Unanchoring Literature
Dr. Lisa K. Perdigao
Florida Institute of Technology
ASDP Summer Institute 2010
July 29, 2010
“In our modern, multicultural world, one that has become
geographically unbound, perhaps literature too has become
unanchored. It can only add a sense of rootlessness, as
writers and books traverse the globe. Certainly the university
departments of post-colonial literature are behind the times.
We’ve moved beyond that. V. S. Naipaul has spoken of
writing ‘from the periphery.’ But there is no longer a center
against which the margin can be measured. And if there
were, it would have to include Naipaul himself in his
Wiltshire manor house.”
--Monica Ali, “Did I Know Enough to Be British?”
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/08/did-i-know-enough-to-bebritish/7538/
Redesigning Maps, Navigating Borders
• Infusing South Asian studies into the Humanities curriculum
• Re-examining how borders are drawn in Humanities courses,
from survey courses to specialized topics
• Conceptualizing South Asian studies: How do we decide which
texts should be included? How do we map our courses?
• Border crossing—as theme for a course and as an approach to the
Humanities curriculum
New Cartographies
• From Western Civilization: World Civilization
• Constructing World Literature
• Creating minors in English, international studies
• Expanding studies in literature: children’s and adolescent
literature, postcolonial literature, comparative literature
• Intersections: South Asian, Southeast Asian, Asian American,
Latin American, Caribbean, African American, African, British,
and American literatures
“Border Crossing in World Literature”
• Stories of space, displacement, and identity
• Othering the self, self-fracturing, reconciliation
• Development of identity within and between cultures, as insiders,
outsiders, immigrants, exiles, and travelers
• Journeys of the self articulated through the navigation of space;
South Asia as exoticized, romanticized, idealized, nostalgicized,
criticized
• Homer’s Odyssey as nostos (homecoming)
• The bildungsroman (coming-of-age story) vs.
entwicklungsroman (story of development)
Course Design
1.
Unchartered Waters: Creating the Self and the World
2.
Drawing Borders: Insiders and Outsiders
3.
Circumnavigation: Narrating the Self and/as Text
4.
Castaways: Self in/as Exile
1. Unchartered Waters
• Martel, Yann, Life of Pi (2001): odyssey at sea, attempt at homecoming;
struggles with idea of India, of faith (Hinduism, Christianity, Islam);
significance of storytelling; Spanish/Canadian writer
• Rushdie, Salman, Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990): odyssey of/through
father’s stories; significance of storytelling as he “saves the world of makebelieve”
• Tarsem’s film The Fall (2006): Los Angeles, 1915, American stuntman telling
story to young Romanian girl; envisions an “Indian”; exoticizing India,
storytelling; Jaidpur, Jodhpur, the blue city
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080603/PEOPLE
/868926055/1023
2. Drawing Borders
• Roy, Arundhati, The God of Small Things (1997): twins struggling with
identity; separation, displacement, and reconciliation; magical realism;
family’s history
• Ghosh, Amitav, The Shadow Lines (1988): boy growing up, moving from
Calcutta to Delhi to London; telling story of life through 20th century; Bengali
and English families; borderlands with partition
• Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandan’s film Slumdog Millionaire (2008):
orphan from Mumbai; importance of narrative, retelling story of life
• Gurinda Chadra’s film Bend It Like Beckham (2002): Punjabi girl living in
London wanting to play professional football; Beckham as god; struggle
between tradition and modernity; identity politics mapped along lines of race,
class, gender
• Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s film Delhi-6 (2009): American/Indian,
Hindu/Muslim identities—clips with New York meets Delhi, Indian Idol
• Mishra, Pankaj, The Romantics (2000): expatriates in India; twenty year old
Brahmin narrator is torn between East and West, trying to understand Western
tradition
3. Circumnavigation
• Narayan, R. K., The Vendor of Sweets (1967): Jagan reading the Bhagavad
Gita; novel-writing machine; technology versus creation; modern versus
traditional India; rereading the literary tradition
• Tharoor, Shashi, The Great Indian Novel (1989): retelling of the
Mahabharata; play with colonialism in retelling master narratives
• Gilbert, Elizabeth, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything
Across Italy, India and Indonesia (2006): spiritual quest to find self; American
conception of India, attempt to find meaning
4. Castaways
• Naipaul, V. S. The Mimic Men (1967): writer living in London returns home;
tension between being Indian/Caribbean/English; idealization versus
disillusionment in representation of India
• Rushdie, Salman, Fury (2002): professor leaves family in London to live in
America; disillusionment with three worlds, India, England, America, his own
history
Mapping other Humanities courses
•
Children’s and Adolescent Literature: Martel’s Life of Pi, Rushdie’s Haroun and the
Sea of Stories, J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland, L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Katherine Paterson’s
Bridge to Terabithia, Rodman Philbrick’s The Last Book in the Universe, Francesca
Lia Block’s I Was a Teenage Fairy, Cornelia Funke’s Inkheart
•
Magical Realism: Martel’s Life of Pi, Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Roy’s
The God of Small Things, Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow, Toni
Morrison’s Beloved, Erna Brodber’s Louisiana
•
Comparative Literature (connections for survey courses, postcolonial literature):
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, and
Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s House of Glass; Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy
and Ngugi’s The River Between; Homer’s Odyssey, James Joyce’s Ulysses, and Derek
Walcott’s Omeros; the Mahabharata and Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel; Bhagavad
Gita and Nayaran’s The Vendor of Sweets
•
Diasporic: Morrison’s Beloved, Charles Johnson’s The Middle Passage, Walker’s
Possessing the Secret of Joy, Roy’s The God of Small Things, Mishra’s The Romantics,
Rushdie’s Fury, Naipaul’s The Mimic Men, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman
Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club
Infusing Sources
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Ashcroft, Bill, and Garesh Griffith, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in
Post-Colonial Literature (Routledge, 2002)
Discusses Naipaul’s The Mimic Men and Narayan’s The Vendor of Sweets
Appadurai, Arjun, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (U of
Minnesota P, 1996)
Ball, John Clement, Imagining London: Postcolonial Fiction and the Transnational
Metropolis (U of Toronto P, 2004)
Chapter: “London South-East: Metropolitan (Un)realities in Indian
Fiction”: Rushdie, The Mimic Men, The God of Small Things
Bhabha, Homi K., Nation and Narration (Routledge, 1990)
----,
The Location of Culture (Routledge, 1994)
Gokulsing, K. Moti, and Wimal Dissanayake, Popular Culture in Globalised India
(Routledge, 2009)
Chapter: Lothspeich, Pamela,“The Mahabharata’s Imprint on Contemporary
Literature and Film”
Kumar, Amitava, ed., Away: The Indian Writer as an Expatriate (Routledge, 2004)
Essays by Rushdie, Ghosh, Narayan, Naipaul, and Mishra
----, Bombay—London—New York (Routledge 2002)
Mishra, Vijay, The Literature of the Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the Diasporic
Imaginary (Routledge, 2007)
Nasta, Susheila, Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2004): idea of “Asian” Britain
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Nelson, Emmanuel S., Reworlding: The Literature of the Indian Diaspora
(Greenwood, 1992)
Ranasinha, Ruvani, South Asian Writers in Twentieth-Century Britain: Culture in
Translation (Oxford UP, 2007)
Singh, Amritjit, and Peter Schmidt, Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race,
Ethnicity, and Literature (U Press of Mississippi, 2000)
Introduction: “On the Borders between US Studies and Postcolonial Theory”
Williams, Patrick, and Laura Chrisman, Colonial Discourse/Post-Colonial Theory
(Columbia UP, 1994)