From: Ed Wiltse <ecwiltse-AT-naz.edu>
Subject: Re: poco rewrites/detective fiction
Date: Thu, 22 Jun 2000 13:20:55 -0400


Hi all,

In a course I came to think of as colonial-postcolonial ping-pong a few years
ago, I did some of the pairings Sangeeta has chosen (though I put Season of
Migration to the North with Heart of Darkness--worked very well).  I also did
Kipling's Kim with Midnight's Children (I know, Tristram Shandy is in many ways
the more logical antecedent, but I couldn't see flogging my undergrads through
it, and with the Kim-MC pairing you get a kind of unit on Imagining India).  When
you do Wide Sargasso Sea, I'd strongly recommend Judith Raiskin's new Norton
Critical ed. for its ancillary materials, particularly the bits from Rhys's
letters and essays, and of course the Gayatri-Benita exchange (more ping-pong!).
What's missing is some kind of brief, balanced introduction to obeah/vodou.
Raiskin's footnotes are pretty good, I think, but not enough.  Anyone have
suggestions for something short and accessible to undergrads?

More broadly, I wonder about the consequences of these courses, which seem to be
proliferating.  Eric's typically agent-provocateurish question about why "they"
can't come up with anything original, while obviously ironic, is nonetheless the
kind of thing my students might think to themselves (without irony).  Further,
such courses seem to encourage an even greater degree of globetrotting literary
tourism than a Postcolonial Novels course might, since the ping-pong class has to
keep going "back" to England before again venturing out into the periphery.  The
benefits of the course are obvious--you get to show not only the Empire writing
back and using the master's tools to (try to) dismantle his house, but also how
the "Western" tradition is always already in and inflected by cultural encounter
with its Others.  But it takes pretty skillful finessing of that latter idea to
avoid an overly simplistic "bad imperialist original vs. good poco rewrite"
structure to the course.  One thing one might do to complicate the equation would
be to pair some poco texts with other kinds of Western "originals"--say,
Kincaid's A Small Place with some travel brochures about Antigua--to show that
it's not simply the Western canon that poco writers must re/over/unwrite, but
entire discursive fields.  But I'd welcome other suggestions and responses.

And while I'm asking vague, rambling questions about pedagogy, I'd welcome a
discussion of the broader question of how to avoid the "positional superiority"
of the tourist or the ethnographer when teaching poco lit.  Last semester I did
an African novels class which was just about the only "non-Western" lit the
students in it had read or were likely to read in their 4 years here.  While I
worked like hell to ground each work in the historical, political and cultural
traditions from which it came, there was nonetheless an element of
culture-hopping (if this is week 10, we must be in Senegal...) which made me
profoundly uncomfortable.  The tempting alternative is to narrow the course
further--I'd love to teach the South African novel, for instance.  But then the
students graduate having had no exposure to Ngugi or Achebe or...  These are,
obviously, really big questions.  But maybe since it's summer here in the North,
there are some folks out there with a moment to discuss them in this forum?

Finally (I will shut up soon, I promise), on poco detective fiction, no one has
mentioned either Patrick Chamoiseau's Solibo Magnificent, which interrogates the
genre's assumptions about facts, clues, truth and blame in ways parallel to
Sherman Alexie's Indian Killer, or that BBC series about the British cop in
colonial Kenya, Heat of the Sun.  I'd be very interested to hear of other
detective fiction either set in or written in the colonial or postcolonial world,
or to discuss any of these texts.

Best,

Ed Wiltse

ps--when I tried Bombay Ice on Amazon, the other suggested titles they thought I
might like to buy included Bill James' British police procedurals and Suleri's
Meatless Days.  ah, hybridity...

sr42 wrote:

> Thanks everyone for the suggestions. I guess I was on the mark with the poco
> rewrites class.
>
> I will be teaching Conrad's heart of darkness--Roy's the God of Small Things
> (will talk about Achebe of course and woolf's Voyage to the North among
> other rewrites of the Conradian text)
>
> Jane Eyre--Wide sargasso sea
>
> robinson crusoe--Coetze's Foe (will talk about walcott and Lamming)
>
> Othello--and Philips' Nature of Blood
>
> I am playing with the idea of doing Wuthering heights and Conde's new
> rewrite but want to stay with English just for purposes of keeping the class
> under some kind of control
>
> And again might do Scarlet letter with Mukherjee's Holder of the World if I
> feel ambitious enough. Thanks for suggestions all and one.
>
> As for the Mystery/detective stuff--Recently in the popular domain there have
> been novels like Bombay Ice and the writer Paul mann who writes mysteries set
> in India with a whole cast of Indian characters. Paul mann is particularly
> interesting and problematic. I am interested in tracing this back to the
> rise of the detective novels in Victorian lit (Collins, dickens) and to
> Rudyard Kipling and then this new twist.
>
> I anyone knows of other such popular writers British, American or australian
> who write mystery novels set in India I would love to know.
>
> thanks again
>
> Sangeeta
>
> Sangeeta RAY
> Associate Professor
> Dept. of English
> Univ. of Maryland
> College Park MD 20740
> Email:Sangeeta_RAY-AT-umail.umd.edu (sr42)
> Phone: 301-405-3807
>
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--
***********************************************************
Ed Wiltse                            ecwiltse-AT-naz.edu
English Dept.                       ph: (716) 389-2646
Nazareth College                 fax: (716) 586-2452
Rochester, NY 14618         http://www-pub.naz.edu:9000/~ecwiltse/




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