Mar 22, 2021 03:48 PM
(This post was last modified: Mar 22, 2021 04:10 PM by C C.)
The Problem With the Postcolonial Syllabus (against a peculiarly Western allergy to the pleasure of the text)
https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-pr...en_sign_in
EXCERPT: In the essays my students write, I have begun to notice a common pattern. They are structured almost like Aesop’s fables. A moral seems necessary at the end — a kind of wrapping up, whichever way one chooses to look at it, like a prayer of gratitude after a meal, or an antacid tablet to aid the digestive process. Occasionally, I notice this in their poems as well, how the concluding lines must justify the existence of the lines preceding them. I have begun calling it “moralitis.” Without a text’s display of morality, we seem to be at a loss about how to justify its existence.
“Why are you so suspicious of pleasure and delight?” I asked the students on Google Meet. I later wondered whether that sounded like a moral question, but a few of them volunteered responses. Their answers told me that they didn’t quite understand whether I was scolding them good-naturedly or praising them.
It wasn’t really their fault. In most — almost all — of the literature courses they take, the texts they study are supposed to be illustrative: They are used to critique some kind of -ism that is being scolded or praised by the course instructor.
I remind myself, and my students, that when the discipline began life in the 19th century, the first professors of English literature often had backgrounds in rhetoric and theology, and were concerned primarily with the transmission of moral and religious values [which an incremental transition to leftist crusading simply continued with its own evolving ideological values].
Only decades later did the discipline become predominantly concerned with directing our attention to beauty and its backstory, as well as to stylistic and aesthetic questions that had previously been considered extraneous to academic study. Initially, it was possible to see this as an addition to the territory covered by literary studies: not only law and morality but also beauty and form. But we are often left with the impression that beauty (I’m using it as shorthand) must exist in stark opposition to morality, even as, living from moment to moment, we are made aware that they coexist, without disharmony.
Today, there is a welcome movement among some North American scholars to emphasize enchantment and attachment as responses to literature that are as valid as moral analysis. Still, I know of no literature department in any culture — and certainly not in any of the Indian languages — that suffers from a surfeit of pleasure.
I offer these summaries as an outsider. I wasn’t born in America or England, and I wasn’t a participant in, or even a contemporary observer of, Anglophone literature departments. I am a postcolonial citizen reading the white world reading.
[...] The syllabus-makers had legitimized their wandering. It was all right, the white writer could write about anything. The expectation of the nonwhite writers was different. They were to be tour guides to their cultures, burdened with satisfying the intellectual curiosity of the white world.
... In India — where I now teach in the English and creative-writing department [...] what began with Salman Rushdie and Amitav Ghosh and Vikram Seth performing their roles as researchers for this new reader soon turned into a habit. ... They were ambassadors of the Indian nation, often thought to be “representing” India just as artists and performers represented it in Festival of India programs abroad.
[...] Postcolonial texts seem to have two jobs in these syllabi: They either negatively illustrate some form of moral or social misconduct, or they positively represent a “marginalized” culture or geography ... Even a casual glance at these reading lists will reveal the priority given to literature that resembles a Republic Day parade. Like those tableaux representing the different states of the Union of India, the Indian English novel must always speak for a culture, either geographical or moral. This is a burden of nationalism that seems to have escaped even the nationalism-skeptics in academia, so much so that it gradually solidified into a requirement of the genre.
While academics often see themselves as correcting the oversights of mainstream publishing, in this case, the two have colluded, even if unconsciously. [...] Like the soldier fighting for the country, these writers are seen as fighting for their culture. ... Meanwhile, choosing what books to read becomes itself a moralistic enterprise, a form of atonement. One must read postcolonial literatures to pay the guilt tax. It is a reading toll that the student of the white-literature syllabus is not asked to pay.
But the proliferation of readers who seem to have become addicted to paying this tax has created a new kind of marginalized literature: literature that does not serve the didactic purposes of the postcolonial survey course. For one thing, the postcolonial-literature syllabus continues to remain parasitic on the novel ... Even when we limit ourselves to novels, only the delight of being a morally conscious reader is considered nutritious.
[...] The same question should be asked of the postcolonial syllabus. While the moralizing mission might appear admirable, these courses ignore all literature that does not fit its agenda. What else explains the utter absence of comic novels in the postcolonial course? How else to explain why Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s novels, particularly Aranyak, are not taught? Or why Amit Chaudhuri’s novels, with their life-loving energy, do not find a place here? Or why stories and novellas about provincial life, such as we find in the magical writing of R.K. Narayan, have not yet been included? Literature about the moment, about the everyday, is rejected: Comedy, laughter, pleasure — the postcolonial subject must not be seen partaking of these contraband things. The syllabus often reminds me of what our hostel matron used to say: Don’t smile and show your teeth when praying.
[...] What I am seeking is for the postcolonial-literature reading list to be liberated from its current status as “minor literature.” ... Literature in the postcolonial syllabus should surprise the student, not just confirm and illustrate “theories.” This, too, should be part of the decolonizing-the-syllabus mission: to dismantle the binary between postcolonial writers as content writers and Western writers as experimenters with form. Only then can we begin to address the “moralitis” of my students, which, although it might seem at first harmless, or even praiseworthy, turns out to entail a troubling indifference to pleasure and beauty, to ananda (joy and delight), which is often the backbone of India’s modern literatures.
[...] Next semester, I’ll be teaching a course on the rasas, an aesthetic philosophy that goes back to the first millennium in the Indian subcontinent. ... The theory of rasa is a theory of pleasure that tries to understand the individual, not the collective. Does that explain its exclusion from the postcolonial syllabus, where individuals are most often studied only as representatives of a group or social condition? Looking at postcolonial-literature syllabi, I feel the need, as a postcolonial citizen and subject, for our literatures to be read for more reasons than the guilt rasa. I’ve decided to begin my next semester by teaching a comedy, the hasya rasa. I hope for my students to laugh without guilt. (MORE - details)
https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-pr...en_sign_in
EXCERPT: In the essays my students write, I have begun to notice a common pattern. They are structured almost like Aesop’s fables. A moral seems necessary at the end — a kind of wrapping up, whichever way one chooses to look at it, like a prayer of gratitude after a meal, or an antacid tablet to aid the digestive process. Occasionally, I notice this in their poems as well, how the concluding lines must justify the existence of the lines preceding them. I have begun calling it “moralitis.” Without a text’s display of morality, we seem to be at a loss about how to justify its existence.
“Why are you so suspicious of pleasure and delight?” I asked the students on Google Meet. I later wondered whether that sounded like a moral question, but a few of them volunteered responses. Their answers told me that they didn’t quite understand whether I was scolding them good-naturedly or praising them.
It wasn’t really their fault. In most — almost all — of the literature courses they take, the texts they study are supposed to be illustrative: They are used to critique some kind of -ism that is being scolded or praised by the course instructor.
I remind myself, and my students, that when the discipline began life in the 19th century, the first professors of English literature often had backgrounds in rhetoric and theology, and were concerned primarily with the transmission of moral and religious values [which an incremental transition to leftist crusading simply continued with its own evolving ideological values].
Only decades later did the discipline become predominantly concerned with directing our attention to beauty and its backstory, as well as to stylistic and aesthetic questions that had previously been considered extraneous to academic study. Initially, it was possible to see this as an addition to the territory covered by literary studies: not only law and morality but also beauty and form. But we are often left with the impression that beauty (I’m using it as shorthand) must exist in stark opposition to morality, even as, living from moment to moment, we are made aware that they coexist, without disharmony.
Today, there is a welcome movement among some North American scholars to emphasize enchantment and attachment as responses to literature that are as valid as moral analysis. Still, I know of no literature department in any culture — and certainly not in any of the Indian languages — that suffers from a surfeit of pleasure.
I offer these summaries as an outsider. I wasn’t born in America or England, and I wasn’t a participant in, or even a contemporary observer of, Anglophone literature departments. I am a postcolonial citizen reading the white world reading.
[...] The syllabus-makers had legitimized their wandering. It was all right, the white writer could write about anything. The expectation of the nonwhite writers was different. They were to be tour guides to their cultures, burdened with satisfying the intellectual curiosity of the white world.
... In India — where I now teach in the English and creative-writing department [...] what began with Salman Rushdie and Amitav Ghosh and Vikram Seth performing their roles as researchers for this new reader soon turned into a habit. ... They were ambassadors of the Indian nation, often thought to be “representing” India just as artists and performers represented it in Festival of India programs abroad.
[...] Postcolonial texts seem to have two jobs in these syllabi: They either negatively illustrate some form of moral or social misconduct, or they positively represent a “marginalized” culture or geography ... Even a casual glance at these reading lists will reveal the priority given to literature that resembles a Republic Day parade. Like those tableaux representing the different states of the Union of India, the Indian English novel must always speak for a culture, either geographical or moral. This is a burden of nationalism that seems to have escaped even the nationalism-skeptics in academia, so much so that it gradually solidified into a requirement of the genre.
While academics often see themselves as correcting the oversights of mainstream publishing, in this case, the two have colluded, even if unconsciously. [...] Like the soldier fighting for the country, these writers are seen as fighting for their culture. ... Meanwhile, choosing what books to read becomes itself a moralistic enterprise, a form of atonement. One must read postcolonial literatures to pay the guilt tax. It is a reading toll that the student of the white-literature syllabus is not asked to pay.
But the proliferation of readers who seem to have become addicted to paying this tax has created a new kind of marginalized literature: literature that does not serve the didactic purposes of the postcolonial survey course. For one thing, the postcolonial-literature syllabus continues to remain parasitic on the novel ... Even when we limit ourselves to novels, only the delight of being a morally conscious reader is considered nutritious.
[...] The same question should be asked of the postcolonial syllabus. While the moralizing mission might appear admirable, these courses ignore all literature that does not fit its agenda. What else explains the utter absence of comic novels in the postcolonial course? How else to explain why Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s novels, particularly Aranyak, are not taught? Or why Amit Chaudhuri’s novels, with their life-loving energy, do not find a place here? Or why stories and novellas about provincial life, such as we find in the magical writing of R.K. Narayan, have not yet been included? Literature about the moment, about the everyday, is rejected: Comedy, laughter, pleasure — the postcolonial subject must not be seen partaking of these contraband things. The syllabus often reminds me of what our hostel matron used to say: Don’t smile and show your teeth when praying.
[...] What I am seeking is for the postcolonial-literature reading list to be liberated from its current status as “minor literature.” ... Literature in the postcolonial syllabus should surprise the student, not just confirm and illustrate “theories.” This, too, should be part of the decolonizing-the-syllabus mission: to dismantle the binary between postcolonial writers as content writers and Western writers as experimenters with form. Only then can we begin to address the “moralitis” of my students, which, although it might seem at first harmless, or even praiseworthy, turns out to entail a troubling indifference to pleasure and beauty, to ananda (joy and delight), which is often the backbone of India’s modern literatures.
[...] Next semester, I’ll be teaching a course on the rasas, an aesthetic philosophy that goes back to the first millennium in the Indian subcontinent. ... The theory of rasa is a theory of pleasure that tries to understand the individual, not the collective. Does that explain its exclusion from the postcolonial syllabus, where individuals are most often studied only as representatives of a group or social condition? Looking at postcolonial-literature syllabi, I feel the need, as a postcolonial citizen and subject, for our literatures to be read for more reasons than the guilt rasa. I’ve decided to begin my next semester by teaching a comedy, the hasya rasa. I hope for my students to laugh without guilt. (MORE - details)