The Latest Lowdown and Ballad

The passages/issues we might still think about in The Lonely Londoners are probably legion! There's surely still more to say about homes and housing (and the idea of home) -- with cramped rooms, dormitories, hostels, and temporary meeting places seeming to loom so large, reminding us, perhaps, of that Grace Nichols poem with which we began the semester and inviting some possibly rich paper topics (I know there is a Selvon short story entitled "Basement Lullaby" -- I wonder what that might offer); Waterloo Station, with its many scenes of arrival, is one of the many central spaces of the novel (a locus of return, of rendezvous, of remembrance) that needs to be addressed (is Piedra's "Game of Critical Arrival" relevant here?); renamings and nicknames are crucial to Selvon's novel, and are another continuation of a prominent concern in our course; the whole idea of reimagining (and reverse colonizing) the metropolis (in a sense, inventing a black London) probably deserves more consideration (we did well to note Tanty's tropicalizing of the local food store, as well as the symbolic appropriation of some of London's central landmarks (which may provide intriguing overlap as we look ahead to Book 5 of Omeros and Chapter 5 of No Telephone to Heaven)); the spatial creolization that transforms St. Pancras Hall into "Saltfish Hall" in Trinidad suggests (even if just for a few moments) a new kind of socially inclusive space (don't even the gender relations seem a little different during Harris's fete?) and foreground the performative cultural resources of London's new citizens (how cool to think of them dancing calypso style to "God Save the Queen"!); the difference between Moses's and Galahad's approaches to living in London seem to go to the heart of the confused spirit of the rehomed (but still largely unhomed) West Indian migrant. Lots still to talk about, as you can see, and I'm sure you all would add to this list (also, perhaps, lots still to write about -- if you have a stray moment during these busy days, this blog space still seeks your musings!).

The Lonely Londoners is certainly a novel about itineraries, about routes, about an alternative pedestrian rhetoric (which is why I think de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life could be relevant here), about a sustained (and largely optimistic) engagement with the immigrant's built environment. Fittingly, the novel, which begins on a "grim winter evening" (23), ends on a summer night when "laughter fell softly" (142), and seems ultimately to offer a figurative rendering of the migrant's creative spirit, which was still able to be suffused with hopefulness in the mid- to late-1950s. And how wonderful, too, that the proliferating narratives never reach closure but remain open, and thus suggest that "Selvon's boys" are not fated to be merely passive and acted upon by the world; their stories are never finished, and it will apparently become Moses's quest to become the narrator of both his own life and the lives of his people.

I hope that you were able to avoid excessive "botheration" this past weekend, that you were able to "coast a lime" or two, and, indeed, that the glorious weather meant the weekend did really be hearts for all of you!

Reading Between the Lines with Homi

Hi All,

Just a quick recommendation of a podcast I listened to last summer that seems to prove Bhabha's thesis in "DissemiNation."  It's a RadioLab podcast on the Mau Mau movement in Kenya that began in the 1950s.  The Mau Mau were a group of colonized Africans who engaged in some, shall we say, violent tactics in an attempt to assert themselves to their British colonizers.

The official British narrative of the Mau Mau Uprising/Revolt was basically all the outside world had, then some researchers began talking to former Mau Mau people decades later and finding a new narrative.  And finally, when former Mau Mau fighters sued the British government several years ago, it was revealed that the British government had documents disputing the "official" narrative.

The podcast is kind of long, but it's a good listen and I think enlightens some of Bhabha's points.  The podcast came out July 2, so it's easy to find, and it's free.

Happy listening!

Monster of the Isle

Thanks to Brandon for giving us/you a separate container/thread for any residual Tempest conversation, to which I guess I'm adding another -- there's still so much to comment on, I suspect. In a play that is, we might say, about the making of identity and about contingent, constructed realities (and about ontological undoing as a result of storms and being "sea-swallowed"), it's interesting to contemplate, as we did briefly in class last week, the "deformity" and visual representation of Caliban. Without any kind of detailed knowledge of the history of these representations on the stage and in film, I'd propose that it probably doesn't matter "how" he's deformed; Peter Hulme writes that "the difficulty in visualizing Caliban cannot be put down to a failure of clarity in the text. Caliban, as a compromise formation, can exist only within discourse: he is fundamentally and essentially beyond the bounds of representation." George Lamming, in another great book, The Pleasures of Exile, sees Caliban as standing in for the Other, as "the excluded, that which is eternally below possibility"; this aspect of Caliban does authorize us to situate this text quite directly within the poetics and discourses of the New World.

Some of you, by the way, might want to take note of (and maybe track down) Hulme's useful and penetrating book, Colonial Encounters: in addition to a chapter on Prospero and Caliban, the book includes a survey of other adventure/discovery stories involving the likes of Columbus, Robinson Crusoe, John Smith and Pocahontas, etc.

Much of the postcolonial/ideological debate surrounding this play revolves around choosing between Ariel and Caliban as a way of understanding one's past and imagining one's future (whether individually or collectively as a nation). Both are subject to Prospero, of course, but Ariel is a willing subject while Caliban is more forcefully enslaved. Ariel accepts Prospero's directives and, at play's end, seems ready to regain his freedom in a kind of untroubled way (i.e., as Edward Said notes, he projects as a kind of "bourgeois native untroubled by his collaboration with Prospero"). Choosing to align oneself with Caliban, though, implies either accepting his mongrel past while looking ahead with some optimism to emancipated development, or escaping the state of abjection and seeking out his originary essence -- i.e., the identity and history that predate the contamination that resulted from the colonial encounter. As Said proposes, we can say that "both Calibans nourish and require each other," even as each suggests different central investments and political purposes. As we move forward in this class and with our subsequent readings, Caliban will perhaps more evidently come to be seen as a kind of representative for all who were similarly subjugated. Anyway, feel free to weigh in and to keep building up the relevance of Shakespeare's play to our inquiry. There seem to be all sorts of relevant keywords we might use as jumping off points: exile, displacement, shipwreck, the sea, Robinson Crusoe, usurpation, bondage, coercion, the decentering of power and legitimacy, language and representation, historiography, etc.

See you in a couple days.

Caliban

Hello, everybody.  I'm not sure if this is the type of thing that this blog is intended for; but now that we're in the second week of the course, it seemed like a good idea to me that we have a post put up on here anyhow.

During the class tonight, there was a comment made that it would be really nice to have a "New World" reading of The Tempest.  Unfortunately, though, most of the conversation seemed to point the other way!  I guess, if a person really wants a really loose parallel between the text and the new world, though, one hit me on the way home tonight.

When my first family members immigrated to Canada in the early 1600s, they wrote down a brief memoir--not their whole story, but just a quick recap of everything.  And one of the things that they mentioned was that the Indians became friends with the French primarily as a way to get rid of the English.  They chose a less demanding master, I guess, and promised to help kill the English settlers if the French would take over.

To me, it just sounded a lot like Caliban's situation, I guess.  I don't know of anything similar to that happening in Europe, though it very well could've happened!  If it's useful to that person who was looking for an excuse to make The Tempest about the New World, maybe you could use it!

Have a good tail-end of the week.

Depth Charge

Greetings, everyone. I think we'll be more fully provisioned for the semester if we have this blog at our disposal; perhaps it will help us adjust the intellectual rigging from time to time, to collect the stray drops from our briny casks that would otherwise fall unrecorded, to ensure that valuable insights don't end up forever buried in the orlop deck (and, don't worry, I'll eventually ease up on the nautical metaphors, once the novelty passes!). No, seriously, as I said in class, the blog may prove to be a very rewarding supplement and archive, but you're to feel no obligation: use it as you will and we'll see what shape it takes.

I hope the first class meeting went passably well in terms of identifying some of the operative contexts for the course. Given that the course will be transhistorical and transnational in its framing and in its featured texts, I'm hoping/expecting that there will be all manner of possibilities for you to move the material (and, eventually, your research and written work) in directions that intersect with your own interests. A short list of contexts, of course, as I tried to convey last night, includes the Middle Passage, historical trauma more broadly, postcolonial perspectives, Caribbean literature and poetics, New World poetics (with the implicit distinction between "Old" and "New" worlds, the notion of an Adamic imagination, etc.), the discourse of islands, travel and tourism, power and representation, diaspora studies, the poetics of home, etc. etc. Another prominent area of inquiry, I realize, especially after considering that trio of poems last night, is the passage of genres, aesthetic conventions, and languages across the Atlantic: we will undoubtedly encounter reconfigurations, hybridizations, reappropriations, creolizations, etc., of many types, so if you're interested in more formal matters and in matters of literary craft, or in linguistics, then there should be some promising opportunities for you. Hayden's strategy of reversing the Middle Passage and asserting control for an African-American sense of history -- by questioning the truth value of historical documents and redeploying "white" documents and voices -- provides an immediate opening; there was also Walcott's ironic and searing exegesis of the Biblical narratives in "The Sea of History"; and we had just those waning moments to get to the stylistic/linguistic blendings of Grace Nichols in "Wherever I Hang," a poem that reminds us of James Clifford's sense that once traveling is foregrounded as a cultural practice, then dwelling (or "home"), too, needs to be reconceived.

After foregrounding the oxhide boat of St. Brendan, I might have more fully introduced, too, the suggestive richness of the notion of the ship. Paul Gilroy, in The Black Atlantic, proposes that "the ship provides a chance to explore the articulations between the discontinuous histories of England's ports, its interfaces with the wider world ... As it were, getting on board promises a means to reconceptualize the orthodox relationship between modernity and what passes for its prehistory." Recalling a quote from Marcus Rediker that I shared last night, we are invited to consider the slave ship as a "world-changing machine," one that was "central to a profound, interrelated set of economic changes essential to the rise of capitalism: the seizure of new lands, the expropriation of millions of people and their redeployment in growing market-oriented sectors of the economy; the mining of gold and silver, the cultivating of tobacco and sugar; the concomitant rise of long-distance commerce; and finally a planned accumulation of wealth beyond anything the world had ever witnessed" (The Slave Ship 43) ... Some of you, too, may ultimately want to think about the sea itself as an important chronotope, as a metaphor that, among other things, suggests the fluidity and unmappability of identity and meaning. Anyway, onward we go ...

First up, of course, is Shakespeare and The Tempest. I don't think you'll have trouble putting it to work for our purposes: it should allow us to talk about the point of first contact (where, according to Piedra, "the game of critical arrival" is conducted), about Old and New World encounters and the one understanding itself through the other, about discovery, about sovereignty, about power, language and representation, about islands, about the paradigm for the colonial relationship. We could have started, I suppose, with More's Utopia, which would have taken us back to 1516 -- that text, which features one of the first (of many) ideal societies to be located in newly discovered realms, becomes an exercise in European social criticism more than a depiction of New World realities. We may wonder if there's a similar process at work in The Tempest. Feel free, of course, in advance of any class meeting, to weigh in at this location -- the quarterdeck! -- and get some of the ideas and questions circulating. See you next Wednesday!