Dispatches from the Colony

“We all attempt to live on the surface, where we assume we will be less lonely, whereas experience is of the depths and is dictated by what we really fear and hate and love as distinguished from what we think we ought to fear and hate and love.”

“This Nettle, Danger…,” 687

“I’m not interested in anybody’s guilt. Guilt is a luxury that we can no longer afford. I know you didn’t do it, and I didn’t do it either, but I am responsible for it because I am a man and a citizen of this country and you are responsible for it, too, for the very same reason: As long as my children face the future they face, and come to the ruin that they come to, your children are very greatly in danger, too. They are endangered above all by the moral apathy that pretends it isn’t happening. This does something terrible to us.”

– “Words of a Native Son,” 707

I just read Citizen: An American Lyric and I was struck by the urgency with which it touched me, made me want to handle it, read it again as if I had never experienced her words. There was so much truth in this book that, for a moment, I didn’t understand that it was not written just for me.

Not long ago you are in a room where someone asks the philosopher Judith Butler what makes language hurtful. You can feel everyone lean in. Our very being exposes us to the address of another, she answers. We suffer from the condition of being addressable.
—
For so long I thought the ambition of racist language was to denigrate and erase me as a person, but after considering Butler’s remarks I begin to understand myself as rendered hyper-visible in the face of such language acts. Language that feels hurtful is intended to exploit all the ways that I am present. My alertness, my openness, my desire to engage my colleague’s poem, my colleague’s words, actually demands my presence, my looking back at him. So here I am looking back, talking back and, as insane as it is, saying, please.

(Page numbers forthcoming)

Hilary Mantel, when describing how she writes, refers to a passage near the beginning of her earlier novel Beyond Black, about a performing medium, Alison:

She takes a breath, she smiles, and she starts a peculiar form of listening. It is a silent sensory ascent; it is like listening from a stepladder, poised on the top rung; she listens at the ends of her nerves, at the limit of her capacities. When you’re doing platform work, it’s rare that the dead need coaxing. The skill is in isolating the voices, picking out one and letting the others recede.

“6 Scholars Who Are ‘Reimagining Black Politics’: There’s a world of urgent discourse beyond Dyson, West, and Gates.”

From Robin D.G. Kelley:
I don’t play pundit because I’m not interested in ‘influencing popular opinion’ if it means sacrificing analytical rigor. Our job as intellectuals is to ask the hard questions, interrogate inherited categories, take nothing as self-evident, and go to the root of the problem. That includes the work of addressing contemporary social crises. I’m concerned that if we persist in conflating relevance with popular, the form, or rather the forum, will become our main concern.

Thoughts?

I gave a conference paper on (Re)Mapping the Black Atlantic at DePaul University in 2013. It was on the anniversary of Paul Gilroy’s seminal work The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness. I spoke on Sam Selvon’s short novel The Lonely Londoners and the idea of a desiring language – one that Frantz Fanon named as the urgency of ‘reciprocal recognitions.’ The conference paper was published just a month ago in African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal, a British journal.

The full-text of the article is here!
“The imperfect longing: Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners and the dance of doubt.”

One of my favorite seminars to teach at Hampshire is a close study of the contemporary European novel. Of course, I have to be very selective and attend to the limitations on text length imposed by a 14-week semester. Each time that I have offered this seminar, I switch up the novels. It keeps me on my toes and it also energizes me around new subtexts emerging from European literature. I always begin with Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia. Students can immediately engage with Karim Amir’s announcement that he is “…a funny kind of Englishman.”

We’ve moved around quite a bit in this seminar since 2009. Michel Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles. Caryl Phillips’s Foreigners. Andrea Levy’s Small Island. Christoph Ransmayr’s The Last World. W.G Sebald’s The Immigrants. David Grossman’s See Under: Love.

The current reading list for the seminar has been quite stable. Apart from Kurieshi’s novel, I’ve included  Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher, Imre Kertész’s Fatelessness, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Orhan Pamuk’s The White Castle. 

Future novelists that I want to include will expand what we  understand as European literature. In this case, I am thinking about the paucity of women writings in the seminar. One of my lazy reasons relies on the extravagant page count of many novels by women writing Europe:  Zadie Smith, A.S. Byatt, Sarah Waters, Anita Desai, for example. In the next offering, the seminar will focus on how women writers conceive of Europe. This brings me into territories that allows a deeper historical sensibility to emerge – one that is gendered, raced and classed.

The language must be careful and must appear effortless. It must not sweat. It must suggest and be provocative at the same time. It is the thing that black people love so much—the saying of words, holding them on the tongue, experimenting with them, playing with them. It’s a love, a passion. Its function is like a preacher’s: to make you stand up out of your seat, make you lose yourself and hear yourself. The worst of all possible things that could happen would be to lose that language. There are certain things I cannot say without recourse to my language. It’s terrible to think that a child with five different present tenses comes to school to be faced with those books that are less than his own language. And then to be told things about his language, which is him, that are sometimes permanently damaging. He may never know the etymology of Africanisms in his language, not even know that “hip” is a real word or that “the dozens” meant something. This is a really cruel fallout of racism.
“The Language Must Not Sweat,” Toni Morrison (New Republic, March 21, 1981)

Thanks to my colleague Dr. Sonya Donaldson for bring this this passage to me.

2014 – 2015

Fall 2014 100 Level – Reading Generically: Modern Short Prose (Tutorial)

Fall 2014 High 100 level – Disturbing the Peace: Baldwin, Morrison, and a Black Literary Tradition

Spring 2015 100 Level – Representing Reality: The Literature of Kleist and Kafka

Spring 2015 200 Level - The Idea of Europe: Readings in the 20th Century Novel

2015-2016

Fall 2015 100 Level - Writing from the Diaspora: Readings in Contemporary Women’s Fiction

Fall 2015 200 level - Reading Generically: Weird Fictions

Spring 2016 100 Level - An Introduction to Literary Studies: 20th Century Caribbean Literature

Spring 2016 300 level - Fictional Systems: Narrative Frustration

This is an article that was published in 2012 after a truly rigorous peer review process.

Identity as Cultural Production in Andrea Levy’s Small Island

Abstract:
Andrea Levy’s Small Island (2004) presents a counter-history of the period before and after World War II (1939-1945) when men and women from the Caribbean volunteered for all branches of the British armed services and many eventually immigrated to London after the war officially ended in 1945. Her historical novel moves back and forth between 1924 and 1948 as well as across national borders and cultures. Levy’s novel, written more than fifty years after the first Windrush arrival, creates a common narrative of nation and identity in order to understand the experiences of Black people in Britain. Small Island—structured around four competing voices whose claims of textual, personal and historical truth must be acknowledged—refuses to establish a singular articulation of the experience of migration and empire. In this essay, I focus on discrete moments in the “Prologue” in Levy’s Small Island in order to think through the formation of discursive identity through the encounter with others and the necessity of accommodating difference. Small Island forecloses the possibility of addressing modern multiculturalism as a purported ‘happy ending’ in light of Levy’s formulation of the Windrush moment as disruptive, violent, and overwhelmed by flawed characters. Yet, through the space of writing, she also invites the reader to experience moments of encounter and negotiate the often competing claims on nationhood, citizenship, and culture.