Date: Tue, 15 Apr 1997 23:49:07 +0100
From: David Callahan <callahan-AT-mail.ua.pt>
Subject: Re: poco lit course readings


>Dear All,
>     I am in the process of setting up a course in postcolonial
>literature (grad level) and rather than rehash the same stuff we
>know as "canonical" for the field (Achebe, Rushdie, and so on), I'd
>like to invite the students to enter into a contested field that is in
>the process of being defined.

This worries me a bit.  Rushdie has been publishing for less than 20 years
and already he's considered old hat here, being marginalized on account of
being too central.  Achebe for around 40 years, hardly an eon.  There must
be reasons why these authors recur in the sort of course you are setting
up, although we don't know whether they are grad students who already know
something or even a lot about such things, in which case your option seems
sensible, albeit not quite for the reasons you offer, or whether they are
students who don't know so much, in which case your option seems a little
misplaced to me.  Surely there's space for all sorts of author, although
I'm not clear either on what your other type of author might be,
considering that Achebe and Rushdie are both very much part of "a contested
field that is in the process of being defined."  They in fact have done
some of the most significant contesting.  Without including such figures I
don't think such a course would be properly responsible to the issues you
want to tackle.  Moreover, contesting only makes sense in context;
contesting what?  Generally speaking postcolonial studies have contested
Eurocentric perspectives, but you seem to want to make postcolonial authors
contesting each other or assumed centralities in postcolonial studies the
focus of your course.  However, dealing with the "same old" authors will
lead to that anyway.  You can't go far with Achebe before getting into
issues generated by Chinweizu, Ngugi etc, and you can't go far in Rushdie
without getting into, well, practically every issue of significance in
postcolonial studies, not to mention contemporary culture as a whole.  So I
suppose this ramble would be a suggestion not to get too carried away with
revisionist zeal, not to throw the baby authors out with the bathwater of
familiarity.  But anyway, if you want texts that are not so familiar that
come at things from different angles, I endorse the suggestion of Duff, who
is an intensely contested figure in Aotearoa New Zealand, and yet in ways
that will be instantly available to your students, and also put forward my
own suggestion, that of Peter Carey's _The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith_,
which invents a whole fabular world of opposing/implicated cultural worlds,
one of which should certainly spark recognition among American students.

******************************************************************************
                 David Callahan  [callahan-AT-mail.ua.pt]

Departamento de Linguas e Culturas, Universidade de Aveiro,
3810, Aveiro, Portugal.        Home phone and fax: +351-34-26854




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