Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2000 09:43:14 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Re: Teaching postcolonial National literatures & other things


On Mon, 14 Aug 2000 Clarkejnc-AT-aol.com wrote:

> I apologize for the length of this post....
> 
> 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...)
> 
> Joe Clarke
> 
I heartily second Joe's plaint.  Maybe here's where some theory and
activism (of a kind) can come together.  I've been moaning about the
absence of decent critical editions of frequently taught African texts at
the African Literature Association, trying to get people interested in
putting together a list of primary texts to edit.  But, as Joe says, the
rules of the academic game mean that for most of us, editing texts doesn't
"count"--the "fabulous critical essays" do.  Working for other people
(producing tools for others to use) is less highly valued than carving out
a solo career.  It's a real shame--not just in the sense of being a pity,
but that it's actually shameful.  Surely this is one of the most obvious
roles for postcolonial intellectuals in the teaching machine (or whatever
you want to call us)--to provide and/or facilitate access to primary texts
from beyond our students' parochial, mainstream boundaries.   
At the moment there are a few texts translated from French with some
critical apparatus published by CARAF out of Virginia, there's a
Heinemann special of _Things Fall Apart_, there's an OUP Classics
version of _The Story of an African Farm_, and there are scholarly
versions of some of the African epics, but there's nothing like the
Norton Critical Edition series on any African text (though I believe
there may be an _African Drama_ in the pipeline).  It may not be
revolutionary exactly, but isn't this something we can change if we act
collectively, get organized? . . .
Simon

 Simon Lewis
Lewiss-AT-cofc.edu
Department of English College of Charleston 66 George Street
Charleston SC, 29424-0001
Tel: 843-953-1993; Fax: 843-953-3180





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