Month: November 2013

In “Decolonizing the mind”, Ngugi wa Thiong’o  presents a reflection about how the English language and academia built on Kenya a way of perceiving the world through the eyes of the British culture and imperialist language.

The text structure addresses different stages. After a brief introduction about the topic, the author explains his own experience remembering how in his natal place and his home, he used the Gĩkũyũ language and it works for every single aspect of his everyday life, including oral stories that identify him with his community. Later, the appearance of the colonial language, the English, transforms his life completely since in the school he has to learn a new code, a new structure and a new culture since the books that the British brings are those that represent the European values. The reflection take him to analyze the importance of the language for building the culture and how the language is culture itself for three reasons: 1) the culture is product and reflection of human beings communicating with each other; 2) language as culture is as an image-forming agent in the mind of the child; 3) culture transmits those images of the world and reality through the written and spoken language (1134). In that order of ideas, when the English language is imposed in Africa, the African culture is submitted to the English culture.

Thiong’o notices that this process is more clear in the writing language, where the child can not express his or herself in an emotional way, but the writing becomes a “cerebral activity” (1135), since the school language is not related with the language of home.

The article turns to question aloud what to do to decolonize the mind of children that have received or are receiving classes about European literature and not African in English language. The conclusion is a “quest for relevance”, process in which Thiong’o wants “to look for at it far as relates, not to just the writing of literature, but to teaching of that literature [African literature] in schools and universities and to the critical approaches” (1138). So he summarize discussions about how to propose the African literature as centre and not periphery of the literary education, and how this literature should nurture from the others literatures. He even mentions that Indian, Caribbean and Latin American literature should be add to the academic programs since they share a lot of things in common.

Thiong’o extract make me think about how the education I received also perpetuated colonial ideas. For instance, when I study my B.A. in Literature in Universidad Nacional, many of the professors who taught me had obtained their Masters and PhD in French universities. For that reason their classes cover a lot of European literature but, over all, French literature. For instance, the Literary Theories that I took were specific studies about one or two authors, some of them were Barthes, Lukács, Goldman, Saussure, Ubersfeld, Bourdieu, Gennete, a little of Benjamin, who is not French but German (but we read his text about Baudelaire) and Bahtin. Actually, I did not receive much information about North American or British theorists (perhaps Raymond Williams and Northrop Frye), but almost nothing about Latin American approaches. Literature classes were about Colombian, Latin America and Spain; but we also had these group of classes called “Universal Literature”, and this classes were about important authors of the world in different historic moments but we did not read Li-po, Chinua Achebe or Tagore, we read Dante, Bocaccio, Flaubert, Dostojevski, Kafka, Ionesco…  European authors. I think is important to recognize when my professors studied their B.A., during the 1970’s and 1980’s, many of them studied in the very same Universidad Nacional, a public university deeply politicized to the left, so the United States were seen like the epitome of the “yankee imperialism”, and not many students look for North American universities to complete their graduate education. I do not know about Canada, but probably it was not seen with good eyes. So the majority of students, who later would be professors in this university, saw Europe, but over all France, as the possible place where they can improve their knowledge.

Anyway, the theoretical perspectives I received from my professors were, in its majority, the French perspectives. I can not say these perspectives are not interesting or not useful to analyze or criticize literary texts, but after reading Thiong’o I think I would like to have learned not only North American. African, Asian approaches, but, more important, Latin American theoretical approaches for analyzing Colombian and Latin American literature. I do not know how is the Literature program currently, I supposed it have changed since there are new professors, new times, new reflections, and a new relationship with the North American academia, since many students, including me, have come to US or Canada for obtaining post graduate titles (the brain drain that perhaps is a new form of colonialism in the academy, but this is other topic).

So far I do not know much about Latin American literary theories, I think is one of my task as student to get to know them. Actually, one of the my conclusions of these postcolonial readings is that is really important for me to know some of them. Just checking online, I found the “Grupo Latinoamericano de estudios Subalternos”, headed by Walter Mignolo, inter alia, and the “Grupo modernidad/colonialidad” headed by Anibal Quijano and also by Mignolo, authors or theories that we will not be able to read or analyze in the course, since we have not enough time of it, but I am really eager to read.

Perhaps, under the light of these postcolonial readings and thoughts, in the future this Introduction to Literary Theory course could include Latin American theoretical approaches. I know time is short but maybe if they are included would help to some students from Hispanic or French Graduate studies to think about their projects. Maybe?

I know is not related (or is it?) with our topic of the week, but I found this great definition of ideology, one of the terms we probably will have to define in our exam.  Here, a commentary by Zizek about the movie “They live”, in the film The perverts guide to ideology, where the philosopher and the director Sophie Fiennes deepen in how Hollywood maintains the ideology (I would really like to watch this movie before the exam!)

Have a nice weekend!

I know is not related (or is it?) with our topic of the week, but I found this great definition of ideology, one of the terms we probably will have to define in our exam.  Here, a commentary by Zizek about the movie “They live”, in the film The perverts guide to ideology, where the philosopher and the director Sophie Fiennes deepen in how Hollywood maintains the ideology (I would really like to watch this movie before the exam!)

Have a nice weekend!

I really enjoyed this week’s reading I think that like gender and feminist studies and theory ethnic literary and cultural studies really talk about current and important issues. One of the things that stood out to me was a quote by Haney Lopez, which stated “Race may be American’s single most confounding problem, but the confounding problem of race is that few people seem to know what race is”(966) I think this really describes much of the racial discrimination and problems. One of the reasons why it is so hard to define “Race” is because race its self is not a biological aspect but a social construct Lopez mentions that: “the referents of terms like Black and White are social groups, not genetically distinct branches of human kind” (966). That is why the personal example Lopez gives of him and his brother and how both are half Salvadorian and half Irish but he considers himself Latino but his brother identifies more with the Anglo side of the family. Showing that race really is a construct and the individual plays a role in defining himself. Yet self-definition of what race is not the only thing that defines what race we are but also other social aspects. Lopez highlights that the law has always influenced our concept of race he says “law serves not only to reflect but to solidify social prejudice making law a prime instrument in the construction and reinforcements of racial subordination”(965) Like the Hudgins V. Wright who decided how to determine some one’s race and set a precedent for the future. Another thing that caught my attention was the notion of the time when Irish became white how they passed form not being discriminated to being part of the white supremacist culture. Showing how this is a constructed idea and can change (maybe someday we will all become part of it). But why doesn’t it change? Well Fishkin says that the reason is that everyone overvalues “whiteness” not just white people but everyone and reminds me of many racist comments Spanish people say and how they overvalue whiteness (of course here I’m overgeneralizing). But in conclusion because race is constructed it can also be deconstructed and this should be our aim to have a race-less world (and genderless too).

It seems like racial problems discussed more intensely within the border of United States where multicultures  separate as well as blend in this land. Ian F. Haney Lopez gave an definition about “race”: it’s “a vast group of people loosely bound together by historically contient, socially significant elements of their morphologie and /or ancestry”. Moreover, “Race is neither an essence nor an illusion, but rather an ongoing, contradictory, self-reinforcing, plastic process subject to the macro forces of social and political struggle and the micro effects of daily decisions.” Indeed it needs a social and historical background to support the existence of race, if the colonial settlement never occured, there would be less conscern about the race.

I got the concept of race since junior high school by reading the powerful speech of “I have a dream” by Martin Luther King, the leader in African-American Civil Rights Movement. The movement has great influence on political aspect, because the legislation finally admit the equal rights among whites and blacks. it is a great victory in the history, but what about literature?

Toni Morrison provides us an perspective that the White population takes an “Africanist” presence for granted. She firstly has an assumption as a reader, and finds out that blacks made no appearance in the imagination of white American writers. Then she began to read as a writer, and she came to realize that “the subject of the dream is the dreamer”, “an extraordinary meditation on the self”. A case in point is Willa Cather’s Sapphira and the slave girl, where shows exactly how Americans choked in representation of an Africanist presence. For Morrison, the slave girl Nancy is a fugitive within the household but the identity of a white woman triggers moral debate. Sappira too is a fugitive in this novel commited to escape. The final fugitive is the the novel itself, which escapes from the pages of fiction into nonfiction. The whole “escape” process proves that the neglection of blacks among the creation of the american writers. Intendedly or unconsciously, this circumstances isn’t it a another form of inequality in literature?

Politically or literally, it seems to me that, whether Africans or Acians, the groups of people that loosely bound together all have the same purpose to identify the group they are situate, and to urge for the same rights and same attentions as the dominating group in the multicutural society.

I found this week to be one of the most diverse groups of readings that we have encountered, and I really enjoyed that we were able to investigate articles on “whiteness,” as it’s called in several articles, as well texts that focus on black/African-American, Chicano and Asian-American theoretical principles.

A common theme that I saw throughout the readings, particularly the second half of the readings for this week, was that many of the authors, like other authors we’ve seen in studying other types of theory, adopted a personal approach.  Some described their lives as they lived them, growing up in the United States, such as Anzaldua does.  Others took literature and examined it, compiling other writers’ experiences to make their points.  I found it interesting, however, that almost all of the authors in this week’s readings come from the same ethnic background about which they are writing.  I found it even more interesting that in her article, Toni Morrison makes the illusion that this may be detrimental to her (and by inference, other writers’) credibility: “I am vulnerable to the inference here that my inquiry has vested interests; that because I am African-American and a writer I stand to benefit in ways not limited to intellectual fulfillment from this line of questioning: (Rivkin and Ryan 1000).

It is an interesting point, but it brings me back to what Fishkin says in her article: that sometimes when people of another ethnicity borrow stories from from each other, they may distort them.

I immediately thought of an article I recently read (even though it was published in 2011) about the bestselling book The Help, and how author Kathryn Stockett allegedly stole a significant amount of biographical information from her brother’s family’s maid, Abilene (who even shares the same name as the protagonist in the book, though the spelling is changed to Abileen).  Abilene argued (and Stockett’s brother even agreed) that Stockett garnered a bunch of private information without her consent then refused to pay her royalties.  The case was ultimately dismissed, but it was an example of how one woman’s life story was transformed into a tale of whites helping blacks.  Abilene’s laywer ultimately argued that “The Help’s big appeal is to white people. It makes them feel good because it’s about a white woman who reaches across the racial divide to help poor black servants.”

This caters perfectly to Fisher’s point, and as such, I think it’s important to address the second half of Morrison’s quote from the beginning of this post.  She does stand to benefit, it’s true, but then she writes the following: “I will have to risk the accusation because the point is too important.” (My italics)

Yes, sometimes writers stand to benefit from their own writings.  But in the case of injustice, surely the person who stands to benefit should be just as reputable in their coming forward, if not more so.  Inequality is too important an issue to ignore, and who better to address it than those that are treated unfairly?  Nobody understands their own history better than someone who’s lived it personally.

In “The Social Construction of Race”, Lopez discusses the ideas of race and how they came to be. Lopez argues that race does not biologically differentiate humans since “there are no genetic characteristics possessed by all black but not by non-blacks; similarly there is no gene or cluster of genes common to all Whites but not to all non-Whites” (967). Race is not a construction of biology or a natural assertion, but a cultural and social construction, a method to establish a hierarchical system. Lopez says, “ race is neither an essence nor an illusion, but rather an ongoing, contradictory, self-reinforcing, plastic process subject to the macro forces of social and political struggle and the micro effects of daily decisions” (966).  This is a quote I found very important in pointing out the fact that race is merely socially constructed and not biological. In addition to that, it is hard to categorize a group of people based on physical features. Skin color, he says, “differs greatly among persons of the same race, even among Anglo-Saxons, ranging by imperceptible gradations from the fair blond to the swarthy brunette…” (968). Indeed, the affiliation of skin pigment or hair color with race; classifying people according to skin-tone is something impossible to achieve. For example Lopez also talked about the case Ozawa v. United States, which argued that when a fair-skinned Japanese man applied for citizenship and put that he was a “white person” because the color of his skin, but the Supreme Court was not convinced by Ozawa’s counsel. Lopez also talks about “racial fabrication”, emphasizing the idea that racial division is primarily based on social integration of competing forces through the history of humankind rather than differences between physical characteristics of this or that racial type. For example, Lopez cites the case of Hudgins v. Wright, a landmark 19th-century court decision that defined the racial features of African Americans, to illustrate how the dominant culture constructed racial categorizations. The same process continues to exist through the current racialization of Mexicans and most recent immigrants. I also believe that race is just a categorization that labels a person or a group of people making them different from one another and it is based upon our desire to create categories and binaries. Organizing race is, like organizing sexuality, an exercise of power.

Lopez and "The Social Construction of Race" Since the concept of race dates several hundred years ago, there have been numerous attempts in defining it. Lopez, himself a social constructed person regarding race, argues that race should be considered a social phenomenon where physical features and other personal characteristics are mixed in order to give the race a new meaning. For Lopez race is "a vast group of people loosely bound together by historically contingent, socially significant elements of their morphology and/or ancestry. I argue that race must be understood as a … social phenomenon in which contested systems of meaning serve as the connections between physical features, races, and personal characteristics. In other words, social meanings connect our faces to our souls." In other words, for him race is not genetically determined, but rather socially. In order to convince, Lopez takes his own case and says that basically he was given his race by the name he received and that name infuenced his entire racial affiliation. He says that race is practically a formation, a process. He uses a meaningful expression : "racial fabrication" and offers four steps involved in this concept. First, he says race should be related closely to its human nature. Before perceiving the race in a person we should rather consider the human side with all affiliated implications. Second, race is just a part of our human profil. Another important factor is the pace at which people change or evoluate. The last important thing is that races are determined by relations established among people. Consequently race seems to be a process defined by inconstancy. The interactions between people influence the concept of race or these relations offer a subjective trait that is harder to monitor. In other words race is rather defined by perception, how one perceives oneself and how one is perceived by others.

Lopez and "The Social Construction of Race" Since the concept of race dates several hundred years ago, there have been numerous attempts in defining it. Lopez, himself a social constructed person regarding race, argues that race should be considered a social phenomenon where physical features and other personal characteristics are mixed in order to give the race a new meaning. For Lopez race is "a vast group of people loosely bound together by historically contingent, socially significant elements of their morphology and/or ancestry. I argue that race must be understood as a … social phenomenon in which contested systems of meaning serve as the connections between physical features, races, and personal characteristics. In other words, social meanings connect our faces to our souls." In other words, for him race is not genetically determined, but rather socially. In order to convince, Lopez takes his own case and says that basically he was given his race by the name he received and that name infuenced his entire racial affiliation. He says that race is practically a formation, a process. He uses a meaningful expression : "racial fabrication" and offers four steps involved in this concept. First, he says race should be related closely to its human nature. Before perceiving the race in a person we should rather consider the human side with all affiliated implications. Second, race is just a part of our human profil. Another important factor is the pace at which people change or evoluate. The last important thing is that races are determined by relations established among people. Consequently race seems to be a process defined by inconstancy. The interactions between people influence the concept of race or these relations offer a subjective trait that is harder to monitor. In other words race is rather defined by perception, how one perceives oneself and how one is perceived by others.