File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_2000/postcolonial.0006, message 110


From: "Lisa Greenstein" <greenstein-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: poco rewrites/detective fiction
Date: Fri, 23 Jun 2000 08:26:49 GMT


Hi all

What about looking at po-co responses to their po-co predecessors? I'm 
thinking here of Schreiner's Story of an African Farm.  Which seems to me to 
resist an appropriating colonial vision of "Africa", but then also gets 
written back to in, say, In the Heart of the Country, which resists (or 
revises) Schreiners map?


>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.  ...--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 eaching 
>>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

Um, just a thought: what kind of teaching methodology were you using?  I've 
noticed that the lecturers most likely to rattle the paradigms of *us 
undergrads* are those who get us to do the work - not only to give 
researched presentations, but, quite importantly, to investigate what 
personal political history we were bringing to bear on the material at 
hand..

Just a thought from an *undergrad* with some dubious teaching experience
Lisa g
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