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Student Midterm submissions 2015 (2015 midterm assignment) |
LITR 5831 World Literature |
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Jeanette Smith
Midterm Part I
Avoiding
the “Blame Game” in Colonial/Post-Colonial Studies
As I have pursued my literary studies, I have found that with each new
study, I bring questions with me. Colonial-Post Colonial studies has proven to
be no different. The central question that I brought to this class was “Who is
the villain and who is the victim?” as it pertains to the colonizers and the
colonized. As I began to read some
of the previous class posts, I realized that other students have asked the same
question.
For instance, in Ryan Smith’s 2011 research post “Through and Beyond
Evil,” he helped me understand that my question is one that is not answered
easily. In his post, he states that “One is tempted to use the labels “victim”
and “villain” with too little restraint, marking what we do and do not approve
of.” As I read his essay in its entirety, I began to reexamine my pre-conceived
ideas about colonizers and started thinking for the first time about their
motives. I knew when I entered this course that I disapproved of the act of
colonization. The stories of racism and brutalities against the colonized had
always disturbed me.
Ryan acknowledges in his essay that novels such as
Robinson Crusoe demonstrate the
racism and brutalities of the colonizers. He
goes on to say that Crusoe’s “white supremacy” attitude is prevalent throughout
the book. But he also states that there are moments in the novel when “Crusoe
approaches something like tolerance and even respect of another culture” which
Ryan claims may invoke the reader to sympathize with Crusoe.
He brings up a point that I think is
noteworthy: “When we move past judging Crusoe with the black and white
dichotomies of good and evil, we can explore the actual meaning behind
such a character.”
The idea of moving past judgement to exploring meaning is brought up
again by Ryan when he talks about Lucy.
He claims that she is portrayed as a victim (though he says her victimization is
not direct) since she suffers “race and class restrictions which reduce her
choices and limit possibilities.” Despite
her victim status through much of the book, Ryan states that Lucy also
displays “raw honesty, making her prone to hurt people, even (or especially)
those she cares about.” This, he argues, “in addition to her imprudent sexual
explorations” makes Lucy appear as villainous as her colonizers. He ends his
essay with a powerful observation: “When we read these texts in a way that
points not to individual villainy, and the victimization of a single person, we
start to see the villainy of entire systems: modes of thinking, economic and
foreign policies, religious and social biases—all are implied.”
Next, In Paula Tyler’s 2009 research post “The
Discovery of Self through History and Relationships,” she, like Ryan, also
discusses Robinson Crusoe and
Lucy. But her focus is on how both
Crusoe and Lucy share a bond of unhappiness and a fractured sense of self. She
quotes from A Small Place: “The
people in a small place cannot give an exact account, a complete account, of
themselves” (Kincaid 53). Paula claims this “creates a disillusionment of self,
of the life a person lives, and their place in their world.”
She perceives Lucy as someone who
“desperately wanted to be her own person, not an echo of her mother” and brings
up the idea that Lucy felt that her homeland of Antigua was “an unbearable
prison” (Kincaid 95) in which she was compelled to escape. This idea of home as
a prison brought to mind Crusoe who also felt the need to escape the stifling
environment of his homeland. Paula suggests that Crusoe and Lucy were having a
shared identity crisis. She suggests that “The more land he [Crusoe] owns, the
bigger his kingdom is, the more money he has, the happier he will be, but in the
end, he is just as disappointed as Lucy, trying to find their selves in the
world, but never quite being fulfilled.”
This idea of escaping from unhappiness and searching for personal
fulfillment is something that is able to generate sympathy, which in turn,
removes some of the “villainy” of their calloused actions.
Finally, in Susanne Allen’s 2011
essay “Self and Other – A Journey Home,” she, too, uses examples from
Robinson Crusoe and
Lucy. She confirms what I have
discovered from reviewing the other web posts – that “the fight is not
against colonization, it is against self and how one defines the other and what
it means to be a child of a new emerging culture that is slowly defining itself.”
Her essay helped me to see that the conflicts within colonization are not just
external, but internal. She claims that “the characters of Lucy and
Crusoe both flee their homeland only to find that the new place quickly becomes
just like the old place.” It is her opinion that Lucy is not actually trying to
escape colonized Antigua, but “is merely fleeing the dysfunctional maternal
relationship with her mother.” This is interesting, but I believe that her
mother represents Antigua, so by escaping her mother, she is escaping her
colonized homeland and the pain associated with it.
The most interesting statement from Paula came when she wrote: “The
‘other’ is not always the enemy of the self. It
can be a tool to self-awareness and acceptance.”
I understand more clearly after
reading these posts the importance of keeping an open mind as I read the course
texts. Ryan’s words keep returning
to me: “The lines are blurred
between villain and victim, with the focus instead on why characters are the way
they are, and what is implied by their thoughts and actions in relation to
postcolonial studies.” Ryan’s essay
concludes with blaming “the entire system,” but I wonder if we can even blame
them. This leaves me with the conclusion that with knowledge comes
understanding, and with understanding, perhaps, even a little sympathy. My hope
is that as I continue my Colonial/Post-Colonial studies that I will learn even
more ways to avoid the “blame game.”
******************************************************************
Jeanette Smith
Midterm Part II
Essay
Dialogue:
The Method of Creating Meaning in Colonial/Post-Colonial Texts
Reading Colonial/Post-Colonial texts has proven to be both interesting
and challenging at the same time, particularly since I have read so little of
both before this class. What I knew of Colonialism, I learned from history books
or films which made colonization seem like an adventure.
Before this class, literature about Colonialism did not hold much appeal
for me. I had already made up my mind that the very act of colonizing was
immoral and that all colonizers were bullies, seeking power and financial gain
over those they considered their inferiors. I sympathized with the colonizers. A
particular text that deeply affected me was Dee Brown’s
Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee, a
tragedy told from a Native American’s point of view. The novel describes the
horrors inflicted upon the native population by the American colonizers.
I became convinced that the colonized
were victims and the colonizers were villains, no matter the geographical
location. It could be North America or India. It was all the same to me. After
reading Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee,
I realized that the novel was a powerful tool that could be used as an
instrument to transform a reader’s opinion of the world. This novel affected me
in such a way that I became both empathetic and judgmental - empathetic with
those I perceived as victims and judgmental toward those I perceived as
villains. My thinking has remained unchanged for many years until this course.
Reading both Colonial and Post-Colonial
texts together clearly reveal the schisms that have been created between the
colonizer and the colonized (the villain and the villain) who are described in
this course as the “self” and the “other.” In the Colonial texts I have read so
far in this class, I was not surprised to notice that the colonizers see
themselves as superior to the “other” in order to justify the act of
colonization. For instance, the narrator in our first Colonial text,
Robinson Crusoe, views the “other” as nothing more than a naked savage. In
The Man Who Would be King, Daniel and
Peachey call the native people “beggars.” And the narrator in “Shooting an
Elephant” labels the colonized Indians “evil-spirited little beasts.”
Since these texts are told from a first-person point of view, a reader
may be inclined to sympathize with the colonizers.
In Jamaica Kincaid’s Post-Colonial novel
Lucy, also told in first person, the
another voice emerges – that of the transnational “colonized” Lucy who carries
with her to America all of the bitterness she feels as being viewed as the
“other.” In the novel, Kincaid reveals
how crippling anger can be as Lucy fights racism and marginalization in the New
World of her colonizers. This anger also appears in Kincaid’s
A Small Place when the narrator
labels the British colonizers of Antigua “criminals.” If these modern texts are
read in isolation, the reader may feel empathetic with Lucy and label the
colonizers as villains as I did when I read the Brown novel many years ago.
Despite the evidence of “self” and “other” antagonisms in both the old
and new canon texts, when they are read together instead of in isolation, a
dialogue emerges which accomplishes a remarkable thing - it creates a type of
fusion of the “self” with the “other.” Ryan Smith mentions in his 2011 research
post “Through and Beyond Evil” that the lines between villain and victim become
blurred when these type of texts are read together, forcing readers to reexamine
their former prejudices.
I believe that one of the fusions of the texts already read in class is
the mutuality of dissatisfaction and feelings of “lostness.” These feelings are
experienced by both the colonizers and the colonized.
For instance, Crusoe laments that the
plague of mankind is to not be satisfied with their lot in life. He is
dissatisfied with his predictable “middle” status back in England. Likewise,
Daniel and Peachey are dissatisfied with their post-military life in India but
don’t want to return home to England either. Additionally,
the narrator in “Shooting an Elephant” claims that he, like the others, is
caught between his hatred of “the empire” and his hatred of the colonized. They
all suffer from Crusoe’s plague.
When read in dialogue with Lucy,
I realized that the colonized (Lucy) also suffers from the same sickness as the
colonizers. She is lost and disillusioned, at home in neither Antigua nor in
America:
“If
only I could cross the vast ocean…a change…would banish forever the things I
most despised.” She, like the colonizing men, feels
like “I was lying there in a state of no state.” The narrator in
A Small Place expresses the same when
she says that she feels orphaned, like one with “no motherland, no fatherland.”
I realized that these feelings of
dissatisfaction and lostness cross cultural lines and help to unify these
diverse texts. In addition, I found myself generating a new understanding of the
way I viewed the “self” and “other” - judging less and sympathizing more with
all of the characters that I have encountered.
Lucy displays some of the same selfish attitudes as the male characters
in Colonial texts. She is capable at times of being both the “self” and the
“other.” In the same way, I began
to see the colonizers as being victims of a failed system, not just cold-hearted
brutes. I may not have come to this realization if these texts were not read in
dialogue with one another.
For me, seeing the dialogue created between Colonial and Post-Colonial
literature has not lessened my respect for the old canon authors such as Defoe,
Kipling, and Orwell but has, surprisingly, caused me to hold them in even higher
regard as I observe their timeless representations of human nature in their
writings. If modernity is about constant change and a departure from traditional
values, then all of the texts that I have read so far reflect, in some degree,
modernity because of the way that the characters become disillusioned with
traditional values which cause them to adopt a new way of life.
As I considered the importance of this course, I thought of the in-class
article, “John Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism” and how the editors
claim that Post-Colonial Studies “replaces one problematic with another.” They
suggest that the traditional Western (old canon) views found in literature need
to be criticized, or even replaced, by more modern views. But this theory
doesn’t allow for real discourse to occur between the old and new canon
literature. That is why I believe that a course such as
Colonial/Post-Colonialism is crucial today. It is doubtful that changes of
thought will happen unless there is a dialogue between the traditional and
modern literary texts.
In conclusion, I have begun to ask myself the question “How will I extend
my learning beyond this course?” My goal is now to strive to enrich the lives of
my multicultural 7th grade writing students by incorporating
intertextuality into the classroom. I
have observed my students fighting their own daily “culture wars” as they
struggle to assimilate into American culture. I am convinced that they see me at
times as the “colonizer” – someone who does not understand their marginalization
in American society. My students are children of Mexican and Central American
immigrants, Asian immigrants, and African-Americans. Their diversity makes me
desire to get a literary dialogue going in the classroom with the inclusion of
more multicultural writers. By reading diverse texts together instead of in
isolation, I hope to create a dialogue within the classroom that will generate
within my students a better understanding of themselves and hopefully those they
consider to be outside of their world.
******************************************************************
Jeanette Smith
Part
III
Midterm Research Proposal
I am
interested in doing two research posts, both on the representation of the island
in the Colonial/Post-Colonial novel. I am intrigued with the idea that the
island appears to represent much more than a body of land; it appears, in a
sense, to be a “mother” to the “children” who call it their home. While reading
Robinson Crusoe, I became interested
in this idea, and I became even more interested after reading
Lucy. A dialogue between these two
texts is the starting point for my research.
Although I am still in the early stages, I think I may be able to break my
research into two parts – either by the two texts mentioned above or perhaps by
two different representations of the “mother.” I see the islands of both Crusoe
and Lucy portrayed in both positive and negative lights (as a mother often is),
so I may be able to use this as point of separation for the two posts.
Another concept that I may be able to bring into my essay is the treatment of
the “mother” by the colonizers. Would it be wise to join this idea along with
the earlier idea into one essay? If yes, then this might also be a point of
separation for the two research posts. I would appreciate your suggestions.
