Teaching in Times of Crisis : Applying Comparative Literature in the Classroom 9780367626754, 9781003110217

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Teaching in Times of Crisis

Teaching in Times of Crisis explores how comparative methods, which are instrumental in reading and teaching works of literature from around the world, also provide us with tools to dissect and engage the moments of crises that permeate our contemporary political realities. The book is written in the form of a series of classroom reflections— or memos—capturing the political environment preceding and proceeding the 2016 US presidential election. It examines the ways in which the ethics involved in reading comparatively can be employed by teachers and students alike to map and foster “lifelines for cultural sustainability” (to borrow the term from Djelal Kadir’s Memos from the Besieged City) that are essential for creating and maintaining a healthy multicultural society. Nyawalo achieves this through comparative readings of postcolonial films, LGBTQ texts, French slam poetry, as well as episodes from Star Trek: The Next Generation, among other materials. The classroom reflections captured in each memo are shaped by the Appalachian setting in which the discussions and lessons took place. Inspired by this setting, the author develops pedagogic ethics of comparison—a method of reading comparatively—which privileges the local educational spaces in which students find themselves by mapping the contested cultural politics of Appalachian realities onto a world literature curriculum. Mich Yonah Nyawalo is an Associate Professor of Critical Ethnic, Black/Race Studies at Xavier University, Cincinnati, Ohio. His areas of specialization are globalization studies, postcolonial criticism, African literatures (including audio and visual cultures from the continent), media studies, critical pedagogy, and service learning. The years he has spent living and studying in Kenya, Uganda, France, Sweden, and the United States have highly defined his academic projects, which appropriate a mixture of critical tools and scholarly texts derived from the fields of African, African diaspora, and African-American studies. Some of the classes he teaches include World Literature, Black Transnationalism, Comparative Feminist Literature, Comparative Queer Theory and Literature, Introduction to Media and Culture, Graphic Novels and Animation, as well as Video Games and Virtual Worlds.

Routledge Studies in Comparative Literature

This series is our home for cutting-edge, upper-level scholarly studies and edited collections. Taking a comparative approach to literary studies, this series visits the relationship of literature and language alongside a variety of interdisciplinary and transnational topics. Titles are characterized by dynamic interventions into established subjects and innovative studies on emerging topics. Beyond Collective Memory Structural Complicity and Future Freedoms in Senegalese and South African Narratives Cullen Goldblatt Children of Globalization Diasporic Coming-of-Age Novels in Germany, England, and the United States Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo World War II in Contemporary German and Dutch Fiction The Generation of Meta-Memory Jan Lensen Teaching in Times of Crisis Applying Comparative Literature in the Classroom Mich Yonah Nyawalo Family Fictions and World Making Irish and Indian Women’s Writing in the Contemporary Era Sreya Chatterjee To learn more about this series, please visit https://www.routledge.com/lite rature/series/RSCOL

Teaching in Times of Crisis Applying Comparative Literature in the Classroom

Mich Yonah Nyawalo

First published 2021 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Taylor & Francis The right of Mich Yonah Nyawalo to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 9780367626754 (hbk) ISBN: 9781003110217 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

Contents

Acknowledgments

vi

Introduction

1

Memo I

The Deliverance or Domestication of Others: Memos from Comparative Literature Classes in Appalachia

12

Memo II

Syllabusing: Mapping Appalachian Texts onto a World Literature Curriculum

29

Memo III

Pedagogies of Cultural Translation: Debating Polygamy, War, and Patriotism in Comparative Literature Classes

44

Memo IV

Syllabusing: Mapping Appalachian Queer Texts onto a Comparative Literature Curriculum

61

Memo V

Monstrous Encounters in Outer Space: A Pedagogic Analysis of Star Trek’s Racial Politics from a Comparative Perspective

79

Comparative Feminism and Social Justice: Instrumentalizing the Poetics of Assia Djebar’s “The Woman in Pieces” in Experiential-Learning Courses

96

Memo VI

Conclusion

113

Bibliography Index

117 126

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my wife, Shureka Nyawalo, whose assistance and input were essential in enabling me to complete this project. The idea for this project was born out of extensive conversations on the relationship between comparative literature and critical pedagogy with Germán Campos-Muñoz that began during our days as graduate students at the Pennsylvania State University. I also wish to thank Janet Feight for encouraging my interest in Appalachian history and culture as I attempted to make sense of my new realities as a junior faculty member at Shawnee State University. Finally, I wish to thank the students whose curiosity and passion for social justice provided me with a great degree of comfort and hope during the dark and troubling political events that have characterized the last few years. In an environment where scholarship on the intersections between literary criticism and pedagogy is sometimes viewed askance in some academic circles, I have been pleased to witness the positive attention given to such endeavors at the Society for Comparative Literature and the Arts (SCLA). Indeed, the SCLA offered a vital platform to share and receive feedback on some of the ideas and concepts I have included in this book.

Introduction

Theoretical interventions that have defined the discipline of comparative literature over the years have often employed the language of “crisis” as a way of justifying their exigency. Certainly, many of the early foundational figures who shaped the discipline of comparative literature in the United States were exiles fleeing the crisis of Nazism that had engulfed Europe. These exiled scholars included Leo Spitzer, Eric Auerbach, and René Wellek, who founded the Department of Comparative Literature at Yale University in 1946 (D’haen 64). In many ways, Wellek’s caution and critique of approaches to literary criticism that exalted nationalism, or engaged in “a calculus of national credits and debts” as he put it, can be read to have emerged from his direct experiences with the consequences of ethnonationalism, which ignited the Second World War (Wellek 167). As I write this introduction, the word “crisis” seems especially apt to describe the current surrounding social and political environment. At this particular moment, over 204,000 US-Americans have died as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic; concerned citizens are mobilizing to protest the murder of Breonna Taylor at the hands of the police and the grand jury’s refusal to criminally charge the officers involved; radicalized white supremacists are targeting their guns (or using their cars as weapons) at Black Lives Matter protesters; efforts to undermine and delegitimize mail-in ballots to be cast for the 2020 US presidential election are increasing at an alarming rate; indeed, even the prospects of a peaceful transition of power after the November 3rd presidential election, in the event that the current occupant of the White House loses, seem dim; the recent death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the prospective appointment of an additional conservative justice promises to undo many of the hard-fought gains that sought to secure the civil rights of women, African Americans, immigrants, and members of the LGBTQ community; and finally, the looming existential climate crisis has exacerbated the severity of wildfires, which have spread across the states of California, Oregon, and Washington. Thus, given the discipline’s recurrent instrumentalization of

2

Introduction

the rhetoric of crisis (some might say exploitation of the rhetoric of crisis), how might comparatists respond to and engage with the social and political turbulences that continue to shape their present realities? Despite the fact that pedagogy and pedagogic spaces are, for the most part, seldom incorporated and instrumentalized to engage with scholarship on comparative literary criticism (a cursory glance at panels and presentations accepted for inclusion at most ACLA conferences in the last few years reveals the paucity of attention given to the role of pedagogy in the discipline), teaching—whether it is performed reluctantly, enthusiastically, or exploitatively in the context of part-time adjunct labor—remains a vital part of what we do as comparatists. Furthermore, comparative literature’s locative position as a tertium comparationis—the discipline’s focus on comparative methods or ways of relating texts, cultures, media, spaces, and people within and across national boundaries—offers an ideal opportunity to include pedagogic spaces as part of our comparative framework. In his reflections on the discipline’s methods, Djelal Kadir contends that comparative literature, while enmeshed in the world, is distinctly marked by an extemporized status as an outsider, or as alterity to the times, terms, or the parties it mediates […] comparative literature’s locative position, then, traditionally referred to as tertium comparationis—the third term of comparison—occupies a nomadic locus that is a translocal and itinerant articulation between or among other positions or locations. (4) In the context of the classroom, comparatists assume the locative position of cultural mediators who relate and negotiate texts and materials stemming from different national contexts, the cultural location of the classroom, and the diverse communities of readers to which students belong. As cultural mediators, not only do we enable our students to discover, engage, and make sense of works and cultures that are unfamiliar to them, but we also, when possible, attempt to make these works relevant, by way of comparison, to the social and political climate that surrounds them. It is through this comparative exercise that the social relevance of works, sometimes identified as world literature, are extended beyond their culture of origin and are repurposed in new contexts for the benefit of our students. It is by focusing on the role of comparatists as cultural mediators in the classroom that this book engages the social crises that culminated into the rise of an ethnonationalist presidency and the re-legitimation of open white supremacy in political discourse and policy. During the fall semester of 2020, as a way to comparatively examine the realities of the COVID-19 pandemic in one of my classes, I began teaching a course titled “Infectious Diseases and the Cultural Politics of Race, Class,

Introduction 3 Gender, and Sexuality.” The course included works such as Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), Albert Camus’ The Plague (1947), José Saramago’s Blindness (1995), Larry Kramer’s plays The Normal Heart and The Destiny of Me (1985 and 1992), Robin Camillo’s film 120 Beats per Minute (2017), as well as other historic and ethnographic works that focused on political and cultural responses to infectious diseases. Camus’ novel, in particular, experienced a dramatic resurgence in interest and record sales as people attempted to make sense and conceptually grapple with the realities of the COVID-19 pandemic. In a contemporary US-American setting, the relevance of Camus’ novel not only enabled my students to examine and discuss the social realities engendered by COVID-19 but also, just as importantly, the crypto-fascist political proclivities that have exacerbated the social effects of the pandemic. Set in the coastal Algerian city of Oran, The Plague dramatizes human responses to pandemic diseases, including the dichotomy between the human instinct for individualized self-preservation and short-term gain as well as the impetus for collective sacrifice to secure the survival of a larger community. In the novel, this dichotomy is depicted in the character of Raymond Rambert, a journalist from Paris who finds himself trapped in Oran following the outbreak of the plague when a city-wide quarantine is imposed preventing residents from leaving the area. At first, Rambert’s only preoccupation is to escape from the city; in his schemes to escape and join his wife in Paris, Rambert does not consider the possibility that he may spread the contagion to other areas. However, changed by his experiences during the plague, Rambert later opts to willingly stay behind and help in collective efforts to contain and fight the contagious disease. Rambert’s dilemma in The Plague resonated with students at a time when the ethics of wearing a mask and of ephemerally experiencing inconveniences so that others may have a chance to live clash with the spectacle of armed anti-mask supporters storming statehouses under a perverted rhetoric and interpretation of freedom and liberty. In Camus’ novel, we also witness individuals and social entities who attempt to ascribe different forms of meaning to the senseless carnage and death caused by the plague. The Jesuit priest, Father Paneloux, for example, first espouses the belief that the plague emerged as punishment from God for sins committed. Upon witnessing an innocent child die of the diseases, he later interprets the plague as a productive test in one’s faith in God. Nonetheless, it is not just the priest who attempts to ascribe meaning to the mounting number of corpses victimized by the plague; as the novel points out, prison authorities also attempt to codify the significance of dead bodies within institutional hierarchies: The plague was no respecter of persons and under its despotic rule everyone, from the warden down to the humblest delinquent, was under

4

Introduction sentence and, perhaps for the first time, impartial justice reigned in the prison. Attempts made by the authorities to redress this leveling out by some hierarchy—the idea was to confer a decoration on guards who died in the exercise of their duties—came to nothing. [The civil authority decided that] the simplest solution was to bestow on guards who died at their post a “plague medal” […] Moreover, the plague medal had the disadvantage of having far less moral effect than that attaching to a military award, since in time of pestilence a decoration of this sort is too easily acquired. (170)

The Plague, of course, was not just a novel about a pandemic; Camus wrote it between 1941 and 1947 when the memory and trauma of the Nazi occupation of France were still fresh. Nonetheless, while The Plague makes allegorical gestures toward the rise of Nazism, war, and the Holocaust in the content of its pages, it was also meant to be read as a general commentary and warning about the temptation of ideologies and political visions that justify human suffering, war, and death as necessary costs. In this context, the prison authorities’ relentless attempts to attribute hierarchized value to certain forms of human death and determine, through codified rituals and symbols, the types of bodies that are mournable and those that go unmourned remains relevant to how our own society classifies grievable and ungrievable lives; it gestures toward ways of conceptualizing the human cost of war, the lives of immigrants crossing the border, and the sanctity of Black lives that should matter but do not. Here, it should be pointed out that the invisibility of Arab characters and lives in a novel whose plot takes place in an explicitly French colonial context also demonstrate Camus’ own blind spots in this regard. The Plague informs us that “there have been as many plagues as wars in history, yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise” (37). Read from our current crisis-bound vantage point, the statement captures denials from elected officials, a lack of preparedness that exacerbated the effects of COVID-19, as well as, from a larger political perspective, the difficult task of imagining the real possibility that US-American democracy might implode and radically alter the familiar constructs of our lives like a plague or war “that crashes down on our heads from a blue sky” (Camus 37). The possibility/impossibility of this act of imagination hinges on our ability to jettison the myth of US-American exceptionalism and acknowledge that here too, like many other places and moments in history, democracy as we know it can end. In other words, this act of imagination necessitates the possibility of comparison. Camus’ novel opens itself to this form of comparative exercise in its final words:

Introduction 5 [He] knew that the tale he had to tell could not be one of a final victory. It could only be the record of what had had to be done, and what assuredly would have to be done again in the never-ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaught, despite their personal afflictions, by all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers. And, indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperiled. He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bids its time in bedroom, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send forth to die in a happy city. (308) As Dr. Rieux, the narrator of the novel, compiles his chronicle of the plague, the described characteristics and purpose of his narrative acquire the exigency and properties of Djelal Kadir’s definition of the word “memo” as described in his book Memos from the Besieged City: Lifelines for Cultural Sustainability. As Kadir explains, I use the word memo and it’s plural in the multiplicity of these semantic nuances. The resourcefulness of the term is not merely semantic; it is also temporal and transformational; And, in this sense, what one of tradition’s most aggressive technicians of memory, Giordano Bruno, teaches us is that a memo is not only a harkening to the past or a telling again in order to take us back. It is, as the precedent of Bruno and Calvino’s envoi suggest, a reminder of and for the future, a telling in anticipation and a cue aiming us in the direction of a way station we have yet to reach. (17) In this sense, Rieux’s chronicle, and Camus’ novel by extension, operates as memos, in Kadir’s definition of the term, which not only record the memories of events and actions taken in the past but also function as constant reminders of what continuously needs to be done in the present and future within the never-ending fight against the plagues of fascism, ethnonationalism, and political terror, which have a propensity for manifesting themselves in different morphologies through varying historical, cultural, and national reincarnations. In the parting words of Camus’ novel, readers are warned that, biding their time, these destructive social forces constitute an enduring element

6

Introduction

in the fabric of our societies and will always wait for the right moment to re-emerge. In these moments of crises, the novels and stories we present to our students can function, in Kadir’s definition, as “lifelines for cultural sustainability” that “extend the conversation in which we endeavor to be articulate and through which we are articulated as a cultural continuity linked across spaces and times in diverse languages and multiple modes of human expression”; the comparative dimensions of these works enable them to interact and inform our present predicaments (205). For example, José Saramago’s novel Blindness, which, like Camus’ work, deploys the trope of disease and infection as a political allegory, dramatizes strategies of resistance and collective action that are also relevant to our current political moment. The novel depicts the onslaught of an infectious disease, causing its victims to go blind in an unnamed city. The lack of geographic, historical, or overt cultural references identifying the city invites readers to interpret and frame the story within a plethora of spatial coordinates and cultural contexts. In the novel, as citizens of the city are infected by a mysterious illness that causes sudden blindness, the government reacts by placing some of the first victims affected by the disease in forced quarantine at a repurposed facility. Cut off from the external world with meager food ratios distributed by trigger happy military guards, the blind men and women are left to their own devices. As the quarantined “inmates” debate how to organize themselves in their new social environment, a group of blind men, led by an individual with a gun, forcefully appropriate the food rations. Having taken possession of all the food, the armed blind men proceed to extort each ward in the facility by asking occupants to part with their jewelry and valuable goods in exchange for rations. After acquiring all the material goods they can find, the armed men subsequently opt to extort sex from women in the facility, who are given the “option” of either starving to death or selling their bodies for food. Born in Azhinhaga, Portugal, and having lived through the 36-year military dictatorship (1932–1968) of Prime Minister Antonio de Olvieira Salazar, José Saramago criticizes despotic governments in his novel. In Saramago’s work, the government’s repeated assurances that its actions are conducted in the name, interests, and well-being of its people are constantly juxtaposed with the dystopic realities experienced by forcibly quarantined citizens. Cut off from the rest of the world, the blind men and women debate what governing structures (whether they should elect leaders in each ward, etc.) might be suitable to help them manage resources and organize life at the facility. The novel also seems to problematize governing structures that privilege the protection and large-scale acquisition of private property and surplus value at the expense of human dignity and well-being through the figures of the armed tyrannical blind men who, in a way, employ violence to

Introduction 7 hoard, privatize, and profit, through barter-trade, from communal resources (the food rations) meant for the collective body of residents at the facility. Blindness also explores the psychological impact of living under an authoritarian government by showing how some of the blind residents at the facility passively rationalize or even turn against one another as a way of adapting to the daily terror that permeates their new existence at the feet and whims of the despotic gang of armed men who extort them for food. In this way, the novel documents how previously unimaginable realities can quickly become normalized and accepted, a warning that acquires new resonance at a time when ethnonationalist forces have held significant influence and say within the executive branch of the US-American government. Many passages from Blindness are described through the focalized perspective of a doctor’s wife (all the characters in the novel remain nameless), the only person who maintains the ability to see throughout the novel. If the condition of collective blindness enables the greed, exploitation, and self-interest that previously existed to become even more “visible,” then the doctor’s wife, like Camus’ narrator, frequently assumes the position of the chronicler from whose focalized perspective readers witness the ugliness and horror of this unearthed reality. At various points in the novel, the doctor’s wife grapples with the burden of being a witness to the horrible events and actions she observes, realities that are invisible to others around her; she wrestles with the ethical responsibilities that the gift of sight confers onto her. Ultimately, using her ability to see, she is the one who kills the leader of the armed men (the one with the gun), orchestrates a rebellion, and safely leads members of her ward out of the facility, which was set on fire during their uprising. As the blind men and women exit the facility, the political metaphors of blindness and sight acquire a significance that remains relevant to our current social and political predicament. Indeed, throughout the novel, Saramago deploys the metaphors of blindness and sight—metaphors with obvious problematic ableist connotations—in a variety of ways. In the final page of Saramago’s work, the doctor and his wife make the following observations: why did we become blind, I don’t know, perhaps one day we’ll find out, Do you want me to tell you what I think, Yes, do, I don’t think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see. (326) Here and in other parts, the metaphor of blindness is used to document human reactions and behaviors when faced with a set of political choices and realities—realities that include the experience of living in a political moment

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Introduction

characterized by despair and hopelessness, or as the doctor’s wife observes, “blindness is also this, to live in a world where all hope is gone” (209). For example, Blindness describes how the escape from the facility presents the formerly quarantined blind inmates with an immediate dilemma: Say to a blind man, you’re free, open the door that was separating him from the world, Go, you are free, we tell him once more, and he does not go, he has remained motionless there in the middle of the road, he and the others, they are terrified, they do not know where to go, the fact is that there is no comparison between living in a rational labyrinth, which is, by definition, a mental asylum and venturing forth, without a guiding hand or a dog-leash, into the demented labyrinth of the city, where, memory will serve no purpose, for it will merely be able to recall the images of places but not the paths whereby we might get there. (217) For the blind inmates, the facility represents a familiar structure within which they organize themselves. The act of burning the entire edifice or system in which they were quarantined (it was burned in the act of retaliation by one of the quarantined women) signals a radical rupture from previous attempts, through proposals to democratically elect representatives in each ward, to manage their lives and make the best out of an environment purposely set up to produce scarcity and inequity. As they try to exit the facility and navigate the city’s labyrinth, they find themselves ephemerally paralyzed through terror by their inability to imagine the road ahead. Once again, this failure of imagination, previously explored in the comparative reading of Camus’ novel, here captures the difficult task of conceptualizing roads that represent radical departures from existing structures of domination and violence. In our current moment, as protesters burn down police stations, we hear calls for this act of imagination when activists demand that we radically reconceptualize policing and incarceration beyond dominant frames of reference employed to understand, define, and engage with the topic. The characters in the novel regain a different sense of “sight” in the larger city by organizing themselves. Their self-awareness and attempts to redefine the meaning of blindness and sight are reflected in some of their dialogue: “and how can a society of blind people organize itself in order to survive, By organizing itself. To organize oneself is, in a way, to begin to have eyes” (296). Nonetheless, beyond the capacity to simply organize, it is their attempts to reimagine and implement new structures and social relationships among themselves that ultimately sustains them. As a lifeline for cultural sustainability, Saramago’s creative work not only offers insights about

Introduction 9 the dark impulses that pervade our past and present but also posits this act of imagination as a precondition of meaningful social change in the future, within its own imaginative content. Thus, creative works, including those we frequently use in our classrooms, provide ideal platforms from which radical alternatives to existing structures may be conceived in dialogue with our own imagination as readers. Nonetheless, this act of imagination must also be extended to include the ways in which we think about our own scholarship. The 2017 decennial ACLA report on the state of the discipline, entitled Futures of Comparative Literature, includes a chapter on performative scholarship written by Avram Alpert, that partly echoes the need for this imaginative imperative in its indictment of current scholarly and professional practices: Contemporary scholarship has a content problem. I do not mean that there is anything wrong with the actual contents of academic criticism. Rather, I mean that the academy focuses too narrowly on innovation in content, We assume that advances in modern scholarship will arrive as content-ideas and not as form-ideas. This state of affairs is endemic to an academic situation that privileges publication over pedagogy, knowledge of smaller periods over broad-based investigation, and that allows an economy of information to dictate an increasingly unjust labor market […] performative scholarship calls upon us to think beyond the restriction of our scholarship, and invites us to make the presentational and formal varieties of teaching, political organizing, database-making, and creative writing, among others, equal aspects of our scholarly careers. (17–18) Rejecting the binary between pedagogy and research, this book reimagines ways of practicing scholarship by examining how comparative methods employed to respond to moments of crisis emerging in the classroom, including national periods of crisis and their effects on classroom politics, can be used to provide insights about the discipline. Each chapter of this book is structured and conceived according to Djelal Kadir’s definition of the “memo.” In other words, each chapter/memo chronicles situations where I have deployed comparative methods to tackle pedagogic crises and opportunities; the memos also point to possible ways of engaging and conceptualizing the discipline of comparative literature in the future by capitalizing on the cultural politics that shape classroom dynamics and the design of syllabi. Aside from the example cited in this introduction, the courses described in this book were taught at Shawnee State University, an Appalachian public institution located in southern Ohio. For this reason, the Appalachian

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Introduction

setting—its history and cultural politics—greatly informs the comparative approaches described in the memos. The first memo chronicles my first year of teaching in Appalachia. It captures my attempts to uncover and undo my own prejudices about the Appalachian region, as well as my students’ own biases regarding the cultures explored in the literary works we analyzed. The first memo conceives world literature classrooms as delivery systems that bring a plethora of cultural worlds in contact with our students; this delivery of difference can sometimes be a painful process as students are compelled to reckon with their own prejudices and ethnocentric proclivities. The second memo explores how the Appalachian setting of my classes can be comparatively incorporated within a world literature curriculum; it analyzes the writings of Appalachian activists and authors in relation to postcolonial works emerging from different cultural contexts. The third memo highlights pedagogic strategies for navigating the pitfalls of homogenizing reading practices that gravitate between, on the one hand, assimilating foreign works in ways that erase traces of their difference and, on the other hand, exoticizing their Otherness in a fashion that makes them incommensurable or incomparable. The memo features an analysis of Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter and traces the multiple translations of Émile Zola’s short story The Attack on the Mill as a means of contextualizing the vicissitudes of homogenizing reading practices. I argue that the variety of interpretive frameworks harnessed to “read” the Other and make sense of difference have greatly contributed to the moments of crises endured in the past few years. The fourth memo compares Appalachian queer-anti-urban responses to metronormative depictions of LGBTQ spaces in relation to rhetorical strategies adopted by queer Kenyan activists in their critiques of neo-colonial depictions of queer spaces and people on the African continent; it foregrounds this act of comparison as a way of validating the inclusion of Appalachian spaces and realities in comparative literature classes. The fifth memo responds to the crisis engendered by Donald Trumps’ Muslim ban through a comparative analysis of episodes from Star Trek: The Next Generation and other works that center and problematize the invocation of state security and cultural superiority to delegitimize the rights and personhood of marginalized populations at different moments in history. The sixth and final memo extends the pedagogic application of comparative methods to community engagement and study abroad spaces. The memo engages the ethnonationalist politics that define our present and offers pedagogic strategies to dissect them through comparative readings of Jason Lutes’ graphic novel Berlin and Grand Corps Malade’s slam poem “Saint-Denis” in study abroad contexts. It is by capitalizing on the pedagogic conceptual maps dramatized in Assia Djebar’s short

Introduction 11 story “The Woman in Pieces” that the sixth memo constructs its comparative methodology. At a time when universities are under siege by both neoliberal and crypto-fascist forces, it becomes imperative to reimagine how we produce scholarship in ways that center our pedagogy, our activism, and our relationship to the immediate environment and different communities that surround us.

Memo I

The Deliverance or Domestication of Others Memos from Comparative Literature Classes in Appalachia

In his work The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age, David Palumbo-Liu examines the relevance of world literature as a delivery system. According to Palumbo-Liu, works of literature bring the lives of others to us. As a system of delivery, literature, therefore, exposes us to alternative cultural worlds that transcend the borders of our own lived realities. However, it is not just others and their worlds that are exposed to us; the “rational” foundations we employ to make sense of our world also become exposed, destabilized, and scrutinized in the process. The deliverance of difference is therefore not always a painless process. As a professor of world literature teaching at an open-enrollment university in rural Appalachia, where many students have limited exposure to people and traditions outside their immediate environment, I find that Palumbo-Liu’s analysis effectively captures the pedagogic imperatives and dilemmas that I navigate in my classes. From a pedagogic perspective, Palumbo-Liu’s work offers a useful way of framing and understanding students’ resistance to particular types of texts and reading experiences. It is by envisioning comparative and world literature classes as delivery systems that this memo will frame pedagogic issues as indispensable theoretical platforms on which comparatists can articulate the exigency of the discipline. Such an approach can encapsulate an engagement with some of the following questions: How do we determine, organize, and politicize the corpus of what is delivered? How much difference is enough? What delivery methods should we employ? Is translation an effective delivery method? How do literary worlds travel through these delivery systems and how do we make sense of these processes of circulation? These questions do not just summarize debates in the discipline, but they also directly epitomize anxieties about the way comparative and world literature classes should be taught. Ethical quandaries regarding strategies for delivering, engaging, positioning, and incorporating texts that emerge from different national and cultural

The Deliverance or Domestication of Others 13 contexts have historically engendered a tradition of crisis, permeated by epistemological ruptures, through which the discipline of comparative literature has defined its deontological priorities and imperatives. Between 1959 and 1966, both René Etiemble and René Wellek, figureheads from the French and US-American schools of comparative literature, respectively, vociferously declared that there was a crisis in the discipline. While Etiemble bemoaned what he termed a conflation between general and comparative literature in the United States, Wellek criticized the positivist focus on influences that partially defined the French school (37–39, 163). Comparatists have also struggled to unshackle themselves from the Eurocentric epistemologies that have permeated the discipline. As Weisinger and Joyeaux contend in their explication of Etiemble’s polemical work entitled Comparaison n’est pas raison: La crise de la littérature comparée, “many comparatists, having managed to emancipate themselves from the thrall of nationalism, promptly enslave themselves in the larger, but still confining, concept of the primacy of Western literary tradition” (xiii). Indeed, the Green Report, published in 1975, stipulated that the growth of interest in the non-European literatures is another development we can welcome, while cautiously searching for ways to accommodate this interest in our own traditions […] we still need the virtues of precision and integrity our inherited culture has taught us. It goes without saying that we cannot begin to absorb the wealth of exotic [my emphasis] literatures before firmly possessing our own. (36) Of course, by the time the Bernheimer Report emerged in 1993, the impetus and symbiotic entrenchment of postcolonial and postmodern literary theory had created a discursive atmosphere that attempted to dislodge the Eurocentric proclivity of the discipline. The Derridean mantra “il n’y a pas de hors-texte,” coupled with the growing influence of cultural studies, had also led the contributors of the Bernheimer Report to question whether literary phenomena “should be the exclusive focus of our discipline” (42). Nonetheless, the tradition of crisis and rupture embedded in the discipline, with its penchant for analytical autopsies, has engendered works such as Gayatri Spivak’s Death of a Discipline (2003) and Emily Apter’s Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (2013). Ten years before Spivak’s postmortem diagnosis, Susan Bassnett had also prophesied the inevitable demise of comparative literature and its subsequent evolutionary (dare I say eschatological) “rebirth” in translation studies. These works legitimately foreground important challenges facing the discipline. Apter, for example, contends that reading a vast plethora of linguistically diverse

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works on a “gargantuan scale” at best only allows a superficial engagement with texts and at worst reinforces ethnocentrism by smoothing out difference through translation. Spivak similarly contends that comparatists must abdicate their roles as homogenizing global agents—who apprehend the “southern hemisphere” as objects of study—and instead become planetary subjects (72–73). From this perspective, the dying elements embedded in the discipline do not necessarily condemn it, but rather enable comparative literature to be “born again” in this epistemological tradition of rupture and rapture. According to this comparatist eschatology, the discipline in its present form must perish, it must be “purified,” in order for an alternative future to exist. While debates regarding the future of the discipline are important to its continued relevance, these discussions need to be contextualized and anchored around the symbiotic relationship between pedagogy and comparative literature. College classrooms have become the dominant spaces in which texts emerging from different national and cultural traditions circulate. From this perspective, questions of translatability and homogenized reading become increasingly important in comparative and world literature classes. The theoretical and deontological quandaries affecting the discipline are, indeed, inextricably linked to teaching. By this I mean that the act of teaching comparative literature is essentially a theoretical exercise. To teach comparative and world literature is to adopt, iterate, or reject a number of theoretical positions. Thus, the fetishism of crisis and ruptures, when used as epistemological strategies from which the discipline articulates its theoretical positions and constantly seeks to reinvent itself, should be extended, similarly, to moments of disruption and crisis that emerge in classroom settings. In this memo, I will therefore focus on three moments of crisis and rupture that materialized during class discussions of Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, and Edward Said’s Orientalism, which was discussed in conjunction with J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians. The goal is to situate theoretical moments of crisis within classroom dynamics as a focal point of analysis (this pedagogic and institutional situatedness may also partially restrain us from the temptation of having to manufacture new forms of crisis as a purely conventional rhetorical gesture). As a discipline, comparative literature defines itself through its systematic focus on an imperative that articulates a number of methods. In this sense, comparatists have an imperative to examine and theorize the discursive practices emerging from cultural encounters among texts and people from different national and cross-national contexts. Thus, the field of comparative literature engenders a particular discourse whose epistemology is grounded in the significance of cultural contacts and their roles in shaping the diffusions of shifting local, global, and glocal realities, geo-economic and political policies, as well as cultural practices. Literary works, in this context, are used

The Deliverance or Domestication of Others 15 by comparatists as depictive artifacts that simultaneously mirror, propagate, resist and engage in multiple ways with the vast array of phenomena emerging from intercultural interactions and encounters—including, I argue, cultural interactions between teacher, students, and texts representing different national traditions. The discipline of comparative literature, therefore, theorizes and ontologizes itself through an intercultural and transnational imperative emphasizing a specific method of analysis. It is from the performative dimensions of this method that comparatists draw their conclusions. By its definition, comparative literature, henceforth, dismantles the artificial barriers commonly constructed between theory and practice because it is through the prism of a specific method or praxis—the praxis of analyzing literature comparatively—that it aspires to articulate its global imperative. Due to its methodological focus, I contend that the discipline of comparative literature offers significant insights into the role and application of critical pedagogy in literature classes. The practice of teaching is henceforth part and parcel of the performative dimensions through which comparative literature should articulate its method and theorizes itself. As previously mentioned, framing comparative and world literature courses as delivery systems enables us to engage with questions of translatability, untranslatability, and cultural homogenization. My analysis of translation here will be restricted to concerns about cultural domestication. The translator inadvertently always domesticates a given work within the semantic system of reference embedded in the target language. However, this act of cultural domestication is, of course, not just confined to language translation. As students encounter works of literature that are foreign to them, regardless of whether these works are originally written in their native language or in translation, they cognitively domesticate—or interpretively translate—these texts within pre-existing beliefs. If comparative and world literature courses are delivery systems that enable students to confront their own cultural assumptions through encounters with different literary worlds, then it becomes imperative to focus on the terms in which they engage with these texts. In my teaching experience, three texts (among others) that have engendered negative reactions from my students are Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, Jamaica Kinkaid’s A Small Place, and Edward Said’s Orientalism. In the case of the first two works, these strong negative reactions mostly emerged from a particular type of aesthetic reading experience they had to grapple with. The world literature classes in which these texts were taught encapsulated works from the Americas, Asia, Europe, as well as the African continent. While many of these works were translated from languages that included French, Spanish, Portuguese, Gikuyu, Chinese, and Japanese, other texts, such as Selvon’s Lonely Londoners, were presented to students in Creole English.

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The Lonely Londoners recounts the lives and adventures of West Indian immigrants in London during the aftermath of the Second World War. In his novel, Selvon portrays the systemic discrimination and prejudice encountered by the West Indian community. By interspersing comedic elements in an otherwise tragic story, the novel explores the quest for upward social mobility, which is, for the most part, defined through the politics of British citizenship and racial identities. Samuel Selvon arrived in London in 1950, at a time when large numbers of Caribbean people were migrating to Britain. In her analysis of immigration in post-war London, Rebecca Dyer examines the ways in which Selvon’s place of birth, Trinidad, and his newly adopted home, were inherently intertwined: Trinidad did not achieve self-governing, postcolonial status until 1962, and before that, Trinidadians and other West Indians were—legally, at least—considered full subjects of the British Crown. Thus, Selvon’s London set fiction was not produced—as Salman Rushdie describes diasporic writing in “Imaginary Homelands”—while “out-of-country and even out-of-language” because English-speaking Trinidad could not be considered politically or even culturally “outside” the UnitedKingdom. Like many other migrants of the immediate postwar years, Selvon was not a border-crossing “immigrant” in the strictest usage of the word, nor was he considered British as his mixed reception in the mother country soon made clear. (113) Selvon’s novel examines the sense of alienation that emerges from the liminal position of those who were full subjects of the British crown but were, nonetheless, excluded as “unauthentic” citizens or “outsiders.” Due to a growing and desperate demand for cheap labor emerging from the need to “staff the vacancies in the economic market” during the aftermath of the Second World War, Britain actively encouraged West Indian immigration to its shores (Pichler 48). As the flow of migrant workers increased, a growing impetus to police and “contain” them also ensued. In The Lonely Londoners, Selvon depicts how these migrant communities struggled with their systematic alienation and partial exclusion from British society, specifically in areas such as employment and housing. Selvon’s novel epitomizes how global capital, through the project of empire, functions as a delivery system permeated by the circulation of both people and commodities. In this context, the periphery is no longer “quarantined” and exploited at a distance but instead forces the center to confront its presence, its alterity, via flows of migration from the outer reaches of empire to its capital. Selvon’s target audience was white British citizens who refused to confront or engage with this delivered alterity, often by resorting to

The Deliverance or Domestication of Others 17 exclusionary policies. As Dyer observes, “Selvon has claimed that this wide intended audience did not include Caribbean people and has hinted that depicting migrants in London was his method of informing white Britons” (115). In this way, both the content and style of Selvon’s novel reflect his efforts to place different cultural worlds in dialogue by forcing white Britons to poetically confront and experience the difference and Otherness situated in their own backyards. As the narrator of Selvon’s novel explains in Creole, It have people living London who don’t know what happening in the room next to them, far more the street, or how other people living. London is a place like that. It divide up in little worlds, and you stay in the world you belong to and you don’t know anything about what happening in the other ones except what you read in the papers […] Them people who have car, who going to theatre and ballet in the West End, who attending premier with royal family, they don’t know nothing about hustling two pound of Brussel sprout and half pound potato, or queuing up for fish and chips in the smog. (74) Here, the loneliness that Selvon’s characters experience stems from their social exclusion as second class citizens. It is by describing these socioeconomically stratified cultural worlds—worlds that are interdependent but yet walled off from each other—that Selvon identifies the need to capture and deliver the realities and experiences of West Indian immigrant communities to a wider British audience. As Selvon’s text circulated in my classroom, students were similarly confronted with a purposefully marked Otherness embedded in the medium of delivery. While reading Selvon’s novel, my students grew increasingly uncomfortable with the narrative voice. In his novel, Selvon creates a narrator who describes the social obstacles encountered by West Indians using Creole English. In an interview with Michel Fabre, Samuel Selvon explains that the choice to write in Creole English emerged from a creative dilemma. While wanting to appeal to a broader European audience, Selvon found it difficult to capture, what he terms, “a certain quality in West Indian everyday life” using “standard English” (66). Selvon further believed that one of the major responsibilities of the West Indian writer was to make “his country and his people known accurately to the rest of the world” (67). He thus had to negotiate between the need to deliver his work within a broad sphere of circulation and the desire to imbue his novel with a culturally distinct aesthetic that would more aptly capture the realities he sought to portray. Selvon describes how he reconciled these two needs, in the following passage from the interview:

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The Deliverance or Domestication of Others I did not pick the Jamaican way of talking in London. I only tried to produce what I believed was thought of as a Caribbean dialect. The modified version in which I write my dialect may be a manner of extending the language. It may be called artificial and fabricated. The way I treat the language is not the way it is spoken in Jamaica, or Barbados, or Trinidad either, for the matter. I only resorted to a modified Trinidadian dialect because, much more than Jamaican or Barbadian English, it is close to “correct” Standard English, and I thought it would be more recognizable to the European reader. Children should be able to understand it. I only modified it so people outside the Caribbean would be able to identify with it. (67)

In this context, Samuel Selvon managed to break the walls of cultural incommensurability by creating a modified Creole that was not only intelligible to a global Anglophone readership but also, just as importantly, forced its target audience to engage with its Otherness in its own terms. It is this intrusive Otherness—whose language was foreign yet recognizable and which appeared in the form of a postcolonial narrative aesthetic— that my students resented and actively resisted. The modified Creole that Selvon had invented was, in fact, an act of translation, which, nonetheless, retained traces of its local origin, both in the content of the novel as well as in its discursive aesthetic. While my students were more than willing to engage with the content of Selvon’s novel, they felt alienated by the way it had been “packaged for delivery.” My students had encountered many of the assigned readings for the class in translation. These translated works had appeared in “standard English.” Thus, while they embraced a corpus of literary works that contained culturally diverse content, the form had to be domesticated according to their aesthetic sensibilities. David Damrosch contends that “universalizing modes of presentation” can be problematic when they “contribute to the erasure of basic elements of the original work” (138). In this context, the “‘universal’ is only a cover for an unconscious process of assimilation to one’s own prior values” (138). Here, Standard English emerged as the supposed “universal medium” through which a diverse array of literary content was to be delivered. It was only after pointing to the culturally stigmatized Appalachian dialect, which many of my students spoke at home, that we were able to effectively critically engage with the politics of language and symbolic power. Some of the students, who grew up in the local community, had acquired a hyperawareness and sensitivity vis-à-vis the historically stigmatized Appalachian English dialect spoken in the region and subsequently felt compelled to change their own speech patterns (in academic contexts) as well as police other variants (whether local or international) that deviated

The Deliverance or Domestication of Others 19 from the hegemonic linguistic norms prevalent in the academy. To a certain extent, confronting the marked discursive Otherness embedded in the poetics of Selvon’s work also entailed reflecting on their own sense of difference or conformity vis-à-vis the academic fields of cultural production in which they were situated. However, as previously stated, the politics of domestication and cultural homogenization are not purely translation based issues. Neither does the solution to this problem reside in excluding translated works from one’s syllabi. Institutional budgetary policies, constraints, and politics often also foreclose many opportunities for proper foreign language instruction. Furthermore, many translators experiment with the target language in innovative ways as a means to capture local stylistic elements that mimic (while recreating) some discursive aspects of the original source. An instructor can also, sporadically, highlight dilemmas related to translatability (or untranslatability) when teaching in translation from a language that he or she knows. I therefore posit that in order to have a comprehensive discussion on the subject, the politics and problematics of cultural homogenization need to be systematically framed within the deontological imperatives of comparative and world literature classes, including the institutional realities in which such practices take place. References to the pedagogic and theoretical space of the classroom should not merely emerge as peripheral appendages; they should be axiomatic to the discussion. In his exposition of comparative literature’s imperatives, Palumbo-Liu contends that what we obtain through reading is a life not like our own and a life specifically beyond “our lot.” Not only does it not seem like what we have experienced, it also comes from experiences that are not likely ever to be ours at all. (11) Great art, henceforth, stirs in us a sense of difference, and this difference, if delivered well, in turn prompts us to reach beyond the ordinary sphere of our proper existence. This transcendence leads to a broader sort of empathy. And at that moment, we ‘become’ something different, something inflected with otherness. (11) Nonetheless, in order to attain this transcendence, we sometimes need to engage with difference in its partial incommensurability, in its ability to

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challenge, alienate, and possibly transform us. It is in this sense that Selvon’s novel forces us to contend with its Otherness through its content and style. In order to meaningfully engage with The Lonely Londoners, my students were forced to revisit and modify their assumptions about language and reflect on their relationship to linguistic forms of symbolic capital. Just like Selvon’s novel, Jamaica Kincaid’s book A Small Place, which offers a virulent postcolonial critique of contemporary Antiguan society, as well as the tourist industry, similarly compels readers to have a continuous awareness of their position of alterity vis-à-vis the text they are reading. The following passage exemplifies the book’s seeming antagonism toward a hypothetical “Western” reader: The thing you have always suspected about yourself the minute you became a tourist is true: A tourist is an ugly human being. You are not an ugly person all the time; you are not an ugly person ordinarily; you are not an ugly person day to day […] An ugly thing, that is what you are when you become a tourist, an ugly, empty thing, a stupid thing, a piece of rubbish pausing here and there to gaze at this and taste that, and it will never occur to you that the people who inhabit the place in which you have just paused cannot stand you, that behind their closed doors they laugh at your strangeness (you do not look the way they look); the physical sight of you does not please them; you have bad manners (it is their custom to eat their food with their hands; you try eating their way, you look silly; you try eating the way you always eat, you look silly); they do not like the way you speak (you have an accent); they collapse helpless from laughter, mimicking the way they imagine you must look as you carry out some everyday bodily function. (14–17) Unlike Selvon’s novel, A Small Place is not written in Creolized English. Yet, by creating and incorporating the reader’s subject position within its narrative, the book forces one to contend with alterity in a particular way. Here, it is not the text that is othered but rather the reader’s own subject position. Jamaica Kincaid reverses and subverts the dynamics of the colonial gaze. “Exotic” natives are not the ones being scrutinized as objects of analysis; it is the reader, whose subjectivity and corporeality becomes suspect. The reader is not just a tourist in the physical and geographic sense of the word; he or she is also a reader/tourist interacting with the realities described by Kinkaid. This reader/ tourist must, consequently, understand and relate to this textual world according to the terms and perspectives stipulated by the “native voice.” My students, who did not care much for this literary strategy, resisted the subject position in which they had been inscribed through Kinkaid’s

The Deliverance or Domestication of Others 21 narrative. Part of that resistance (aside from taking offense at being called ugly) could have emerged from a refusal to accept the possibility of their own systemic complicity in the socioeconomic global structures of exploitation that Jamaica Kincaid outlined in her book. During class discussion, we explored how as citizens, taxpayers, general consumers, or tourists, we inadvertently participate in macroeconomic and political systems that often engender the global inequalities we abhor. It was through this uncomfortable encounter with delivered alterity, that they attempted (some more successfully than others) to imagine their “relation to others and [think] through why and how that relation exists, historically, politically, ideologically” (Palumbo-Liu 14). Part of the students’ resistance to this text may have also stemmed from the fact that while some of them had visited the Caribbean, others had never left the country. Indeed, a number of students attending the university stem from socioeconomic contexts where vacations to “exotic” destinations are, for the most part, out of reach. It is possible that some of the Appalachian students could have—albeit partially—identified more with the realities experienced by economically disenfranchised Antiguans than with the jet setting tourists. In this case, such students were compelled to occupy a subject position that radically diverged from their lived realities. The socioeconomic position of many Appalachian regions, which function as internal peripheries of the United States, thus, complicates a pedagogically situated reading of Kincaid’s work. The modes of circulation, found in my situated readings of The Lonely Londoners and A Small Place, encapsulate an assemblage of delivery networks (Deleuze and Guattari) connecting the diffusion of ethnoscapes—in the form of tourists or migrant workers—and the global movement of mediascapes containing stories that capture these phenomena (Appadurai). These stories, which circulate in pedagogic contexts, are also taught by faculty stemming from local and international backgrounds, who are themselves delivered across academic institutional networks tied to the vicissitudes of local and global job markets. In this case, a situated comparative reading engaged with pedagogy must also theorize the embodied and lived experience of teaching faculty in relation to the texts and students they interact with. Such an analysis focuses on the ways in which situated meanings emerge from these overlapping and interactive networks of circulation. Scholars in critical pedagogy such as Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux, and bell hooks have conceptualized the process of theorizing as a lived experience. bell hooks, for example, contends that: When our lived experience of theorizing is fundamentally linked to processes of self-recovery, of collective liberation, no gap exists between theory and practice. Indeed, what such an experience makes more

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The Deliverance or Domestication of Others evident is the bond between the two—that ultimately reciprocal process wherein one enables the other. Theory is not inherently healing, liberatory or revolutionary. It fulfills this function only when we ask that it do so and direct our theorizing towards this end. (61)

From this perspective, our lived experience becomes theorizeable to the extent that we teleologically imbue the process with a set of deontological values and expectations. As a faculty member of Kenyan heritage working at a predominantly white “teaching institution” in the Appalachian region of the United States, my ability to effectively teach world literature classes in a way that fosters cultural tolerance, while mitigating ethnocentrism, racism, sexism, heterosexism, etc., depends on a series of theoretical performances that permeate every aspect of my teaching: ranging from the construction of a syllabus, the materials I choose, how I respond and engage with my class, to the way I position and instrumentalize my physical presence as a black body in front of students—many of whom have had very little contact or experience with other cultures and people outside of constructed media stereotypes they consume on a daily basis. Indeed, my lived experience in the classroom, as it is articulated through a number of cultural encounters and interactions among myself, a member of the African diaspora, my students who come predominantly from rural Appalachia, and the vast repertoire of texts stemming from different national contexts, capture the phenomenological processes from which the discipline of comparative literature defines itself. Henry Giroux contends that the goal of critical pedagogy is to provide tools that “unsettle common-sense assumptions, theorize matters of self and social agency, and engage the ever-changing demands and promises of a democratic polity” (3). From this perspective, education is not only important “for gainful employment but also for creating the formative culture of beliefs, practices, and social relations that enable individuals to wield power, learn how to govern, and nurture a democratic society that takes equality, justice, shared values, and freedom seriously” (3). In my attempts to unsettle “common-sense” assumptions about different cultures and people in literature classes, I have often employed Edward Said’s analysis of Orientalism as a way to discuss the politics of contemporary media representations of “ethnic Others” in geopolitical contexts. During the course of one particular semester, my students read J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, a novel that dramatizes the ways in which Orientalist discourses are instrumentalized as a means of not only projecting military and economic power abroad but also in order to police citizens at home. “The barbarians” in Coetzee’s work emerge in the minds of citizens as essentialized uncivilized threatening figures living within the peripheral shadows of a hypothetical

The Deliverance or Domestication of Others 23 empire. The novel’s protagonist, a magistrate who has been placed in charge of one of the frontier settlements in the outer regions of the empire, becomes increasingly disillusioned with the virtues of his mission upon witnessing the systematic torture of prisoners of war at the hands of an interrogation expert from the military. Having himself been labeled a barbarian sympathizer due to his conflicted empathy for torture victims, he is ultimately extrajudicially tortured and thrown in jail. Waiting for the Barbarians examines the ways in which the image of the uncivilized Other is employed as a tabula rasa on which the empire writes its own script and defines itself. Michael Valdez Moses observes that: Coetzee’s reluctance to supply the precise historical coordinates of this story stems not merely from political discretion or postmodern literary proclivities, but more deeply from his commitment to explore disturbing questions that cannot be answered by outcome of current political development in South Africa. His fiction offers a meditation on the question of whether all civilizations are necessarily founded upon some arbitrary distinction between civilized and the barbarian, a historical distinction that seems to require an element of force and compulsion, an act of discrimination that has no moral basis. (116) Indeed, Coetzee’s novel is mostly centered on the magistrate; the natives, including the barbarian woman he keeps in his house, mostly appear as silent figures in the background—figures on whom he attempts to impose meaning. In the course of the novel, the magistrate realizes that his identity as a “civilized” citizen of empire is intricately connected to the military torturers who disgust him. In a moment of vivid reflection, the magistrate declares, for I was not, as I liked to think, the indulgent pleasure loving opposite of the cold rigid Colonel [the torturer]. I was the lie that Empire tells itself when times are easy, he the truth that Empire tells when harsh winds blow. Two sides of imperial rule, no more, no less. (135) Thus, if Coetzee’s work engages in a general critique of imperialism, the barbarians also encapsulate the interchangeable fantasized alterity through which “empire acquires its form, by writing on its subjects” (Moses 120). The lack of spatial or historical coordinates attributed to the story provided a perfect opportunity to address the geopolitics of the United States in class. As I planned this section of the class, I intended to use Coetzee’s novel as a narrativized palimpsestic device on which my students could visualize

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the sociopolitical relevance of Edward Said’s arguments and apply them to contemporary debates in the United States regarding terrorism, torture, extraordinary rendition, rights to habeas corpus, warrantless surveillance, and the implementations of the PATRIOT ACT as well as the National Defense Authorization Act. Close reading analysis of various passages in Waiting for the Barbarians were subsequently, later during the semester, followed by watching a 40-minute documentary where Edward Said elaborated on the inherent intertextual relationship between his two books Orientalism and Covering Islam. I hoped that these intertextual and hypertextual connections would reveal the rhetorical similarities between Coetzee’s “barbarians” and contemporary depictions of Muslims through the lens of terrorism, as representations of the same discursive practice identified by Said as Orientalism. Borrowing from Derridean discourse on grammatology, I planned to explain how words continually displace and alienate the things they seek to name in the process of naming them (Derrida). In this case, the words “Islam” or “Muslim,” as they are frequently used in the US-American context, seek to linguistically domesticate a vast plethora of different cultures and people by abstracting and homogenizing them in the pursuit of both domestic and geopolitical agendas. Here Muslim figures emerge as discursive archetypes, as dramatis personae condemned to play the same predictable roles in our political imagination. It is at this juncture that works of fiction can act as countervailing forces. As Robert Scholes explains in Textual Power, “when science fiction [or other kinds of fiction for that matter] really works it does not domesticate the alien but alienates the domestic” (126). In other words, by alienating what has become domesticated through discourse, works of fiction have the ability to defamiliarize what is familiar, thus imbuing us with the ability to question normalized assumptions and worldviews we use to interpret and engage the world. By setting its plot in the context of a hypothetical empire, Waiting for the Barbarians therefore provides a distant yet familiar echo of culturally accepted dogmas frequently used to justify the existence and propagation of empires, in a manner that denaturalizes and therefore reveals the realpolitik that empire’s ideological impetus usually obscures. Roughly a month before the class discussion on Edward Said, the US-American consulate in Benghazi was attacked on September 11, 2012; in the course of this attack, the US Ambassador to Libya, John Christopher Stevens, lost his life. Concomitantly, an anti-Islamic film entitled The Innocence of Muslims provoked protests in Libya, Tunisia, Pakistan, and Egypt where people gathered around US diplomatic posts in anger. As we discussed Edward Said’s analysis, the attack in Benghazi (as well as those on the World Trade Center) lingered in the minds of my students and were

The Deliverance or Domestication of Others 25 frequently alluded to in their responses. One of my students vociferously argued against Said’s thesis by positing that if the Middle East does not want to be seen in this way then why don’t they try to portray the good things about them more or try to do good things for others instead of harboring thousands of terrorists or doing unspeakable acts in the name of their religion? Another student contended that these stereotypes come about because “the majority of Middle East people hate Americans. Terrorists teach their children to kill innocent people due to their religious beliefs […] The movie that was recently put out led to the killing of US Embassy workers!” Other students even wondered whether it was even possible to coexist peacefully with Muslims. The words terrorist, Muslim, and Middle East were frequently used interchangeably as synonyms. The actions of some people who associated themselves with Islam were simplistically projected as a faithful representation of all Muslims in the world. The Middle East was grammatologically domesticated into an anthropomorphized nemesis taken from an action film. The familiar archetype of the Muslim villain had returned with a vengeance and had even managed to analytically quarantine Coetzee’s work. In their minds, the people inhabiting what they monolithically referred to as the Middle East had nothing to do with the “noble victims” of empire that Coetzee depicted in his novel. They had refused to “take the bait” (so to speak). My student had “covered” Islam in the same way that many US-American journalists “cover” Islam with a blanket of prejudice. As interpretive communities bombarded with images of protesters storming US Embassies and setting the US-American flag on fire, they categorically refused to engage with Said’s examination and therefore could not see that their reactions dramatically epitomized his diagnosis (these reactions are, of course, not atypical; many college instructors and professors can probably cite similar incidents occurring within the contexts of their own classes). In Covering Islam, Said argues that while people have certainly used Islam in order to attack and kill innocent civilians, much of what one reads and sees in the media about Islam represents the aggression as coming from Islam because that is what “Islam” is. Local and concrete circumstances are thus obliterated. In other words, covering Islam is a one-sided activity that obscures what “we” do, and highlights instead what Muslims and Arabs by their very flawed nature are. (xxii)

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That evening, as I erratically and moodily drove back home to my theoretical drawing board, I gave myself the task of finding a strategy to overcome this discursive impasse that had emerged in the classroom. At this juncture, it is important for me to state that while my students expressed Islamophobic sentiments in the classroom, they, nonetheless, generally showed a propensity to care a great deal about matters of social justice and equality. They were generally very eager to learn and tackle the materials presented in class. I had formed a close personal bond with them during the course of the semester and often enjoyed and looked forward to engaging with the meaningful discussions and questions they asked. During the course of the semester, they had shown a great deal of empathy toward the plight of indigenous communities in Guatemala, when reading I, Rigoberta Menchu; they had also championed the cause of the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico, when analyzing the writings of Subcomandante Marcos. It was easier for them to critically examine the plight of indigenous communities in Guatemala, including the complicity of the United States in engendering such conditions, than to come to terms with the problematics of Islamophobia in contemporary US-American society. Part of my students’ resistance to Said’s analysis had emerged out of an instinctive act of “self-defense.” Said was pronouncing an indictment against an entrenched and emotionally charged aspect of their worldview, they therefore felt attacked and needed to reaffirm their beliefs without engaging or unpacking the details of his argument. bell hooks explains that there can be, and usually is, some degree of pain involved in giving up old ways of thinking and knowing and learning new approaches. [For example,] White students learning to think more critically about questions of race and racism may go home for the holidays and suddenly see their parents in a different light. (43) Educators should recognize and respect this pain as they become aware of the discomfort that arises when students are encouraged to shift paradigms (43). Nonetheless, this sense of discomfort can also be used as a pedestal from which students can gain new perspectives. One way of doing this is by “linking confessional narratives to academic discussions so as to show how experience can illuminate and enhance our understanding of academic materials” (21). In this way, students become aware of how their own cultural biases affect their textual interpretations. In order to compel my students to revisit the subject from a different perspective, I shared my own personal experiences regarding my attempts to deal with personal prejudices vis-à-vis working-class whites from rural

The Deliverance or Domestication of Others 27 Appalachia as well as the larger southern regions of the United States. I told my students that until I started teaching in southern Ohio, my image of rural, working-class whites had for the most part been mediated by televised images of highly bigoted country folk who epitomized the dark history of violence that had been inflicted upon the African-American community. Whenever I encountered individuals that dressed or spoke in ways that exemplified my interpretation of Appalachian culture, I would become conscious of my own black body and experience a tremendous sense of fear, especially when I felt surrounded. My perception of them was based on a homogenized caricature of a heterogeneous group that I had domesticated within my own frames of reference. By presenting my attempts to recognize and overcome my own biases, I de-centered the classroom. I was no longer the impersonal authority figure who dissected and problematized their own views but instead emerged as a human being that they could relate to. bell hooks states, when education is the practice of freedom, students are not the only ones who are asked to share, to confess […] Professors who expect students to share personal narratives but who are themselves unwilling to share are exercising power in a manner that could be coercive. (21) By divulging my own personal experiences, I did not seek to make my students comfortable with their own prejudices; instead, I wanted to create an awareness of the homogenizing power of a given cultural gaze that proliferates through media representations. It was through my personal narrative that my students were not only able to identify with the processes I was describing but were also able to, albeit in a limited fashion, occupy from a different discursive paradigm the archetypal position to which they had ascribed all Muslims. This was accomplished through an analysis that comparatively textualized my narrative experience, the communities of interpretation to which my students belonged, and the materials presented in class. Even though not all my students abandoned their prejudices, some of them could nonetheless now begin to meaningfully engage with Said’s analysis. By relying on the theoretical tools favored by the discipline of comparative literature, I sought to articulate the values espoused by the field of critical pedagogy in my teaching. Part of this comparative strategy involved alerting my students to the dangers of seeing the world through “a single story.” As Chimamanda Adichie contends, the danger of a single story is manifested not just in its propensity to simplify and restrict our understanding of the complex array of social phenomena that surround us but also in its ability to disempower groups of people by imposing narrow definitions of who they are, therefore limiting the diverse ontological

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possibilities and platforms through which they can articulate their grievances and empower themselves. In this context, comparative literature’s preoccupation with literary diversity offers an ideal pedagogic space in which students can begin to question, or at the very least confront, the single stories they use to make sense of the world. Single stories can be challenged when students are compelled to critically engage with delivered alterity on multiple levels. As I have argued, this delivered alterity does not only take into consideration the circulation of culturally diverse texts in pedagogic spaces, but also encapsulates the movement of faculty and students from diverse backgrounds within academic institutions and networks. A situated reading therefore takes into consideration the ways in which interpretive possibilities in pedagogic settings are filtered through and shaped by these interactive networks of circulation. The pedagogically situated interpretive analyses of A Small Place, The Lonely Londoners, Waiting for the Barbarians as read with Orientalism emerged out of an assemblage of textual, intertextual, ideological, spatial (the circulation of people and stories), corporeal (through embodied notions of ethnicity), and socioeconomic interactions involving the cultural world inhabited by the students, the teacher’s subject position, and the texts. The impact of the current sociopolitical and economic climate on academia also gives these interactive networks their form. At a time when we have to justify the relevance of the humanities based on prospective employment numbers, when the skills our students acquire only gain value if they can be incorporated within the logic of the market, our classes become delivery systems that package students in the service of global capital, either by strapping them with debt or sending them off to post-graduate careers where many of them will toil as underpaid adjunct laborers. But this inquiry into the nature of our own positions within these networks of circulation must not stop there. The symbiotic relationship between the deliverance or domestication of alterity is not confined to interpretive textual issues. We must also confront the ethical aporia that emerges from mining and domesticating stories and artistic expressions on a global scale for the sole purpose of satisfying the endless accumulation of cultural capital that materializes in the form of academic publications. From this perspective, experimenting with new ways of approaching our scholarship, our relationship to critical pedagogy as well as our responsibilities vis-à-vis the institutions we inhabit is both a theoretical as well as a political imperative.

Memo II

Syllabusing Mapping Appalachian Texts onto a World Literature Curriculum

Upper-level undergraduate classes, as well as graduate seminars, often provide the opportunity for some teaching faculty not only to incorporate their current research into their teaching but also develop and experiment with different concepts, which later find their way in published articles or books. In this case, a given course has the potential of becoming a laboratory in which research ideas are tested. For some, the classroom is not just a space that enables one to brainstorm ideas for future publication on a given subject; instead, classroom dynamics, the ways in which students engage with translated texts emerging from different cultural contexts, the selection of works available through translation, the students’ affinity or resistance to specific forms of reading, constitute, in and of themselves, the focal subject of analysis. As a discipline that primarily articulates its deontological imperative through a specific method of analysis, comparative literature has offered fertile ground for such forms of investigation. Here, the methodological imperative to compare a variety of cultural texts, in the context of a classroom, highlights a specific pedagogic position that is inherently connected to the theoretical grounds on which the discipline articulates its exigency. Instead of approaching research on literature and pedagogy as a way to examine and perfect teaching methods, this memo focuses on the situatedness of the classroom and instructional dynamics as theoretical spaces from which one can effectively engage with a plethora of debates permeating the field of literary criticism. In this context, the dimensions of literary analysis encapsulate a network connecting students and instructors from various backgrounds, texts emerging from different national contexts, the specific situatedness of the academic space and region in which those texts are read, as well as the epistemological framework employed to organize literary works and other materials on a syllabus. It is from this perspective that this memo will focus on the politics of circulation in world literature—specifically as it relates to the networks of cultural encounters mentioned above. In this regard, this particular analysis tackling the global circulation of literary works aims to focus,

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not on cultural hierarchies between the most and least disseminated texts, but instead on literary interactions that are rendered invisible by dominant epistemologies, which in turn shape how classroom syllabi are designed. I will first begin by providing a general outline tying some of the major debates in the discipline to specific pedagogic positions before analyzing a world literature syllabus in which students (many of whom were from Appalachia) examined the global circulation and local appropriation of postcolonial theory by Appalachian writers. Many of the debates that permeate the field of comparative literature are inherently connected to issues that affect how world and comparative literature classes are—or should be—taught. For example, David Damrosch’s definition of world literature as texts that “circulate beyond their culture of origin” implicitly defines the type of materials that may be offered for inclusion in a given world literature class (Damrosch 4). Nonetheless, as many have argued, these modes of circulation do not occur in a hierarchical vacuum; they are often constricted or enabled by existing social, economic, geopolitical, and cultural structures of power. In their highly contested works, both Franco Moretti and Pascale Casanova have employed a world-systems approach in an attempt to outline how geopolitical hierarchies affect the production and dissemination literary texts. Moretti contends that books from the core [are] incessantly exported into the semi-periphery and the periphery, where they [are] read, admired, imitated, turned into models—thus drawing those literatures [from the periphery] into the orbit of the core ones, and indeed interfering with their autonomous development. (Moretti 402) In her reflections on the relationship between literature and national cultural capital, Pascale Casanova argues that the original dependence of literature on the nation is at the heart of the inequality that structures the literary world […] The writer stands in a particular relation to world literary space by virtue of the place occupied in it by the national space into which he was born. (235–237) According to Casanova, this a priori position is subsequently shaped by how the writer instrumentalizes this “unavoidable inheritance” (237). Theoretical debates that dominate the field of comparative literature, thus, often focus on the politics of circulation; that is, they examine the types of texts/authors that typically circulate in translation, the kinds of works that

Syllabusing 31 have historically been excluded from these global processes of circulation, as well as the national and international cultural politics that dictate these global processes of inclusion and exclusion. Since world and comparative literature classes are among the dominant spaces in which materials stemming from different national and cultural spaces circulate, the very act of designing a syllabus, a new course proposal, or a curriculum emerges as a way to engage with these debates. Indeed, the aggregate conglomeration of world and comparative literature syllabi bear part of the responsibility for opening, subverting, restricting, or creating avenues in which texts are disseminated and read on a wide scale. As previously mentioned, many have highlighted the limitations of both Moretti and Casanova’s methodologies. Moretti’s book Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History has been criticized for “sidestepping the intricacies of specificity and of the particular through strategies of ‘distant reading’” (Kadir 1–2). Others, such as Christopher Prendergast, have argued that Pascale Casanova’s work not only places too much emphasis on the role of the nation-state without considering other variables but also confines itself to Eurocentric definitions of literature and literary traditions. Helena Carvalhao Buescu’s analysis of the World Republic of Letters echoes these sentiments. When reflecting on Eurocentric assumptions made in Casanova’s text, she points out that to say that only after decolonization “countries in Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and Asia demanded access to literary legitimacy and existence” [as Casanova contends] is, if nothing else, to arbitrarily put aside traditions that may not have been recognized as hegemonic by national agendas in Europe, but that were still fundamental, such as the Arab one. (Buescu 131) In other words, Casanova’s propensity to focus on nationalism as well as her Eurocentric definitions of literature privileges some forms of circulation and cultural exchanges while rendering others invisible. Buescu’s criticism places an emphasis, not on cultural hierarchies between the most and least disseminated texts, but on literary interactions that are rendered invisible by dominant epistemologies. Such an approach might, for example, also place a focus on the transnational dissemination of popular music (or other forms of oral literature) across regions situated in the “global periphery.” We might therefore think about how this shift in focus—a focus on comparative methodologies that enable or disable the visibility of existing literary forms of circulation and cultural exchanges—could also be articulated through the construction of a world or comparative literature syllabus. In this regard, some of the following questions may provide some guidelines: How

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do we explain the academic visibility attributed to some literary forms of circulation and not others? How might a world or comparative literature syllabus highlight or legitimize literary-cultural exchanges that have remained invisible or understudied in US academia? The last question acknowledges the fact that literary works are not just legitimized and circulated on a global scale through the politics of translation, classroom syllabi, among other factors, also function as legitimating tools (there is obviously a symbiotic relationship between these two platforms of cultural legitimation). The purpose here is not simply to incorporate literary phenomena that have remained submerged under the radar of US-American scholarship into one’s syllabus, but also to construct appropriate comparative tools from which they can be rendered visible, studied, presented, and discussed. I will now turn to a specific example revolving around a world literature class that I taught in the spring semester of 2015, which sought to incorporate writings from Appalachia as part of its comparative impetus. As a region, Appalachia has historically been caricatured as an isolated, rural, anti-modern, and homogeneous place. Thus, these projected images of isolated homogeneity appear to be incompatible with a world literature perspective—especially one that privileges artistic modes of circulation and intercultural exchanges on a global scale. In The Invention of Appalachia, Allen Batteau explains that “the image of Appalachia as a strange land and peculiar people was elaborated at the very same time that the relationships of external domination and control of the Southern Mountain Region’s natural and human resources were being elaborated. Until very recently, the idea of Appalachia has deflected attention away from the political interests that contributed to the definition of the region, at times in a manner that denied the basic premises of those interests” (15). Caricatures of Appalachia and its inhabitants were thus used to legitimize specific economic and political interests while concealing systemic forms of violence. As Batteau contends, in the image, it was not the speculative greed of the planters for the land but the love of freedom of the mountaineers that led them to settle in the mountain wilderness; it was not the manipulation of antagonisms by the aristocrats but the lawlessness of the hillbillies that led to the feuds; in the prevailing image it was not the monopolization of public services in the lowlands but the degeneracy of the highlanders that produced high levels of poverty and illiteracy. (15) Cultural traits projected onto Appalachia were thus used to legitimize the continued exploitation of the region.

Syllabusing 33 The constructed image of Appalachia also provided a space for those residing outside the region to articulate their social anxieties about the present. For example, in the aftermath of the civil war, many magazine articles and travel journals depicted Appalachia as “a distinct region separate and isolated from the rest of the country, its people untouched by the problems of the modern industrial age” (Hays and Taylor-Caudill). Works such as Blacks in Appalachia and Back Talk from Appalachia: Confronting Stereotypes (among others) have sought to counter the image of isolation and racial homogeneity by tracing how national and international patterns of migration have affected the region’s cultural tapestry and history. In many ways, the enduring stereotypes of Appalachia—which these works seek to subvert—have covered, or rendered invisible, many transnational intercultural exchanges that have continued to affect the region. Appalachia has historically been exploited, often by forces outside the region, for both its natural and human resources. It is a region that has, on the whole, scarcely benefited from the tremendous amount of wealth extracted from its soils. In an attempt to make sense of this exploitation, Appalachian writers, scholars, and activists who read the works of Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi (among other postcolonial writers) developed what they defined as the “colonial model” in Appalachian studies during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The colonial model of Appalachian studies emerged as a reaction against several dominant analytical frameworks that were employed to diagnose realities in the region. These frameworks included the culture of poverty model, which attributed “regional problems to the deficiencies of the people and their culture,” as well as the underdevelopment model, which focused on the lack of infrastructure and local capital in the region without addressing the socioeconomic and political conditions that engendered such material realities (Lewis 1–2). These Appalachian writers and activists preferred to think of the region as an “internal colony” of the United States. They argued that those who exploited, controlled, and managed the region’s resources were predominantly outsiders; they contended that many locals had lost their land to outside speculators and coal companies; quoting from travel journals and magazine articles, they further documented how the region’s exploitation was framed through the narrative of a civilizing mission; this civilizing narrative, they explained, had contributed to the stigmatization of their regional dialect and culture (Askins, Johnson, and Lewis). The civilizing discourse of which these Appalachian activists spoke was, for example, epitomized in Allen James’ article “Mountain Passes of the Cumberland,” which he wrote for Harper’s Magazine in 1890: As I stood one day in this valley, which has already begun to put on the air of civilization with its hotel and railway station and mills and pretty

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Syllabusing homestead I saw a sight which seemed to complete the epitome of the past and present tendencies there at work […] creeping slowly along the wilderness road toward the ascent of the Cumberland Gap came a mountain wagon, faded and old, with its dirty, ragged canvas hanging motionless, and drawn by a yoke of mountain oxen which seemed to be moving in their sleep […] on the seat in front […] sat a faded, pinched and meager mountain boy […] His stained white face was kindled into an expression of passionate hunger and mental excitement. For in one dirty claw-like hand he grasped a small paper bag, into the mouth of which he thrust the other hand, as a miser might thrust his into a bag of gold. He had just bought with a few cents he had perhaps saved no one knows how long some sweetmeat of civilization which he was about for the first time to taste. (qtd. in Gaventa 145–146)

In this passage, Allen James frames outside forces of modernization— depicted here through the market infiltration and consumption of consumer goods—as civilizing agents coming to save a backward region. The old faded wagon drawn by mountain oxen is further used to dramatize the region’s supposed primitive rusticity. In the same way that the colonial gaze painted monstrous bodies in order to dehumanize natives, here the mountain boy’s physical appearance, his stained white face, his claw-like hand, is used to exaggerate his Otherness. Appalachian activists and scholars influenced by postcolonial criticism also observed similarities between the “civilizing” role of schools in colonial contexts, as described by writers such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and the denigration of Appalachian dialects and culture in educational settings. As Lewis, Kobak, and Johnson observe, “the family encourages biculturalism. The schools create duality—a world different from the family environment […] Many mountain youth remember the shaming process when they had to deny their ‘mother tongue,’ reject their music and religion” in various classroom settings (134). While many Appalachian activists and writers initially employed the term “internal colony” in reference to the region, others, who were later influenced by worlds-systems theory, preferred to think of Appalachia as an internal periphery (Plaut; Walls). Thus, in making their case, they often utilized the observations of postcolonial writers emerging from different national contexts. It is the history of these intellectual influences and debates—a history that traces the circulation of postcolonial texts in Appalachian spaces— that I decided to incorporate in a postcolonial world literature course. The syllabus I designed emerged as a response to some of the following questions: how might one comparatively situate Appalachian appropriations and

Syllabusing 35 instrumentalizations of postcolonial theory from a world literature perspective? What insights can we gain by studying these appropriations? Does the history of these local iterations of postcolonial theory have any contemporary relevance for the region? It is through the construction of a syllabus as well as semester-long discussions with Appalachian students registered in the class that I sought to explore these questions. Below, I have provided a description of the course as well as class readings as they were presented to students on the syllabus: Course Description and Thesis of the Class: In his seminal work, What is World Literature?, David Damrosch offers the following definition of world literature: “I take world literature to encompass all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language […] in its most expansive sense, world literature could include any work that has ever reached beyond its home base […] a work only has an effective life as world literature whenever, and wherever, it is actively present within a literary system beyond that of its original culture” (4). Literary works emerging from specific cultural and national contexts thus become world literature through processes of circulation. Many years before the publication of Damrosch’s work, René Etiemble, a leading figure in the French school of comparative literature, exalted a different notion of circulation—one based on influences. According to Etiemble, “everything is interdependent in the history of literatures, and he who does not have more than a little insight into a rather larger number of literatures will never understand—and I mean understand—a single literature” (14). A focus on influences, as highlighted by Jean-Marie Carré in his preface to Litterature Comparée, “does not essentially [or solely] consider works in their original value, but is especially concerned with how nations and writers transform what they have borrowed” from different literary traditions around the world (37). In this course, we shall not only employ both of the aforementioned ideas of circulation and influence in our analyses but also engage in thematic comparisons of different texts across cultural traditions. Such thematic comparisons will offer new perspectives from which different localized realities and cultural norms can be apprehended. The overarching theme of this world literature course is postcolonialism. As a theme, postcolonialism, specifically its manifestation within a corpus of texts, foregrounds processes of both circulation and influence, as exemplified by the global dissemination of postcolonial literatures as well as the localized forms of appropriation, transformation and instrumentalization of ideas embedded within these texts. As comparatists (you will

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Syllabusing all have to become comparatists by virtue of the types of analyses you are expected to engage in for the duration of this class), we must also remember that the physical Appalachian context in which we inhabit— contrary to stereotypes of rural anti-modern isolation and racial homogeneity—is also a cite in which processes of circulation and influence take place. For this reason, we shall also examine the ways in which Appalachian activists and scholars have strategically borrowed from postcolonial theory in order to engage with different challenges they experience in their local realities. Throughout the duration of this semester we shall therefore seek to answer the following questions: what are the intellectual genealogies of postcolonial theory? What are the global permutations of postcolonial theory? How and why have the ideas popularized in postcolonial theory circulated and been appropriated across national contexts by different marginalized communities, including in Appalachia? Introductory Materials (Weeks 1–3) Decolonizing the Mind by Ngugi wa Thiong’o (pages 4–30) The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon (pages 97–144) “Post-Colonial Critical Theories” by Stephen Slemon The Labyrinth of Solitude by Octavio Paz (pages 89–149) Lumumba by Raoul Peck (film available online) Thomas Sankara: The Upright Man (documentary available online) Appalachian Comparisons: Colonialism in Modern America: The Appalachian Case (pages 9–26, 111–156, 309–316) Oral Traditions, Historical Narratives and the Politics of Transcription (Weeks 4–5) The Royal Commentaries of the Incas and General History of Peru by GarciLaso de la Vega (available at bookstore) The Epic of Askia Mohamed edited by Thomas A. Hale (available at bookstore) “Reading a Woman’s Death: Colonial Text and Oral Tradition in Nineteenth-Century Ireland” by Angela Bourke Appalachian Comparison: “Folklore and Folklife” by Mary Hufford Representation and Orientalism (Week 6) “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” by Chinua Achebe “Race Against Time: Racial Discourse and Irish History” by Luke Gibbons Edward Said on Orientalism (video available online)

Syllabusing 37 Appalachian Comparisons: (1) The Invention of Appalachia by Allen W. Batteau (pages 1–18), (2) “Beyond Isolation and Homogeneity: Diversity and the History of Appalachia” by Ronald L. Lewis (pages 21–38) and (3) “Where Did Hillbillies Come From? Tracing Sources of the Comic Hillbilly Fool in Literature” by Sandra L. Ballard (pages 138–147) The Politics of Identity, Hybridity and Displacement (Weeks 7–9) The Mimic Men by V.S. Naipaul S (available at bookstore) “African Identities” by Kwame Anthony Apiah “Negotiating Caribbean Identities” by Stuart Hall “Colonialism and the Caribbean Novel” by George Lemming “Inventing Ireland” by Declan Kiberd Appalachian Comparisons: (1) “Internal Colony or Internal Periphery? A Critique of Current Models and an Alternative Formulation” by David S. Walls, (2) “Extending the Internal Periphery Model: The Impact of Culture and Consequent Strategy” by Thomas S. Plaut (pages 351–362) as well as (3) “‘The Last Bastion of Colonialism’: Appalachian Settler Colonialism and Self-Indigenization” by Stephen Pearson Gender and Colonial/Postcolonial Subjectivities (Weeks 10–12) Children of the New World: A Novel of the Algerian War by Assia Djebar (available at bookstore) City of the Queen: A Novel of Colonial Honkong by Shi Shu-Ching (available at bookstore) “Can the Subaltern Speak?” by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak “Colonizing Gender in Colonial Australia: The Eliza Fraser Story” by Kay Schaffer Appalachian Comparison: Life in the Iron Mills by Rebeca Harding Davis Exploitation of Human and Environmental Resources (Weeks 13–15) A Month and a Day & Letters by Ken Saro-Wiwa (available at bookstore or Amazon starting from $9) Maquilapolis by Vicky Funari and Sergio de la Torre (documentary available online) Sleep Dealer by Alex Rivera (film available for streaming on Amazon for $2.99) Appalachian Comparison: Storming Heaven by Denise Giardina (available at bookstore) As it was presented to the students, the syllabus did not just provide information about course policies or assignments; it also sought to posit comparative

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strategies for mapping out Appalachian texts within a postcolonial world literature perspective. The syllabus contained both the thesis of the course as well as an outline featuring a thematic organization of the reading materials for the class. The course was divided into five different thematic segments: oral traditions; historical narratives and the politics of transcription; representation and Orientalism; the politics of identity, hybridity, and displacement; gender and colonial/postcolonial subjectivities; as well as exploitation of human and environmental resources. Most of these sections provided students with a wide array of materials from different global contexts and also featured an “Appalachian comparisons” section that framed each of the themes discussed in each segment within an Appalachian context. For example, in the “representation and Orientalism” section, students related Allen Batteau’s analysis of representations of Appalachia to Edward Said’s definition of Orientalism as well as Chinua Achebe’s analysis of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. In the “exploitation of human and environment resources” section, students compared the effects of coal mining on the Appalachian environment as well as the labor conditions of coal miners to the violation of human rights in the Niger Delta as a consequence of oil drilling. The Appalachian students in my class were particularly interested in the way Ken Saro-Wiwa—the environmental activist who was brutally executed by the Nigerian government with the help of the Shell corporation—argued that the ancestral land occupied by the Ogoni people, a land rich in oil, had become an internal colony of the Nigerian state (16). Indeed, in his detention diary, Ken Saro-Wiwa makes the following observation about sociopolitical and economic realities affecting the Ogoni people: They had been sleepwalking their way towards extinction, not knowing what internal colonialism had done and was doing to them […] We drove on in silence, past sleepy little villages nestling close to the engulfing forest, over a bumpy tarmac road, toward Benin City. The state of the road irked me. It was one of my overriding concerns. Not the road itself, but the fact that in this rich, oil bearing area, the road should be so rickety, while in the North of Nigeria, in that arid part of the country, there were wide expressways constructed at great cost with petrodollars which the delta belched forth. The injustice of it cried to the heavens. (17) As a large oil-producing region located in the southeastern part of Nigeria, Ogoniland, and its inhabitants, the Ogoni people, have seen little gain from the oil wealth extracted from its soils. Ogoniland remains one of the most impoverished regions in Nigeria. Recurrent oil spills and gas flarings have severely contaminated the drinking water in the region, including well water

Syllabusing 39 and rainwater. In his reflections, Ken Saro-Wiwa contends that the wealth extracted from Ogoniland enriches other regions of the country to the detriment of the Ogoni people. The students therefore compared Saro-Wiwa’s analysis of Ogoniland as an internal colony with the way the term had been used in Appalachian contexts. The students found echoes of Saro-Wiwa’s arguments in the writings of Jack Weller, a postcolonial Appalachian activist. In “Appalachia: America’s Mineral Colony,” published in 1974, Weller posits that in central Appalachia, coal is king. There are estimates that over onetrillion dollars’ worth of this black gold has been mined from east Kentucky alone. But in this area, according to the 1960 census (the last one for which these figures are calculated), 6 of the 10 poorest counties in America lie […] Appalachia is a colony which America has exploited. It is used, stripped of her wealth, raped and reamed and reduced to ruin, while those who gain their wealth from her invest their profits elsewhere and live elsewhere. (49) Thus, both Appalachia and Ogoniland emerge as exploited territories located within a broader nation-state that enables their subjugation. In both cases, the immiseration of the area is precipitated by the activities of the fossil fuel industry. The syllabus also sought to highlight the history of state-sponsored violence inflicted on union coal miners and Ogoni activists seeking to ameliorate their material conditions and voice their grievances. While studying the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight Ogoni activists at the hands of the Nigerian government and the Shell corporation, students were also required to read Storming Heaven—a novel written by Denise Giardina chronicling the Battle of Blair Mountain, one of the largest labor uprisings in the United States. The 1921 labor uprising, which was violently suppressed and led to the deaths of many union activists, pitted Appalachian coal miners against the brutal coal company-funded militia and the US Army. In her novel, Denis Giardina depicts a coal mining union that struggles and seeks to overcome national, racial, and linguistic barriers. Storming Heaven traces the migration of Italian Americans into the coal mines of West Virginia as well as the experiences of African-American coal miners and activists in the area. By depicting the circulation of immigrant labor into the Appalachian Mountains, the cultural conflicts that emerged from linguistic barriers, and the coal miners’ attempts to navigate cultural, linguistic, and racial boundaries, Giardina’s novel unsettles the common propensity to imagine Appalachia as an isolated and homogeneous space. As exemplified

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in the following passage, part of the ways in which the novel complicates this projected homogeneity is through its redefinition of the word redneck: It was a golden summer. We lived in tents, but the weather was warm and the union sent us food. We had typhoid, but no more than usual in the camps. Some of the mines still worked but our men blew up tipples and burned company stores. Some were killed, but no more than in the mines. Jenkinjones belonged to us. And whenever we walked to town we were greeted with a sign proclaiming FREE ANNADEL. The Free Press, back ordered in memory of C.J. Marcum, ran articles, extolling the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence. On every corner an armed miner stood the sentinel. With his red bandana knotted around his neck. The gun thugs called us rednecks. It was a name we accepted with pride.1 (214) Here, Giardina first begins by rebranding “redneck” with an iconoclastic political impetus. What now identifies the men as rednecks is not uniquely their white, working-class identity, but rather, in a larger sense, the political symbol of proletarian resistance signified by the red bandanas knotted around their neck. The red bandanas are thus worn by a broad coalition of protesting workers that include Italian and African-American coal miners. This rebranded redneck identity is subsequently used, in Giardina’s novel, to contest the onslaught of racial segregation in public spaces: Dr. Booker and I entered a restaurant with a crowd of miners while Rondal went to see about the train. We squeezed around a table in the corner. The owner hovered uncertainly in the middle of the room, tried to walk two directions at once. Then called out in a voice that cracked, “Listen here! Listen! I don’t serve no colored in here. Yall go on back outside.” A dark Negro at the lunch counter swung around on the stool. He made sure the man saw him lay his pistol on the counter. “Mister, yall going to serve this here colored, or else I going to serve myself. And I guarantee, I’ll give myself a bigger helping than you would.” “We’re all rednecks!” someone yelled from the back. The man retreated to the kitchen […] We applauded. (273) The vociferous assertion, “we are all rednecks,” in this context, places an emphasis on common working-class realities while mitigating the ways in

Syllabusing 41 which the word has been historically operationalized in ways that disrupt potential alliances across racial boundaries. As previously mentioned, the presence of migrant workers from Italy also gestures toward the precarization of labor on a transnational scale. In this way, mapping Appalachian texts onto a world literature curriculum renders visible the circulation of both ethnoscapes and, in this case, ideoscapes emerging from the influences and local appropriations of postcolonial theory. Of significance is also the fact that the iconoclastic African-American doctor who helps found and organize the miner’s union is named Toussaint L’Ouverture Booker—a conspicuous reference to Booker T. Washington and Toussaint L’Ouverture, the leader of the Haitian slave revolt. In its quest to depict the violence inflicted on Appalachian coal miners, Giardina’s novel also seeks to tacitly frame these local struggles within a larger historical continuum of social uprisings across national borders. Nonetheless, as previously mentioned, while some Appalachian activists employ the term “internal colony,” others such as David Walls and Tom Plaut opt to define the region as an internal periphery. The internal periphery model describes “the region as essentially a resource preserve, complete with ‘native’ leadership that serves the needs of the advanced industrial, resources, and recreational-hungry society that surrounds it” (Plaut 353). In his critique of the internal colonialism model, David Walls argues that parallels about the forced involuntary entry of the colonizer do not really fit within Appalachian contexts; he thus makes a distinction between colonized subjects and early European immigrant groups that settled the region (326). From Walls’ perspective, the deception and fraud used in Appalachia by the vanguard of land, timber, and mineral agents do not appear to differ in kind from those techniques used generally by capitalists and their agents throughout the country in the period of industrial expansion. (327) While finding the internal periphery model useful, Plaut, however, contends that the focus on cultural marginalization and hegemony developed within the colonial model needs to be preserved and incorporated within the worldsystems analysis approach. The section on “the politics of identity, hybridity and displacement,” which included the texts of David Walls and Tom Plaut, seemed to have been the one that challenged students the most. One reading, in particular, Stephen Pearson’s “‘The Last Bastion of Colonialism’: Appalachian Settler

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Colonialism and Self-Indigenization,” engendered a lively class discussion. In his article, Pearson contends that the Appalachian postcolonial model relies on the creation of a white indigeneity for settler Appalachians, which disavows the late settler-colonial status of present-day Appalachia, reinforces and perpetuates the interwoven settler-colonial structures and genocidal processes that have characterized the region since the initial European invasions. This creation of a white indigeneity for settler Appalachians precludes the settler from engaging in decolonization efforts in solidarity with Indigenous peoples. (166) Indeed, one form of intercultural encounter that the Appalachian colonial model has rendered invisible is the genocidal violence and displacement of Native Americans. For some of the students, the colonial model had provided a useful lens through which they could apprehend and historicize their present realities. As part of the course requirements, some of them gave historical presentations that incorporated the colonial model at the local museum and high school. A more artistically inclined student was even influenced to write a play and present it to the local community. While many of the students still found the colonial model of Appalachian studies to be useful, they did so with an increased awareness that the categories of victim and oppressor were not mutually exclusive—that communities and people could occupy both positions at different historical periods or even at the same moment. Thus, the insights as well as the limitations embedded in the colonial model of Appalachian studies, a model that emerges from comparative forms of analyses conducted by Appalachian scholars and activists, reveal and historicize certain structures of power and domination while rendering others invisible. Of course, comparative perspectives are never neutral; they privilege specific subject positions and not others, even when they focus on processes of circulation. I have found that the strategies used to design and organize a syllabus, the students’ affinity or resistance to specific texts or reading methods as well as how we anticipate or navigate these reactions, tend not only to dramatize but also to shape these comparative perspectives. Furthermore, in light of the growing impetus of white working-class nativism, which dominated the US-American 2016 presidential elections and its aftermath, a postcolonial world literature curriculum that incorporates Appalachian texts as part of its comparative methodology can be employed to complicate the ethnocentric perspective from which white blue-collar grievances are often perceived or articulated. By focusing on global socioeconomic structures that engender—not similar, but comparable—social and

Syllabusing 43 cultural realities across marginalized settings, such a comparative approach transforms local politics (and poetics) of suffering and social despair from one that instigates xenophobic native impulses into one that recognizes the self in the Other and conceives possibilities for forging alliances across racial, national, and cultural contexts.

Note 1 My emphasis.

Memo III

Pedagogies of Cultural Translation Debating Polygamy, War, and Patriotism in Comparative Literature Classes

The field of comparative literature is constantly defined and redefined through consecutive moments of crisis. From René Etiemble’s The Crisis in Comparative Literature (1966), Gayatri Spivak’s Death of a Discipline (2003), to Emily Apter’s Against World Literature (2013), this constant allusion to iterations of crisis has been instrumentalized as a recurrent rhetorical device from which comparatists theorize their discipline. These various iterations of crisis are, for the most part, centered on issues emerging from the large-scale comparative frameworks and methodologies that outline the global scope of the discipline. For example, while the publication of the Bernheimer Report—or Comparative Literature in the Age Multiculturalism (1995)—signaled a significant shift away from both Eurocentric and new critical approaches established by US-American comparatists such as René Wellek, Spivak’s Death of a Discipline further criticizes US-centered methodologies used to compare, analyze, and aggregate literary works on a global scale. In her work, Spivak argues in favor of reading strategies that privilege one’s planetary position while displacing US-centered global and globalizing perspectives that homogenize the world through their interpretive, linguistic, and epistemological choices. In differentiating the “globe” from the “planet,” Spivak contends that “globalization” or the globe “is the imposition of the same system of exchange everywhere,” it is on our computers. No one lives there. It allows us to think that we can aim to control it. The planet [however] is in the species of alterity, belonging to another system; and yet we inhabit it, on loan. It is not really amenable to a neat contrast with the globe. I cannot say ‘the planet, on the other hand.’ When I invoke the planet, I think of the effort required to figure the (im)possibility of this underived intuition. (72) Hence, from Spivak’s perspective, the idea of the planet encapsulates an untamable and irreducible cultural and linguistic heterogeneity that the

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globe, as a concept, homogenizes. Similarly, in his definition of globalectics, Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o exalts this notion of a decentered global heterogeneity. As Ngũgĩ explains, “Globalectics is derived from the shape of the globe. On its surface there is no one center; any point is equally a center.” Thus, globalectics emerges “as a way of thinking and relating to the world, particularly in the area of globalism and globalization” (8). If we are to rehabilitate the comparatist emphasis on crises, from a cheap and overused rhetorical device to a useful deontology, it becomes necessary to explore the applications of Spivak’s planetarity and Ngũgĩ’s globaletics in the classroom—specifically in the larger context of democratic crises that threaten not just the United States but also other nations in Europe. This focus compels us to examine ways of developing comparative strategies that enable students to read world literature as planetary subjects and not homogenizing global agents. As David Damrosch argues in How to Read World Literature, “if we read a foreign text in ignorance of its author’s assumptions and values, we risk reducing it to a pallid version of some literary work we already know” (1). Thus, Damrosch, on the one hand, warns about the perils of assimilation, where foreign texts are uncritically incorporated into the reader’s cultural frame of reference and values without regard to the local contexts from which they stem, and exoticism, on the other hand, where, for example, a Sanskrit poem is read “as the product of some mysterious Orient whose artists are naïve and illogical, or whose people feel an entirely different set of emotion than we do” (13). In many ways, the extremes of assimilation and exoticism, the difficulties involved in navigating between these two polarities, echo the growing resurgence of authoritarian ethnonationalism, including its encroachment on democratic institutions, which hinges on voters’ ability or failure to properly read and make sense of the presence of what they perceive as foreign bodies, religions, cultures, traditions, and histories within their own national space. A critical pedagogy which seeks to enable students to navigate the cultural politics of difference and Otherness is therefore imbued with larger democratic implications. This section will focus on two moments of crises that emerge in the classroom. The first segment of this memo will henceforth examine the difficulties involved in teaching Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter to US-American college students. The second segment will contextualize the challenges involved in reading across cultural contexts in classroom settings, through the politics of translation and mistranslation. Since its publication in 1981, So Long a Letter has acquired a reputation as one of the foundational African feminist texts. Set in the city of Dakar, Senegal, Mariama Bâ’s semi-autobiographical novel depicts the living conditions of Senegalese women who are forced into polygamous relationships. By highlighting the plight of Senegalese women within the geopolitics of African national independence, Bâ’s text addresses postcolonial realities

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from a feminist perspective. The plot of So Long a Letter is centered on Ramatoulaye, a Senegalese woman whose husband decides to marry a second wife. Reflecting on her precarious situation in a polygamous marriage, the novel is structured in the form of a series of melancholic letters written by Ramatoulaye to her old friend, Aissatou, who resides in the United States. As she finds herself trapped in a polygamous relationship with a co-wife who is the age mate and former friend of her own daughter, Ramatoulaye is also forced to live through a period of economic insecurity as her husband abandons her, both financially and emotionally, in order to focus on his new bride. In the process, Ramatoulaye learns to become more independent and self-reliant. After her husband dies, she turns down two marriage proposals and manages to acquire financial independence and security for both herself and her children. As previously mentioned, in exploring the precarious situation of women who are ushered into polygamous marriages, the novel also offers a general critique of a postcolonial nation where women remain subjugated and have yet to enjoy the fruits of a newly acquired independence. This is evidenced in the following passage from the novel where Ramatoulaye elaborates on the sociopolitical status of women within a newly independent Senegal: We have a right, just as you have, to education, which we ought to be able to pursue to the furthest limits of our intellectual capacities. We have a right to equal well-paid employment, to equal opportunities. The right to vote is an important weapon. And now the family code has been passed, restoring to the most humble of women the dignity that has so often been trampled upon. Nearly twenty years of independence! When will we have the first female minister involved in the decision concerning the development of our country? And yet the militancy and ability of our women, their disinterested commitment, have already been demonstrated. Women have raised more than one man to power. (64) For Roumatoulaye, the social and political marginalization of women in Senegalese society is legitimized and institutionalized through appeals to local traditions and customs. Indeed, the tensions between long-held traditional customs and the realities of modern Senegalese society emerge as a recurrent theme in Bâ’s novel. However, far from sanctioning a simplistic dichotomy that presents all local traditions as repressive and modern phenomena as emancipatory, Bâ outlines positive and negative aspects of both long-held traditional customs as well as newly acquired contemporary cultural practices and realities that have emerged in Senegalese society. For example, while traditional customs

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are self-servingly employed by men to trap women in financially precarious polygamous marriages, Roumatoulaye also exalts the values embedded in local folk tales by declaring that “this kind of oral education, easily assimilated, full of charm, has the power to bring out the best in the adult mind, developed in its contact with it” (49). In the novel, the trappings of modern society are not always seen as a blessing: playing in the congested city streets, Ramatoulaye’s son is hit by a motorcyclist and she catches three of her daughters smoking. Nonetheless, it is through the vehicle of “Western” education that the women in Bâ’s novel are able to break away from the symbolic and material patriarchal structures that define their reality and become self-reliant. Roumatoulaye’s friend Aissatou, whose husband similarly decides to marry a younger second wife, is able to leave him by studying to become an interpreter and securing a position at the Senegalese embassy in the United States. The relationship between education and female agency is further dramatized when Roumatoulaye reflects on the educational opportunities that both she and her friend Aissatou received: Aissatou, I will never forget the white woman who was the first to desire for us an “uncommon” destiny […] The admission policy, which was based on an entrance examination for the whole of former French West Africa, now broken up into autonomous republics, made possible a fruitful blend of different intellects, characters, manners and customs […] To lift us out of the bog of tradition, superstition and custom, to make us appreciate a multitude of civilizations without renouncing our own, to raise our vision of the world, cultivate our personalities, strengthen our qualities, to make up for our inadequacies, to develop universal moral values in us: these were the aims of our admirable headmistresses. (15–16) Here, Ramatoulaye’s celebration of the “universal values” acquired through French colonial education, one that liberates her from the “bog of tradition, superstition and custom” while enabling her to maintain aspects of her African heritage, arguably presents the realities of France’s mission civilisatrice, or civilizing mission, in a benevolent light. While Mariama Bâ’s text deserves its position as one of the canonical works of African feminism, its seeming celebration of France’s civilizing mission, in certain passages, offers particular challenges when taught in US-American classrooms. When presented in an introductory survey course, in a context where many students are exposed to a work of African literature for the first time, Bâ’s novel reinforces an evolutionary continuum that places oppressive patriarchal “African” societies at one end of the spectrum and liberated “Western” cultural spaces and norms on the other side. Far

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from shedding light on the multifaceted politics and outcomes of colonialism, which simultaneously exert excessive levels of physical, cultural, and institutional violence while destabilizing pre-existing gender roles in both positive and negative ways, class discussions, and student essays, despite the best efforts of the professor, often devolve into responses such as, “those poor women, they have to fight for so many things we take of granted, we are so lucky to live here in the United States.” Such readings of Mariama Bâ’s novel place emphasis on the spatial symbolism attached to Aissatou’s acquired independence when she leaves her polygamous husband to work as an interpreter in the United States. Even Ramatoulaye’s emancipated eldest daughter, who is in a more egalitarian monogamous marriage, becomes celebrated for her proximity to the students’ own cultural models and definitions of agency within the institution of marriage. From this rationale, the very real problems and struggles experienced by women in polygamous marriages (in the case of Bâ’s work, Muslim polygamous marriages) are employed to exalt the institution of compulsory monogamy as an enlightened and more civilized cultural practice. Such ways of reading “third world” women’s struggles across cultural contexts carry consequences that transcend the walls of the classroom. As much as one may be tempted to downplay or laugh at such discursive practices, lessons from the past inform us that this propensity to perceive the United States as a unique and exceptional space where individual liberties, despite room for improvement, are the most respected, can easily be weaponized in ways that both conceal or minimize existing systemic forms of violence while legitimizing specific geopolitical agendas at the same time. As Arundhati Roy reminds us in her reflections on the war on terror in Afghanistan, “it’s being made out that the whole point of the war was to topple the Taliban regime and liberate Afghan women from their burqas […] Can we bomb our way to a feminist paradise?” In other words, the idea that US-American women, or even LGBTQ communities, experience greater levels of personal liberty relative to those found in other countries considered “less civilized,” whether real or imagined, can provide justifications for war and validate international or domestic policies that are xenophobic in nature. The fact that Bâ’s novel examines the problematics of polygamous marriages in Islam further reinforces negative media stereotypes that students may already have. Jasbir Puar examines the ways in which feminist discourse can be co-opted in the name of US-American militarism in her work, Terrorist Assemblage: Homonationalism in Queer Times: The recent embrace of the case of Afghani and Iraqi women and Muslim women in general by western feminists has generated many forms of U.S. gender exceptionalism. Gender exceptionalism works as a

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missionary discourse to rescue Muslim women from their oppressive male counterparts. It also works to suggest that, in contrast to women in the United States, Muslim women are, at the end of the day, unsavable. More insidiously, these discourses of exceptionalism allude to the unsalvageable nature of Muslim women even by their own feminists, positioning the American feminist as the feminist subject par excellence. (5) As Jasbir Puar documents, this logic is then used to justify foreign military interventions. The process of “pinquashing”—a public relation maneuver in which the Israeli government presents itself as a gay-friendly nation in order to deflect from human rights abuses inflicted on Palestinian populations in the occupied territories—also provides another example of the ways in which this rhetorical strategy can also be extended to LGBTQ rights. As a member of the African Literature Association, I have attended numerous conference panels on pedagogy where Africanists bemoan the counterproductive futility of teaching Mariama Bâ’s text in introductory survey classes. Marame Gueye, for example, argues that in the case of So Long a Letter, the Western reader need not put on their lens because the narrator purposefully caters to a Western audience. Although the letter is addressed to Aissatou, it is clear that Roumatoulaye’s targeted audience is the West […] The numerous footnotes which translate or explain Wolof terms and practices confirm that Aissatou, who has witnessed or taken part in most of the events narrated, is not the interlocutor. By speaking to an audience geographically and culturally situated outside Senegal, Roumatoulaye’s epistle is a quest for Western sympathy. (3) However, instead of permanently removing Mariama Bâ’s novel from undergraduate survey classes, I propose that a comparative pedagogy that places So Long a Letter in conversation with Mary Ka’s short film The Other Woman (which was filmed 32 years after the publication of Bâ’s novel and is set in the same city) offers a comparative framework that enables students to more effectively trace technologies of power in both polygamous and monogamous institutions of marriage. The pedagogic value of this kind of comparative strategy is highlighted by Garry Harisson in his contributing chapter to Teaching World Literature, where he argues that “the notion of text versus counter-texts” puts “into play a variety of perspectives on a theme or issue” that not only renders “the alien familiar” but also alienates the familiar (208). From this perspective, placing So Long a Letter in dialogue with The Other

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Woman can be used as a point of departure to help defamiliarize students’ cultural readings of monogamous marriages while providing new perspectives from which they can begin to assess polygamous relationships. Like So Long a Letter, Mary Ka’s short film focuses on a female protagonist whose husband decides to marry a younger second wife. However, unlike Bâ’s text where the co-wives have an antagonistic relationship fueled by an imperative to compete for the patriarch’s affection and financial support, the women in Ka’s short film embark on an intimate sexual relationship with each other. Thus the title of the film, which typically alludes to heterosexual marital infidelities involving a man and two women, is given new meaning in a plot where Madeleine, a 50-year-old woman, experiences a sexual awakening at the hands of Amayelle, her 30-year-old co-wife. Rather than being the center of their relationship or attention, the husband they share is presented as an unnecessary obstacle to their ongoing amorous explorations. At the film’s conclusion, in the aftermath of one of their sexual experiences with each other, Madelaine and Amayelle’s rest is interrupted by their clueless husband, who seats himself between his two wives. As they conceal their secret and share knowing glances across from him, the newly-found intimate bond between the two women overshadows their individual relationship with their husband. Of course, lesbian relationships between co-wives in African polygamous societies are not just a contemporary or isolated phenomenon. As Richard Troiden observes, Several patterns of formal and informal lesbian relations emerge in nonclass societies where women have greater autonomy. Among the polygynous Azande of Africa, for example, where each wife had her own dwelling and her own plot of land, and controlled whatever profits from her work she made through trade, some women established lesbian relationship with co-wives within the formal structure of polygynous marriages. Husbands could not forbid these arrangements, but their wives kept them secret to avoid threatening their husbands. Lesbian relationships are also reported to exist among the Nyakyusa, another polygynous African group. (66) The goal here is not to glamorize Madelaine and Amayelle’s situation in a way that would problematically conceal the larger cultural architecture of a patriarchal polygamous institution that they still have to contend with, but rather to examine the manner in which students can develop different cultural readings on polygamous and monogamous marriages across national contexts when both institutions are examined through the prism of normative and non-normative sexual expressions and identities. In a Senegalese national

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space where same-sex sexual relations are criminalized, polygamy, and not monogamy, provides the most effective institutional cover for two women to engage in sexual relations, a crime punishable by up to five years in jail under Article 319 of the Senegalese Penal Code. Furthermore, this perspective also enables students to reflect on the ways in which the institution of compulsory monogamy, as practiced in the United States and elsewhere, also polices and punishes polyamorous sexual expressions (including many nonpatriarchal ones) that fall outside its boundaries. Such a perspective seeks to prevent students from ethnocentrically idealizing one cultural space over another; instead, the limitations and possibilities emerging from technologies of power that dominate different contexts and traditions are carefully traced alongside others, thus, discouraging reading strategies that merely seek to reductively organize all cultural differences into domestic frames of reference. In this way, rather than simply engage in ethnocentric debates that center on personal preferences about ideal relationship structures, students can instead focus on how the varying cultural morphologies of patriarchal violence are articulated within both polygamous and monogamous institutions, as well as analyze the terms and boundaries through which women navigate these social systems. Aside from a Tunisian exchange student who read the novel in the original French, most of my students engaged with an English translation of Mariama Bâ’s work. In many ways, students’ attempts to navigate the pitfalls of assimilation, on the one hand, and exoticism, on the other hand, when reading literary works across national and cultural contexts, are, for the most part, complicated by the politics of translation. Translation, including the geocultural politics governing dominant translation practices, has constituted a vital part of the ways in which world literature has been defined and debated over the years. As one of the foundational proponents of world literature, Goethe was also a gifted translator who saw the practice as one of the necessary tools enabling the circulation of literary works across national boundaries (D’haen 117). Echoing what has now become the common definition of world literature as works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, Walter Benjamin similarly posited that “a translation comes later than the original, and since the important works of world literature never find their chosen translators at the time of their origin, their translation marks their stage of continued life” (254). In other words, it is through processes of translation that literary works find their afterlife in other contexts. Yet, despite its ubiquitous status in most world literature curricula, the heavy reliance on translation has continued to engender heated debates in the field of comparative literature. For example, the 1965 Levin Report on professional standards pertaining to the discipline of comparative literature stated that “more graduate programs in Comparative Literature would prefer that their candidates have

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solid training in a few languages, rather than they have skimmed through a great many works in translation or literary history second hand” (23–24 qtd. in Bernheimer). Indeed, at the time, the requirement that comparative literature students read works stemming from different national contexts in their original languages meant that undergraduate world literature classes, which heavily relied on English translations of foreign works, were primarily taught in English departments as opposed to departments of comparative literature. As Theo D’haen documents in his analysis of world literature as an American pedagogic construct, comparatists argued that undergraduate world literature classes offered in English departments lacked rigor due to the fact that they were primarily taught in translation. From their perspective, the insufficient depth emerging from the brevity and extensive multiplicity of translated passages covered in anthologies confused students (86). Nonetheless, as the Eurocentric dimensions of comparative literature came under attack and as the corpus of world literature expanded in an attempt to be more inclusive and representative of the globe—or as D’haen aptly puts it, as the corpus of world literature was expanded “beyond the comparatist trinity of French-English-German, with perhaps Italian and Spanish thrown in for good measure, along with classical languages”—the reliance on translation became inevitable and its indispensable role in the study of world literature has not abated to this day (117). The growing significance and visibility of translation and translators in the field of comparative literature was perhaps best epitomized in 1993 when Susan Bassnett declared that “we should look upon translation studies as the principle discipline from now on, with comparative literature as a valued but subsidiary area” (161). While translation theorists such as Lawrence Venuti subsequently re-emphasized the importance of translation in the creation of world literature and its imagined communities of readers, Gayatri Spivak highlighted the problematics emerging from a homogenizing aesthetic effect in which “the literature by a woman in Palestine begins to resemble, in the feel of its prose, something [written] by a man in Taiwan” when their works appear in translation (315). In Death of a Discipline, Spivak contends that through processes of translation, local differences, and specificities can potentially be erased in fundamental ways. She therefore seeks to recuperate these differences by advocating for the teaching and learning of local languages and cultures. While Spivak does not deny the utility of translation, her “New Comparative Literature” seeks to make “visible the import of the translator’s choice” when a translation is necessary (18). As demonstrated in this very brief summary of the historic role of translation in the theorization of comparative and world literature, many of the prominent debates that continue to shape the discipline, whether tacitly or overtly, often gesture toward pedagogic concerns. Yet, despite the central position that pedagogic quandaries occupy in these debates—the specificities

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of classroom dynamics, the ways in which undergraduate students respond to translated texts, the practices of translation, mistranslation, and untranslatability that proliferate the lived experience of professors in the classroom— such concerns are only seldom addressed in these discussions. Indeed, while close readings tackling translation issues are often brought to the forefront, they rarely involve an in-depth analysis of interactions between students and teachers. Yet, if “translation is fundamentally a localizing practice” as Lawrence Venuti argues, if “every step in the translation process, starting with the selection of a source text, including the development of a discursive strategy to translate it, and continuing with its circulation in a different language and culture, is mediated by values, beliefs, and representations in the receiving situation,” then what textual, intertextual and interpersonal opportunities can one exploit to render “visible the import of the translator’s choice,” in the space of the classroom, as Spivak advocates (Venuti 180; Spivak 18)? Just as importantly, how might we use the cultural encounters between students, instructors, and translated texts stemming from a variety of cultural contexts in order to theorize the discipline of comparative literature? It is by capitalizing on students’ responses to a mistranslation of one of Émile Zola’s short stories that I seek to tackle these questions. Since the late 1800s, English translations of Émile Zola’s short stories have been very popular in the United States. Between 1878 and 1900, 31 publishers released over 180 translations of Émile Zola’s works in English. The translations were printed in cheap paper-cover and sold at 21 cents each (Jones 521). They were thus made available to a vast quantity of readers. Part of this mass-marketing strategy involved choosing title translations of these short stories that sought to appeal to the cultural sensibilities and tastes of US-American readers. Translators, thus, often chose titles that diverged widely from those written in the original French works. Other writers, seeking to capitalize on the popularity of Zola’s translated works, wrote stories that falsely bore Zola’s name (Jones 522). During this period, one of Zola’s most popular translated short stories was L’attaque du Moulin or The Attack on the Mill, which was translated and then published by Peterson and later Black as The Miller’s Daughter (Jones 208). In this particular translation of L’attaque du Moulin—a short story that problematizes patriotic appeals to war by highlighting human suffering as a necessary cost—the translator decided to make significant plot alterations in order to make its somber message more palatable to US-American readers. Zola’s original short story is set during the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in a rural French village. The story revolves around three central characters: Old Merlier, the village mayor and owner of the local mill; Françoise, Old Merlier’s daughter; and Dominique, a young man from Belgium who eventually becomes Françoise’s fiancé. Dominique is first portrayed as an

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outsider, a foreign citizen from Belgium whom the villagers distrust. He is often accused of being idle by locals in the village, of existing outside the social structures and conventions that bind the community. As Zola elaborates in his shorty story, [Dominique] had come down from Belgium, having inherited a small property from an uncle, situated right on the edge of the forest of Gagny, exactly opposite the mill and only a few gunshots away. He said that he was intending to sell up the property and go back home. However, it would seem that he had found the district to his liking for he stayed on. He farmed his little plot, grew a few vegetables for his own table and went fishing and shooting. On a number of occasions he was nearly caught by gamekeepers and sent up before the magistrates. Such an independent way of life, from sources which the locals found a trifle mysterious, finally brought him a bad reputation. Dominique’s independent existence at the periphery of the village’s social life and his isolation from the rest of the community paint him as a figure who has yet to culturally and economically assimilate into his social surroundings at the beginning of the story. It is only after falling in love and getting engaged to Françoise, as well as demonstrating his dedicated work ethic by working relentlessly at the mill (signifying his entry into the socioeconomic life of the village), that he is thus accepted as a member of the community. The peaceful existence in the village is finally interrupted by the arrival of French soldiers trying to curtail the imminent threat of a Prussian invasion in the area. As the French soldiers battle the Prussian army, Dominique picks up arms to fight alongside the French—this decision is partially sparked by his desire to protect his bride-to-be. When the French soldiers retreat from the advancing Prussians, Domonique is taken prisoner and summarily sentenced to quick execution. In an attempt to save her fiancé, Françoise sneaks into his holding quarters, where he awaits execution and gives him a knife to escape. Dominique manages to free himself but ends up killing a Prussian soldier with the knife during his escape into the forest. Realizing that Françoise is Dominique’s fiancée, the commanding Prussian officer threatens to shoot Old Merlier unless Françoise reveals the location of her fiancé. Given the impossible choice of either saving her father or her fiancé’s life, Françoise refuses to make a decision. Ultimately, Dominique makes the decision for her; he surrenders himself to the Prussians, refuses to become a collaborator in exchange for his life, and is subsequently shot as French soldiers return to successfully retake the village from the occupying Prussian army. This ending of Zola’s short story has suffered through plot alterations in the process

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of translation. Below, I have included the original conclusion of the story in French, a more faithful translated conclusion of the story without alterations to the plot, and then the translated conclusion of the story with significant plot alterations: L’attaque du Moulin: Conclusion of the story in the original French version Sous le hangar, Françoise n’avait pas bougé, accroupie en face du corps de Dominique. Le père Merlier venait d’être tué raide par une balle perdue. Alors, comme les Prussiens étaient exterminés et que le moulin brûlait, le capitaine français entra le premier dans la cour. Depuis le commencement de la campagne, c’était l’unique succès qu’il remportait. Aussi, tout enflammé, grandissant sa haute taille, riait-il de son air aimable de beau cavalier. Et, apercevant Françoise imbécile entre les cadavres de son mari et de son père, au milieu des mines fumantes du moulin, il la salua galamment de son épée, en criant :—Victoire! Victoire! The Attack on the Mill: Translated conclusion of the story without plot alterations1 Under the shed, Françoise had not stirred, crouched down opposite Dominique’s body. Old Merlier was killed outright by a spent bullet. Then, when the Prussians had been annihilated, and the mill was burning, the French captain was the first man to enter the courtyard. From the beginning of the campaign it was the only success he had won. And, all aglow, drawing up his tall figure to its full height, he laughed with his gracious air of a fine cavalier. And, seeing Françoise, imbecile, between the dead bodies of her husband and father, amidst the smoking ruins of the mill, he gallantly saluted her with his sword, crying out: “Victory! victory!” The Miller’s Daughter: English conclusion of the story with significant plot alterations2 Beneath the shed Françoise still sat near Dominique’s body; she had not moved. Pere Merlier had received a slight wound. The Prussians were exterminated, but the ruined mill was on fire in a dozen places. The French rushed into the courtyard, headed by their captain. It was his first success of the war. His face beamed with triumph. He waved his sword, shouting: “Victory! Victory!” On seeing the wounded miller, who was endeavoring to comfort Françoise, and noticing the body of Dominique, his joyous look changed to one of sadness. Then he knelt beside the young man and, tearing open his blouse, put his hand to

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The excerpts featured above compare two English translations of Zola’s short story. The title of the one without plot alterations was translated as The Attack on the Mill, a translation that more closely approximates the French original L’attaque du Moulin, while the translation featuring significant plot alterations was titled The Miller’s Daughter. In some ways, these two titles reveal the topical and thematic orientation of each translation. While The Attack on the Mill attempts to foreshadow the devastation brought on by war, The Miller’s Daughter simply alludes to a familial relationship. In The Attack on the Mill, the story ends as both Dominique and Old Merlier are killed by Prussian bullets. The cries of victory celebrated by the French captain ring hollow amidst the image of a shell-shocked and traumatized Françoise, placed between the dead bodies of her fiancé and father. The original plot, as it was drafted by Zola, sought to contextualize jingoistic displays of militarism and patriotic duty within the devastating realities of human casualties, including the suffering and despair caused by war. Zola’s short story was written in 1880, ten years after the Franco-Prussian War, which culminated in the communard uprising in 1871. This Parisian revolt against the French government partially emerged in opposition to the humiliating terms of the peace treaty that was being negotiated between the French National Assembly and the Prussians, whom the inhabitants of Paris held responsible for engendering excessive levels of starvation during their occupation of the city. Consequently, many Parisians felt betrayed by their own government, which had initiated the war in the first place. While Zola never approved of

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what he saw as the excesses of the communard uprising, he was also highly critical of the Franco-Prussian War. After writing L’attaque du Moulin, he would later expand his criticism of the Franco-Prussian War in his 1892 novel entitled La Débâcle (The Debacle). However, unlike The Attack on the Mill, The Miller’s Daughter reduces the tension and sociopolitical message emerging from Zola’s work to a love story that is ephemerally imperiled by the realities of war. In The Miller’s Daughter, Dominique survives his execution and quickly regains his health, while Old Merlier only receives a slight wound from the Prussian bullets. In this translation of Zola’s short story, Dominique and Françoise live happily ever after and even Old Merlier’s mill, which was destroyed during the battle, is rebuilt. It is not unreasonable to suspect that this altered ending of Zola’s work found in The Miller’s Daughter was written in order to conform to the mass-market popular fiction format in which it was sold in the United States. To this day, The Miller’s Daughter remains available and easily accessible to many unsuspecting readers. This particular translation of Zola’s short story is widely available for purchase on Amazon; it can also be found on various online pages (including those associated with academic institutions) for free. I first stumbled upon the mistranslation of Émile Zola’s short story by accident, when I mistakenly assigned it as one of the readings in a literature class. Having read and enjoyed the original French version as an undergraduate student, I was horrified to note, a week before we were to discuss it in class, that my students were reading a version of the story with an alternative ending that differed from the one I was familiar with. During this particular week of the semester, I had paired Zola’s short story with The Experimental Novel, one of the author’s most well-known essays on naturalism. Rather than point them toward a better translation, I decided to use this as an opportunity that would enable them to both familiarize themselves with the conventions of naturalism in literature as well as reflect on the politics of translation. In The Experimental Novel, Émile Zola exalts and outlines a scientific approach to the production of literary works. Written in 1893, The Experiment Novel seeks to redefine the author as a scientist. Zola construes the writing process as an experiment in which an author places different types of characters, each occupying specific social roles, in particular socioeconomic and institutional settings. In this literary experiment, each character is meant to respond, as “ordinary” people would, to the social forces set by the author. Here, according to Zola, the actions of each character described by the author are largely determined and conditioned by their position in the larger socioeconomic, cultural, and political setting in which they have been placed. Émile Zola sees his “scientific” realism as akin to a controlled experiment in which the author/scientific observer simply describes the outcome of social

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forces that he or she has set in motion. Responding to accusations that his “scientific” realism advocates a form of fatalism, Zola contends that all we do is to apply this method in our novels, and we are the determinists who experimentally try to determine the condition of the phenomena, without departing in our investigations from the laws of nature […] the moment that we can act, and that we do act, on determining the cause of phenomena—by modifying their surroundings, for example— we cease to be fatalists. (marxists.org) Thus, according to Zola, his method is not fatalist but instead gestures toward larger social forces in an attempt to comprehend trends in human behavior. From this perspective, significant social changes to existing realities can occur when systemic structures are altered. Having informed my students that the translator had made significant plot alterations to their reading, I asked them to reconstruct the original plot of the story as Zola had intended, using the “scientific” methods outlined in The Experimental Novel. Other than basic details of the story’s setting as well as a description of the larger social forces (e.g., the outbreak of war) set in motion by Zola, the students did not receive any details pertaining to the original plot; in other words, they did not know which specific segments of the story had been significantly altered since this information was only given to them at the end of the exercise. They were henceforth tasked to complete the following activity: Using the scientific method advocated by Zola, you are tasked to restore the plot of The Miller’s Daughter (The Attack on the Mill) back to its original structure as Zola initially wrote it. We will then compare your “scientific” restoration to the French original. Describe the setting: the experiment needs to take place within a setting that determines the actions of various characters. Describe each character and their social roles: the social roles each character occupies will influence what types of actions they are likely to take in a given situation. Describe the social forces that affect the setting and the characters: these social forces can include love, war, wealth, poverty, death etc. […] Describe the outcome of the experiment: In other words, describe what is most likely to happen, once characters placed in a given social setting and occupying specific roles are affected by specific social forces. What choices are they most likely to make? What are the consequences of those choices?

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Of course, far from simply offering an “objective” measure of human behavior within specific circumstances, Zola’s experimental methodology simply reflects the cultural expectations, social motivations, and perspectives espoused by the author. As the students attempted to recover Zola’s original plot through the activity outlined above, they quickly discovered that their preconceptions of what was typically predictable human behavior revealed more about their own assumptions, cultural worldviews, and political ideologies. A debate focused on Dominique’s actions quickly emerged in the classroom. While some students found it perfectly reasonable that, having escaped captivity, Dominique would willingly surrender himself and refuse to collaborate with Prussian soldiers in exchange for his life, others vociferously argued that, as a foreigner (Dominique is a Belgian immigrant), he had no allegiance to France and would therefore have no qualms cooperating and helping Prussian soldiers in order to save his life. The debate offered two contrasting ways of reading Dominique’s identity as an immigrant. While one segment of the class doubted whether a newly arrived immigrant could forge a strong sense of allegiance vis-à-vis his or her new country of residence, other students affirmed this possibility. In the process of trying to recuperate the original plot of Zola’s short story, students were compelled to make sense of shifting, evolving, and overlapping identity constructs that shape the cultural realities experienced by different immigrant communities and groups. Thus, in re-writing Zola’s short story, my students were forced to confront their own assumptions, biases, and perspectives about patriotism, immigration, and war. Zola’s short story, its critique of the discursive practices through which war is romanticized, and the traces of its circulation through translation and mistranslation enabled them to map their own contemporary political realities. This activity also revealed the importance, both pedagogic and theoretical, of incorporating and actively engaging with mistranslated texts in a world literature curriculum. Of course, students’ readings and interpretations of texts tend to diverge regardless of the quality of a given translation. Nonetheless, a focus on mistranslated works dramatizes the cultural processes through which texts are domesticated for a local audience. In other words, rather than effacing differences between the self and the Other, such a focus, in the space of the classroom, renders visible the interpretive practices through which texts emerging from different cultural and literary traditions are apprehended while giving students the opportunity to explore the continued cultural significance of specific translated works within the imagined community of readers to which they belong. Furthermore, since the translation activity analyzed above was primarily facilitated by my native fluency in French, such endeavors will be primarily shaped and limited by the linguistic backgrounds and abilities of both professors and students (a

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translation activity might, for example, emerge from an observation made by a student who is fluent in one of the languages from which a given text has been translated). Of course, in the context of this particular mistranslation, it was not only helpful that I had accidentally chosen a faulty translation (only to later capitalize on it) but also, just as importantly, that Émile Zola is a canonically celebrated European author. There are ethical quandaries that would make many instructors, myself included, hesitate before purposely choosing an inadequate translation of an author stemming from the margins of the global literary field of cultural production, whose voice or perspective is seldom represented on syllabi and reading lists. As previously mentioned, the field of comparative literature has constantly been defined through various iterations of “crisis.” Throughout this memo, I have capitalized on different forms of crises or challenging moments that emerge in the classroom as a departing point of exigency for my analyses. In this context, the mistranslated version of Zola’s short story, which my students had to contend with, as well as the cultural politics that make it difficult to effectively teach So Long a Letter, a canonical work of African literature, to undergraduate students in a survey course created pedagogic conundrums that needed to be resolved. Of course, as Naomi Klein highlights in The Shock Doctrine, from the imposition of neoliberal policies following the 1973 Chilean coup d’état to the accelerated gentrification and privatization push that emerged in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, moments of crisis have often been instrumentalized in order to precipitate the realization of draconian social policies and economic reforms. The language of crisis (whether real or imagined) traditionally exploited by many comparatists in order to advocate for major reforms in the discipline, in many ways, mirrors the rhetorical strategies deployed by neoliberal institutions they usually otherwise critique. Nevertheless, when situated in the context of issues that habitually emerge in a classroom setting, these moments of crises or instability offer pedagogic and theoretical opportunities for comparatists to develop insights about dominant issues and debates that permeate our discipline. Hence, these classroom crises have the potential of challenging students and instructors alike to re-think their own assumptions and widen their understanding of the materials discussed in class.

Notes 1 Translated by William Foster Apthorp and published by Copeland & Day in 1895. 2 Translated by George D. Cox and published by Peterson, Philadelphia, in 1882.

Memo IV

Syllabusing Mapping Appalachian Queer Texts onto a Comparative Literature Curriculum

Introduction In his 2004 article entitled “To World, to Globalize—Comparative Literature’s Crossroads,” Djelal Kadir posits that “comparative literature is defined not by a corpus, a subject matter, an object, or an immutable set of problems” but rather by a dynamic set of practices done in its name (1). Kadir henceforth instrumentalizes the word “world” as a verb. When conceptualized as a verb, the notion of “worlding” or “to world” compels us to examine “who carries out [this] worlding and why?” (2). As Kadir explains, “Where the foot of the compass rests is inexorably the center. And, since all actions are motivated, the worlding of literature is not random, though the outcomes of the actions, as with the potential of all actions, could well be unintended and accidental” (2). Hence, worlding involves a practice of mapping, thematizing, relating, taxonimizing, and generally conceiving the world in a manner that is always anchored to specific interests, subject positions, and goals. Kadir’s definition of comparative literature as a practice of world-making has obvious pedagogic implications. My goal here is to relate the process of worlding to the idea of “syllabusing,” which functions as a both a pedagogic and comparative method of inquiry. For comparatists, designing a world literature syllabus becomes a world-making process that involves a number of operations: these include the selection of a theme; the decision to highlight or mitigate specific voices, experiences, and representations; the process of selecting and relating works stemming from different national and cultural contexts to each other, of privileging and deprivileging different forms of media through which stories circulate; as well as rationalizing the grounds on which selected texts can be compared to each other for the purposes of achieving specific learning outcomes. In designing a syllabus, the comparatist weaves together particular stories from different parts of the globe into a larger meta-story, often composed of texts and counter-texts, which he or she, in turn, uses to theorize or make sense of a given set of global social phenomena. Here, “syllabusing,”

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as a verb, and from a comparative literature perspective, situates processes of world-making within pedagogic imperatives and conundrums. In this context, it is by examining the ongoing construction and reconstruction of a syllabus from a comparative queer theory and literature course—a syllabus used in a class I regularly teach—that I will compare and interrogate the invisibility of Appalachian and Kenyan queer identities in prevailing theoretical visualizations of queer spaces across cultural contexts. In particular, I will examine how specific Kenyan and Appalachian texts employ similar rhetorical strategies to contest, respectively, heteronationalist and metronormative narratives that have been used to efface the visibility of queer subjectivities and practices within the local cultural milieus from which they stem. Finally, through a queer reading of Jomo Kenyatta’s Facing Mount Kenya, I will examine how ideas of sexual deviance, ideas that have been used to define Appalachia’s “culture of poverty,” have similarly been instrumental in legitimizing power structures in African colonial contexts. While there are many obvious differences between Appalachia and Kenya, there is also a basis for comparing the cultural politics that permeate both regions. Furthermore, by examining Kenya (a country) and Appalachia (a region within a country), such a comparative analysis opens up a multilayered analysis of the ways in which structures of power and domination operate not only between countries, but also, just as importantly, within regions of a country. The comparative queer theory and literature class I regularly teach incorporates a wide representation of novels, films, and biographical narratives depicting LGBTQ realities in different national contexts. In this respect, students are able to engage with cinematic and literary works such as Strawberry and Chocolate from Cuba, Tropical Malady from Thailand, Walking with Shadows from Nigeria, Summertime from France, My Life in Pink from Belgium, Crystal Boys from Taiwan, Babyji from India, Before Night Falls from Cuba, Stories of Our Lives from Kenya, or even Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic and Loving Mountains, Loving Men from the United States, among others. I teach at an Appalachian institution, and the majority of my students come from the surrounding area. In designing my comparative queer theory and literature class, I henceforth sought to incorporate the experiences and stories of Appalachian LGBTQ communities into my comparative literature curriculum. When possible, I often try to map local realities and contexts that are familiar to students onto the global phenomena we analyze in my comparative and world literature classes. In this sense, it is by tracing the permutations of a given theme or concept, in both familiar and unfamiliar contexts, that the contours of cultural constructs permeating the lived realities of students—constructs that are often naturalized as “common-sense” and therefore rendered invisible—are then able to become more visible. The task at hand was therefore to explore possible grounds of

Syllabusing 63 comparison through which Appalachian queer texts could be mapped onto an LGBTQ world and comparative literature curriculum. As previously mentioned, one way of doing this was to outline discursive similarities between the queer anti-urbanism developed in Appalachian texts and the postcolonial queer criticism articulated in Kenyan works; or, to be more specific, the ways in which both Kenyan and Appalachian queer texts foreground their agency and navigate their respective identities through the politics of visibility. In this respect, I also sought to outline a discursive genealogy of the rhetoric of sexual deviance and its role in legitimating particular social realities in both Appalachian and Kenyan contexts.

Queer Anti-Urbanism in Appalachian Contexts A growing number of texts seeking to highlight queer Appalachian spaces have found it necessary to contest the prevalence of metronormative perspectives that homogenize LGBTQ experiences. These works include Scott Herring’s Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism, Maryl Gray’s Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Visibility in Rural America, as well as Mathias Detamore’s Queer Appalachia: Toward Geographies of Possibility. As Scott Herring explains, the concept of metronormativity can be defined from the perspective of six analytical axes: first, it takes the form of a travel narrative—a type of bildungsroman—in which a queer subject escapes a stifling homophobic rural environment to find sexual liberation in a more enlightened metropolitan urban center; second, it glorifies a temporal hierarchy in which queer subjects from the metropolis are seen to be more “cutting-edge” and “forward looking.” Similarly, it establishes an epistemological continuum, which assumes that the closer one is to an urban center, the more one is “in-the-know”; fourth, it foregrounds an aesthetic that establishes what counts as fashionable. Fifth, it privileges white upper-middle-class urban experiences and effaces the visibility of queer communities of color, while nominally exalting the metropolis for its ethnic and cultural diversity, which in turn instrumentalizes to define a “backward” and bigoted landscape of rural white homogeneity. Finally, it “enables prosperous queers to announce, to feel, to mold, and to capitalize on their leisure-oriented urbanism as a bourgeois privilege and as niche market” (15–16). Against this metronormativity, queer Appalachian works, such as Jeff Mann’s Loving Mountains, Loving Men, deploy a queer anti-urbanism, which functions as a “transformational mode of social and aesthetic critique that questions” hegemonic queer sexual representations and is “grounded in the geographic configurations of the non-metropolitan” (Herring 12). Loving Mountains, Loving Men encapsulates both a collection of poems as well as autobiographical accounts of the author’s life written in prose. Mann’s

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refusal to choose between prose and verse is meant to mirror his decision to embrace both his queer and Appalachian identities; in this way, the arguments he advances in his book are also echoed in the poetics of his text. As Mann contends, As defiantly as I cling to both mountain and queer heritage, such segregation would be my first tendency, and, in the past, in the few volumes of poetry I have published, that has been my decision: “hillbilly” poems here, “queer” poems there. They seem incongruous, not to be mixed, like sodium and chlorine, chemicals that explode when combined. Similarly, up to now, I have published poetry or memoir, not a combination of the two. Indeed, some readers might prefer that I stick to one genre, not blend the two as I do in this book. Mixed-genre books are a rarity, an odd hybrid most agents and publishers would eye askance. No one knows quite what to do with them. Like gay Appalachians, such books resist simple labeling, simple pigeonholing. (xv) This refusal to be pigeonholed, to mark his visibility as a gay Appalachian man, emerges as a central theme in his work. His book, which transports the reader from his childhood memories to his adult life, therefore narrates the journey he undertakes to reconcile his queer and Appalachian identities— identities which are often pitted as being antithetical to one another. In many ways, Mann’s experiences as an Appalachian gay man undercuts the metronormative narrative that posits a one-way journey of self-discovery toward sexual freedom that begins in a homophobic small town and ends in a more open-minded and large metropolitan area outside of Appalachia. While Mann does not conceal the homophobia he experienced as a gay man growing up in Hinton, West Virginia, his ephemeral escape to Washington, DC, does not necessarily offer him the fulfillment he seeks. As Mann explains, “I found no magically welcoming gay paradise […] I taught at George Washington University during the fall semester of 1985, was dismayed by the coldness of the faculty, the mercenary obsessions of city dwellers, the constant irritants of urban life” (10). Far from encountering an open-minded accepting community in the city, he also finds himself marginalized as a result of his Appalachian accent and identity. Mann occupies a liminal space in which he is both stigmatized for his queer identity in his hometown as well as for his Appalachian identity in the city. Reflecting on this conundrum, Mann posits that if a gay man flees to the city, he is often encouraged to drop “that funny accent” and “those country ways,” to feel ashamed of his mountain

Syllabusing 65 culture. If a lesbian stays in the mountains, she might face bigotry and abuse, especially from intolerant fundamentalist Christians. (xii) For Mann, the solution to this impasse lies in both forging and recognizing the existence of queer spaces and communities throughout the Appalachian region. Thus, in the process of mapping his return to Appalachia, he identifies places such as Blacksburg, Virginia, Morgantown, West Virginia, and Lost River, West Virginia, as LGBTQ friendly locations, which have enabled him to reconcile his two identities. In his autobiographical account, Mann describes how this cartography reveals a fertile ground for the development of a queer aesthetic that he favors: I’ve never fit into most mainstream gay bars, whose denizens are as unimpressed with my beard and boots as I am with their styled heir and designer clothes […] Now however, with the expansion of gay culture in the cities of Appalachia, I can remain in the mountains and still enjoy the company of gay men very much like me. When I watch bears and leather men march in the West Virginia Pride Parade every June in Charleston, West Virginia, I can’t help but remember my youthful years of secrecy and isolation. Then I brim with amazement and gratitude, knowing that the Mountain State has, in this respect at least, changed radically for the better. (154) It is useful, in this context, to note that the dichotomy between rural and urban, town and city, as used by proponents of queer anti-urbanism, are not necessarily anchored around specific measures of population density; instead, they gesture toward a critique of imagined homonormative sexual geographies that outline the boundaries of queer visibility along regionally defined cultural expressions and codes. In this sense, Jeff Mann can both describe queer formations in Appalachian cities, in one part of his book, and then write about “the city” as a space outside Appalachia in a different section. Here, Mann’s autobiography is meant to disrupt the cultural logic of a metronormative bildungsroman that would chronicle his “evolution” from a closeted teen living in Hinton, West Virginia, to a liberated gay man whose sexual freedom is enabled by residing in a large metropolitan area outside of Appalachia. His book, instead, seeks to connect the evolving symbiosis of his gay and Appalachian identities with the progressive visibility of queer communities in the region. Thus, Mann’s Appalachia is not a region permanently stuck in the past; it is not a space that permanently remains untouched by the passage of time, evolving social attitudes, and norms.

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In many ways, metronormative sexual geographies that render the existence of queer spaces in Appalachia invisible align with broader stereotypes that have historically been used to depict the region. In these images, Appalachia is depicted as a region that is constantly out of step with modernity. At other times it is nostalgically portrayed as a space that allows one to travel back in time—to travel back to one’s “ancestral roots.” The complexities of Appalachian realities are often reduced to discourses about poverty in the region. Media portrayals of Appalachia, such as CBS’ 1964 special Christmas in Appalachia, CBS’ 48 Hours 1989 episode “Another America,” (qtd. in “Flashback: Eastern Kentucky Responds to 48 Hours Report”) Rorry Kennedy’s 1999 documentary American Hollow, or even Dianne Sawyer’s 20/20 special A Hidden America: Children of the Mountain, have repeatedly highlighted “a devastating poverty that plagues part of the region while simultaneously ignoring the presence of middle-class and upper-class mountain residents” (Locklear 92). Rather than examining the systemic roots of poverty existing in some parts of the area, a common narrative is to blame Appalachia’s economic realities on “cultural” characteristics that are supposedly unique to the location. Thus, the “culture of poverty” diagnosis conveniently sidesteps the ways in which the region’s land and resources have historically been exploited in ways that never benefited the majority of its inhabitants. Sexual norms and mores have frequently been used to describe and explain Appalachia’s supposed backwardness. In particular, the myth of pervasive inbreeding, often used to stereotype the region’s population, ascribes deviant sexual mores as one of the causes of Appalachia’s poverty. As Robert Tincher documents in Night Comes to the Chromosomes: Inbreeding and Population Genetics in Southern Appalachia, today’s general public seems to assume that inbreeding is responsible for the presumed low intelligence, “genetic deficiencies,” and “rare hereditary diseases” of the region, one authority has actually suggested that mountain people are inherently to blame for their disadvantaged economic and political situation because of inbreeding and its genetic consequences. (27) Hence stereotypes about inbreeding in Appalachia are employed to corroborate narratives about the region’s supposed homogeneity and isolation from the rest of the word. Of course, as Robert Tincher reveals in his research, findings, along with data from previous studies of marriage patterns in mountain communities, suggest that inbreeding levels in Appalachia do

Syllabusing 67 not seem extreme enough to justify labeling inbreeding as unique or particularly common to the region, when compared with those reported for populations elsewhere or at earlier periods in American history. (27) Other publications such as Blacks in Appalachia and Immigrants in the Coalfields have also sought to counter dominant perceptions of Appalachia as a place defined by racial or cultural homogeneity and isolation. Nonetheless, these images of a homogeneous population, whose sexual deviance is characterized by the prevalence of incest, reifies the myth of a community that is not only isolated from the world at large but also, more generally, from various notions of social progress, including evolving ideas about sexual orientation. In this way, metronormative perceptions of Appalachia are rhetorically compatible with a long-established discourse about the region. These narratives of deviant sexualities in Appalachia are also articulated through projected caricatures of gender norms in the region. Sexual deviance, in this context, is constructed out of a perceived reversal of traditional gender roles. As Carissa Massey argues, the hillbilly man is lazy, ignorant, and drunk, an unproductive figure who does nothing to elevate himself, a status that is amplified by his hard-working wife […] Once their masculine anchor—labor or hard work—is removed, then other cultural ‘norms’ are overturned. (170–171) From this perspective, if the “hillbilly” man’s laziness enables his sexual deviance, Appalachian women are also perceived to be hypersexual, overly fecund, aggressive, and manly. Massey notes that for a cultural context that prizes woman as feminine and men as masculine dichotomies, the Appalachian woman is often rendered as at least unnatural or uncivilized as the man because she takes on the duties he lays aside and thus is stripped of the passivity and femininity desired of women in western culture (130) Hence, the rhetoric of sexual deviance has both historically been used to marginalize LGBTQ communities as well as naturalize the systemic poverty that permeates some Appalachian communities by depicting them as “uncivilized,” out of step with progress (as signified by the projected sexual and cultural practices ascribed to them), and therefore deserving of the socioeconomic precarity in which they find themselves.

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Queer Postcolonialism As some Appalachian scholars and activists have noted, mainstream depictions and discourses about Appalachia often mirror those used to diagnose realities on the African continent as well as other colonial and neo-colonial spaces. Indeed, even depictions of queer sexualities and spaces on the African continent also echo those that are used to render Appalachian LGBTQ communities invisible. As Sokari Ekine notes, Two distinct, yet interlinked, narratives dominate discussions of queer African sexualities: one claims that queer sexualities are “un-African” and the other treats Africa as a site of incessant homophobia […] these fundamentalists argue that queer sexualities threaten African social and cultural norms and claim that pro-queer initiatives in Africa by Western countries and NGOs are imperialist. The second narrative on “African homophobia” is rooted in colonial discourses of deviant and peculiar African sexuality and in a contemporary neoliberal, global “LGBT” agenda which seeks to universalize white European norms and gender expressions. (78) Therefore, in the same way that queer Appalachians have been made to feel that there is an opposition between their sexual and regional identities, African religious leaders and politicians alike have similarly claimed that same-sex sexual practices are “un-African.” Here, queer African sexualities are construed as a “Western import” corrupting Africa’s youth. These narratives often have the effect of erasing the visibility of both contemporary and pre-colonial same-sex sexual practices that have existed in many parts of the continent. Furthermore, on the other side, non-African NGOs, organizations, as well as the international Western media, prefer to see the African continent as an unenlightened and hopeless space riddled with homophobia, thus also denying the existence of queer spaces and activism emerging in many parts of the region. In this globally deployed, Western-centric, queer imaginary, African LGBTQ communities are depicted as helpless victims waiting to be saved by their more enlightened Anglo-American and European counterparts. Such attitudes were, for example, evidenced in the global reception of Stories of Our Lives, a book and film project created by a Kenyan interdisciplinary artistic group known as the Nest Collective, which chronicles the lives and experiences of LGBTQ Kenyans across the country. When showcasing their film in Toronto (it was banned from distribution in Kenya), several of the Kenyan artists involved in the film and book project also took the opportunity to come out and disclose their sexual identities. Jim Chuchu,

Syllabusing 69 one of the artists involved in the book and film project, reveals that he was often asked whether it was safe for him to go back home. While members of the Nest Collective faced various forms of reprisals in response to their film—one of them was even arrested—Chuchu argues that such questions often came with a series of both overt and tacit assumptions. As he explains, every time I travel to other countries, in France, for instance, invariably I hear the question ‘where are you based?’ And the answer is always Nairobi. But sometimes I get the sense that people asking me that question are disappointed with the answer. (Chuchu) According to Chuchu, his interlocutors often expect an “out of the closet” queer Kenyan artist to leave, or at least strongly desire to emigrate away from, his or her home country in order to find salvation in Western Europe, the United States, or Canada. However, queer Kenyan artists and activists like Chuchu do not aspire to leave their country; they instead seek to forge local spaces, both physical and discursive, which enable them to dismantle heteronationalist narratives that pit their national and LGBTQ identities against each other. Here, just like Jeff Mann’s Loving Mountains, Loving Men, The Nest Collective’s Stories of Our Lives was created to critique the single story about Kenyan LGBTQ experiences. The book, which was later used as the basis for their film, reproduces recorded transcripts capturing the voices of queer Kenyans stemming from large metropolitan centers to small towns and representing different socioeconomic walks of life and professions. The people represented in Stories of Our Lives include sex workers, business owners, students, and writers, among others. The following excerpts from the book provide a snapshot of these voices: I want people to know that it’s not shameful to love another man. It is not shameful for men to hold hands. It is not shameful to be called homosexual. I am a homosexual, and very proud of that, and I AM A KENYAN. (277) I think it’s easier to be a lesbian now than how it was before. I don’t know how it was before for other lesbians, but over time the general public is starting to realize that gay people are here to stay and it’s not just a phase. When I came out to my friends in 2009, they took it better than I think they would have before. Being a lesbian is no longer shocking to the educated folks. I THINK IT’S GOING TO GET EASIER. (226)

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Syllabusing Sometimes I think, “I’m not meant to be here.” When I say here, I mean Kenya. I mean why am I in this environment that is so hostile? […] My family does not understand. My sisters don’t understand it. And, I think that’s one of the things that troubles me most, because even my siblings ask me questions like, “Do you have to be like that? Can’t you change? Why are you DOING THIS TO MUM?” (218) THE FIRST PERSON I CAME OUT TO was my sister and she was OK. She told me she already knew. She sat there, and I talked and I talked. She gave me a hug and said, “You know what? You’re my brother. This doesn’t change my relationship with you, and I will support you. Can I meet your boyfriend?” […] Next I told my brother and his fiancée. I told them, “I need you guys to know that I’m gay.” They were not very surprised. All of them had a feeling I was gay. [My brother] discussed it with his fiancée and they said it was OK. (259) My family knows about me. They know because I was caught […] they came to my house while I was with my boyfriend and peeped through the windows. They realized we were watching gay porn […] They waited until we started having sex. Unfortunately I hadn’t locked the door. They came in. Tushawapata! Msivae! We’ve already caught you. Don’t wear your clothes. They made us walk outside, naked. “Hatutaki mashoga huku mtaanani” We don’t want fags in this neighborhood! We were beaten and punished, and that story died there. They were beating us as if our gayness was something that could be beaten out of us. (249–250) EVERY TERM IN MY HIGH SCHOOL, the Christian Union girls used to come up with a list of suspected lesbians that they wanted to pray for. Fucking busy-bodies. I was always number 1 on that list, and my girlfriend was always number 2 and some people who hung out with me were lesbians by association. We told the Christian Union to keep praying if they wanted to. Our headmistress, funny enough, didn’t give a shit. She told us, “So you’re lesbians? You’ve decided to become lesbians? That’s fine. Have fun. In fact, that’s better than your friends, who are always hitting on boys and getting pregnant.” She was quite something, our headmistress. I REALLY ENJOYED HIGH SCHOOL. (241)

Syllabusing 71 Some people are very supportive, very supportive, while some are very opposed to us. It’s 50–50. I know places where I can go and I’m totally safe. They know I’m gay and they are very OK with me. And I know of a place I’ll go and they’d say, “LETS’S KILL THIS DUDE.” (225) The voices above offer a glimpse of the diversity of LGBTQ experiences in Kenya. Just like Jeff Mann, who seeks to claim both his Appalachian and gay identities, some of the people interviewed by the Nest Collective sought to affirm their identities as both queer and Kenyan. Furthermore, far from portraying a homogeneously homophobic national community, the book documents varying levels of tolerance and intolerance, from hostile rejection and violence to warm accommodation and support, experienced by queer Kenyans who come out to their families and communities. As one of the voices interviewed by the Nest Collective explains, “we are completely different people from different realities” (200). It is by rendering visible a plurality of voices and experiences that Stories of Our Lives showcases the ubiquity and multiplicity of queer lives in different parts of Kenya; this functions both as a response to homophobic essentialists who claim that homosexuality only exists in large metropolitan tourist zones where local youth are “contaminated” by foreign ideas, as well as to the wider Western community that imagines the entire African continent, and not just Kenya, to be a hopelessly homophobic region of the world devoid of any possibilities of social transformation.

Sexual Deviance and the Legitimation of Colonial Power Just like in Appalachian contexts, projected perceptions of deviant sexualities have also often been employed to depict African cultures as backward or uncivilized during the advent of colonialism. In fact, popular opposition to LGBTQ rights in Kenya do not emerge in a historical vacuum, they are a product of the battle (and subsequent synthesis) between colonial technologies of power—which were often enforced by policing and pathologizing the customs, family structures, and sexual bodies of colonized subjects through the dogmatic dictates of missionary evangelism—and anti-colonial forms of resistance that partially articulated their revolutionary impetus through a heterosexual matrix dipped in notions of tradition and “Africanness.” From this perspective, the rhetorical parameters around which the debate regarding LGBTQ rights are framed in Kenya are, for the most part, contemporary permutations of both the colonial legacy, including the institutionalization of sodomy laws in British colonies, as well as the discursive strategies of resistance adopted by the colonized. Indeed, such a genealogy can be traced

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through a queer reading of canonical works of African literature such as Jomo Kenyatta’s Facing Mount Kenya (1938). As Kobena Mercer and Isaac Julian explain in “Race, Sexual Politics, and Black Masculinity,” sexuality was always part and parcel of the colonial project: Historically, the European construction of sexuality coincides with the epoch of imperialism and the two inter-connect. Imperialism justified itself by claiming that it had a civilizing mission—to lead the base and ignoble savages and “inferior races” in culture and godliness. The person of the savage was developed as the Other of civilization and one of the first “proofs” of this otherness was the nakedness of the savage, the visibility of his sex. This led Europeans to assume that the savage possessed an open, frank and uninhibited “sexuality”—unlike the sexuality of the European which was considered to be fettered by the weight of civilization. (106–107) Here, just as in Appalachian contexts, projected images of uninhibited sexuality are used to define the backwardness of African natives. In many ways, Jomo Kenyatta’s work Facing Mount Kenya emerges as a response whose mission is to tackle directly the problematics of the colonial gaze. Written in 1938 under the tutelage of Bronislaw Malinowski at the London School of Economics, Kenyatta’s book aspires to explain the intricacies of Gikuyu traditions and social organization to a British academic audience. It is by difficultly assuming the rhetorical aesthetics of the “ethnographic present” that Kenyatta restlessly gravitates between a narrative style that attempts to be detached and “scientific” and one that is also polemic and deeply personal in its denunciation of colonial paternalism. As Barbara Celarent explains in her analysis of Kenyatta’s work, when the colonized write their own ethnographies, the result is very complicated indeed. On the one hand, ethnography was a metropolitan genre, created in the museums and universities of the imperial states. On the other hand, it had a profound, if paradoxical commitment to represent the other for itself. (723) This tension phenomenalizes itself in Kenyatta’s text through juxtaposing narrative conventions. About three chapters in the book are dedicated to Gikuyu sexual practices and customs as they relate to a communal sense of identity. As he describes

Syllabusing 73 Gikuyu sexual customs, Kenyatta is compelled to systematically translate these customs both within and against the colonizer’s cultural logic. For example, in his discussion of initiation ceremonies, Kenyatta states that: the large place given to sex in the initiation ceremonies is often misunderstood by Europeans, as if sexual indulgence is encouraged for its own sake; the obscenity of songs and dances and the profligacy associated with many of these ceremonies are held to prove unusual moral depravity. On the contrary, the Africans look upon these ceremonies as a final stage, in which boys and girls must be given full knowledge in the matter of relating to sex, to prepare them for future activities in their own homestead and in the community. In fact all sex-teaching is given with a social reference. (106) Here, Kenyatta attempts to mitigate projected colonial perceptions of deviant and uninhibited sexualities by foregrounding the educational aspects of these practices. Likewise, in his description of ngweko, a type of foreplay where boys and girls being initiated into adulthood are allowed (and even encouraged) to experiment sexually with each other, Kenyatta tirelessly reminds his Western reader that far from condoning sexual promiscuity, the custom is meant to instill sexual self-control and “safeguard the youth from nervous and psychic maladjustments” (149). Responding to missionaries who virulently criticized and punished Gikuyu men and women who engaged in this practice, Kenyatta contends that “the Gikuyu who have not been brought up under the missionary’s influence find it difficult to understand this sort of European puritanism, for a Gikuyu man has been taught from childhood to develop the technique of self-control in the matter of sex, which enables him to sleep in the same bed as a girl without necessarily having sexual intercourse” (153). Kenyatta thus rehabilitates the practice of ngweko as a socially beneficial pedagogic tool that interpellates subjects within normative social conventions. A similar logic is echoed in the following description of group masturbation among Gikuyu boys about to be initiated into manhood: In the Gikuyu community any form of sexual intercourse other than the natural form, between men and women acting in a normal way, is out of the question. It is considered taboo even to have sexual intercourse with a woman in any position except the regular one, face to face. Before initiation it is considered right and proper for boys to practice masturbation as a preparation for their future sexual activities. Sometimes two or more boys compete in this, to see which can show himself more active than the rest […] the practice is given up after the initiation ceremony,

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This homoerotic form of group masturbation in which young boys display their sexual virility for each other’s visual consumption is therefore legitimized as a rehearsal for future heteronormative sexual activity performed within the institution of marriage. However, while homoerotic group masturbation among men is encouraged, Kenyatta is quick to remind us that masturbation among girls is considered wrong, and if a girl is seen by her mother even so much as touching that part of her body she is at once told that she is doing wrong. It may be said that this, among other reasons, is probably the motive of trimming the clitoris, to prevent girls from developing sexual feelings around that point. (158) These androcentric definitions of sexuality and sex play thus foreclose possibilities of female-centered sexual pleasure (as well as other forms of samesex sexual intercourse) in their anti-colonial exaltations of Gikuyu tradition. Such anti-colonial gestures have a propensity to mute certain voices and sexual corporealities in the name of cultural resistance. Of course, postcolonial nation-states, as well as revolutionary movements in general, have historically been riddled with such repressive outcomes. As John Hawley asserts, it is common that fiction emerging from such self-identifying “new” nations often dances around themes that pit the individual against a totalizing national power that doesn’t have time for individual rights […] In such [postcolonial] nation building cultures, sexual dissidence is a distraction: you are either one of us or you are not. (9) As an ardent defender of female genital mutilation, Kenyatta proudly describes how traveling Gikuyu men who came back home with foreign, uncircumcised wives were often chased away and disinherited—one of the most severe punishments that a community could inflict upon a person (127–128). Thus, while the colonizers interpreted the practice of female genital mutilation among the Gikuyu as proof of their barbarity and legitimation of the civilizing colonial mission, anti-colonialists clung to the practice as an exercise in counter-hegemonic cultural resistance—a form of cultural resistance that demands conformity among in-group members and

Syllabusing 75 mitigates expressions of difference that are perceived to threaten re-constructed postcolonial identities. It is useful to remember that Kenyatta, who would later become the first president of Kenya, wrote Facing Mount Kenya not simply as an exploration of Gikuyu traditions, but, more importantly, as an anti-colonial document that sought to legitimize native customs and sociopolitical structures, thus foregrounding their capabilities for self-rule. Hence, the demand for communal conformity, whether this conformity is articulated through the defense of female genital mutilation as a symbol of tradition among the Gikuyu during colonization, or heteronormative nationalism in contemporary Kenyan society, is used to police perceived “non-normative” sexualities and corporealities—the clitoris being one of them. Gikuyu clitoridectomy in the colonial context and heteronationalism in postcolonial settings, therefore, are both employed counter-culturally in order to assert a sense of communal sovereignty. In this regard, Kenyatta, quite significantly, informs us that Gikuyu independent schools, free from missionary influence, first emerged as a result of the acrimonious debate over female genital mutilation. The Gikuyu felt that they needed schools where children would be taught how to read and write without sacrificing their traditional heritage. These independent schools were the first manifestations of native self-rule (126). It is therefore useful to analyze how questions of sovereignty and self-rule also inform contemporary discussions about homosexuality in Kenya. As previously mentioned, debates about LGBTQ rights in Kenya are, in many ways, contemporary permutations of a script emerging from colonial contestations, which are adapted to new realities. These contemporary adaptations include the same archetypal colonial and anti-colonial characters occupying similar discursive roles. Reflecting on the draconian Anti-Homosexual Bill that was introduced in Uganda, a country that neighbors Kenya, Sylvia Tamale explains that After the bill was introduced, outsiders descended on Kampala like locusts. Ugandan activists were besieged by requests for sound bites and opinion pieces. Western researchers, journalists, activists, students, and donors asked variants of one key question: “Why is Uganda so intolerant of gay people?” The reports they wrote and the documentaries they made were largely negative, ahistorical, and myopic; in perpetuating racist stereotypes even as they narrated homophobic stories, they eclipsed one example of discrimination with another. [By depicting Ugandan homosexuals as helpless victims, Western journalists portrayed] a perfect juxtaposition of modern, “civilized” Western sexuality and backward, “uncivilized” Africa; the archetypal “us” versus “them.” (37)

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Africans, once again, are caricatured as having a deviant culture, except that this time it is attributed to restrictive attitudes about sexuality. The civilizing mission is thus rehabilitated, once again, albeit as a different type of “humanitarian” endeavor, which concomitantly legitimizes neo-colonial technologies of power. Tamale posits that the imposition of donor sanctions may be one way of seeking to improve the human rights situation in a country but does not, in and of itself, result in the improved protection of the rights of LGBTQ people. Threats of donor sanctions against African countries, including Kenya, are by their nature coercive and reinforce the disproportionate power dynamics between donor countries and recipients (41) It is not coincidental that appeals to national sovereignty are often used to condemn and victimize LGBTQ people in places like Kenya and Uganda. In his macro analysis of the “scope, causes, and consequences of homophobia in Africa,” Patrick Ireland observes that “when globalization in general and neoliberalism in particular began to spark negative reactions in developing countries by the early 1990s, resistance to the West therefore took on a homophobic cast: open markets and homosexuality became inextricably linked” (54). In this geopolitical climate, “‘global resistance to neo-liberalism’ tends to cast gay men especially as ‘the winner or even the agents of capital’s globalization, of the precarization of labor,’ and the leading edge of ‘Western societies’ immoralism’” (54). From this perspective, financial sanctions that seek to force local governments to secure the rights of LGBTQ people in countries such as Uganda or Kenya also, counterproductively, harken back to the imposition of Structural Adjustment Programs, whose effects still linger in the material world and collective consciousness of the domestic citizenry. Donor sanction and aid conditionality also end up hurting the very groups they claim to protect. As African LGBTQ activists who opposed British aid conditionality as an incentive for securing gay rights on the continent explain, “aid cuts also affect LGBTI people. Aid received from donor countries is often used to fund education, health, and broader development. LGBTI people are part of the social fabric and thus part of the population that benefit from the funding” (Abbas 9). Donor sanctions, henceforth, enable heteronationalism to become the platform on which neoliberalism is contested, a platform that violently mitigates and or denies the presence of local queer sexualities and identities. Furthermore, many authoritarian African leaders also “see gays as useful scapegoats for drawing attention away from the poor performance and corruption of their regimes” (Ireland 55).

Syllabusing 77 It is often ironically pointed out that both Western activists who contend that homophobia is an intrinsic part of “African” culture or African leaders who make polemic statements about cultural imperialism when talking about homosexuality ignore the fact that sodomy laws were introduced on the continent through the advent of Western colonization or that the Christianity which African religious leaders use in order to oppose homosexuality was also, for the most part, imposed from the West as part and parcel of the colonial project. Those who suffer under the violence of postcolonial heteronationalism are therefore sacrificed in the interests of dialectically scripted forms of anti-colonial and imperial humanisms, each purporting to speak on behalf of the marginalized and oppressed.

On Syllabusing and World-Making Both metronormative depictions of Appalachia and neo-colonial interpretations of Kanyan homophobia echo and, in many ways, reproduce broader discursive patterns that have historically been used to depict and make sense of the two regions. Indeed, in both contexts, constructs of deviant sexual practices have historically not only been ascribed to people living in these areas but have also been employed to legitimize either the impetus of colonialism in Kenya or the exploitation and immiseration of Appalachian communities. In both Appalachia and Kenya, LGBTQ individuals are expected to escape or flee from the communities in which they were born as the only way for them to successfully actualize their sexual identities. Their queer identities are, in this sense, construed to be antithetical to their regional sense of belonging. In this context, Appalachia or Kenya are solely posited as being homophobically hopeless places from where marginalized gay people can only be “saved,” as opposed to challenging environments where queer subjects can exist on a long-term basis and be able to construct cultural spaces of resistance and survival. Examining Stories of Our Lives in relation to Loving Mountains, Loving Men, therefore, exposes how both works similarly attempt to contest imagined sexual geographies that foreclose possibilities of queer existence and collectivities in their respective regions. In this way, they offer a venue for Appalachian students to relate local LGBTQ issues to larger global trends and debates. As previously mentioned, the process of designing a syllabus requires the comparatist to make connections, not just between texts stemming from different national contexts, but also, especially, among students, the works discussed in class, and the cultural and geographic location in which the classroom is situated. The idea of syllabusing, henceforth, involves a process of constructing a comparative analysis, of arranging culturally diverse texts into a given meta-story, of mapping the world by making

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specific links, in a way that is primarily oriented toward achieving specific pedagogic goals in the classroom. Here, I would like the reader to conceptualize the structure of this project along the organizational system and cultural logic of a Matryoshka doll (also known as a nesting or stacking doll), in other words as a type of mise-enabyme: the cultural location of my classroom, my students’ backgrounds, the regional mission of the institution in which I teach, as well as the purpose and goals of the course all form the outermost layers of the project; the analysis of queer anti-urbanism in Appalachian texts form the second layer; the examination of The Nest Collective’s Stories of Our Lives as it relates to Jeff Mann’s Loving Mountain, Loving Men forms the third layer; and finally the queer reading of evolving concepts of deviant sexualities in Jomo Kenyatta’s Facing Mount Kenyatta, an analysis that situates itself comparatively with an earlier examination regarding discourses about sexual deviance in Appalachia, forms the final layer of this project. From this logic, syllabusing, in this context, entails connecting the impetus of a given comparative research project to specific pedagogic exigencies. The classes I teach tend to be composed of many first-generation college students from the Appalachian region. While these students see higher education as a means to upward social mobility, many of them also feel that their Appalachian background and culture are incompatible with the academic settings in which they find themselves; after all, to this day, some educators still stigmatize Appalachian regional dialects as being “defective” or “backwards” (Dunstan). Mapping Appalachian texts onto a world literature curriculum therefore offers a way to legitimize their cultural background in an academic context while also enabling them to discover texts, traditions, people, and histories that extend beyond their immediate social realities.

Memo V

Monstrous Encounters in Outer Space A Pedagogic Analysis of Star Trek’s Racial Politics from a Comparative Perspective

Star Trek’s image as a show that exalts multiculturalism, tolerance, and diversity was partially propagated by the extra-textual discourse that has continued to surround the franchise. The media marketing of Star Trek as a bastion of tolerance and diversity emerged after The Original Series was cancelled in 1969 (Kanzler 70). As Katjya Kanzler documents in Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations, the cancellation of The Original Series “left fan audiences with a painful absence of incoming material, whose discussion had provided the basis for their fandom. They, therefore, enthusiastically welcomed the publication of The Making of Star Trek in late 1968” (70). This book, which was co-authored by Gene Roddenberry, Star Trek’s creator, outlined the creative process and vision of the show for the first time. In subsequent years, the personal biographies of various cast members from the show have also contributed to ossifying the franchise’s multicultural image. George Takei’s autobiography, for example, begins with his childhood experience at an internment camp for Japanese-Americans during the Second World War and ends with his successful career as an actor. As Kanzler explains, both within his personal story and in his historical narrative, Takei positions Star Trek as the driving force. Not only did the program open up the precious opportunity for him to make a living as an actor; acutely aware of the limited range of (unflattering) roles Asian actors were allowed to play, he also points to the importance of being part of a television series that was reversing a pattern in images of Asians. (80) Similarly, in her reflections on the show’s contribution to positive representations of minorities on television, Nichelle Nicholas, one of the AfricanAmerican cast members of the franchise, recalls a conversation she had with Dr. King:

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Monstrous Encounters in Outer Space I told Gene after the end of the first season that I would not be returning to the show, that I wanted to return to my first love, which is musical theatre. But I did not know that meeting a Star Trek fan would change my life. I was told that a fan wanted to meet me, and I turned and looked into the face of Dr. Martin Luther King. I was breathless. He says “yes, I am a trekkie, I am a Star Trek fan.” He told me that Star Trek was one of the only shows that his wife Coretta and he would allow their little children to stay up and watch. When I thanked him but told him that I was leaving the show, all the smile came off his face and he said “you can’t so that.” He said, “don’t you understand that for the first time we are seen as we should be seen. You don’t have a black role; you have an equal role.” And then I went back to work on Monday morning (https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqoZ0C0cnRE).

Here, the extra-textual discourse surrounding the show’s multicultural vision positions it as an epiphenomenon of the civil rights movement. King’s words, as recollected by Nichelle Nicholas, have been frequently cited by many Star Trek fans as well as numerous documentaries focusing on the “behind-thescenes” making of the show. Other black cast members such as LeVar Burton (plays Geordi LaForge in Star Trek: The Next Generation), Avery Brooks (plays Benjamin Sisko in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine), as well as Whoopi Goldberg (plays Guinan in Star Trek: The Next Generation) have similarly extolled the show for what they perceive to be its commitment to tolerance and diversity. The Star Trek universe presents us with a society in which many of the sociopolitical and economic problems currently affecting humanity have been resolved. In this universe, social issues such as racism, sexism, ableism, militarism, or even capitalist greed are projected and debated within the framework of cultural encounters between humans and non-human species from other planets. In this way, Star Trek, on the one hand, seeks to examine and critique present social problems and, on the other hand, aspires to model and project an ideal utopic society in which contemporary social conflicts are overcome. Thus, in a future where a more egalitarian economic system has replaced capitalism on earth and where patriarchal violence has been eradicated, the Ferengi represent the brutal aspects of our mercantile and misogynistic culture; in a utopic multicultural society connected by a federation of planets in which humans and diverse alien species live side-by-side in harmony, the Klingons and the Cardassians embody the militarist and ethnonationalist trends that have defined our history and which continue to dominate in our contemporary political realities. Depictions of alien civilizations henceforth function as rhetorical spaces on which our current flaws and social conflicts are projected. In this sense, Star Trek appropriates the modus operandi of many political works

Monstrous Encounters in Outer Space 81 of science fiction that situate familiar conflicts in unfamiliar spaces, in other words, defamiliarize the familiar in order to better critique it. In such works, the monstrous dimensions of some alien creatures are merely a reflection of monstrous tendencies in our own societies. The Star Trek fandom spans across generations. At my institution, I became increasingly aware of the fact that many of my students were trekkies; a few even contributed to various fan fiction sites. Intending to capitalize on the popularity of Star Trek among my students, I sought to design a Star Trekthemed honors composition class that would enable them to explore a variety of topics such as gender, sexuality, race, human rights, colonialism, and postcolonial criticism. Hence, if we approach the process of designing a syllabus as both a pedagogic and theoretical exercise, then the exigency for this project was based on the following two questions. The first and most obvious question was: how do I instrumentalize my students’ interest in Star Trek as a way of studying historical and current sociopolitical issues, including the internationalization of ethnonationalism that permeates our contemporary political culture? The second—and perhaps less obvious—question, one that relates to my background as a comparatist, was how might one appropriate comparative methodologies in order to both teach and study Star Trek? The impetus to compare is partly driven by the notion that there are particular insights to be gained by examining and relating texts emerging from different national or cultural contexts to each other, insights that are not easily discernible by analyzing such materials in isolation from one another. Furthermore, during key moments in the history of the discipline, this impetus to compare, the methods favored by the comparatists, were often adopted as engaged responses to imminent social and political problems. Foundational figures such as Leo Spitzer, Eric Auerbach, as well as René Wellek, who shaped the field of comparative literature in the United States, arrived as exiles from Europe during the Second World War. René Wellek criticized European approaches to comparative literature by contending that the patriotic motivations “of many comparative literature studies in France, Germany, Italy, and so on [had], led to a strange system of cultural bookkeeping, a desire to accumulate credit for one’s nation by providing as many influences as possible on other nations” (167). Wellek’s critique, his suspicion of comparative methodologies that promote hyper-nationalist sentiments, can be read through his own personal experiences as a war exile whose deontology was shaped by an intimate familiarity with the devastating consequences of ethnonationalism. By tracing what he saw as the cosmopolitan origins of comparative literature, Wellek argued that comparative literature arose as a reaction against the narrow nationalism of much nineteenth-century scholarship, as a protest against the

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Wellek, therefore, sought to develop a comparative methodology whose goal was to “grasp the nature of art and poetry” and lead to the disappearance of “national vanities” (171). My aim in citing this historical example is not to engage with the specifics of Wellek’s methodological prescriptions but rather to highlight the importance of situating a given comparative impetus within larger social, political, and economic predicaments that surround the critic. After all, given the fact that the ethnonationalist impulses against which René Wellek articulated his comparative methodology have not abated to this day, what comparative tools might we deploy in order to engage with our current political culture? In this context, one solution is to theorize comparative methods that are grounded in specific pedagogic practices. Here, I extend Edward Said’s analysis of the symbiotic relationship among “the world, the text, and the critic,” to also include pedagogic exigencies. I taught my Star Trek class in the spring semester of 2017 following the election of Donald Trump on November 8, 2016. Realizing that the supposed permanence of my permanent residency in the United States may not be that permanent after all, I submitted my paperwork for US citizenship later during the month of November 2016, soon after the election. I designed my syllabus amidst news reports of proposals to ban Muslims from entering the country. Stories of white nationalists being positioned to occupy prominent roles in the White House circulated in the media. Above all, a prevalent feeling of despair, insecurity, and hopelessness had lodged itself within the collective consciousness of immigrant networks to which I belonged, as well as international and minority students seeking reassurance from faculty members on our campus. Designing the Star Trek course emerged as a way for both my students and me to study, to comparatively historicize, as well as to develop rhetorical strategies for understanding and responding to our current political reality. It is against this background that I designed the following syllabus: The Rhetoric of Star Trek Course Description: In this class, you will study the multifaceted ways in which rhetoric operates in society. By examining a number of rhetorical situations located in episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation you will explore topics that tackle the relationship among rhetoric and gender, science, race, individual rights, conflict resolution, and sexuality. Thus, the Star Trek episodes

Monstrous Encounters in Outer Space 83 we will be exploring during the course of the semester will provide us with perspectives from which you will examine and write about pertinent social issues that permeate our political culture. Throughout the semester, you will be required to write four research essays. The four main writing assignments will consist of a historical contextualization essay, a definition essay, a proposal essay in which you promote a social concept or political/philosophical theory, as well as an argumentative essay in which you defend a marginalized group. Each essay will require you to perfect a cumulative set of skills that you will be able to synthesize and deploy in each subsequent research assignment. For example, in your second essay, you may use the historical contextualization skills acquired in the first assignment to examine how a given phenomenon or concept has been defined across historical periods; you may employ a definition argument in order to promote a social concept in your proposal essay; finally, you may also use a given social concept or political theory to defend a marginalized group in your final argumentative essay. During the semester, you will also be habitually responding to critical essays on Star Trek as well as other reading materials that provide historical examples of issues that are explored in various episodes. Please note that you will be required to have a Netflix or Hulu subscription in order to view episodes from the show. Course Goals and Objectives: By the end of this course, student are expected to • • • • • •

Acquire an understanding of rhetorical contexts Know how to construct arguments that are suited for specific rhetorical contexts and audiences Know how to navigate academic sources and incorporate them into their research Become familiar with the conventions of MLA and APA citations Understand how rhetoric shapes our perceptions of social and political issues Understand how rhetoric functions in popular culture (especially science fiction)

Course Outline Course Introduction: Star Trek’s Vision (Weeks 1–2) • • •

From the Next Generation: Watch “The Arsenal of Freedom” (Season 1 Ep 20), “Where Silence has Lease” (Season 2 Ep 2) Read “Introduction: Living with Star Trek” (pages 18–54) by Lincoln Geraghty Read “Introduction,” “the theoretical landscapes,” and “The Vision: Star Trek’s Construction as Multicultural Utopia” (pages 1–85) by Katja Kanzlar

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Monstrous Encounters in Outer Space Cultural Encounters and Conflicts (Weeks 3–5) •

• • • • •

From The Next Generation: Watch “Home Soil” (Season 1 Ep 17), “Who Watches the Watchers” (Season 3 Ep 4), “The Enemy” (Season 3 Ep 7), “The Best of Both Worlds Part 1 & 2” (Season 3 Ep 26 & Season 4 Ep 1), “I Borg” (Season 5 Ep 23), “First Contact” (Season 4 Ep 15), “Half a Life” (Season 4 Ep 22), “Darmok” (Season 5 Ep 2), “The Inner Light” (Season 5 Ep 25), “The Chase” (Season 6 Ep 20), “Homeward” (Season 7 Ep 13) Read “Make It So: Kant, Confucius, and the Prime Directive” by Alejandro Barcenas and Steve Bein (pages 36–45) Read “Klingons: A Cultural Pastiche” by Victor Grech (pages 71–81) Read “The Borg as Contagious Collectivist Techno-Totalitarian Transhumanists” (pages 83–94) by Dan Dinello Historical Example: Read Death and the King’s Horseman by Wole Soyinka Historical Example: Read A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies by Bartholomé de las Casas

Individual Rights (Weeks 6–8) •

• • • •

From The Next Generation: Watch “Justice” (Season 1 Ep 7), “The Measure of a Man” (Season 2 Ep 9), “The Offspring” (Season 3 Ep 16), “The Drumhead” (Season 4 Ep 21), “The Quality of Life” (Season 6 Ep 9), “Inheritance” (Season 7 Ep 10), “Ethics” (Season 5 Ep 16) Read “Data, Kant, and Personhood; or, Why Data Is Not a Toaster” (pages 172–179) by Nina Rosenstand Historical Example: Read The Controversy of Valladolid by Jean-Claude Carrière Historical Example: Watch the documentary on the Dreyfus Affair and read “I accuse” by Émile Zola Historical Example: Watch Allegiance, the musical by Jay Kuo

Gender, Reproduction, Sexuality (Weeks 9–11) •

•

From the Next Generation: Watch “Angel One” (Season 1 Ep 13), “Loud as a Whisper” (Season 2 Ep 5), “The Host” (Season 4 Ep 23), “The Child” (Season 2 Ep 1), “Galaxy’s Child” (Season 4 Ep 16), “Up the Long Ladder” (Season 2 Ep 18), “Violations” (Season 5 Ep 12), Sub Rosa (Season 7 Ep 14), “The Outcast” (Season 5 Ep 17), “The Perfect Mate” (Season 5 Ep 21) Read “A Threat to the Entire Federation: The Woman Ruler” (pages 45–65), “I Am for You: The Perfect Mate” (pages 66–87), “What Makes You Think You Can Dictate How We Love? Sexual Orientation” (pages 108–124), “The Right to Exercise Control: Reproductive Politics” (pages

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• •

144–163), “No, I Won’t Let You: Rape, Romance and Consent” (pages 164–189) by Robin Roberts Read “Sex(uality)-Gender” (pages 163–223) by Katja Kanzlar Read “Deanna Troi’s Tenuous Authority and the Rationalization of Federation Superiority in Star Trek: The Next Generation Rape Narrative” (pages 33–50) by Sarah Projansky

Race (Weeks 12–13) •

• •

• • •

From The Next Generation: Watch “Heart of Glory” (Season 1 Ep 19), “A Matter of Honor” (Season 2 Ep 8), “The Emissary” (Season 2 Ep 20), “Sins of the Father” (Season 3 Ep 17), “Reunion” (Season 4 Episode 7), “Galaxy’s Child” (Season 4 Ep 16), “In Theory” (Season 4 Ep 25), “Aquiel” (Season 6 Ep 13), “Birthright Part 1& 2” (Season 6 Ep 16 & 17), Parallels (Season 7 Ep 11) Read “Textualizing Star Trek’s Multicultural Identity,” “Species Race Ethnicity,” “Reading the Alien” (pages 115–126) by Katja Kanzlar Read “The Meaning of Race in the Generation of Star Trek” (pages 1–25), “Trek on the Silver Screen: White Future-Time as the Final Frontier” (pages 69–104), “The Next Generation: Toward a Neoconservative Play” (pages 105–136) by Daniel Leonard Bernadi Read “We Weren’t Meant to Know Each Other at All” (pages 125–143) by Robin Roberts Read “Worf as Metonymic Signifier of Racial, Cultural, and National Difference” (pages 51–68) by Leah R. Vande Berg Read “Dating Data: Miscegenation in Star Trek: The Next Generation” (pages 69–88) by Rhonda Wilcox

Economic, Social, and Political Systems (Week 14–15) •

• • • • •

From The Next Generation: Watch “The Last Outpost” (Season 1 Ep 4), Symbiosis (Season 1 Ep 21), “The Neutral Zone” (Season 1 Ep 25), “The Hunted” (Season 3 Ep 11), “The High Ground” (Season 3 Ep 12), “Force of Nature” (Season 7 Ep 9), “Preemptive Strike” (Season 7 Ep 24) Read “Federation Trekonomics: Marx, the Federation, and the Shift from Necessity to Freedom” (pages 115–126) by Jeff Ewing Read “The Human Adventure is Just Beginning: Star Trek’s Secular Society” (pages 326–339) by Kevin S. Decker Read “Cyborgs in Utopia: The Problem of Radical Difference in Star Trek: The Next Generation” (pages 95–111) by Katrina G. Boyd Read “For the Greater Good: Trilateralism and Hegemony in Star Trek: The Next Generation” (pages 137–156) by Steven F. Collins Read “Domesticating Terrorism: A Neocolonial Economy of Différance” (pages 157–181) by Kent Ono.

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The class was divided into five topical segments that included Cultural Encounters and Conflicts; Individual Rights; Gender, Reproduction, and Sexuality; Race; and Economic, Social, and Political Systems. In order to make the course more manageable, I decided that the class would only focus on episodes from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Students were given readings from book chapters and scholarly articles on Star Trek that aligned with each of these themes. I also placed specific Star Trek episodes in conversation with texts emerging from different historical and national contexts. These texts were positioned in the syllabus as “historical examples” that enabled students to relate the conflicts depicted in Star Trek’s futuristic landscape to concrete historical events and debates; in other words, these works gave students the ability to historicize Star Trek episodes and apply the insights from these historical analyses to their present. The comparative dimensions of the class henceforth involved placing Star Trek episodes, texts dramatizing specific historical events across national contexts, as well as contemporary political realities, in dialogue with each other. Thus, Star Trek episodes centered on Cultural Encounters and Conflicts such as “Who Watches the Watchers” and “Half a Life” were respectively paired with A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies by Bartholomé de las Casas and Death and the King’s Horseman by Wole Soyinka. “The Drumhead,” an episode engaging questions about due process, xenophobia, and individual human rights was comparatively situated alongside Émile Zola’s open letter “J’accuse” and Jay Kuo’s musical Allegiance, which chronicles the internment of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War. Finally, Jean-Claude Carrière’s dramatization of the debate between Bartholomé de las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlvida was also comparatively paired with “The Measure of a Man,” an episode that explores the cultural boundaries used to define sentient and intelligent life as they relate to individual rights. In January 27, 2017, Donald Trump signed Executive Order 13769, also known as “the Muslim Ban,” which prevented nationals from seven majority-Muslim countries—namely, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen—from entering the United States. Affected international students stemming from these countries suddenly found themselves ephemerally stranded without an ability to return to their families during the summer. Fearing they would not be allowed to re-enter the country, some of them promptly cancelled their plans to travel back home at the end of the semester. As these events were unfolding, my students were tasked to watch a Star Trek episode entitled “The Drumhead.” When designing the syllabus, I had included the episode in anticipation of discussing President Trump’s Muslim ban, a policy proposal he frequently alluded to during his presidential campaign. I intended students to use this episode as a palimpsestic device on

Monstrous Encounters in Outer Space 87 which they could trace past and present permutations of similar xenophobic policies in both domestic and international contexts. The plot of “The Drumhead” begins with an explosion that occurs in a chamber hatch aboard the USS Enterprise-D spaceship. Suspecting that the explosion was caused by an enemy spy aboard the ship, the leadership of the enterprise engages in a thorough investigation of the incident. Worried about the slow progress of the investigation, Starfleet Command, the authority overseeing the security of the United Federation of Planets, sends Norah Satie, a retired admiral, to investigate the case. In the course of her investigation, Satie uncovers a Romulan spy aboard the enterprise, who nonetheless denies any involvement in the explosion. Convinced that the spy could not have worked alone, Admiral Satie, with the help of Lieutenant Commander Worf, the strategic operations officer aboard the ship, begins a search for possible collaborators. The two of them quickly arrange to interrogate possible suspects. While interrogating a technician named Simon Tarses, a telepathic investigator helping with the case senses that the young man is concealing a secret. It is at this moment that frictions begin to emerge between Jean-Luc Picard, the captain of the ship, and Admiral Satie. While Satie perceives the discomfort of the young technician as proof of his guilt, Picard contends that the evidence is insufficient. Thus, from this moment, the central conflict of the episode is dramatized in a debate that pits the importance of due process against the need to act swiftly in a manner that ignores individual rights, specifically when a community is faced with what it considers an imminent external threat. As Simon Tarses emerges to be a central suspect in the investigation, it is soon revealed that the explosion was an accident. This revelation, however, does not stop Admiral Satie from dropping her investigation on Tarses, whom she still perceives as a threat. Indeed, Satie soon discovers that the young technician had purposefully lied about his ancestry on his application to Starfleet; he had falsely stated that his grandfather was a Vulcan while he was in fact a Romulan, a species currently at war with the federation. Despite Tarses’ insistence that he only lied out of fear that his origins might disqualify him from being admitted into Starfleet, Admiral Satie perceives his ancestry as proof of his guilt. She quickly convenes a hearing in which Captain Picard assumes the role of Tarses’ defense council. Admiral Satie, in turn, interprets Picard’s defense of Tarses as proof of his own compromised complicity, she thus begins to question the captain’s allegiance to the federation. In most episodes, Jean-Luc Picard often serves as the voice of reason and wisdom; the moral lessons communicated in each show are often conveyed through his speeches. It is frequently through his words and diplomacy, as opposed to his phaser or other weaponry, that conflicts are resolved. Picard thus functions as a metatextual guide through which the audience can understand the purpose

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and vision embedded in a given episode as well as the show at large. This is observed in “The Drumhead” when Picard explains the meaning behind the title of the episode to Lieutenant Commander Worf: “Five hundred years ago, military officers would upend a drum on the battlefield, sit at it and dispense summary justice. Decisions were quick, punishments severe, appeals denied. Those who came to a drumhead were doomed.” Similarly, at the hearing, Picard manages to rhetorically outmaneuver Admiral Satie by using the words of her own respected father against her: I am deeply concerned by what is happening here. It began when we apprehended a spy, a man who admitted his guilt and who will answer for his crime. But the hunt didn’t end there. Another man, Mister Simon Tarses, was brought to trial and it was a trial, no matter what others choose to call it. A trial based on insinuation and innuendo. Nothing substantive offered against Mister Tarses, much less proven. Mister Tarses’ grandfather is Romulan, and for that reason his career now stands in ruins. Have we become so fearful? Have we become so cowardly that we must extinguish a man because he carries the blood of a current enemy? [There are] some words I’ve known since I was a school boy. With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably. Those words were uttered by Judge Aaron Satie as wisdom and warning. The first time any man’s freedom is trodden on, we’re all damaged. (www.chakoteya.net/NextGen/195.htm) One area where “The Drumhead” stands out from other episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation is in its portrayal of the fact that even a utopic society like the United Federation of Planets can quickly revert back to old, undemocratic practices it had left behind. Indeed, this seems to be the lesson of the episode, as communicated by Picard, when he makes the following observation to Lieutenant Commander Worf: We think we’ve come so far. The torture of heretics, the burning of witches, it’s all ancient history. Then, before you can blink an eye, it suddenly threatens to start all over again [Satie may be defeated, but] someone like her, will always be with us, waiting for the right climate in which to flourish, spreading fear in the name of righteousness. Vigilance […] that is the price we have to continually pay. As previously mentioned, I paired “The Drumhead” with comparative readings of Émile Zola’s open letter “J’accuse” as well as Jay Kuo’s musical, Allegiance. The connections between the “The Drumhead” and the Dreyfuss

Monstrous Encounters in Outer Space 89 affair are obvious. The Dreyfuss affair, which galvanized France in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, involved a French soldier of Jewish background named Alfred Dreyfus who was accused of sending military secrets to German forces. This occurred after a French spy at the German embassy discovered a treacherous torn letter whose handwritten style was identified as belonging to Alfred Dreyfus. After Dreyfus was summarily found guilty in a drumhead court martial, the new head of the French army’s intelligence unit, Georges Picquart, whose last name echoes Starfleet’s own Jean-Luc Picard, unearthed ignored evidence that pointed to a different officer named Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, as the person responsible for composing the letter. Georges Picquart later suffered from retaliation in his attempts to prove Dreyfus’ innocence. It soon became evident to some that Alfred Dreyfus was wrongly convicted on the basis of his Jewish ethnicity. Thus, like Picard’s moral speech at the end of the episode, French author Émile Zola’s open letter to President Félix Francois Faure outlines the anti-Semitism and lack of due process that defined the case. At the time, Émile Zola contended that the evidence of Dreyfus’s character, his affluence, the lack of motive and his continued affirmation of innocence combine to show that he is the victim of the lurid imagination of Major du Paty de Clam, the religious circles surrounding him, and the “dirty Jew” obsession that is the scourge of our time. In his letter, Zola argued that the military prosecutors and French government officials were “trampling the nation under their boots, ramming back down their throats the people’s cries for truth and justice, with the travesty of state security as a pretext” (www.marxists.org). While analyzing Zola’s letter, students were henceforth able to identify the manner in which arguments about state security are used to circumvent due process procedures; they were also able to make a comparative connection between the accused Romulan aboard the ship and the figure of the Jew, in the European imagination, as someone who’s sense of national allegiance and citizenship is always suspect. In positioning “The Drumhead” alongside other materials, I found that the show’s futuristic landscape, its ability to defamiliarize familiar social conflicts by projecting them in outer space, facilitated my student’s ability to make certain types of comparative connections. For example, far from limiting the episode’s moral lesson to an analysis of a specific historic event, “The Drumhead” opens itself up to multiple comparative possibilities. Indeed, considering Picard’s concluding remarks at the end of the episode, the show invites its audience to examine Admiral Satie, not as a specific historic character, but rather, as a re-occurring archetype. This compels students

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to focus on the cultural logic underlying broader social patterns and behaviors dramatized in the episode, which they can then transpose onto a variety of contexts, both historical and contemporary. Thus, in analyzing Allegiance, a musical performance that starred George Takei from Star Trek’s original series, students were able to observe similar rhetorical patterns used to justify the internment of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War; they were also able to identify the same archetypal roles and rhetorical devices that contribute to the demonization of Muslim-Americans and other minority groups in our current political culture. This comparative analysis contributed to a class discussion of how individual rights, including the right to due process, far from being inalienable, are often discarded by defining groups of people as aliens within our collective body. Yet, it is precisely by dramatizing and focusing on alien bodies and spaces that Star Trek attempts to enable us to recognize the monstrous tendencies that dwell within us when we look at them. As stated earlier, I also tasked my students to examine a Star Trek episode entitled “The Measure of a Man” in relation to Jean-Claude Carrière’s The Controversy of Valladolid. The plot of “The Measure of a Man” is centered around Data, the android aboard the Starship Enterprise. Data is a beloved high-ranking member of the crew who, over several episodes, has established strong friendships (both platonic and sexual) with many of his colleagues. Several episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation focus on Data’s aspiration to be human; his quest to experience human emotions, as well as his attempts at emulating approximations of human behavior, appears in many storylines. When Commander Bruce Maddox, a cyberneticist working for Starfleet, makes a requests to dismantle Data in order to analyze and understand the workings of his positronic brain, Data rejects the procedure on the following grounds: While I believe it is possible to download the information contained in the positronic brain, I do not think you have acquired the expertise necessary to preserve the essence of those experiences. There is an ineffable quality to memory which I do not believe can survive your procedure. I regret the decision, but I must. I am the culmination of one man’s dream. This is not ego or vanity, but when Doctor Soong created me he added to the substance of the universe. If by your experiments I am destroyed, something unique, something wonderful will be lost. I cannot permit that, I must protect his dream. (www.chakoteya.net/NextGen/135.htm) Thus, while refusing to undergo the procedure, Data also foregrounds his rights of personhood. Here, his personhood is defined as the essence of his

Monstrous Encounters in Outer Space 91 experiences, which are more than simply the information, or “data,” contained in his positronic brain. In “Data, Kant, and Personhood; or Why Data is Not a Toaster,” Nina Rosenstand observes that the Star Trek universe offers three distinct definitions of human as a concept: a biological one, someone with human DNA; a humanoid one, defined as “any being who shares basic human qualities of self-propelled mobility and intelligence, but above all has the same general psychological makeup as a biological human”; as well as a moral meaning of the term, described as “any being, regardless of appearance or origin, who’s capable of asking itself questions about right and wrong” (172). The central conflict in this episode therefore emerges when Commander Bruce Maddox attempts to take possession of Data for his experiment; Maddox does this by arguing that, as a machine, Data must simply be considered the property of Starfleet and is therefore not endowed with any rights of personhood. In his traditional role as the voice of justice, the metatextual guide who communicates each episode’s moral lesson, JeanLuc Picard is tasked to defend Data’s personhood claims in a trial organized aboard the ship. Commander William T. Riker, one of Data’s close friends, is subsequently appointed, despite his protestations, to prosecute the case on behalf of Commander Maddox. Threatened by the fact that failure to perform this duty to the full extent of his capabilities will result in an automatic unfavorable ruling against Data, Riker is consequently forced to prosecute his friend. During the course of the trial, Riker henceforth attempts to define Data as a mere machine in the following fashion: by contending that he was designed and built by a man, by demonstrating Data’s superhuman strength, by disassembling one of Data’s arms, as well as by switching Data off. Picard tries to counter Riker’s devastating performance by offering a series of definition arguments. He thus begins by expanding the court’s definition of a machine: Commander Riker has dramatically demonstrated to this court that Lieutenant Commander Data is a machine. Do we deny that? No. Because it is not relevant. We too are machines, just machines of a different type. Commander Riker has also reminded us that Lieutenant Commander Data was created by a human. Do we deny that? No. Again it is not relevant. Children are created from the building blocks of their parents’ DNA. Are they property? (www.chakoteya.net/NextGen/135.htm) Picard’s definition of a machine henceforth encapsulates humans as biological machines, a definition that also echoes posthumanist calls to dismantle conceptual boundaries separating the idea of the humane from the machine

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(among many other dichotomies). Picard also opts to prove Data’s personhood by defining him as a sentient being. Picard uses three criteria to define sentience: intelligence, self-awareness, and consciousness. Having proven that Data is both self-aware and intelligent, Picard makes the following observations about consciousness: You see, he’s met two of your three criteria for sentience, so what if he meets the third. Consciousness in even the smallest degree. What is he then? I don’t know. Do you? (to Riker) Do you? (to Phillipa) Do you? […] Now, sooner or later, this man or others like him will succeed in replicating Commander Data […] Are you prepared to condemn him and all who come after him to servitude and slavery? (www.chakoteya.net/NextGen/135.htm) While leaving out the question of Data’s consciousness as an inquiry too difficult for the court to answer, Picard, nonetheless, argues that the debate regarding Data’s status as property is merely a euphemism for slavery; he henceforth asks the court to consider the larger repercussions involved in defining Data, and others like him, as property. As Nina Rosenstand observes in her examination of Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative, as dramatized in certain episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation: by endowing Data with rights of personhood as a rational being, he can no longer be used as a means to an end; instead, his personhood must be considered to have intrinsic value “as an end in himself” (175). Agreeing with Picard’s argument, the Judge, Captain Phillipa Louvois, renders her verdict: Is Data a machine? Yes. Is he the property of Starfleet? No. We have all been dancing around the basic issue. Does Data have a soul? I don’t know that he has. I don’t know that I have. But I have got to give him the freedom to explore that question himself. It is the ruling of this court that Lieutenant Commander Data has the freedom to choose. (www.chakoteya.net/NextGen/135.htm) Inquiries about the nature of Data’s soul as well as his consciousness are therefore left for him to discover, a freedom that is presumably also accorded to other rational beings with rights of personhood. While discussing Judge Captain Phillipa Louvois’ ruminations about the nature of Data’s soul, I asked my students to comparatively situate this episode in relation to the historical debate between Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda on the question of the humanity of indigenous peoples of the Americas, which took place in the middle of the 16th century. Indeed, while many Star Trek scholars have focused on the posthuman dimensions of Data’s personhood rights,

Monstrous Encounters in Outer Space 93 the rhetorical features of the episode also echo arguments regarding justifications for jus ad bellum (just war) against indigenous groups in the Americas, which characterized the Valladolid debate. The debate pitted Bartolomé de Las Casas, the Dominican Friar known for his chronicles capturing the abuses inflicted on indigenous populations in the Americas, against Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, a Spanish theologian and advocate for colonial slavery. Sepúlveda contended that the war and atrocities committed against indigenous people in the Americas were justified because of the following reasons: the traditions of Native Americans, their “impious cult of idols,” violated “natural law”; their customs provided proof that they had no concept of good and evil and could therefore not be categorized as rational human beings; he argued that indigenous Americans were naturally inferior and henceforth the “equivalent of Aristotle’s natural slave,” that is “one who is lacking in reason and therefore incapable of judging good and evil” (Brunstetter and Zartner 737). According to Sepúlveda, “Those who excel in prudence and wisdom […] are by nature masters while those who are retarded and weak in mind […] are natural slaves” (qtd. in Brunstetter and Zartner 737). It is on this basis that Sepúlveda posited a hierarchy between the civilized world and barbaric populations who, according to him, could justifiably be coerced into servitude. It is important to note that while Sepúlveda and Las Casas are positioned at opposite sides of the debate, they, nonetheless, both take the supremacy of their Christian worldview as a given and believe in the necessity of spreading its dominance over other populations and belief systems, either through war (as Sepúlveda advocates) or by peaceful means (as Las Casas recommends). Indeed, Las Casas attempts to humanize indigenous Americans by contending that they are endowed with souls, which can then be converted to the “true” religion of Christianity; he opposes the war on the basis that it will impede efforts aimed at converting native populations in the Americas. That said, as Claudia Alvares documents in her analysis of how human identity was redefined during the conquest of the New World, the more iconoclastic dimensions of Las Casa writings stem from his observations that “the extreme violence of the colonizers’ actions in the New World had deprived them of full humanity”; in this way, those considered civilized and human are shown to be the actual barbarians (138). The setting of Jean-Claude Carrière’s dramatic interpretation of the Valladolid debate takes place in a trial where Sepúlveda and Las Casas debate the humanity of indigenous people of the Americas. In the trial, four indigenous Americans, a couple with a child as well as a street entertainer, are brought in for observation. During the course of this observation, the four indigenous Americans are tested (at times in a violent fashion) for their ability to appreciate humor and art, their intelligence, their understanding of

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Christianity, their possession of a human soul, their ability to experience psychological pain, as well as their general compatibility vis-à-vis Eurocentric social norms, in an attempt to determine whether they can be categorized as human beings. Thus, just like in Data’s trial, criteria such as intelligence as well as the nature of human consciousness and the soul are used to litigate the boundaries of human personhood. In The Controversy of Valladolid, the child of the indigenous couple is briefly snatched from them and threatened with death in order to test the parent’s capacity for human emotion; in a different segment of the play, a clown is invited to perform as a way to examine their ability to enjoy and understand humor. Similarly, during Data’s trial, Picard makes a point of highlighting Data’s intimate relationship with lieutenant Tasha Yar, one of the crewmates aboard the enterprise, as a means to foreground emotional aspects of his humanity; in this instance, Data’s decision to keep a portrait of lieutenant Tasha Yar after her death is used as evidence of his capacity to love as well as mourn. However, if Data’s rights of personhood, on the one hand, are granted by Captain Phillipa Louvois’ verdict in a manner that simultaneously recognizes his Otherness as a machine while asserting his human rights, Las Casas, on the other hand, argues for the inclusion of indigenous Americans as human beings based on the possibility that their Otherness can be erased through the impetus of Christianization and conversion. This comparative reading henceforth presents students with two models of co-existence: one that emphasizes assimilation and cultural erasure in its attempt to engage with Otherness, and a multicultural one, presented in the Star Trek universe, which incorporates diversity in its social vision. Here, Data simply becomes one more addition to the diversity of lifeforms and cultures that populate the citizenry of the United Federation of Planets. Thus, reading Star Trek’s “The Measure of a Man” against The Controversy of Valladolid contextualizes the episode beyond an examination of liminal spaces separating human and machine; such a reading also historicizes for students how the shifting boundaries used to define human personhood have served specific political projects, including the colonization of the Americas as well as the transatlantic slave trade; indeed, in the play, once the personhood of indigenous Americans is settled, it is concluded that their labor will henceforth be replaced by those of African slaves, who, as a matter of “commonsense,” are considered not human. In other words, considering that the Star Trek character Data has often been analyzed from a posthumanist perspective—a perspective often imbued with a general critique of anthropocentric epistemologies, including a critique of established dichotomies separating human from machine, human from animal, as well as human from nature—this comparative exercise therefore also offers a historic contextualization of some of these anthropocentric epistemologies and reveals to students the extent to which they emerged from specific ethnocentric

Monstrous Encounters in Outer Space 95 worldviews and were deployed to advance particular socioeconomic interests. Furthermore, in a political environment where immigrants crossing the border are referred to as “animals” and “not people” by the president of the United States, this comparative reading also serves the purpose of sensitizing students to the contemporary language used to dehumanize groups of people. In this sense, the comparative readings pairing Star Trek episodes with texts such as The Controversy of Valladolid, as well as Émile Zola’s open letter “J’accuse” recontextualize encounters with alien beings or artificial intelligence in outer space as a way of enabling students to both historicize and meaningfully engage with the language of intolerance and ethnonationalism that permeates our contemporary political culture.

Memo VI

Comparative Feminism and Social Justice Instrumentalizing the Poetics of Assia Djebar’s “The Woman in Pieces” in Experiential-Learning Courses

Frederic Jameson’s often-quoted analysis of the Benaventura hotel provides a useful point of departure in this last and final memo. Because of its postmodern architecture, the Benaventura hotel has been the subject of analysis in many academic texts as well as documentaries. In his analysis, Jameson observes that the hotel aspires to capture the feel of a miniature city through its architectural design. In particular, Jameson focuses on the sense of fragmentation, displacement, and disorientation that one feels while attempting to navigate one’s way inside the hotel. For Jameson, this sense of disorientation, reproduced within the confines of the hotel, also captures our contemporary inability to effectively map our position within the interconnected and complex global networks of financescapes, ethnoscapes, mediascapes etc. […] that defines our reality. As Jameson explains, So, I come finally to my principle point here, that this latest mutation in space—postmodern hyperspace—has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world. And I have already suggested that this alarming disjunction point between the body and its environment— which is the final bewilderment of the older modernism as the velocities of space craft are those of the automobile—can itself stand as the symbol and analogue of that even sharper dilemma which is the incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great global multinational and decentered communication network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects. (51)

Comparative Feminism and Social Justice 97 In many ways, this sense of disorientation experienced in the face of evolving interconnected global processes of communication, circulation, production, consumption, displacement, wealth creation, and immiseration has provided a fertile ground for the internationalization of ethnonationalist and xenophobic politics. This is primarily because ethnonationalist nativist rhetoric provides a cognitive shortcut that both simplifies and distorts the complexities of these global flows. For example, the devastation wrought by neoliberal economic policies and trade agreements, which have contributed to the loss of manufacturing jobs in the United States and agricultural jobs in Mexico, is often obfuscated by the nativist impulse to project economic insecurities caused by these complex interconnected processes, onto migrants crossing the border. Thus, the vilification of Mexican migrants as the cause of economic hardship both simplifies and conceals the complex interconnected networks and effects of trade agreements such as NAFTA (projected to be replaced by the USMCA as of this writing), which depressed wages in the United States while devastating Mexican agricultural producers with an onslaught of subsidized and cheaper imports from the US—imports that they could not compete with. The economic precarity caused by NAFTA, of course, had the effect of increasing the flow of migrants from Mexico into the United States. As I currently write this memo, the world in which I reside is enflamed by an interconnected assemblage of viral networks whose evolving dynamic structure is composed and loosely sutured in the following fashion: the global spread of the COVID-19 virus whose propagation is facilitated by the constant movement of people within and across national boundaries; the exacerbation of existing class and racial inequalities, heightened in the wake of the virus; connected to that, the disproportionate policing of black and brown bodies, perpetrated by law enforcement, while implementing social distancing mandates in places like New York City; the viral spread of footage documenting racial violence and police brutality; and the “viral-like” propagation of protests around the country in response to such footage. The contours and outlines of this complex ecology tend to be mystified or obscured by conspiracy theories involving 5G networks and microchips in vaccines, hatred, and suspicion of Asian-Americans, as well as nativist calls for US-American isolationism rather than international cooperation to fend off the virus. Like the pandemic, these conspiracy theories and nativist impulses also have a viral scope, as evidenced in their electronic propagations across vast internet communities. It is in response to such forms of mystification—in response to the prevailing inability of citizens to cognitively map their place within such a complex ecology—that Jameson’s appeal for “an aesthetic of cognitive mapping, a pedagogical political culture which seeks to endow the individual subject

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with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system,” finds its exigency within our contemporary political moment (519). In this regard, the pedagogic applications of comparative methods, which I have explored in each memo throughout this book, provide us with useful tools to respond to Jameson’s imperative. In particular, the goal here is to explore how comparative literature can be instrumentalized to answer the call for “an aesthetics of cognitive mapping” that gets to be realized through the implementation of a “pedagogical political culture” (519). Set within the context of a classroom, the narrative structure of Assia Djebar’s short story “The Woman in Pieces”—a narrative structure that opens up an exploration of how works of fiction can function as didactive maps enabling students to orient themselves in the world they inhabit—provides a useful point of departure from which this call can be answered. Djebar’s short story provides a feminist and contemporary postcolonial reworking of the One Thousand and One Nights. The mise-en-abyme structure of “The Woman in Pieces” echoes that of the One Thousand and One Nights, both in its style as well as its didactive imperative. Indeed, in the One Thousand and One Nights, the stories Scheherazade narrates in order to forestall her execution at the hands of the king serve the purposes of not only keeping her alive but also providing moral lessons and situations that mirror the main frame narrative. Thus, many of Scheherazade’s tales feature individuals in similar circumstances as her own who are subject to and negatively affected by capricious figures of authority holding tremendous power. In these tales, such powerless individuals are often compelled to deploy their wit and intellect to evade precarious situations. For example, in the tale of the “Fisherman and the Jinni” (the second main story told by Scheherazade), a fisherman accidentally liberates an ifrit (a malevolent jinn) from a jar. Angered by the fact that it took many years for someone to finally rescue him, the ungrateful ifrit decides to kill his benefactor. Using his wit, the fisherman subsequently tricks the ifrit into re-entering the jar and subsequently manages to trap him there once again. In order to impart a moral lesson to the ifrit (who pleads for mercy after this dramatic reversal of fortune), the fisherman tells the story of “The Wazir and the Sage Duban.” Similar to the predicament between the fisherman and the ifrit (as well as the one between Scheherazade and the king in the main frame narrative), in this tale, a king suffering from leprosy is cured by a sage named Duban, who is well versed in different sciences, including healing. One of the viziers (a highranking political adviser) becomes jealous of the king’s affection for Duban and henceforth manages to convince him that the benevolent sage is plotting to poison him. Believing the false accusation, the king condemns Duban to death by beheading. Duban accepts his punishment but asks the king to read one of his books of wisdom while keeping the sage’s head nearby after the

Comparative Feminism and Social Justice 99 decapitation. To everyone’s astonishment, Duban’s decapitated head begins to speak in the aftermath of his execution and instructs the king to read the book. Mystified, the king complies with these instructions, licks his fingers as he turns the pages, and subsequently dies from the poison that had been strategically smeared in the book by the sage. Thus, the tale of “The Fisherman and the Jinni,” “The Wazir and the Sage Duban,” as well as the initial frame narrative involving Scheherazade and the king, feature powerful figures of authority who inflict punishment against innocent individuals in a whimsical manner. In this context, Scheherazade projects her double in the figure of the fisherman who—just like her own predicament at the hands of her murderous husband—is compelled to narrate a story to the ifrit, warning him about the consequences of capriciously abusing his power. The three stories are symbiotically connected through the presence of a didactive imperative. In other words, each aforementioned story that unfolds within the frame narrative provides a didactive map whose purpose is to decode, chart, and critique abuses of power. Assia Djebar’s “The Woman in Pieces” appropriates the didactive exigency of the One Thousand and One Nights by situating the frame story in a classroom. The frame narrative of Djebar’s short story takes place during the Algerian civil war that started in the 1990s. During this period, between 80,000 and 120,000 Algerian citizens were killed. In particular, teachers of French were targeted and killed for “daring to teach French in Algeria.” The perpetrators of these murders were often left to roam free, “unidentified and unpunished,” as the Algerian government either largely ignored or was incapable of containing these killings. The victims of these murders included “intellectuals, writers, musicians, journalists, foreigners, and ordinary Algerians” (Jones 1). It is in response to this national moment of crisis that Djebar writes her short story. Djebar’s short story focuses on Atyka, a professor of French who delivers a lecture on a tale from the One Thousand and One Nights to her students. Djebar employs a mise-en-abyme technique to connect and gravitate between the events and dialogue that occur in the classroom and the story of “The Three Apples” from the One Thousand and One Nights. “The Three Apples” features the story of a woman who falls into a depression upon discovering that she is pregnant. Having already birthed three children, the woman becomes extremely apprehensive about the prospect of a fourth child. Her husband notices the change in her mood but does not suspect a new pregnancy. One day her husband overhears her absentmindedly murmur her desire for an apple; believing this to be an invitation for sex (based on a previous incident) and a fortunate reversal in his wife’s recent mood, he sets out to travel far and wide in order to find her an apple (apples were out of season). The husband manages to find and purchase apples at an

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exorbitant price and joyously presents them to his wife, who later gifts them to one of her sons. A handsome black slave tricks the woman’s son into surrendering the apple he was given. The woman’s husband later has a random encounter with the handsome black slave who proudly holds the apple in his hand and informs the husband, upon being questioned, that he obtained the fruit from a married woman with whom he was having an affair. Believing himself to be a cuckold, the husband kills his wife in a fit of rage, cuts up her body, wraps her mutilated body parts in a veil, places them in a sealed chest, and throws the chest into the Tigris river. Nonetheless, the chest does not remain hidden in the river for long. A fisherman manages to get hold of the sealed chest, which he gives to the caliph. Upon discovering the body of the mutilated woman, the caliph becomes enraged that such a horrendous murder could occur under his reign. It is during this fit of rage and sorrow that the caliph commands his vizier, Djaffar, to either find the person responsible for the murder or die in his place. On the day of his execution, a crowd gathers to lament the impending death of the vizier. In order to stop the vizier’s execution, the woman’s husband steps forward and confesses his crime. Forgetting about the mutilated woman, the crowd’s sympathies begin to shift to the husband; they feel he was “tricked” into murdering his wife. Even the woman’s father attempts to save his sonin-law, his daughter’s killer. Meanwhile, as Djebar observes, “the body of the woman in pieces rests near the room where the caliph hears his counsel. Unburied. Unmourned” (113). It is at this moment that the caliph issues another declaration: the vizier is, once again, given three days to find the guilty black slave or else he will be executed. As he prepares for his death, the unfortunate vizier accidentally discovers an apple in his homestead; he finds out that it was his daughter’s favorite slave who had taken the apple from the mutilated woman’s son and lied to her vengeful murderous husband. Thus, in an attempt to save the slave’s life, the vizier asks the caliph to pardon him in exchange for a story that is “more astonishing than the one that concerns the black man” (115). Intrigued by this exchange, the caliph accepts. At this juncture in Djebar’s short story, the following debate emerges in Atyka’s classroom as her students analyze this section of “The Three Apples”: A teenage girl in a white chador with scalloped edges remarks sweetly, “I hope that Djaffar shows himself to be a skillful narrator and saves Rihan’s [the slave’s] life.” Then, in Arabic, she recites the well-known hadith: “As said by our prophet, may the grace of God be on him: The best among the believers shall lead my people, even if it’s a Sudanese slave! You see,” she concludes in a soft voice, “Islam promotes equality.” But another starts up and interjects in French, “Then tell me—if the equality that you invoke is really without limits, what if it were a

Comparative Feminism and Social Justice 101 women—yes, simply a woman? Would she lead ‘our’”—she stresses the possessive pronoun with an ironic tone—“community?” “And why not?” the first girl replies in French. “These days, aren’t there several Muslim states led by women prime ministers?” It’s pandemonium in the classroom. Atyka restores order. “This is neither a political science, nor a religion class. Let me remind you that we are discussing translated excerpts from The One Thousand and One Nights.” (116) Here, it is fruitful to point out that Atyka seeks to restore order in her classroom by attempting to quarantine the issues presented in the One Thousand and One Nights from the political and cultural world her students inhabit. However, despite her initial reticence, even Atyka is compelled to engage the gender politics of “The Three Apples” with her students as the classroom debate continues: A tall, skinny boy stands up and speaks pantingly, then suddenly stops, blushing with shyness. “Can I add something? I’ve noticed that Djaffar, by taking his turn as storyteller, becomes […]” He hesitates, mumbles. “Becomes Scheherazade’s double” Atyka responds, eagerly entering into the conversation. “With this parallel, does it seem that Sheherazade, by bringing in Djaffar is sending a message to her formidable husband: I could be your vizier, Master, I could be your Djaffar, so well beloved— but so envied” […] “In this respect,” the first boy exclaims, this time without getting up, “could we say that The One Thousand and One Nights are political stories? “Or feminist,” his neighbor, the brunette, exalts. “Scheherazade in the role of the sultan’s vizier. How revolutionary for the time!” And in a joyous hubbub, shouts of laughter rise up from them all. (117) Thus, Djebar’s mise-en-abyme, sutured by a didactive imperative, incorporates the tale of “The Three Apples,” the frame story involving Scheherazade and her husband, Atyka’s classroom and the communities of interpretation to which her students belong, as well as us, the readers. The stories within this mise-en-abyme cannot be contained within their individual frames; instead, they shed light on one another. Indeed, it is not just that Atyka fails to quarantine contemporary politics from contaminating classroom discussions of The One Thousand and One Nights, the political world—in this context, a product of the Algerian civil war—also comes crashing into this pedagogic space when armed gendarmes barge into her classroom. The armed men accuse Atyka of teaching obscene

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stories, and one of them, a hunchback, proceeds to decapitate her before the terrified and traumatized eyes of her students. Significantly, as the armed men force their way into Atyka’s classroom, one of her students “has the impression that they were all part of the scene in front of the caliph’s Baghdad palace” (112). As the student later observes, “I really believed that the sultan Haroun el Rachid, who I thought was so terrible, such a dictator, who I felt on the sidelines, menacing us, had sent his guards to punish us. But for what?” (122). Atyka’s student cannot help but relate the characters and abuses of power in the One Thousand and One Nights to the violent scene occurring in the classroom. As Atyka becomes the woman in pieces, the lessons and moral debates embedded in Scheherazade’s tales are not hermetically sealed from the political and cultural world the student inhabits; instead, they inform his immediate reality. In her short story, Djebar also signals this intricate connection between the tale of “The Three Apples” and Atyka’s classroom through the stylistic choices she uses to first separate and then merge the two worlds. As Christa Jones observes in her analysis of the teacher as a performative activist in Djebar’s short story, Djebar’s masterful mise-en abyme—the continuity of Atyka’s lesson which alternates with the mise-en-abyme of the tale from the Arabian Nights is accompanied by stylistic change. While Djebar makes ample use of poetry and symbolist imagery in the parts relating to the tale from the Arabian Nights, the frame story—Atyka’s story—is written in a more sober, journalistic style which befits 1990s Algeria. (2) In the short story, the sections featuring Atyka’s classroom are also italicized, while those narrating the tale of “The Three Apples” are not. However, as the gendarmes force their way into Atyka’s classroom, the stylistic differences demarcating the narration of these two worlds collapse; for example, nonitalicized letters and a more poetic prose are used to capture Atyka’s beheading and its aftermath. The fantastic imagery from the One Thousand and One Nights also make their way into Atyka’s classroom when her severed head, far from being silenced, continues to speak and finishes her lecture; Atyka becomes Duban the sage whose voice, even after death, persists in threatening and undermining abuses of power. In this context, Atyka’s talking head is tacitly presented as a manifestation of one of her student’s trauma-induced hallucinations. This student keeps hearing Atyka’s voice after the beheading and proceeds to comb the city in further search of it. Here, Djebar seems to suggest that the teacher’s voice continues to live on within her students and affects how they interact with their surroundings.

Comparative Feminism and Social Justice 103 Like the gendarmes making their forced entry into the deceptively safe pedagogic space where Atyka delivered her lectures, there are moments when existing power structures and systems of inequity come crashing into our classrooms. The COVID-19 pandemic certainly exacerbated the violence embedded in existing structures of inequality that separate students; especially as some of them were compelled to follow online Zoom lectures from home environments that were overcrowded, marked by financial insecurity, hostile to their sexual or gender identities, or even permeated by the constant realities of domestic violence. For these students, the safe spaces offered by classrooms and academic environments away from home were suddenly breached; the horrors and violence some students had left at home now reemerged to intrude into their classrooms as the two spaces merged. Similarly, the cruelty and violence of immigration policies taking place at the southern US-American border found a new frontier in our classrooms as international students were, for a moment, faced with an impossible choice of either risking their health by taking face to face classes during a pandemic or risking the certainty of deportation by opting to enroll in online classes (as of this writing, this situation seems to have been resolved). As I have argued in my previous memos, it is important to explore how works of literature can be instrumentalized as didactive maps that enable both our students and ourselves to navigate these moments of crises. In my comparative feminist service-learning classes, I have frequently assigned Assia Djebar’s “The Woman in Pieces” as a conceptual pedagogic map to help students chart their way and relate the theoretical texts and fictional works studied in the class to the community projects they are tasked to complete during the semester. Written in response to a period of national crisis, Djebar’s work frames the stories and texts that populate literature curricula as instruments that compel us to act in our world and inform our relationships toward our communities. As Jones similarly contends, in Djebar’s text, “the teacher becomes an activist herself while her students—and, on the level of meta-narrative, the readers—witness cruelty unfold and become themselves part of a crime scene” (4). Students in my classes are thus encouraged to regard the social environment in which they engage their service-learning projects as an extension of a mise-en-abyme connecting texts, the classroom, and the community. Like the tale of “The Three Apples,” the stories they read in class spill onto their service-learning projects and inform their community practices; and just like Atyka’s student who is compelled to follow his teacher’s voice through the streets, the “voices” of the works my students read are intended to extend their meaning and purpose by living on through them and in dialogue with their interactions with the world. In order to accomplish this synthesis, the literature, both fiction and non-fiction, that I incorporate in my

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service-learning classes are carefully selected to enhance students’ understanding of the work and project goals set by community partners with whom I collaborate (in the context of my classes, I have collaborated with the Women and Gender Equity Center at Shawnee State University). In other words, instead of attaching a given community project as an afterthought latched onto a pre-existing syllabus, the goal is to develop a curriculum composed of readings that are organically informed by the priorities of the community partner. This also means that the course syllabus needs to be developed in collaboration with community partners; similarly, assignments must also incorporate students’ analyses of the relationship between required course readings and community projects. Some of the community projects students have been involved with in my classes include setting fundraisers and donations for the local women’s shelter, organizing red flag awareness campaigns on campus tackling sexual assault and bystander awareness, as well as planning intersectional LGBTQ pride events and information sessions aimed at creating a more tolerant space for sexual minorities on campus and in the community (Shawnee State University is surrounded by a community that has not always been tolerant of LGBTQ people despite recent improvements). However, in this memo, I am particularly interested in examining how the pedagogic concepts explored in “The Woman in Pieces” can be applied to experiential-learning activities in study abroad contexts. The “place as text” approach to study abroad pedagogy, which instructs students to “read” and analyze the socio-spatial assemblages they encounter during class excursions, provides the opportunity for a palimpsestic form of comparative reading which, just like the faint contours of projected apparitions of antagonists and protagonists from the One Thousand and One Nights in Atyka’s tragic classroom drama, involves identifying and tracing conceptual outlines and insights stemming from literary works in the cultural spaces students encounter outside of the classroom. In the fall semester of 2019, I taught a Graphic Novels and Animation class that included a study abroad trip to Berlin. The course was divided into five sections: Super-Heroes, Dystopias, and Utopias (United States); BD Traditions in France and Belgium; Human Rights, Genocide, and Military Conflict (Germany, United States, Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, Syria); Manga and Anime (Japan); as well as The Cultural Politics of Revolution (Iran, Cuba). The course included graphic novels and animated films, many of them capturing historical and political events from a wide variety of national and cultural contexts. The Human Rights, Genocide, and Military Conflict section of the class featured works such as Berlin by Jason Lutes, The Complete Maus: A Survivor’s Tale by Art Spiegelman, Citizen 13660 by Miné Okubo, Palestine by Joe Sacco, Waltz with Bashir by Ari Folman, and Freedom

Comparative Feminism and Social Justice 105 Hospital: A Syrian Story by Hamid Sulaiman. In exploring historical events such as the internment of Japanese-Americans in the United States or the rise of the Third Reich in Germany, through the medium of graphic novels, the goal was to enable students, by way of comparative examples, to orient themselves within the crypto-fascist cultural politics that have come to define the United States in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election. Jason Lutes’ graphic novel Berlin, in particular, outlines the slow but progressive erosion of democratic principles by chronicling the fall of the Weimar Republic. Lutes’ work chronicles the transformation of Berlin from a multicultural metropolis where intellectualism and liberal values thrive into an increasingly intolerant city that succumbs to fascism and ethnonationalism. Berlin follows the lives of several characters, each representing different social spaces within the city. Among the characters featured in Berlin, readers are first introduced to Martha Müller, an art student originating from a middleclass family in Köln who moves to the capital at the start of the graphic novel, and Kurt Severing, a writer for a weekly political and art magazine. In her academic life, Martha is surrounded by an artistic community detached from the worries of Germany’s working poor, whom they look down upon with contempt (34). As she becomes involved in this milieu, Martha struggles to find a direction for her artistic projects. She makes the following observation as she ponders about her creative dilemma: I’m just not interested in “Expressionism” or “New Objectivity,” or any other movement. I want to draw for myself, the things that interest me […] I don’t want to see the world converging towards a vanishing point! I don’t want to understand people in terms of their skeletal structure or the muscle group that controls their ability to smile. I can’t reconcile those things with what I see. (119–120) From Martha’s perspective, the tools and artistic focus taught to her by the art school she attends fail in enabling her to capture the tumultuous complexities of the world that surrounds her. Nevertheless, while Martha yearns for creative tools she can use to portray her surroundings in a better and more insightful manner, she is also shown to be out of touch with ongoing domestic and international politics. This is, for example, evidenced during a conversation with Kurt Severing, her lover, when she inquires who Trotsky is upon being told about his imminent exile from the Soviet Union (135). While Kurt obsesses about the political crisis unfolding in the nation, Martha is, for the most part, self-absorbed about her current life in Berlin in relation to Köln, her home city (236–237). Kurt and Martha’s first lovers’ quarrel occurs when she interrupts his attempted

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written reflections on the country’s sociopolitical troubles by playing loud music. Angered by this interruption, he vociferously and exasperatingly declares, “this-this racket it’s part of the problem! People dancing mindlessly to this SHIT while everything crumbles around us!” (238). Martha’s lack of awareness or concern regarding the ongoing political turmoil creates a rift between the couple at this moment. Furthermore, while Martha, on the one hand, bemoans the inadequacies of the art school she attends, she also, on the other hand, rejects politically engaged art and espouses the belief that “one draws or paints primarily for oneself” (246). If Martha eventually settles on drawing portraits of regular people from across the city, it is only to confess later that her endeavors lack any purpose or motive; at every step, her self-centered perspective short circuits the social or political potential of her art (267). As previously mentioned, the graphic novel does not only indict Martha for having a limited perspective in her creative endeavors but also a large swath of the artistic community whose attitudes she epitomizes. A pivotal moment in the graphic novel occurs when a member of Martha’s artistic milieu offers the following prophetic warning to the group: “people are shot down in the streets! It’s a madhouse—things are on the verge of collapse! Can’t any of you feel it?! The air is thick with imminent disaster and we spend our time doodling the day away” (246). What this art community demonstrates is its members’ inability to effectively map and position their creations within the complexities of socioeconomic and political tensions, both domestic and international, that will radically redefine their reality. Thus, the graphic novel Berlin, in many ways, presents itself as a metatextual example of an artistic perspective that can more effectively map and trace the coalescing and diverse social forces that generate such moments of national crisis. Berlin accomplishes this by sketching assemblages, composed of interacting social and political spaces, through the heterogeneous viewpoints of a plethora of characters. Some of the characters depicted in the graphic novel include Anna Lencke, a queer artist who witnesses increased restrictions and violent crackdowns on LGBTQ spaces in the city; the Cocoa Kids, an African-American jazz band embodying the city’s previous cosmopolitan proclivities, who are compelled to leave the country due to the growing hostility and intolerance targeted at them; Gudrun and Otto Braun, a married couple from an impoverished working-class background who find themselves ideologically torn apart as husband and wife respectively pledge opposing allegiances to the NSDAP (the Nazi Party) and the Communist Party of Germany; Pavel, a Russian Jewish migrant forced to navigate an increasingly anti-Semitic and dangerous environment; Margarethe von Falkensee, a wealthy socialite heiress who opportunistically decides to host and forge alliances with the NSDAP; as

Comparative Feminism and Social Justice 107 well as Elga Braun, daughter of Gudrun and Otto Braun, who becomes a member of an underground resistance after her mother’s death. As I structured the study abroad experience in Berlin (and the city’s surroundings), the class excursions I chose were either influenced by or connected to the sociospatial and cultural locations highlighted in the graphic novel through the experiences of individual characters. Thus, for example, I scheduled visits to both the Schwules Museum as well as the Jewish Museum Berlin. While the Jewish Museum memorializes and compels visitors to confront the persecution of Jews in both its curated displays as well as the emotional architectural designs meant spatially to communicate the horrors of the Holocaust, the Schwules Museum documents the flourishing existence of queer spaces in Berlin during the Weimar Republic as well as the persecution of LGBTQ people during the rise of the Third Reich. The goal of the trip was not only to highlight the horrors of the Holocaust and the persecution of different groups but also, just as importantly, to provide a conceptual map of how an open and multicultural city could fall victim to the clutches of fascism. After all, Berlin is the place that birthed the Institute for Sexual Science, which enhanced the world’s understanding of LGBTQ identities. The institute is credited as the first medical facility to provide gender-affirming surgeries. Therefore, both the study abroad excursions and the graphic novel chronicle the dissolution of this promising open society and seek to pinpoint the social forces that brought about its demise. One of the monuments in Berlin whose design responds to this inquiry is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Designed by Peter Eisenman, this controversial memorial has been criticized in the past for being too theoretical or abstract, specifically for failing to include identifying information about victims or other historical inscriptions. Eisenman offers the following description of the memorial on his official webpage: This project manifests the instability inherent in what seems to be a system, here a rational grid, and its potential for dissolution in time. It suggests that when a supposedly rational and ordered system grows too large and out of proportion to its intended purpose, it loses touch with human reason. It then begins to reveal the innate disturbances and potential for chaos in all systems of apparent order […] In this monument there is no goal, no end, no working one’s way in or out. The duration of an individual’s experience of it grants no further understanding, since understanding the Holocaust is impossible. The time of the monument, its duration from top surface to ground, is disjoined from the time of experience. In this context, there is no nostalgia, no memory of the past, only the living memory of the individual experience. (https://eisenmanarchitects.com/)

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The memorial measures 19,000 square feet. It is covered with a carefully arranged series of 2,711 tomblike concrete slabs that differ in height. In designing the memorial, Eisenman wanted to convey the feeling of being Other in space and time. The slabs that are carefully arranged in the memorial can be thought of collectively not only as a system but also as a set of events and psychological affects produced within this system. One way of “reading” this memorial is to analyze it using the conceptual maps highlighted in the structure and content of the graphic novel Berlin. Individually, each tomblike concrete slab that populates the memorial is insignificant; however, collectively they produce a powerful effect. They collectively resemble a mass of coffins or unnamed graves. The arranged slabs descend and ascend progressively by height. There are sections of the memorial where visitors in groups can suddenly lose sight of each other—especially as the silhouette of fellow travelers can easily disappear behind one of the taller slabs during a walking tour. Here, the arrangement of the slabs can be interpreted to echo the artistic perspective espoused in the graphic novel Berlin. In other words, like the slabs, each individual event, every minor violation of democratic principles,

Figure 6.1 By ബിപിൻ—Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia .org/w/index.php?curid=91827938

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Figure 6.2 By Dietmar Rabich, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/ index.php?curid=34606850

Figure 6.3 By Crazy Zoc—Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia .org/w/index.php?curid=21177731

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either seems insignificant or becomes normalized by some of the characters witnessing them; however, they collectively engender the fall of the Weimer Republic and the rise of fascism. Furthermore, in the same way the slabs progressively ascend by height, the violence and frequency of such incidents also escalate in the graphic novel. If visitors are able to disappear behind the increasingly taller slabs, then, historically, the progressive escalation of undemocratic measures, ultimately, also leads to the large-scale “disappearance” of undesired populations in concentrations camps. This comparative reading involving a graphic novel and a monument, in expanding ways of reading the memorial, also compels students to identify and map, in a comprehensive manner, the ascending “slabs”/crypto-fascist measures and policies that collectively threaten to brutally reshape established democratic practices in their own country. Aside from Jason Lutes’ graphic novel, I have also applied the pedagogic concepts highlighted in Djebar’s short story to the works of the French slam poet Grand Corps Malade. Born Fabien Marsaud, but better known by his stage name Grand Corps Malade (tall sick body), the slam poet’s artistic name refers both to his tall stature as well as a spinal injury that forces him to walk with a cane. Over the years, Grand Corps Malade has become one of the most celebrated slam poets in France. His poetry albums and concert tours have also become very popular in Québec. In his albums and concert tours, Grand Corps Malade typically recites his poetry over accompanying music (though, there are some poems that he delivers without any musical accompaniment). Born in Seine-Saint-Denis, an immigrant-populated suburb in the outskirts of Paris where French hip-hop culture exploded, many of Grand Corps Malade’s poems capture the social realities of this community—a community whose members are often relegated to the status of second class citizens by the French state. In the aftermath of both the First and Second World Wars, France actively recruited migrant workers from its colonies to work in French factories as the country underwent an industrial and economic boom. These migrant workers were often segregated in the outskirts or suburbs of French cities (known as the banlieues), where they would be shuttled to and from factories where they worked. Years later, as the country experienced periods of economic recession, unemployment, and the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs, many banlieue residents were left out as diminishing employment opportunities were primarily given to white French citizens. Hence, the level of poverty and unemployment in immigrant-populated French suburbs are often markedly higher than in other areas. As some residents without options resort to seeking employment opportunities in informal and illegal sectors of the economy, this state of affairs produced increased levels of policing and police brutality in the banlieues. Given the fact that youth residing in ghettoized French suburbs found themselves

Comparative Feminism and Social Justice 111 relating to the experiences described in the lyrics of African-American artists from across the Atlantic, it is not surprising that hip-hop culture, including slam poetry, quickly gained a foothold in these communities and was instrumentalized to voice their anger and hopes (Nyawalo). Like Jason Lutes’ graphic novel, Grand Corps Malade’s poem “SaintDenis,” maps the interacting social spaces, cultural practices, and people of diverse backgrounds who populate this urban location. In his poem (released in 2006), Grand Corps Malade appoints himself as the tour guide of his place of birth; in the process he also interpellates his listeners as tourists. Like many hip-hop works stemming from the French Banlieues, “Saint-Denis” seeks to make visible the heterogeneous complexities of a community that is often either caricatured in the French media or rendered invisible. Thus, the poem takes us through the multicultural market of Saint-Denis where goods and foods representing a hodgepodge of cultural influences from locations such as Algiers, Tangier, Lisbon, New Delhi, Karachi, Bamako, and Yamoussoukro co-mingle. The diversity of the market also gestures toward the ethnic and cultural heterogeneity of the community; a multicultural image that presents itself in stark contrast to prevalent political identitarian notions of French republicanism that reject intercultural diversity and ethnic multiplicity in their conceptions of French citizenship. “Saint-Denis” also describes Zouk music stores that play sounds from the French Caribbean, the street where cellphone pickpockets are active, and cheap stores where welldressed Arab youth congregate. Grand Corps Malade’s commentary about these diverse cultural spaces is seamlessly integrated with a description of the Basilica of Saint-Denis where French kings are buried. Here, the diverse contemporary cultural tapestry of people, accents, smells, food, music, and fashion effortlessly coexist and are compatible with monuments and symbols of the French republic’s roots and history. During the summer of 2017, I taught a five-week study abroad class entitled “French Hip-Hop and Citizenship” in Paris. As part of a class excursion I organized to Saint-Denis, I asked my students to use Grand Corps Malade’s poem as a map that would help them explore the suburb by identifying and locating, in real physical space, the diverse cultural spaces and sites highlighted in the verses. Students were compelled to pay attention to the poem’s directions. Indeed, one of my students who had not heeded the poet’s warning about pickpockets circulating around the Place du Caquet almost lost his cellphone to a thief when he absentmindedly placed the device in an accessible front pocket; his cellphone was fortunately saved by the surprisingly quick reflexes of another student, who had more carefully paid attention to the poet’s description of the area and managed to thwart the pickpocket’s efforts in time. The poem, in this way, became an indispensable guide whose message they could only ignore at the peril of losing their belongings.

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As students explored Saint-Denis through the help of the poem, they were also able to map the passage of time and demographic shifts in the area, an observation that would have otherwise remained hidden or invisible to the unsuspecting visitor. In particular, toward the end of “Saint-Denis,” Grand Corps Malade describes a cultural café where slam poets congregate and perform. As the students attempted to locate this place, they discovered that it had been turned into a creperie (the class excursion occurred 11 years after the poem’s release). A popular slam poet from the region named Ami Karim, who kindly agreed to give us a history of slam poetry in SaintDenis, informed us that the disappearance of the cultural café was part of a larger gentrifying trend that had displaced many locals from the area. In fact, Saint-Denis’ close proximity to Paris provides a potential refuge for middleclass Parisians seeking to escape skyrocketing rental prices in the capital. Henceforth, this juxtaposition between the world described in the poem—an ephemeral world immortalized through a poetic snapshot of its significance in time—and the evolving contemporaneous realities of Saint-Denis enabled students to orient themselves historically by making the passage of time and demographic movements, including the displacement of economically marginalized communities, more visible. Both Jason Lutes’ graphic novel and Grand Corps Malade’s poem can be instrumentalized to answer the call for an “aesthetics of cognitive mapping” whose pedagogic purpose is to empower students to effectively situate themselves within complex social, economic, political, and historical forces that shape and define their surroundings (519). Specifically, in a study abroad context, these works enable students to read and map the social spaces they encounter. Berlin does not only give students the opportunity to study the fall of the Weimer Republic and the rise of the Third Reich, but also provides them with conceptual tools through which they can trace, connect, and make sense of the volume of occurrences in current affairs that epitomize the rise of xenophobia, nativism, and ethnonationalism in both domestic and international political contexts. “Saint-Denis” guides students through multicultural spaces that define the French suburb as a way of allowing them to conceptually redefine and expand preconceived notions of French identity and citizenship. Furthermore, a comparative reading that relates the poem to present-day Saint-Denis also reveals the hidden traces of ongoing socioeconomic and demographic shifts in the area. These comparative analyses juxtaposing a graphic novel and a monument, or a poem and social spaces, extend applications of comparative methods and foreground their uses in experiential-learning contexts.

Conclusion

The memos in this book chronicle events and situations that took place between the fall semester of 2012 and the spring semester of 2020, in my capacity as a faculty member at Shawnee State University. In the fall semester of 2020, I left Shawnee State University in the midst of a global pandemic to take a new faculty position at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. While acclimating myself to my new institutional surroundings, it was pointed out to me that Xavier University was in the process of reckoning with the institution’s ties to slavery. Indeed, as I came to learn, Bishop Edward Fenwick, the university’s founder, used the capital acquired from his ownership and commercial dealings in the slave trade to settle in the region. But the institution’s ties to slavery did not end there. As Father Michael Graham (Xavier University’s President) explained in a press statement, when the first Jesuits came from St. Louis to Cincinnati to administer the school, they brought with them a kind of admissions financial strategy […] an enrollment strategy that depends upon the sons of slaveholders from the south […] There never were slaves on Xavier’s campus. But, the results of their labor helped many students come to Xavier. (wcpo.com) Thus, the acquisition of tuition fees needed for the institution’s survival largely materialized as a result of the wealth produced and extracted from the ruthless exploitation of slave labor. The seminal roles of violence, exploitation, and displacement in the foundation of academic institutions are, of course, not unique to Xavier University. In his analysis of the origins of land grant universities, K. Wayne Yang traces how the passage of the Morrill Act in 1862 gave appropriated indigenous lands to states that were then “encouraged to sell these ‘land grants’ to raise money for new public universities that would research and educate American settlers in agriculture, science, and mechanical arts” (26). In this sense, academic institutions, both from

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their history and contemporary continued existence, are not “bubbles” that exist outside of the structures of violence and social inequity that we usually research and teach in our classes. Borrowing Deleuzian terminology, we can conceive of the university as a machine that is a composite of many other machinic assemblages that structure our society (Yang 55). As faculty, staff, students, and citizens, we are inevitably “plugged” into these machinic assemblages, in a cyborgian sense, as we navigate our daily duties and lives (60–61). In this book, I have tried to examine how the historic, economic, cultural, and pedagogic assemblages in which we are plugged as faculty and members of academic institutions can be made more visible in the context of our research. Thus, I found it necessary to make the social realities that define my position within these larger structures—realities that include my interactions with students, the Appalachian setting of the classroom, as well as the cultural politics influencing the construction of syllabi—more visible in my reflections on the discipline of comparative literature. When the visibility of our positions and roles within the institutional assemblages we inhabit become part of our scholarly reflections, we are also given an ethical imperative to determine the extent of our participation in the structures of violence, including cultural and symbolic violence, that surround us and our efforts to dismantle them. In the context of teaching at an Appalachian institution, part of these efforts involved legitimizing the academic inclusion of a culture and history that continues to be stigmatized in the unfortunate enduring popularity of works such as J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. The goal was to purposefully undermine the symbolic violence that often alienates Appalachian students from academic institutions, including institutions that are located in their own region. I also sought to provide my students with conceptual maps through which they could position themselves comparatively and navigate the complex national and global crises that define the political realities of their time. All these efforts necessitated the instrumentalization of comparative methods theorized in the discipline. In The Crisis in Comparative Literature (1966) René Etiemble identifies what was, at the time, posited as two conflicting methodological trends in the discipline: “one, which maintains that this discipline [is] virtually contemporaneous with historical studies” and “must be, and furthermore, can be, nothing else but a branch of literary history” shaped by a historical focus on how authors and their literary works influence each other across national contexts and periods; “the other tendency considers that even though two literatures have not had historical relations, it is legitimate to compare the literary genres which each developed for its own use. ‘Even when the possibility of direct influence is ruled out’” (35). The focus on literary history and influences had earlier characterized the division between the French school of comparative literature, which embraced this approach, from its

Conclusion

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US-American counterpart. The incorporation of pedagogic spaces as sites of cultural encounters and influence complicate the dichotomy posited in this debate. As sites of cultural exchange or “delivery networks” that enable, block, or filter the circulation of literary works, comparative and world literature classrooms provide a platform in which both the focus on transnational contacts and influences and the emphasis on general comparability are operationalized. That is, while the pedagogic setting enables possibilities of foregrounding how literary works influence one another, this emphasis on cultural encounters also extends to our students’ interactions with texts and how they reshape, appropriate, or contest their meanings. Furthermore, comparative analyses of works that have no direct contact with one another, as was the case with Appalachian and Kenyan queer texts, can also be instrumentalized to meet specific pedagogic goals—in this context, these goals were informed by the cultural and historical setting in which my classroom was located. Thus, pedagogic spaces become the tertium comparationis, the third element of comparison, that incentivizes these comparative possibilities and connects divergent literary traditions. As highlighted in the last memo, these pedagogic spaces are not restricted to the classroom; they can also include experiential-learning opportunities offered in study abroad and community engagement contexts. In this way, academic scholarship that makes visible our relationships to institutions in which we are plugged encapsulate the multiplicity of social roles we occupy; this includes roles that extend beyond the walls of the university and link us to larger communities.

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Index

120 Beats per Minute (film) 3 1921 labor uprising 39 1965 Levin Report 51 2020 US presidential election, and mail-in ballots 1 academia see US academia academic institutional networks 21 academic institutions, ties to slavery and 113 academic publications 28 academic space and region, situatedness of 29 Achebe, Chinua, analysis of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness 38 Adichie, Chimamanda 27 Afghanistan 48 African Americans, civil rights of 1 African continent 10; queer sexualities and spaces on the 68 “African” culture, homosexuality and 77 African diaspora 22 African LGBTQ activists 76 African Literature Association 49 African-American community 27 Against World Literature (Apter) 13, 44 Alpert, Avram 9 alterity, delivered 16, 21, 28 alterity, domestication of 28 analysis, classroom dynamics and 29 anti-colonial gestures 74 Antiguan society, postcolonial critique of 20 Anti-Homosexual Bill, in Uganda 75

Appalachia: caricatures of 32–33; as an internal colony 33, 34, 41; as an internal periphery 34, 41; mirroring African continent’s queer sentiments 68 “Appalachia: America’s Mineral Colony” (Weller) 39 Appalachian activists 33, 41; and postcolonial theory 36 Appalachian appropriations 34–35 Appalachian coal miners 38, 39, 41 Appalachian culture 27; denigration of 34 Appalachian dialects 18; denigration of 34 Appalachian English dialect see Appalachian dialect Appalachian environment 38 Appalachian LGBTQ communities 62; invisibility of 68 Appalachian postcolonial model 42 Appalachian regional dialects see Appalachian dialects Appalachian setting 9–10 Appalachian spaces, circulation of postcolonial texts in 34 Appalachian students, and discussions about LGBTQ 77 Appalachian studies, and the colonial model 33 Appalachian texts, and postcolonial world literature perspective 38 Appalachian writers: and the colonial model 33; postcolonial theory by 30 appropriations, Appalachian 34–35

Index Apter, Emily, Against World Literature 13, 44 assimilation 45 Attack on the Mill, The 10 Auerbach, Eric 1 Ba, Mariama 45–46; So Long a Letter 10 Babyji 62 Back Talk from Appalachia 33 Bassnett, Susan 52; and demise of comparative literature 13 Batteau, Allen: Invention of Appalachia, The 32; representations of Appalachia 38 Battle of Blair Mountain 39 Before Night Falls 62 Benaventura hotel 96 Benghazi, US-American consulate in, attack on 24 Benjamin, Walter 51 Berlin (Lutes) 10 Bernheimer Report 44 biculturalism 34 Black Lives Matter protesters 1 Blacks in Appalachia 33 Blindness (Saramago) 3, 6–8 Brooks, Avery 80 Buescu, Helena Carvalhao, analysis of World Republic of Letters 31 Burton, LeVar 80 Camillo, Robin, 120 Beats per Minute (film) 3 Camus, Albert: his novel and the COVID-19 pandemic 3–4; Plague, The 3 Caribbean 21; dialect 18 caricature, homogenized 27 Carre, Jean-Marie, preface to Litterature Comparée 35 Casanova, Pascale 30; Prendergast’s criticism of his work 31 Celarent, Barbara 72 cheap labor 16 Chuchu, Jim 68–69 circulation: comparative methodologies and 31–32; networks of 21, 28; politics of 30–31; politics of in world literature 29–30; processes of 35

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civilizing mission 47 class discussions: about global inequalities 21; and moments of crisis and rupture during 14; and Siad’s work 24–27 classes, as delivery systems 28 classroom: Appalachian setting of the 114; lived experience in 22; pedagogic and theoretical space of 19 classroom dynamics 29 classroom politics 9 classroom syllabi 30 climate crisis 1 Coetzee, J.M., Waiting for the Barbarians 14, 22–24 college classrooms 14 colonial gaze 20, 72 Comparaison n’est pas raison (Etiemble) 13 comparatist eschatology 14 comparatists: and the classroom 2; as homogenizing global agents 14 comparative and world literature classrooms 115 comparative literary criticism 2; pedagogy and pedagogic spaces and 2 comparative literature 1, 2, 9, 13, 22; and classroom dynamics 29; critical pedagogy and 25; and cultural contacts and their roles 14; debates about teaching of 30; as delivery systems 15; Eurocentric dimensions of 52; French 114; French school 35; Kadir and 61; and literary diversity 28; and moments of crisis 44; syllabi creation for 31; syllabus for 36–37; teaching of 14 comparative literature curriculum, and LGBTQ realities 62–63 comparative methodologies, and forms of circulation and cultural exchanges 31 comparative queer theory 62 comparison, possibility of 4 Controversy of Valladolid, The 95 coure syllabus 36–37; and thematic segments of 38 course description 35–43 Covering Islam (Said) 24; author’s views on 25

128

Index

COVID-19 pandemic 1, 2, 97; and Camus’ novel 3 Creole English 15, 17, 20 crisis 6; within classroom dynamics 14; fetishism of 14; iterations of 44; language of 1–2; moments of 10, 44; moments of in the classroom 9, 45–52; rhetoric of 2 Crisis in Comparative Literature, The (Etiemble) 44, 114 crisis-bound vantage point, and the Plague, The (Camus) 4–5 critical pedagogy 21, 27; goal of 22 Crystal Boys 62 cultural biases, and effect on textual interpretations 26 cultural capital 28 cultural domestication 15 cultural exchange, sites of 115 cultural gaze 27 cultural homogenization 19 cultural interactions 15 cultural mediators 2 cultural politics 31 cultural practices 14 cultural sustainability 6 cultural worlds, socioeconomically stratified 17 culture of poverty model 33 Damrosch, David 18; definition of world literature 30; How to Read World Literature 45; What is World Literature 35 Death of a Discipline (Spivak) 13, 44, 52 decentered global heterogeneity 45 definitions, imposing narrow 27–28 Defoe, Daniel, Journal of the Plague Year, A 3 Deleuzian terminology 114 Deliverance of Others, The (Palumbo-Liu) 12 delivered alterity 16, 21, 28 delivery networks 21, 115 Department of Comparative Literature 1 Derridean mantra 13 Destiny of Me, The (Kramer) 3 deviant sexualities 71; in Kenyatta’s work 78

D’haen, Theo 51–52 discrimination, against West Indian community 16 distant reading 31 diverse texts, culturally, circulation of 28 Djebar, Assia 10 domestication 19 donor sanctions 76 dramatis personae 24 Dyer, Rebecca 16, 17 education 22 educational settings, and denigration of Appalachian dialects and culture 34 Ekine, Sokari 68 equality 26 ethnocentric proclivities 10 ethnocentrism 14 ethnonationalism 1, 7; nativist rhetoric 97; politics 10 ethnoscapes 21, 41 Etiemble 13 Etiemble, Réne 13, 35; Crisis in Comparative Literature, The 44, 114 Eurocentric assumptions/definitions 31 “exotic” destinations 21 exploited territories 39 Fabre, Michael 17 Facing Mount Kenya (Kenyatta) 72, 75, 78 Fanon, Franz 33 female genital mutilation 74 female-centered sexual pleasure 74 Fenwick, Edward 113 Franco-Prussian War 57 Freire, Paulo 21 French school 13 Fun Home 62 Futures of Comparative Literature 9 Gender exceptionalism 48–49 genocidal violence and displacement, of Native Americans 42 Giardina, Denise, Storming Heaven 39–40 Gikuyu sexual practices 72–75 Ginsberg, Ruth Bader 1 Giroux, Henry 21, 22

Index global capital 28 global heterogeneity, decentered 45 globalectics 45 Goldberg, Whoopi 80 Graham, Father Michael 113 grammatology, Derridean discourse on 24 Grand Corps Malade, “Saint-Denis” 10 Graphs, Maps, Trees (Moretti), criticism of 31 Green Report 12 Gueye, Marame 49 Harisson, Garry 49 Harper’s Magazine 33 Hawley, John 74 Heart of Darkness (Conrad) 38 Hillbilly Elegy (Vance) 114 Holocaust 4 homoerotic group masturbation 74 homogenized caricature 27 homogenizing global agents 14 homosexuality: “African” culture and 77; in Kenya 75 hooks, bell 21, 26; on education 27 How to Read World Literature (Damrosch) 45 humanities, justify the relevance of 28 I, Rigoberta Menchu 26 immigrant labor 39 immigrants, civil rights of 1 immigration 16 imperialism 72 inclusion and exclusion 31 indigenous communities 26 indigenous lands 113 infectious diseases, political and cultural responses to 3 “Infectious Diseases and the Cultural Politics of Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality 2–3 Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations (Kanzler) 79 Innocence of Muslims, The (film) 24 institutional assemblages, visibility of 114 intercultural interactions 15 internal colony 33, 34, 38, 39, 41; Ogoniland as an 39

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internal periphery model 41 interpretation, communities of 27 interpretive textual issues 28 Invention of Appalachia, The (Batteau) 32 Ireland, Patrick 76 Islam, views of 25 Islamophobia, coming to terms with 26 James, Allen, “Mountain Passes of the Cumberland” 33–34 Jameson, Frederic 96 Japanese-American interment camp 79 job markets 21 Journal of the Plague Year, A (Defoe) 3 Joyeaux 13 Julian, Isaac, Race, Sexual Politics, and Black Masculinity,” 72 Ka, Mary 49–50 Kadir, Djelal 2, 9; Memos from the Besieged City 5; “To World, to Globalize—Comparative Literature’s Crossroads,” 61 Kanzler, Katjya, Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations 79 Kenya, homosexuality in 75 Kenyatta, Jomo 72–75; Facing Mount Kenya 72, 78 Kincaid, Jamaica, A Small Place 14, 15, 20–21 King, Martin Luther 80 Kramer, Larry: Destiny of Me, The 3; Normal Heart, The 3 land grant universities 113 land grants, and new universities 113 language 20; politics of 18 “‘The Last Bastion of Colonialism’ (Pearson) 41–42 L’attaque du Moulin/The Attack on the Mill (Zola) 53 LGBTQ communities 48; civil rights of 1; Kenyans 68; people, victimization of in Kenya and Uganda 75, 76; realities, cinematic and literary works dealing with 62; spaces 10 literary criticism, and comparative literature 29 literary diversity 28

130

Index

literary history 114–115 literary interactions, invisibility of 31 literary texts, geopolitical hierarchies on 30 literary works: circulation of 51, 115; as depictive artifacts 14–15; global circulation of 29–30; influence of 115; as legitimating tools 32 literary-cultural exchanges, invisibility of 32 literature: and “common-sense” assumptions 22; Eurocentric assumptions/definitions of 31; and national cultural capital 30; as a system of delivery 12 literature class, comparative queer theory and 62 literature privileges, Eurocentric assumptions/definitions of 31 Litterature Comparée 35 lived experience, in the classroom 22 local politics, transforming of 43 Lonely Londoners, The (Selvon) 14; discussions about language 20; interpretive analyses of 28; negative reactions to 15–16 Loving Mountains, Loving Men (Mann) 62, 69, 77, 78 Lutes, Jason, Berlin 10 machinic assemblages 114 mail-in ballots 1 Making of Star Trek, The 79 Malinowski, Bronislaw 72 Mann, Jeff, Loving Mountains, Loving Men 69 Marcos, Subcomandante 26 marginalized populations 10 media representations 27 Memmi, Albert 33 memo/memos 10; Kadir’s definition of 5–6, 9 Memos from the Besieged City (Kadir) 5 Mercer, Kobena, Race, Sexual Politics, and Black Masculinity,” 72 methodologies, limitations of 31 Mexican agricultural producers 97 Mexican migrants, vilification of 97 Middle East 25

migrant workers 21 migration, Appalachia and 33 Miller’s Daughter, The 53–56 missionary evangelism 71 modernization 34 modified Creole 18 Moretti, Franco 30; Graphs, Maps, Trees 31 Morrill Act 113 Moses, Michael Valdez, on Coetzee 23 “Mountain Passes of the Cumberland,” (James) 33–34 Muslim ban 10 Muslims: archetypal position attached to 27; depictions of 24–25; figures 24; women 49 My Life in Pink 62 NAFTA 97 naming things, process of 24 narrative experience 27 national cultural capital, and literature 30 National Defense Authorization Act 24 nationalism 31 Native Americans, genocidal violence and displacement of 42 Nazism 1; and the Plague, The (Camus) 4 Nest Collective, Stories of Our Lives 68–71, 78 Nicholas, Nichelle 79–80 Nigerian government 38, 39 Normal Heart, The (Kramer) 3 Ogoni activists, execution of 39 Ogoni people 38–39 Ogoniland 38–39; as an internal colony 39 One Thousand and One Nights 102 One Thousand and One Nights 98 Orientalism (Said) 14, 22, 24; negative reactions to 15; read with Waiting for the Barbarians 28; representation and 38 Original Series, The, of Star Trek 79 Other, uncivilized 23 Other Woman, The (film) 49 Otherness 18, 34, 45; and Selvon’s work 19–20; and white Britons 17

Index Palumbo-Liu, David 12; and comparative literature 19; Deliverance of Others, The 12 paradigms: discursive 27; shifting 26 PATRIOT ACT 24 Pearson, Stephen, “‘The Last Bastion of Colonialism’ 41–42 pedagogic assemblages 114 pedagogic crises 9 pedagogic goals 115 pedagogic settings, and interpretive possibilities 28 pedagogic spaces 2, 115; and circulation of culturally diverse texts 28; as sites of cultural encounters 115 pedagogy: critical 21, 27; for students 28; and symbiotic relationship with comparative literature 14 pinquashing 49 Plague, The (Camus) 3; and the COVID-19 pandemic 3–4 planetarity 45 Plaut, Tom 41 political discourse and policy, white supremacy and 2 popular music 31 postcolonial literary theory 13 postcolonial literatures 35 postcolonial narrative aesthetic 18 postcolonial texts, circulation of in Appalachian spaces 34 postcolonial theory 41; by Appalachian activities 36; by Appalachian writers 30 postcolonial world literature course 34–35; curriculum 42 postmodern literary theory 13 prejudices 10 Prendergast, Christopher, criticism of Casanova’s work 31 presentation, “universalizing modes of 18 protests, “viral-like” propagation 97 Puar, Jasbir 48–49 queer African sexualities 68 queer anti-urbanism 63–67 queer Kenyan artists and activists 10, 69 queer sexualities and spaces, and the African continent 68

131

queer spaces, neo-colonial depictions of 10 queer-anti-urban responses 10 “Race, Sexual Politics, and Black Masculinity” (Mercer and Julian) 72 racial segregation 40 racial violence and police brutality 97 rapture 14 “rational” foundations 12 realpolitik 24 rednecks 40–41 Roddenberry, Gene, Making of Star Trek, The 79 Roy, Arundhati 48 rupture 14; fetishism of 14 Said, Edward: Covering Islam 24, 25; definition of Orientalism 38; ethnic Others 22; intertextual relationship between his books 24; Orientalism 14, 15, 24; sociopolitical relevance of 24 “Saint-Denis,” Grand Corps Malade 10 same-sex sexual practices 51, 68 Saramago, Jose, Blindness 3, 6–8 Saro-Wiwa, Ken 38–39; execution of 39 Scholes, Robert, Textual Power 24 second class citizens, social exclusion as 17 Second World War 1, 16; JapaneseAmerican interment camp after 79 “self-defense,” instinctive act of 26 Selvon, Samuel 16–17; Creole English use and 17–18; Lonely Londoners, The 14–16; negative reactions to The Lonely Londoners 18–19 Senegalese Penal Code 51 sexual deviance, in Appalachia 78 sexuality, European construction of 72 Shawnee State University 9, 113 Shell corporation 38, 39 single story, dangers of 27–28 slavery 113 A Small Place (Kincaid) 14; interpretive analyses of 28; negative reactions to 15; student’s resistance to 20–21 So Long a Letter (Ma) 10, 45, 49–50 social exclusion 17 social justice 26

132

Index

sociopolitical and economic climate, effect on academia 28 Spitzer, Leo 1 Spivak, Gayatri 53; Death of a Discipline 13, 44, 52; planetarity of 44–45 Standard English, as the universal medium 18 Star Trek: and 79; comparative analysis of 10; extra-textual discourse about it multicultural vision 80; pedagogic analysis of 79–95 Star Trek universe, and depictions of alien civilizations 80–81 state-sponsored violence 39 Stevens, John Christopher 24 Stories of Our Lives (Nest Collective) 62, 68–71, 77, 78 Storming Heaven (Giardina) 39–40 Strawberry and Chocolate 62 Structural Adjustment Programs 76 structures of power and domination 42 students, and global capital 28 Summertime 62 syllabusing 61–62; and world-making 77–78 symbolic capital 20 tabula rasa 23 Takei, George 79 Taliban regime 48 Tamale, Sylvia 75–76 target language 19 Taylor, Breanna 1 terrorism, lens of 24 Terrorist Assemblage 48 tertium comparationis 2, 115 texts: negative reactions to 15; thematic comparisons of 35 textual interpretations, cultural biases on 26 Textual Power (Scholes) 24 Thiong’o, Ngugi wa 34, 45 “third world” women’s struggles 48 “To World, to Globalize—Comparative Literature’s Crossroads,” (Kadir) 61 tourist industry 20 translation studies 13 Trinidad 16 Troiden, Richard 50

Tropical Malady 62 Trump, Donald 10 Uganda, Anti-Homosexual Bill in 75 “unauthentic” citizens 16 unavoidable inheritance 30 uncivilized Other 23 underdevelopment model 33 universities, new, and land grants 113–114 United States, debates about issues in 24 universal medium 18 US academia 32; effect of sociopolitical and economic climate on 28 US presidential election (2020) 1 US-American 2016 presidential elections 42 US-American democracy, challenge to 4 US-American exceptionalism 4 US-American militarism 48 US-American women 48 US-centered methodologies, criticism of 44 Vance, J.D., Hillbilly Elegy 114 Venuti, Lawrence 52–53 violence, and Appalachian students 114 viral networks 97 Waiting for the Barbarians (Coetzee) 14, 22–24; interpretive analyses of 28 Walking with Shadows 62 Walls, David 41 warrantless surveillance 24 Weisinger, H. 13 Wellek, René 1, 13, 44 Weller, Jack, “Appalachia: America’s Mineral Colony,” 39 West Indian immigrants 17; discrimination against 16 Western literary tradition 13 “Western” reader 20 What is World Literature (Damrosch) 35 white blue-collar grievances 42–43 white supremacists 1; in political discourse and policy 2 women, civil rights of 1 “The Woman in Pieces” 10 working-class whites, personal prejudices against 26–27

Index world literature: definition of 30, 35; politics of circulation in 29–30; syllabi creation for 31 world literature classrooms 10 world literature curriculum, and Appalachian texts 41 world literature syllabus 30 World Republic of Letters, Buescu’s analysis of 31 worlds-systems theory 34

133

Xavier University, ties to slavery and 113 xenophobic politics 97 Yale University 1 Yang, K. Wayne 113 Zapatistas 26 Zola, Emile 10, 95; L’attaque du Moulin/The Attack on the Mill 53–55; translations of works of 53–60