I had a very new experience while travelling through literary theory. There are many things that I want to share about the journey. I had studied the authors in my final year of Masters Program in India but they were lecture classes where the teacher dictated notes about a particular theory and we wrote them down without thinking. Therefore, reflecting upon these theories was never possible or a discussion was not there. I had diaries full of notes which I somehow forgot to bring here and I think in certain ways it was a blessing in disguise because I had to read them all. I started understanding the difference between reading them and taking notes from the teacher on them. Notes are very easy to understand as they are generally dictated in a very comprehensive way whereas reading the authors was completely a new experience for me.  I say this as a journey precisely because of the act of reading them. This act of reading took me through various phases of emotions – anger, frustration, irritation, excitation (when finally I was able to understand some parts of it) etc.

The other part of the journey was writing blogs. I never wrote any blog before this nor have I read so much on blogs. I am always very afraid to speak in front of everybody about my views and also hesitate that everybody read or listen to me. But this concept which initially made me feel so nervous had actually benefited me in many ways. First, I read the articles every week to write something on the blog and at times not once but twice or thrice especially the one about which I was writing. Earlier I was only bothered about writing something on the blog as part of the work that has to be completed but slowly I also started reading other blogs and it was interesting when I started receiving comments on what I wrote. The hesitation that I had earlier about my classmates reading what I think has somehow started disappearing and now I enjoy a discussion on this forum and also share my opinions. The other relation between the blog and the reading that I found interesting is when I re- read my blog. Earlier they were just a summary of the text in my own words, later I started comparing them with each other (texts) and see how they were different, much later there was observation of the reading of different periods and in the last few blogs I started relating the articles with incidences from my country.

I think it would be far more enjoyable if we had read it in two semesters so that we had less reading for each class and then the discussion in the class. For me, it was a sudden stop in that journey when I just started enjoying my travel through the literary theory!!

We read that art was exclusively meant for the royal and the elite class in the Middle Ages. Masses were not allowed to enter in the area where it was projected. As Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan in the “Introduction: The politics of Culture” says that art was viewed and appreciated only by the literate and elite people and it was kept away from the masses because ‘that might impel them to rebellion’ (1233). But we see that with the advancement of technology art started becoming available for the masses especially with photography which started reproducing as many copies as needed by the masses. Hence, technology brought entertainment for everybody. But capitalism in a way has appropriated the availability of entertainment to the masses for its own convenience in a very subtle way. It provides entertainment – film, art, music etc. but supervises the images shown on television. In a way I feel it dominates and also creates superficial tastes for us. I remember during 1980s and probably 90s when in India there were rebellions from every corner of the country especially Kashmir we could see lots of national songs and videos were shown that are done by the popular personalities of the country which talked about the unity that one should have in the country. Which in a very subtle manner stopped us to think about the rebellions or rather it developed in our mind a negative approach towards the states that revolted. These videos were so emotional that it could bring tears in one’s eyes. However, we do not find similar videos that are composed in recent time.

It is interesting to note that ‘culture comes from below’ (1234) but the role that ‘people from below’ or masses play in constructing their culture for themselves. Does it reflect that masses are not conscious about what they see on television? As Marx Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in ‘The Culture Industry as Mass Deception’ says that there is uniformity of media and the continuous projection of stereotypical images who are mocked and the mockery creates entertainment. But who are the stereotyped image? Is he rich man who is mocked or a member of the royal family? Generally we see the mocking images are the masses themselves or the marginalized people of society. Such as a fat lady, a gay couple or a man of color who is projected as the bad guy. In India nowadays every channel conducts a reality show where they bring the poor or lower income people and talk about their dreams, shows their poverty stricken condition and relates it to their dreams of leaving behind their present condition and to get a better place to live. So we get entertainment from the poverty of another person, we laugh when we see a fat woman on television. I wonder, in a heterogeneous society where media is more or less homogeneous and definitely ideology plays a crucial role in it, whether we are conscious of our culture or is it the dominant group which sets culture for us?

It is interesting to observe the terminologies that I came across this week’s reading. Colonialism, Post – colonialism, anti-colonial, and decolonizing………. Few years back in India when I was first introduced the term and read just the basic concept of Post – Colonialism I was very fascinated with it. I was thinking about my research topic at that time and I told my supervisor that I want to focus on Latin American literature in Post colonial era. She asked me what do I understand by Post colonialism and I said the phase after colonialism is post colonialism. She told me that I have to study it in depth to understand it as it is not as simple as I have understood it. Anyways, my research topic shifted to something else where I had to focus and study other theories. All that I understood at that time about Post colonialism was that it is a complex phenomenon and cannot be simplified in the manner as I did it.

Here, in UBC I got to read Post Colonialism again after those years where I was first clear about my ideas but got confused with it. However, Ania Loomba shakes my basic understanding of Post colonialism when she says “This makes it debatable whether once – colonized countries can be seen as properly ‘postcolonial’” (1104). The little that I understood in relation to my country, India, got shaken with this line. I started questioning myself ‘what is Post colonialism’. Not only that, I am also now confused with the term ‘colonialism’ when she says “’Colonialism’ is not just something that happens from outside a country or people, not just something that operates with the collusion of forces inside, but a version of it can be duplicated from within” (1106). Which made me curious about the terms and I started wondering whether post colonialism existed in India during the colonial period if colonialism can exist in Post colonial period? As Ania Loomba talks about the elites of Latin America who according to J. Jorge Klor de Alva ‘were never colonial subjects’. In the same way we still see the elements of colonialism existing in different parts of the world. For example in India, people after more than sixty years of Independence talk about whether we are truly independent or was it an illusion and we are still colonized probably by new colonial powers. Or the farfetched villages in India where we both are foreigners for each other (the villagers and people outside the villages. The urban people or other district people), they are ignorant about the policies and norms run by the Government of India but have their own norms and regulations and live with it. I do not know if we can term this as colonialism or decolonialism (contesting back to the ‘colonial Government’) or probably ‘Post-colonialism’.

What makes the terms especially colonialism or post colonial complex is their heterogeneity. They cannot be used homogeneously throughout. Though Post- colonialism could be termed loosely as a voice from the periphery and not from the centre but what I understood from the readings is that this peripheral voice could come from the Centre as well because even the centre is heterogeneous.

In most of this week’s reading I found a strong connection with literature and its various genres. In Frantz Fanon’s article “The Negro and Psychopathology” he mentions how an image is constructed by a child in Africa about ‘Negroes’ and he in school identifies himself/herself with the ‘explorer’ or with the ‘white’. Therefore, we see that the construction of the image starts from the childhood in school with readings; it develops and strengthens till the child grows. Fanon states “…..there is a constellation of postulates, a series of proposition that slowly and subtly – with the help of books, newspapers, schools and their texts, advertisements, films, radio – work their way into one’s mind and shape one’s view of the world of the group to which one belongs.”   In other words they are the ‘Ideological State apparatus’ as stated by Louis Althusser which constructs images, desires, wishes etc in our mind.

In Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s reading ‘Interrogating “whiteness”’ the above argument can very well be observed. There is a discussion on American literature in America as ‘white’ and an African – American literature as ‘black’ where the American literature or the ‘white’ literature is taught by white persons and Afro – American literature by persons of color. One can see not only the authors probably but even teachers are segregated by the color of the skin and I wonder whether students are also segregated. For instance white student will choose to study American literature and a non white student will choose Afro –American literature. However, we see in this article the important role of one of the ‘Ideological State Apparatus’ i.e. books or literature. Fishkin mentions how Dana Nelson examines ‘the ways in which seventeenth – , eighteenth – and early nineteenth – century white writers constructed versions of their own identity (and of American identity) by defining themselves as unlike various racial and ethnic “others”’.  Hence, Fanon says that the root of this problem is books – the magazines, adventures of Mickey Mouse, Tarzan stories – which the Antillean child reads are written by white men for white kids so the devil or the demon is always associated either with ‘Negroes’ or ‘Indians’ which distances the African kid from her/his culture and brings her/him closer to the ‘white’ culture which is after all an illusion especially when he grows up and develops a contact with Europe. The only solution to this problem as suggested by Fanon is creation of books and magazines for the African kids and until then this problem would exist.

It is also very interesting to note that in India people are obsessed with the skin color as white. The color white is also associated with beauty. There are various creams for both men and women to become fairer and it is further interesting to see that these companies are growing faster in the market which can be understood with the demand of these products in the country. Both men and women want to get married to a white skin person. While reading these articles I was wondering whether the connection with the white skin is actually deriving from the same root as the authors in this week’s reading are arguing about.