Multicultural Literature in the Classroom: Politics and Pedagogy

Session Coordinator: Billy Clem
Waubonsee Community College
billyclem1@yahoo.com

Identities in Translation: Teaching Invisible Man and Ferdydurke in the Same Course

John Carlos Rowe in an article published in PMLA (January 2003) defines several uses of the term “transnationalism” in contemporary scholarship. According to him, in addition to exposing weaknesses of national sovereignties and geopolitical borders, “transnationalism” entails criticism of “historically specific modern or postmodern practices of globalizing production, marketing, distribution, and circulation” (78). Presenting a critical view on globalization, “transnationalism” at the same time explores counterhegemonic strategies practiced by diasporas or accompanying migrations in the new economic world system.  

Strategies of resistance towards homogenizing values, imposed by colonialisms, imperialisms and neocolonialisms on the twentieth century identities, formed one of the points of focus in the undergraduate course on “Identity in Contemporary Literary Studies,” which I taught at Illinois State University in the Fall of 2003. My course examined issues of identity in texts from five different countries ( U.S., Great Britain, Poland, Sudan, Cuba) as well as in a selection of international hip-hop. Although, in my presentation I intend to include a brief overview of the course, I will concentrate my discussion mainly on my experience of teaching two novels: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and a Polish avant-garde novel Ferdydurke (1938) by Witold Gombrowicz. Although written in different social and political contexts, both novels expose the constructed nature of identity, and show limitations placed on human subjectivity by biases and expectations of social environments. Interestingly, protagonists of both novels struggle to define their identity in relation to the models of identity - in both instances labeled as “American” – supported by the ideologies of the dominant cultures in their countries. While Invisible Man resists the supremacy of white male identity as a member of an oppressed minority group, the protagonist of Ferdydurke resists American modernism, which threatens his subjectivity as a European on the one hand and as a person who rejects any illusion of integrated self, on the other.

Juxtaposing my strategies of teaching the two novels, I will devote particular attention to the issues of translation in a transnational literature course. Broadening the concept of translation to include, apart from its literal meaning, also larger problems of understanding and interpretation across different discursive traditions, I will talk about my classroom practices of examining how Ellison and Gombrowicz translate “the American identity” into the context of African-American and Polish/European experiences respectively. However, I will also discuss the problems of teaching Ferdydurke as a text translated into English and I will present the ways of familiarizing students with what Lawrence Venuti calls “the remainder,” textual effects that work only in the target language. Finally, following Simon Gikandi’s view of teaching itself as translation, I will discuss my attempts to encourage students to “translate” the two novels into their own experience. In this discussion, I will refer to Gayatri Spivak’s understanding of translation as advancement of “the intimacy with difference” and will analyze my use of personal reflective assignments as ways of enhancing such intimacy between students and the texts “in need of translation.”  

Katarzyna Jakubiak
Illinois State University
kijakub@ilstu.edu  

Crossing Categorical Boundaries with Sadakichi Hartmann 

In H.L Mencken’s American Mercury (1926) Sadakichi Hartmann is described as: “A fusion of Jap and German, the ghastly experiment of an Occidental on the person of an Oriental. Sublime, ridiculous, impossible.” Critics continue to be fascinated with the half-Japanese, half-German Hartmann (1867-1944), moving beyond negative descriptions of his biracial heritage; however, he and his work have proven (for the most part) “impossible” to categorize. No doubt this is due to Hartmann’s complex biography and artistic versatility. Throughout his life, Hartmann crossed many cultural and artistic borders. He was born on Deshima Island in the harbor of Nagasaki in 1867, the son of a German father and Japanese mother. Soon after his mother’s death in 1868, the infant Sadakichi and his older brother, Taru, were sent to Hamburg, Germany to be raised by a wealthy uncle. At fourteen (after a falling out with his father), Sadakichi was sent to the United States where at the age of 27 (in 1894) he would be naturalized a U.S. citizen.

Alternating roles as actor, artist, dancer, writer, critic, and impresario, Hartmann crossed the borders of many disciplines as well. He is best known today for the essays on art and photography he wrote during the early 20 th century. His professional ties to well-known artists and writers have also brought him notoriety. Hartmann had a close albeit contentious relationship with Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946), one of America's most important and influential modernist photographers. He served as an informal secretary to Walt Whitman and helped to found Mother Earth with Emma Goldman. Gertrude Stein remarked that “Sadakichi is singular, never plural,” and Ezra Pound wrote: “If one had not been oneself, it wd. have been worthwhile being Sadakichi.” Hartmann’s name is associated with icons of popular culture as well. He wrote a series of articles about Hollywood in the 30s, corresponded with Charlie Chaplin and appeared as the court magician in Douglas Fairbanks' Thief of Baghdad (1923).

Despite these enticing associations, Hartmann has yet to be fully recuperated and analyzed by critics of Asian American literature. But not for lack of trying. Their attempts, however, have tended to impede an understanding of Hartmann's oeuvre. The tendency to emphasize Hartmann’s personal experience with and awareness of racism suggests that what binds Asian Americans together is (to borrow words from Trinh Minh-ha) "a sociological notion of the 'sameness' of their oppression"; it presents Asian American as a category in opposition to and outside of Western mainstream culture and society. While this definition acts as a mode of intervention into a particularly oppressive discourse, the limitations of the category become obvious when trying to analyze work as diverse as Hartmann's. Thus, this paper argues that the complexity of Hartmann’s life and work calls for a different model of criticism, one based in contextual, rather than categorical analysis. This will draw out Hartmann’s unique voice and contribution while also emphasizing the vibrant interplay (rather than separation) of cultures and genres associated with him.

Linda Trinh Moser
Southwest Missouri State University
ltm806f@smsu.edu

“When You Start Bombing the Brown Races of the World, You’re an Englishman”: Teaching The English Patient as Multiculturalist/Postcolonialist Text  

Over the past three years, I have been developing and teaching a capstone course for English majors for my department. It is meant to provide students “the opportunity to consolidate their learning within the major, and to connect it with larger frames of inquiry. Through its exploration of a special topic, the course asks students to reflect upon the ways of knowing that they have developed as English majors.” Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient has been one of our texts each year, and each time we work through it, I repeatedly finding myself bemused by how Ondaatje, himself Sri Lankan, managed to write such a postcolonial and, even more surprising, such a multiculturally resonant text with while focusing on—primarily--white characters. This text provides a wonderful opportunity for exposing, shifting, and re-understanding our frameworks of thought and for helping students think about what it means on an everyday life level to be colonized, or the child of the colonized, or the representative of an “Other” culture—and what it means for one’s individual identity to be a member of a nation  

Ondaatje brings four war ravaged voices together in a similarly war torn villa in Italy in 1945. The novel narrates itself more through a series of images than a traditional plot. We first know the characters as the nurse, the patient, the thief, and the sapper. As Hana, Almasy, Caravaggio, and Kip come to have names, they are identified as Canadian, Hungarian, Italian Canadian, and Indian Sikh. Yet my students—quite homogeneous, and often quite concerned over whether there’s a character they can “identify” with—do identify with these characters and their present and past lives as lovers, students (Kip is particularly interesting here, with his allusiveness to Kipling’s Kim), and family (e.g., Hana’s series of father figures). (Notably, American characters are peripheral at most; British are all at one remove—i.e., Kip’s partner Hardy, Almasy’s lover Katharine Clifton.) Almasy (“the English patient”) articulates what becomes a central desire of the text—“Erase the family name! Erase nations! We are deformed by nation-states.” When word of Hiroshima and Nagasaki reach them, however, race and nation reassert themselves and we as readers are left to question the inevitability of such identifications as race and nation, and to grapple with the similarly powerful personal connection that keeps Kip and Hana always in each other’s peripheral vision, though miles and years apart. As we read The English Patient, we discuss postcolonial theory, because, while the novel fits the rubric only very loosely in terms of setting, character, and plot, it provides a rich avenue for pondering some of the key philosophical positions of postcolonial and multicultural thought.  

Kathryn West
Bellarmine University
kwest@bellarmine.edu