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the Middle Passage and asserting control for an African-American sense of history -- by questioning the truth value of historical documents and redeploying "white" documents and voices -- provides an immediate opening; there was also Walcott's ironic and searing exegesis of the Biblical narratives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!