Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 17:46:36 EDT
Subject: Teaching postcolonial National literatures & other things


I apologize for the length of this post....
Greetings all:
I have been following the discussion of "activism" with interest. I felt as I 
read that the response to my query about the film "east is east" is also very 
much at work in the endless debate about the hypocrisy of postcolonial cum 
theoretical work. I was fascinated to see how many people wrapped themselves 
in various forms of truth...Bangladeshiness, for example even though 
Bangladeshi (Like Indian Vs Pakistani) identity is one with a fraught 
"naturalness" (a response to the default of Indian "independence," and/or a 
result of various elites' manipulation of the state apparatus after 
independence...etc. see Hamza Alavi's piece in NLR 72, I think..)
 
I don't think I wanted "correct representation" from "East is East" but a 
piece of art that went beyond description and moved into a kind of Lukacsian 
re-presentation + representation (where the latter is an open-ended narrative 
akin to Mouffe and Laclau's notion of democracy as an open-ended narrative). 
Zadie Smith's "White Teeth" is an interesting example of this, as someone 
mentioned. Seeing certain parochialisms in her own local "Black British" 
experience lead to the opening out into other Black British experiences and 
also white working class experiences. "East is east" seemed to only answer 
the flaccid liberal (Multi)cultural demand to confess the racial self. And I 
am not at all claiming that Smith's novel is more "correct" than the film's 
intervention. There are several misrepresentations of west Indian identity in 
the novel, for example.

Teaching
So for the first time I am teaching a survey course in Anglophone Caribbean 
literature. I find that the syllabus I come up with is woefully inadequate: 
everything is out of print. How can I (we) pretend to be teaching a tradition 
when we can only offer a disjointed partial sense of said tradition? My 
students cannot tackle Edgar Mittleholzer, most of Naipaul etc. The best I 
can offer is Claude Mckay (1930s) followed by the tremendous chronological 
leap to Marshall's "The Chosen people" (1960s). There are of course valuable 
sources like Allison Donnell's fabulous collection, but even it exerts a 
great deal of stuff (not a criticism, since the task of her reader was 
tremendous and was meant to answer precisely the problem that I am babbling 
about here).
This seems to be one place to think through the 
"relevance/value/activism:theoreticism/etc" of postcolonial as an 
institutional entity. And don't get me started on Anglophone African 
Literature....
Isn't it odd (and maybe problematic) that most of the fabulous critical 
essays we churn out (many of which are driven by an ethical claim on our 
audience--and by extension our students as implied audience--which we glean 
from the text at hand) are on texts that our students cannot read 'cause 
they're out of print/not available in the US...(wicombe, nongena, echewa, 
Tlali, nwapa, Khane, Farah, etc...)

I realize that this may not apply to folks in "the Commonwealth."

Here endeth my missive.

Joe Clarke


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