to the native people he encounters,
especially in relation to his fear of their cannibalism, and when he does for a
moment believe he would be the same as they are if he hadn’t been born in
Europe, he reflects that “we did not know by what light and law these should be
condemned; but that as God was necessarily, and by the nature of His being,
infinitely holy and just, so it could not be, but if these creatures were all
sentenced to absence from Himself, it was on account of sinning against that
light.” Regardless of Friday’s ability to observe theological gaps in Crusoe’s
explanations, and of the fact that Friday was easily converted to become a more
devout Christian than Crusoe himself, Crusoe justifies his superiority over
Friday through his superior knowledge of Christianity.
Centuries after Crusoe, Kincaid’s narrator Lucy finds herself in a very similar
situation. While Americans are quite used to the story of encountering strange
people and places, Lucy may be
startling because the strange people the narrator encounters are Americans, and
the strange place is our own country. Who is assigned each role in the
“self-other” relationship depends on who is telling the story, after all, and in
postcolonial literature we Americans are not the ones telling the story. We are
the “other,” this time, and though we are able to recognize our own best
intentions of connecting to people with different experiences than our own in
Mariah’s attempts to bond with and understand Lucy, we are also forced to
confront, through Lucy’s eyes, how difficult or impossible bridging gaps of
understanding can be.
That
both Crusoe and
Lucy are written as novels is a major
reason why both stories can be so uncomfortable for students of
postcolonialism—the interiority it gives readers forces us to consider both
Crusoe’s subjugation of Xury and Friday and Lucy’s judgment of the failings of
white American society from unfamiliar and sometimes painful viewpoints.
Considering how much upheaval is involved in colonial and postcolonial stories,
this genre of story is particularly apt for giving readers a vicarious
experience of the lives of narrators. Most of our narrators have departed from
traditional ways of life, leaving behind their original homes either as
colonizers in Robinson Crusoe and
The Man Who Would be King, or through
transnational migration in the case of
Lucy. The novel allows readers who might otherwise not be able to envision
such departures from tradition an insight into the modernity of the narrators’
lives.
George Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant” paints a picture of the difficulty
of establishing a bond of understanding between the colonizer and colonized,
this time from the colonizer’s point of view. The narrator in the story is
sympathetic to the plight of the colonized people in Burma. He says, “At that
time I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the
sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it the better. Theoretically—and
secretly, of course—I was all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors,
the British.” This viewpoint is easily understandable for most Americans, who
generally dislike oppression on a philosophical level as part of our national
identity. However, just as in the story, we frequently resent the hostility of
groups we oppress, which alters the way we act toward those people in our
day-to-day lives to the extent that we continue to behave as oppressors even as
we dislike our actions. Orwell expresses this internal conflict in the story, as
he says, “With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an
unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in saecula saeculorum, upon the
will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in
the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest’s guts.”
While still presenting the point of view of a colonizer, Orwell’s story
attempts to grapple with the colonial relationship in a way
Crusoe does not. The colonial
relationship automatically implies a power differential, regardless of whether
you accept the prevailing view that the colonial government wishes to exploit
the land and resources belonging to another group of people, or whether you take
the view that the colonizers are trying to help the colonized, as Rudyard
Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden” asserts. Neither view is particularly
flattering to the colonizer from today’s perspective, as the colonized are
completely dehumanized in the poem, which describes them as “Half devil and half
child,” and the colonized in stories like Kipling’s
The Man Who Would be King are
subjugated to fulfill the characters’ quest for power. Orwell recognizes the
overall futility of this relationship, and the way it dehumanizes both colonized
and colonizer. He writes, as the will of the crowd seems to push him to shoot
the elephant that he does not want to shoot, that though it seems he is the one
in control, “I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it
is his own freedom that he destroys. . . . For it is the condition of his rule
that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the ‘natives,’ and so in every
crisis he has got to do what the ‘natives’ expect of him.” Rather than being
free to act as Orwell, the individual, would act, he must act as an agent of the
powerful colonizer, which dehumanizes him nearly as much as the colonized
people.
The
narrator in Lucy notes this behavior
in Mariah as well. When Lucy decides to move out, Mariah no longer tries to
treat her as a friend and instead assigns her arbitrary rules to exert what
authority she has. Lucy notes, “It was a last resort for her—insisting that I be
the servant and she the master. She used to insist that we be friends, but that
had apparently not worked out very well; now I was leaving. The master business
did not become her at all, and it made me sad to see her that way” (143). Just
as Orwell is not able to act as he would like because of the circumstances he is
in, Mariah goes against her own nature, which would like to be Lucy’s friend, to
try to maintain the life she knows.
The
characters Daniel Dravot and Peachey Carnahan in
The Man Who Would be King encounter
the same problem, which leads to their downfall when they don’t fulfill the role
they established for themselves through their colonization of Kafiristan.
Through some luck involving their Masonic backgrounds, they are established in
the area almost as gods. As Peachey tells the narrator, “Dravot he was the King,
and a handsome man he looked with the gold crown on his head and all. Him and
the other party stayed in that village, and every morning Dravot sat by the side
of old Imbra, and the people came and worshipped.” Dravot is happy to fulfill
this role, which all of his actions have worked to achieve, but he doesn’t
remain happy because in some ways he still wishes to live like a normal man in
the society. Specifically, he wishes to take a wife, against the urging of his
friend Peachey, and Dravot reacts badly when the idea of his marrying one of his
female subjects is not immediately welcomed by his followers. When he is
attacked and bitten by the woman he planned to marry and bleeds from her bite,
the reaction of the crowd—cries from the priests of “Neither God nor Devil but a
man!”—illustrate the dangers inherent in the colonizer revealing its weaknesses
to the colonized in their attempts to live alongside one another.
The
admission of weakness or flaws by the oppressor is repeatedly depicted as
dangerous or impossible in colonial and postcolonial literature, and in my
opinion ties into American dislike or rejection of postcolonial literature. The
fear of losing dignity, power, or even life drives those who colonize or oppress
to defend a position they may despise but they find difficult to escape while
current power structures exist. Searching for a way to depart from those power
structures that require oppressor and oppressed, and to admit flaws and weakness
without the fear that we will lose the lives we are used to, could be the path
to understanding other people without the need for them to be just like us or to
be less human than we are.
III.
Research Proposal
I would like to pursue the research posts. This is primarily because I’m
interested in a particular subject raised by
Lucy that I encountered previously in
Jazz, by Toni Morrison. The video
clip we watched about the separation of India and Pakistan also touched on it.
I’m interested in how abortions and infanticide figure into the colonial and
postcolonial story. According to an essay from Angela Davis in
Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader,
the belief that black women knew how to end pregnancies through their knowledge
of herbs has been around since slavery, and tended to horrify white society. I
would like to explore this from a sociological and anthropological point of
view.
For my second post, I would like to explore the history of infanticide
and its relationship to postcolonialism. I’m less interested in infanticide as a
form of birth or population control than its history as an attempt to spare
children from the violent upheavals caused by colonialism. The video you showed
in class about the horrible violence during the massive migrations to India and
Pakistan is my main inspiration for this research topic.
