Dr. Daniel F. Schultz, Professor Social and Behavioral Sciences

Dr. Maryanne Felter, Associate Professor, English

Cayuga Community College

Franklin Street

Auburn, New York 13021

315‑255‑1743 x245

schultdf@cayuga-cc.edu

Reading Historically in an Historically Illiterate Culture

A few years ago, Richard Lederer put together an essay called "The World According to Student Bloopers," a collage of mistakes that he and his colleagues had collected over the years from student essays, eighth grade through college level. Though humorous, the essay dramatizes how tragically incomplete American students' knowledge of history is. From "Sir Francis Drake [who] circumcised the world with his 200 foot clipper" to "the Spanish gorillas [who] came down from the hills and nipped at Napoleon's flanks," American students demonstrated not only their linguistic limitations but their historical ignorance as well (Lederer 1999). Part of the difficulty here may be the way we have been teaching history for years.

Americans are notoriously ignorant of history‑‑their own and others': "The problem with American culture is not, as Christopher Lasch (1978) argues, narcissism, but amnesia" (Thomas 1991). Even though the subject, though no longer called "History" in our secondary schools but "Social Studies," is taught at all levels of elementary and secondary school, it is largely a hodgepodge of various social sciences. What passes for "history" is a series of facts memorized easily and regurgitated quickly on multiple‑choice tests: "most [college] students view history as an ordering of already‑known facts into agreed‑upon chronologies. For many of them, in fact, history is facts, with issues of interpretation scarcely arising at all" ( Gardner 1991). To understand history is to know the perspective of the other, being able to get "inside" as an "outsider," being able to attain an emic perspective. "Understanding" is coming to make sense of the "facts"‑‑the people and the events‑‑by placing them in their contexts‑‑their times, places, and circumstances. In literary studies, too, the New Criticism took literature out of context. In an attempt to focus on the work as an aesthetic object, New Criticism failed to allow for the kind of understanding defined above. This, along with the rise of disciplinary specialization in the late nineteenth century greatly increased the gap between [history and literature]" (Thomas 1991).

We start with the assumption that the study of history informs the reading of literature, that history makes us better readers because it puts the cultural artifact-‑the text‑‑into an historical context. Marxist critics called for such an approach long ago in response to New Critics: said Fredrick Jameson, "Always Historicize! " (Jameson 1981). We agree with New Historicists that the parallel reading of "literary" and "non‑literary" texts from the same period offers insight into both texts that cannot be gained from other theoretical perspectives. This does not privilege the "literary" text (history is "used" to read literature) any more than it privileges the "non‑literary" text (literature is "used" to give the historical text context and interest). In fact, we have found that our students tend to learn history more easily when it is connected to literature and "personalized" in a way that a textbook cannot. But they also read literature in a much more profound and interesting way when they know its historical context.

Even classic works, that have been taught in English courses for years, have often been been taught ahistorically, to the great loss of understanding of the work. E.M. Forster's A Passage to India (1924), for example, set in the 1920s, chronicles the difficulties of achieving friendship between an Englishman, Fielding, and an Indian, Aziz. It is important to note that although this novel has been taught fairly regularly in literature classes in the United States, by no means are US students necessarily familiar with either English or Indian history. It has been read as a novel about personal relations between people. Critics, of course, have discussed the historical implications of the novel, especially in New Historicist and Cultural Studies. But many teachers of undergraduates have focused on other aspects, in part, because of a lack of knowledge on the part of students‑-or perhaps on the part of the professorate, trained in their own specialty and knowing very little indeed about areas outside their own fields of interest.

When we asked our honors students for the past four years what new insights they had gained on old topics throughout the course of their study of the literature and history of imperialism with us, they unanimously asserted that there were no "old topics" here--all insights and topics were new. They knew nothing about the Raj or about Indian history; they believed, if they believed anything, the stereotypes about India as a place of Hindus, cobra-charmers, the Taj Mahal, and, maybe, untouchables. Perhaps we, as teachers of literature, have simply found it easier to focus on other aspects of the novel rather than trying to "correct" years of bad training in history.

Part of the difficulty lay with the history textbooks themselves. Few of the general survey texts touched on the kinds of contemporary reports that historians themselves have access to. And it is these primary sources that help modern readers place the fiction in the context of the time period in which it was written. Although the is changing, as far as we know only a few major textbook companies in the United States publish companion volumes to their basic Western and World Civilization texts that include collections of these primary sources. Even so in most history survey courses, few students have time to read these sources. The effects ripple out beyond the history classroom. Students have no context in which to place A Passage to India, for example, no way of knowing that most of Forster's contemporaries believed that Indians were racially different and more likely to be emotional, panic driven, "wild." The could not know that "Read any of the Mutiny records; which, rather than the Bhagavad Gita, should be your Bible in this country" (Forster 1924), a reference to the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, called up images in the English audience of women and children victimized by barbaric, dark hordes of Indian men ready and eager to rape, kill, and mutilate white English women. Forster's allusions to that watershed event, go unnoticed by most modern readers.

Other classics of Western literature have also been taught divorced from their context. English majors during the 1960s and 70s were routinely assigned Heart of Darkness in introductory courses and British literature surveys. Most were taught that it was a symbolic novel about a psychological journey to the soul. Seldom was Leopold or the Belgian Congo mentioned, yet Conrad intended Heart of Darkness to be a book about Western imperialism. It may be more than that, but Conrad himself, in the 1917 introduction to the novel, said, “. . . it is well known that curious men go prying into all sorts of places (where they have no business) and come out of them with all kinds of spoil [read Leopold in the Belgian Congo]. This story, and one other, not in this volume, are all the spoil I brought out from the centre of Africa, where, really, I had no sort of business” (Conrad 1917). Conrad’s reading public would easily have identified the situation in the Congo though Conrad leaves it vague and unspecified in the novel itself.

We have managed to read and teach these pieces of literature in spite of de-historicizing them. And readers have made some sort of sense of them, albeit incomplete. But what happens when we move outside the Western tradition? How do we read works of literature from other cultures without knowing the history of those cultures? Can we read Pramoedya Toer's Buru Quartet (1975‑1988) without knowledge of Indonesian history, including Dutch colonization, pan-Islamic movements worldwide, and Asian revolutions that affect political nationalism in Indonesia? Can we understand Minke's fascination with the Dutch, his sense of honor at being an HBS student, his anger at being used as a kind of "guinea pig" to test Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje's "Association Theory" unless we understand something about the Dutch as colonizers? It is possible to understand Duong Thu Huong's Paradise of the Blind (1988) unless we know the long history of the Vietnamese struggle against the Chinese, the French, the Americans? Does Hang's story make sense without a clear understanding of what happened to Ho Chi Minh’s dream after the Americans left in 1975? Salman Rushdie's Midnight’s Children (1980) demands a clear understanding of Indian history. Achebe, Soyinke, Emecheta cannot be read without Nigerian history and culture. Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), written on the eve of Nigerian independence, shows, in part, a clash of cultures and the results of British imperialism. Without knowledge of how the British worked in Nigeria, we do not understand Okonkwo’s situation nor do we understand why the Igbo world falls apart with the advent of British missionary and economic imperialism. We need to know about the differences between Igbo culture and other Nigerian cultures to appreciate the ways in which Okonkwo is an anomaly within his own community, to understand reasons why the tribesmen embrace the missionaries as they move into Igbo territory. Nor can we read Soyinke’s Death and the King’s Horseman (1975) without knowledge of Yoruba culture: the entire first scene is indecipherable without it. We also need to know the history of British-Yoruba relations to read the rest of the play.

But we need not go so far beyond our own borders. American students study American literature without a very thorough knowledge of American history. And now that anthologists are following Paul Lauter and the The Heath Anthology of American Literature in redefining the canon and including minority and silenced voices, how do Americans read their own literature without understanding the histories of Native‑Americans, African‑Americans, Asian-Americans, women, or immigrant groups? Can history be relegated to footnotes in a good, standard text? It seems to us that a fictional work loses much without a solid understanding of the history that informs it and that this knowledge cannot be relegated to footnotes.

If we start with the assumption that the study of history is an explanation and clarification of the past, that implicitly means knowing the cultural context in which the events occurred. Records of these events and ideas by observers and participants directly involved in them are as valuable to students of literature as records some distance removed from the events themselves either in time or in space. Implicit in a source's proximity to or distance from the events (historical, psychological, cultural, class, philosophical, etc) is the notion of bias or distortion. Students of literature are trained to recognize such bias in their study of narration. When they view history from this perspective and compare various versions of an event, they are reinforcing their understanding of point‑of‑view as well as gaining insight into the true nature of history. If history is important to our understanding of who we are, what we write, how we live, students need to come to question history's sources. Is history simply a function of power‑‑the differential between those who write the texts and those who are silent (or whose voices are silenced)? By not providing students or ourselves as "professional readers," the historical backgrounds needed to read fiction well, are we not continuing to silence those other voices?

Does the study of history make us better teachers? Any time we have more knowledge about a topic, surely, we can impart more knowledge to our students. And knowledge about history allows us as English teachers to help students appreciate the text within a larger context‑the context of its contemporary production as well as the context of its reading over time. Brook Thomas noted that "the fragmentation of knowledge our students experience is so ingrained within the institutional structure of our universities, which in turn is so vitally linked to our culture's social structure, that it would take a radical restructuring of society to combat fully our students' lack of historical consciousness" (Thomas 1991). Reuniting the study of literature and history would be a small step in combating the fragmentation. It would allow us to help students come to an understanding of their own history and the history of others in a way that makes the history come alive, makes it more personal to them. Literature has much to offer in this endeavor‑‑it has the potential for making events of the past move from the dry dust‑bin of fact into real events and real people with real emotions who are on either side of a particular event. It allows students to see history not as a body of facts but as an interpretive experience that changes with time and place. More than this, it forces us to break the artificial boundaries of discipline and allow ourselves to become more inclusive in our ways of knowing. It might encourage collegiality as we reach out to colleagues in another field for help and guidance in exploring this new discipline. It can also generate excitement--most good teachers are good because they remain good students: they continue to explore new ideas with relish and they feel a real passion for learning. Incorporating the study of history into the study of literature can achieve this.

It becomes, therefore, incumbent upon those of us who believe that the study of history is important to the study of literature to include a variety of sources that examine events and individuals from a variety of perspectives since the historical objectivity can never be ascertained but can only be subjectively evaluated. Students cannot be left to read chapters from traditional history textbooks, most of which gloss over events and do not suggest the difficulties of perspective and bias. We can, certainly, choose our texts based on the availability of “critical editions” of the texts that give historical background. But these are limited.

What we are suggesting is no small feat. It means that those of us who teach literature must suddenly become “experts” in the history and culture of the literatures we teach. This may already exist for those professors teaching upper division undergraduates and graduate students, those professors, that is, who are teaching courses in their own fields. But how many of us teach survey courses, introductions to literary genre courses, and other courses that do not correspond to the particular fields we may have done our Ph.D. comps in? Moreover, many of us may still fear that if we teach literature historically we are relegating literature to the status of one more historical object to be studied rather than "high art."

Does this put an impossible burden on those of us who teach literature? Perhaps. We spend enough time preparing the text itself as well as reading the literary criticism that surrounds the text as we prepare to present it in class. How are we to take on another discipline and know where to start. One answer is collaboration with a colleague in History. We have paired our literature and history courses around the theme of "encounter and imperialism" with great results. It allows us to cover a world history post-1600 survey course while focusing on a topic that connects the west with the world. We have taken four classes of students through this cross‑disciplinary experience and they have been overwhelmingly responsive. Student comments are typically positive: they are relieved to be able to study history in a form that allows them to see how it applies to real life people in real life situations (ironically in fiction). They retained material because the two disciplines reinforced one another. One student wrote. "Having spent a great deal of time over the past few months reading works of authors of diverse backgrounds has been like taking a refresher course in History. It has been an experience both painful and necessary." Another student, who admitted at the start of the class that she hated history and that she was absolutely ignorant of "anything that had happened in the world‑‑ever‑‑," wrote us from the college she transferred to: "I still catch myself remembering something I learned in your class when I'm reading or doing something for other classes." Not only did she learn the material, but she learned how one discipline is interconnected with other disciplines and that the information she learned "actually makes sense!"

By putting our English and history classes together—two courses worth six credits scheduled back to back—we have been able to fill in these gaps in our knowledge. Having taught the course for five semesters, we are constantly refining it, changing case studies and readings as we ourselves learn more about the topics we are teaching. Our latest course syllabus (see appendix 1) reflects the kinds of case studies and readings we work with. We try to cover all major geographic regions—Asia (India, Vietnam, later Indonesia), Africa (Egypt, Congo, later Nigeria), and the Americas (internal colonization—women, African Americans, Native Americans, later the Caribbean). In so doing, we are careful to cover the largest number of Western countries involved in imperialism—Britain, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Belgium, and the United States. We wanted students to see the colonial experience from the perspectives of both the colonizer and the colonized. Finding works by Native writers translated into English and available in the United States was a large undertaking; and developing essay topics that combined both disciplines of History and English was monumental. Some of the case studies presented us with difficulties in choosing selections. When we do the Congo, for example, it is fairly easy to find Western works: Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, E.D. Morel’s White Man’s Burden, Roger Casement’s studies, Mark Twain’s King Leopold’s Soliloquy, and George Washington Williams’s reports on the abuses of Leopold. But it has been very difficult for us to locate Congolese literature in English; in fact, we have had to supply the Congolese perspective with the writings of a French Congolese writer, Henri Lopes, rather than writers from the former Belgian Congo. Moreover, we wanted to be sure to choose texts that would tie into the history we were studying. So although it might have been fun to do some of the contemporary Indian novelists, Arundhati Roy or Jhumpa Lahiri, for example, whom many people are reading today, we needed to find texts that would put the history into a personalized context for our students. Although there are a good number of novels by Indian authors, for example, which would be useful, many of them might be too long and difficult for a 100 or 200 level course. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Gita Mehta’s Raj, Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel—these books take on too much for a survey course in which we have all of three weeks to do the history and literature. So we have used Forster as well as Stoppard (Indian Ink) in combination with a number of Indian short story writers; this year we will leave out Stoppard and add Anand’s Untouchable to the list to see how well the students respond. In the case of Indonesia, we have only enough time to do the first volume of Pramoedya Toer’s Buru Quartet though we are clear that reading all four volumes would be better. The good news is that many of our students like the book so much they go on to read the rest of the tetralogy.

History readings are even more difficult to select. To date we have not found a text for any one of the case studies that gives a thorough background of history and includes primary texts. We will try Stanley Wolper’s India this year. But in the past we put together our own photocopied packet about 270 pages (see appendix 2 for table of contents of this packet) of primary source readings we thought would best represent the kind of study of India that we wanted to do. Much of this packet we wrote ourselves, essays on the historical incidents and background on information our students were unlikely to know (marked on table of contents with asterisk). Other things we photocopied: these included newspaper accounts and contemporary memoirs of historical events, reporting of various incidents by Indian and English journalists and historians. Some selections we put on overhead rather than in the packets: Punch cartoons, photographs of events and people, and contemporary engravings and painting. In any case, it is a time-consuming job since we have not found texts that mix the various kinds of readings together in a way that we want to be able to use them. We have done and continue to work on similar packets for each case study.

In addition, we attempt to pull our students into the cultures of these areas not merely through the histories and the literature but also, whenever possible, through art, music, food, and other cultural experiences. We are luckily situated geographically and have been able to take our students to a yearly gamelan concert at the Eastman School of Music, lecture/presentations at the Johnson Museum at Cornell in orientalism and southeast Asian art and architecture, and performances of such plays as Wole Soyinke’s Death and the King’s Horseman and Caryl Churchill’s Cloud-9 at Syracuse Stage. The cooking, we do ourselves.

Unfortunately, such collaboration remains typically unsupported in the academy. Why does its implementations seem to be so difficult? It is not simply overcoming the usual inertia in academe but often facing outright hostility from the very people who should be offering the most encouragement: administration and other faculty. Our administration pays lip-service to the concept of collaboration, but, with one or two notable exceptions, is parsimonious in finding the appropriate time, money, or classroom space for such innovative encounters. Moreover we have no language in our contract to address collaborative teaching ventures, so we paired two, three-credit courses, back to back. This is workable within the honors program since all the students are advised by the honors coordinator. But we have discussed doing a similar kind of course with non-honors students, and we know that scheduling would be a nightmare.

More than a question of money was a question of time. In our community college, we teach fifteen credit hours per semester, many of us regularly teaching overloads. Finding the time to work with a colleague is difficult. In our case, it consumes winter break, spring break, and the entire summer. We find other difficulties even more challenging. The breaking of disciplinary boundaries is seen as threatening to some; colleagues question the legitimacy of a history professor talking about literature or a literature professor commenting on history. They seem to fear the the integrity of the courses will be lost. Yet we have been scrupulous in meeting requirements of both disciplines; we have worked hard to find writing and research projects that combine literary and historical perspectives. And when we evaluate our students, we do it together, having spent years working out our standards and expectations both in and outside of our individual disciplines. The result has been a sharper focus for each of us in all of our classes and a clearer idea for our students about what academic inquiry involves.

Although no students have dropped the course due to excessive workload (and it is huge), there is occasionally an undercurrent of grumbling that both workload and grading is severe. Nonetheless each year, student evaluations are excellent, and many students have returned after they transfer to tell us how much they miss the course. And the few colleagues and administrators who have been supportive, and some have vigorously supported the course, remind us constantly how worthwhile our efforts have been. The irony is that academic, creative teaching is all that is being offered here—as well as a course that includes for the students guest lecturers, field trips to local cultural events and exhibitions that tie into the case studies, the foods from each of geographical areas studied, and a close, well-defined learning community that brings students and faculty together in a way they do not experience in other classes. It is a course worth saving; it is also a course constantly under scrutiny.

Both administrative and peer support for such collaborations are essential if this worthwhile educational experience is to be pursued. Faculty need time and money for professional development and research. If we believe that combining disciplines enhances the teaching-learning process, we need a flexibility in terms of disciplinary boundaries. Collaboration requires a commitment, a passion, really, from two (or more) strong faculty members who are willing to dismiss academic turf battles as irrelevant, who are willing to leave their egos behind and become students in a mutual information-sharing process. And last, there must be a chemistry that makes it work. Collaboration is not simply team-teaching; it is more—love of the discipline, the profession, the teaching-learning process itself. Unfortunately the teaching of both literature and history divorced from one another has been a kind of academic, intellectual Gradgrindism. Teachers of literature can use history to give a depth to the readings of the texts they choose that could not be achieved without the historical background. But more than this, most texts remain, at least to a degree, indecipherable‑-or at least incomplete‑‑without such a background. Placing literary texts back into their contexts is a major step. Coming to the literature with a true understanding of the history of the culture that text came from can only help us read and interpret the texts more fully. Although we are aware that administrative logistics and campus politics often make an interdisciplinary approach or a collaborative model difficult, we are convinced that pedagogically as well as theoretically, such an approach is the best way to teach both history and English.

APPENDIX 1

Spring semester honors class

English 102/239: Dr. Maryanne Felter History 102: Dr. Daniel Schultz

Office L215 office L 217

Office hours: TR 8:30-9:30; 12:30-2 office hours:

Texts:

Alvarez, Julia. In the Time of the Butterflies. New York: Plume, 1994.

Carpentier, Alejo. The Kingdom of this World. New York: Noonday, 1957.

Churchill, Caryl. Cloud-9. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1985.

Conrad, Joseph. The Norton Critical Edition of Heart of Darkness. New York: W.W. Norton, 1996.

Davis, Wade. The Serpent and the Rainbow. New York: Touchstone, 1985.

Forster, E.M. A Passage to India. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1996.

Ricklefs, M.C. A History of Modern Indonesia since 1300. California: Stanford, 1993.

Rogozinski, Jan. A Brief History of the Caribbean. New Yorl: Penguin, 1994.

Stoppard, Tom. Indian Ink. London: Faber and Faber, 1995.

Toer, Pramoedya. This Earth of Mankind. New York: Penguin, 1990.

Wolpert, Stanley. India.. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

Objectives:

Students who have completed this course will be able to:

· read critically, evaluate, and interpret texts

· come to see texts as cultural and historical as well as aesthetic artifacts

· write coherent, organized, well-developed essays that demonstrate their understanding of concepts explored in the class

· understand similar adaptions to the environment as a fundamental need

· understand the interaction between culture and environment

· understand the beliefs and contributions of the many human communities that have shaped our global culture

· comprehend the issues of war, economics, population, environment, etc. in a global context

· peruse primary documents to obtain perspectives on issues from a variety of sources--rulers, workers, merchants, women, reformers, colonial officials, nationalists, revolutionaries, artists, and writers, etc.

· understand the issues of gender, race, class in a cross-cultural and historical context

· understand that the promise and perils of their world are rooted in the past

· comprehend that the human species throughout the globe has followed a similar history: form isolated communities to intensive contact and penetration, to cultural expansion, amalgamation, to an emerging globalism

· find ways, either virtual or real, to experience the various cultures

The syllabus:

(remember: this might look like a lot of work but this is worth 6 credits, not 3)

week one:

Jan 24 M intro to course: reading and writing culture: how you were raised

To be who you are. Where do you look for your culture?

26 W The Story of Babar; Ariel Dorfman “Of Elephants and Savages.”

handout

George Orwell. “Marrakesh” handout

28 F images and maps. Gerome slides.

Definitions: imperialism

“British Imperialism Stimulated by the Literature of Adventure.”

handout

Huttenbach. “Imperialism and the Proconsul.” handout

Tiffin and Lawson. “The Textuality of Empire.” Handout

week two: The Congo

31 M 9-10: computer discussion

Conrad. Heart of Darkness

Feb 2 W Heart of Darkness

Maurice Hennessy. “The Congo Free State: A brief history.” NC,

79.

Sir Harry Johnston. “George Grenfell: a missionary in the Congo.”

NC, 82.

George Washington Williams. “Report upon the Congo

State…” NC, 84.

George Washington Williams. “Open Letter.” NC, 103.

King Leopold. “The Sacred Mission of Civilization.” NC, 126

4 F Richard Harding Davis. “His Brother’s Keeper.” NC, 126.

Mark Twain. From “King Leopold’s Soliloquy.” Handout.

Chinua Achebe. “An Image of Africa.” NC, 251.

Frances Singh. “The Colonialist Bias of Heart of Darkness.” NC,

268.

Ian Watt. “Impressionism and Symbolism in Heart if Darkness.”

NC, 311.

week three: The Congo

7 M 9-10 computer discussion

Lynne Rice. “Zaire: from colony to nation” NC, 132

9 W Dr. Tikumbi Lumumba-Kasongo, guest speaker: The Congo

Colonial Africa: past and present

an African feast

11 F finish up Congo

week four: The Caribbean: Haiti

14 M Rogozinski. History, pp.3-22;

16 W Rogozinski, pp. 23-33; 34-43

18 F winter break

week five: The Caribbean: Haiti

21 M Rogozinski, 44-54, 75-81,

23 W Davis. The Serpent and the Rainbow, especially chapters 5,11

25 F Rogozinski, 83-4; 90-91; 97-102

week six: The Caribbean: Dominican Republic

28 M Carpentier. The Kingdom of this World

Mar 1 W Rogozinski, 105-121; 123-139

3 F Cornell: Johnson Museum. Lecture/ presentation: colonial images in art

week seven: The Caribbean: Dominican Republic

6 M Rogozinski, 211-223; 235-238;

8 W Alvarez. In the time of the Butterflies

10 F Rogozinski, 238-247

Caribbean feast

week eight: India

13 M Wolpert, 5-22; 25-55

15 W Wolpert, 98-114, 118-133

17 F Wolpert, 136-148

week nine: India

20 M Forster. A Passage to India

22 W Wolpert, 56-70;

24 F slides: Sepoy Mutiny

week ten: India

27 M Stoppard. Indian Ink

29 W Wolpert, 233-248

31 F spring break

week eleven: Indonesia

Apr 10 M Multatuli. Max Havelaar selections

12 W Ricklef, 3-58

14 F gamelan concert: Eastman School of music

week twelve: Indonesia

17 M Ricklefs, 61-105; 199-233

19 W Ricklefs, 151-180; 181-195; 237-309

21 F Easter holiday

week thirteen: Indonesia

24 M Indonesian rijsttafel: 5846 Lakeview Drive. 10-11:30

26 W Pramoedya. This Earth of Mankind

28 F Pramoedya

week fourteen: orientalism and gender

May 1 M Churchill. Cloud-9

3 W Cloud-9 performance Syracuse Stage: 8 pm

5 F discussion: peformance

week fifteen: Internal colonization: African Americans

8 M Stokely Carmichael and other readings—history packet

10 W history packet

12 F Phyllis Wade, Eastman School of Music: slave songs and spirituals/ slave narratives.

Storytelling and song

APPENDIX 2

TABLE OF CONTENTS

*Multiculturalism: A Multidisciplinary Approach …………………. 1

Map: India Before Independence…………………………………... 12

Map: India After Independence…………………………………….. 13

*Outline: Highlights of India’s History……………………………… 14

*The colonial experience in British India……………………………. 18

Pico Iyer. “A Whole Continent was picked up without half-trying”… 21

*Study questions for Iyer……………………………………………… 34

*Literature about India ………………………………………………... 35

George Orwell. “Shooting an Elephant”…………………………….. 40

*Study questions for Orwell…………………………………………… 48

John Greenleaf Whittier. “The Pipes at Lucknow”…………………… 49

*Study questions for Whittier………………………………………….. 51

Alfred Lord Tennyson.”The Defense of Lucknow”………………….. 52

*Study questions for Tennyson………………………………………… 56

Rudyard Kipling. “Gunga Din”………………………………………. 57

Rudyard Kipling. “Recessional”……………………………………… 59

*Study questions for Kipling…………………………………………… 60

*Writing about the Sepoy Mutiny 1857: an introduction……...……….. 61

Mrs. Harris describes the Siege at Lucknow…………………………. 64

Indian Mutineers Blown from Guns, 1857…………………………… 67

William Howard Russell on The Indian Mutiny, 1857………………. 68

Queen Victoria’s Proclamation of Crown Rule………………………. 71

G.O. Trevelyan. “The Massacre at Cawnpore”……………………….. 72

Robert Huttenback. “The Indian Mutiny”…………………………….. 80

*Study questions for the Sepoy Mutiny…………………………………95

*The First Incident in the War of Independence, 1857………………….96

Indian Positions: V.D. Savarkar……………………………………….. 97

Indian Positions: R.C. Majumdar………………………………………..99

*Focus questions for Indian positions…………………………………..102

The Azimgarh Proclamation………………………………………….. 103

Jawaharlal Nehru. “The Great Revolt of 1857……………………….. 106

*Study questions on the first incident…………………………………. 116

*1857 and Beyond: the origins of nationalism…………………………. 117

Tagore and Iqbal poetry…………………………………………………121

*Gandhi’s Call for non-violent Resistance…………………………….. 124

Robert Huttenback. “The Amritsar Massacre”………………………. 125

Salman Rushdie. From Midnight’s Children………………………… 140

*Study Questions for Amritsar Massacre……………………………… 143

Crawling Order, 1919………………………………………………… 144

*India: 1920-1947………………………………………………………. 145

Nehru and Independence Day Resolution…………………………… 148

*India: The Religious Mosaic……………………………………………150

Robert Huttenback. “Partition”…………………………………………158

*Partition Questions……………………………………………………..171

Salman Rushdie. From Midnight’s Children “Tick Tock”………………172

*India: The present Shackled by the Past ……………………………….181

Gandhi: The Limits of Sanctity………………………………………. 186

Castaways of Caste ……………………………………………………. 187

Anand. From Untouchable (the crisis)..………………………………. 193

Anand. from Untouchable (on Gandhi)…………………………………200

*Women: the other untouchables……………………………………….208

Infanticide and Sexual Slavery…………………………………………214

*Modernization and Women…………………………………………….215

Lori Hesse. “The Global War Against Women.” ………………………216

Mahaswweta Devi.”Giribala”………………………………………….219

*Study questions on “Girabala”…………………………………………238

Krishna Varma.” The Grass Eaters”……………………………………239

*Study questions on “The Grass Eaters”…………………………………242

*Topics for Further Research and Writing .……………………………..243

*Bibliographies for further research……………………………………..247