Submitted by adamore on Thu, 2005-03-10 21:53.News
USACLALS Newsletter
February 2005
When USACLALS was founded almost four years ago, the President at the time, Amritjit Singh (who has once again been elected to that position in the latest election that concluded February 7, 2005), described the vision of the organization and its objectives for research and pedagogy. We include an excerpt from his statement to rejuvenate our commitment to the work of USACLALS, which has gained a new urgency in the wake of 9/11 and subsequent events around the globe:
USACLALS . . . hopes to both generate and join the kind of dialogue between Postcolonial Studies and American Studies that is important at this juncture to growing conversations among U.S. scholars regarding cultural and literary studies.We welcome and celebrate the growing recognition that historical forces and theoretical paradigms cut across national boundaries and therefore demand focus on both internal and external borders in global and transnational contexts.And regardless of whether we work in Commonwealth literatures or diaspora studies or American Studies in its broadest meaning, the postcolonial and the neo-colonial intersect and collide in fascinating and complex ways.Issues of nation, gender, marginalization and liminality travel well from one location to another in our study today of culture and literature, even while they require sensitivity and attention to historical experiences in each location.
Promoting inter-linked perspectives on all Commonwealth literatures, African American and other U.S. ethnic literatures would help us to all illustrate and illuminate the new meaning and connection we at USACLALS seek in the ACLALS family. To quote from a 1979 interview Edward Said gave to Mark Bruzonsky, "[The] essentially European legacy of the Orient, which is principally embodied in the imperial careers of England and France, gets transferred to the United States, especially after World War II."But in the same interview, Said recognizes that "there is a genuine sense of idealism about America. It's perfectly possible to understand the same sense of idealism that people have toward the ideals of a republic and the revulsion from the practices of recent American governments. . . .And that’s perfectly possible within the American tradition of dissent."We at USACLALS honor both idealism and dissent.
I am both humbled and honored by my re-election and look forward to working with the new Executive Committee, which is diverse, strong, and appropriately spread throughout the U. S.
Let me begin by thanking all members of the outgoing Executive Committee, whose enthusiasm and commitment has kept USACLALS going despite some challenges and setbacks.I would like to single out the dedication and patience with which Terri Hasseler (Bryant University) has handled since the inception of USACLALS her demanding responsibilities as Secretary -Treasurer.In fact, two individuals will fill her big shoes in the new Executive—John Hawley (Santa Clara University) as Secretary, and Daniel M. Scott, III (Rhode Island College) as Treasurer. Both John and Daniel are familiar figures on USACLALS scene. You will recall Daniel’s hard work as Program Chair for our first conference in Rhode Island in May 2000; and John was our amiable host for the remarkable Second USACLALS Conference at Santa Clara University in April 2002.Please send your membership checks to Daniel and address all other queries to John.I expect Dr. Kamal D. Verma, the indefatigable editor of South Asian Review, to launch an energetic membership campaign in the weeks and months to come. Please urge your colleges and universities to support USACLALS as institutional members.
I am most appreciative of the grace under pressure that Rajini Srikanth, our outgoing Newsletter Editor, has always shown in producing most readable newsletters. Thank you, Rajini, for your service and best wishes for your future activities in the profession.We welcome Seodial Deena (East Carolina Univ.)as the Newsletter Editor.Thanks are also due to our Web Managers Sharon and Dwight Fisher of Lincoln, RI, who are currently enjoying (!)their new life as young parents of two lovely kids.Our best wishes and congratulations!
Several USACLALS members participated in the exciting 13th Triennial ACLALS conference in Hyderabad, the congenial multicultural city that was my home for several years in the mid-1970s.US chapter members present in Hyderabad included the following: Feroza Jussawalla, Robin Visel, Ketu Katrak, Behroze Shroff, Deepika Bahri, Pushpa Parekh, Karni Pal Bhati, Revathi Krishnaswamy., Victoria Chance, and Joseph McLaren.As you can see, we were a sizable and highly individualistic contingent.The hosts in India set new standards for quality programming, hospitality, and convivial evenings. Hats off to Meenakshi Mukherjee, Harish Trivedi, C. Vijayasree, and T. Vijay Kumar for a fine job done!
ACLALS has now moved to Canada and you can expect to attend the 14th Triennial ACLALS Conference in Canada in 2007.We extend our greetings and best wishes to the new ACLALS Chair, Ranjini Mendis (Kwantlen University College, Vancouver, BC) and her team, Victor Ramraj (U of Calgary) and Arun Praba Mukherjee (York University). Please check out website www.aclalas.org for news and activities.
Many of you are planning to attend the 3rd USACLALS conference, and we look forward to seeing you all at the Business meeting on Saturday, February 26, from 1.15 to 1.45 PM.
Whether or not you are at Savannah, we welcome your active participation in all USACLALS activities and suggestions regarding the next Conference. Please feel free to contact any one of us on the Executive.Please let me know if you and your colleagues would like to host the next USACLALS conference.
All announcements to be included in future newsletters should be sent to Seodial Deena, USACLALS’ recently elected newsletter editor. Seodial Deena’s email address is deenas@mail.ecu.edu
Members-at-Large: (1) Terri Hasseler, Bryant College; (2) Cynthia Leenerts, George Washington University; (3) Pradyumna S. Chauhan, Arcadia University; (4) Barbara Silliman, University of Rhode Island; (5) Karen Chow, Foothill-De Anza Community College; (6) Revathi Krishnaswamy, San Jose State University
Graduate Student Representatives: (1) Katy Howe, Rhode Island College; (2) Alice D'Amore, Purdue University; (3) Robin Fields, University of Virginia; (4) Weihsin Gui, Brown University; (5) Ubaldimir Guerra, East Carolina University.
At the December 2004 Modern Languages Association conference in Philadelphia, John Hawley, Secretary of USACLALS, chaired the following stimulating session:
Africa in India, India in Africa
(excerpted from the panelists’ abstracts)
1) Peter Kalliney: “When Was the Global? East African Literature and Transnational Theory”
In this paper, Kalliney uses The Gunny Sack, by Moyez Vassanji, to critique globalization as a narrative of commercial and intellectual progress.Many scholars see globalization theory as a natural successor to postcolonial studies, but this paper will question whether global reading strategies represent the logical next step for postcolonial theory.To this end, I will read The Gunny Sack's "global" narrative against the politics of Tanzanian colonial and contemporary history.
2) Amitava Kumar: “Where Gandhi Became Indian”
A screening from Kumar’s nearly-complete
documentary film "Dirty Laundry," this presentation contrasts Gandhi's brand of exploratory, cross-religious long-distance nationalism in South Africa with today's BJP-allied,often fundamentalist, ultranationalist devotion of the NRI's. In the section that Kumar excerpts from his film, an Indian South African guerrilla of the militant wing of the ANC during apartheid-era South Africa speaks of the experience of founding the first, and only, underground Indian cell and the process through which the group changed its name from "Gandhi unit" to "Ahmed Timol unit." Kumar polemically positions an active, political engagement with local oppression against the reactionary politics of nostalgia and middle-class guilt.
3) Gautam Premnath: “Sam Selvon and the Romance of Creolization”
The ideology of creolization is one of the most durable components of Caribbean national culture, providing societies like Trinidad, Jamaica, and Cuba with a distinctively Caribbean variety of national romance. Cultural critics like Shalini Puri and Viranjini Munasinghe have recently offered penetrating critiques of this official nationalist version of creolization,
demonstrating how it extols cultural combination while maintaining the social separation of these two racialized populations. Premnath discerns a similar logic at work in the writing of one of the most influential articulators of Trinidadian national culture, the novelist Sam Selvon. Premnath considers Selvon’s “Wartime Activities” (1957), a short story framed as an oral, dialogic performance before a rural Indo-Caribbean audience. Throughout his tale Selvon’s storyteller obliges this implied audience to undertake a precise calibration of ethnic difference—in effect, to measure Indian against African, one diaspora community against the other. Selvon’s story constructs Indian diasporic tradition as a counter-culture of postcolonial nationalism, within yet apart from the nation. Yet, as Premnath shows, the story also reveals a fundamental affinity between creolizing nationalism and diasporic exclusivity, grounding both in a logic of social and racial separation.
4) Jaspal Singh: “South Asian Africans and Indian Literature”
While a large presence of India in Africa is well documented, the presence of Africans in India has not produced any significant literature.[T]he presence of Africans in India before British imperialism is not reflected in many texts.One of the texts that do touch on this issue is the Bollywood film by Kamal Amrohi, Razia Sultan. History only acknowledges Yaqub, the Abyssinian slave lover of the Mughal empress queen of India, Razia (1236-1240), to depict the queen as a foolish and errant woman.It is only in the text of Amrohi that one sees Razia’s and Yaqub’s story reflected in contemporary literature. In this film we see Razia going against all odds to remain faithful to Yaqub in the face of aggression by her enemies.However, what is problematic about this romantic story is that the role of Yaqub is played by Dharmendra, a North Indian Punjabi, in a black face and a wig.One of the questions that this paper will address is: is there a significant presence of Africans in India?What about the Siddhis—South Asian Africans—of Gujarat? When and why did they land in India? Is their history well-known?
Malta, the venue of the next European ACLALS Triennial Conference, is not only a very attractive destination but also one that is, by virtue of its location halfway between Europe and Africa, highly suggestive of the unending dynamics of colonialism, ‘post’-colonialism, and neo-colonialism. The Malta Conference should therefore prove an ideal opportunity for revisiting such familiar issues as: the clash of civilizations brought about by colonialism, which forcibly linked disparate geographies under the aegis of imperial regimes; the affirmations of territoriality which often go by the name of post-colonialism, no matter how much these rely on implicit protocols of exclusion; and the contemporary emergence of an explicit neo-colonial (‘new world’) order, in which the uneven distribution of resources across the globe is justified in the name of self-righteous cultural affiliations of diverse denominations. On the other hand, in a more hopeful mood, ‘Malta’ and its complex history may also serve as an objective correlative for the utopian ideal of acknowledging a shared zone of mutual responsibility where all human subjects may be considered as partial insiders to the project of conceiving a common future.
The Conference theme, ‘Sharing Places’, thus strikes at the heart of contemporary experience while also allowing for the development of long-standing debates within ‘post’-colonial studies. Such a theme has numerous potential ramifications, which will be explored in a number of thematic sections dedicated to the following topics:
Frantz Fanon and the pitfalls of national consciousness
The sea and the erosion of cultural identity
Immigration as a challenge to the law of privilege (i.e., etymologically, ‘private law’)
Writing Europe (from an African or otherwise ‘external’ perspective)
From translation to bilingualism, or towards the sharing of mental space
Multidisciplinarity and the future of post-colonial theory
Feminism, patriarchy, and the limitations of gendered space
History as a collective site, historiography as a corrective swipe
Alexander's cross-cultural perspective and sense of global identity (gained from her childhood in India and the Sudan, and her adult life in New York City) infuses her poems. She writes about violence and civil strife, love, despair, and a hard-won hope in the midst of a post-September 11 world.
·John Hawley. Amitav Ghosh: An Introduction. Foundation Books, 2004.
This introduction to Ghosh's major writings, including all his novels and the collections of his various essays, develops the notion of the author as seeking to find a voice for the voiceless in history, and to define himself in his own terms rather than in those of the British Commonwealth.
·Brinda J. Mehta, Diasporic (Dis)locations: Indo-Caribbean Women Writers Negotiate the Kala Pani. Kingstown, Jamaica: University Press of the West Indies. 2004.
Indo-Caribbean women writers are virtually invisible in the literary landscape because of cultural and social inhibitions and literary chauvinism. Until recently, the richness and particularities of the experiences of these writers in the field of literature and literary studies were compromised by stereotypical representations of the Indo-Caribbean women that were narrated from a purely masculine or an Afrocentric point of view. Mehta’s book features the Indian women who braved the treacherous crossing of the Atlantic, or the kala pani, to Trinidad and Guyana and provided courage, determination, self-reliance and sexual independence to their literary granddaughters. These granddaughters in turn used the kala pani as the necessary language and frame of reference to position Indo-Caribbean female subjectivity, equating writing as a pubic declaration of one's identity and right to claim creative agency.
·Uma Parameswaran, Ed., At the Gates. Larkuma Press, 2004.
A collection of stories by 6 students in a creative writing course, as well as one by their teacher and editor, Uma Parameswaran. The stories are about death, darkness, drugs, violence and idealism.
Amritjit Singh and Daniel M. Scott III, eds.The Collected Writings of Wallace Thurman. Rutgers University Press, 2003.
This book is the definitive collection of the writings of Wallace Thurman (1902–1934), providing a comprehensive anthology of both the published and unpublished works of this bohemian, bisexual writer. Widely regarded as the enfant terrible of the Harlem Renaissance, Thurman was a leader among a group of young artists and intellectuals that included Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Aaron Douglas. Through the publication of magazines such as Fire!! and Harlem: A Forum of Negro Life, Thurman tried to organize the younger generation against the ideologies of the older generation of black leaders and intellectuals such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Benjamin Brawley. Thurman also left a permanent mark on the period through his prolific work as a novelist, playwright, short story writer, and literary critic.
·Amritjit Singh and Bruce G. Johnson, Eds. Interviews with Edward W. Said. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004. (hardcover and paperback).
In Interviews with Edward W. Said, the first collection of interviews with this powerful intellectual, Said reveals the displacements and conflicts in his Palestinian background, and the energies and concerns that have made him a shaper of public discourse. Covering encounters from 1972 to 2000, the book provides, for both the specialist and the general reader, an engaging introduction to Said's wide and disparate oeuvre and his insights that have made a considerable impact on the practices of many disciplines, including literature, anthropology, political science, international studies, peace studies, history, sociology, and music.
·Rajini Srikanth, The World Next Door: South Asian American Literature and the Idea of America. Temple University Press, 2004.
Drawing on the cosmopolitan sensibility of scholars like Anthony Appiah, Vinay Dharwadker, Martha Nussbaum, Bruce Robbins, and Amartya Sen, this book argues that to read the body of South Asian American writing justly, one must engage with the urgencies of places as diverse as Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, India, Burma, Pakistan, and Trinidad. Poets, novelists, and playwrights like Indran Amirthanayagam, Meena Alexander, Amitav Ghosh, Michael Ondaatje, Shani Mootoo, Amitava Kumar, Tahira Naqvi, and Sharbari Ahmed exhort North American residents to envision connectedness with inhabitants of other lands. These writers’ significant contribution to American literature and to the American imagination is to depict the nation as simultaneously discrete and entwined within the fold of other nations. The world out there arrives next door.
·Mark Stein, Black British Literature: Novels of Transformation. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, December 2004.
Mark Stein examines “black British literature,” centering on a body of work created by British-based writers with African, South Asian, or Caribbean cultural backgrounds. Linking black British literature to the bildungsroman genre, this study examines the transformative potential inscribed in and induced by a heterogeneous body of texts. Capitalizing on their plural cultural attachments, these texts portray and purvey the transformation of post-imperial Britain. Stein locates his wide-ranging analysis in both a historical and a literary context. He argues that a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approach is essential to understanding post-colonial culture and society. The book relates black British literature to ongoing debates about cultural diversity, and thereby offers a way of reading a highly popular but as yet relatively uncharted field of cultural production.
SAACLALS International Conference, July 10-13, 2005, at the University of Cape Town, South Africa
Rush 150-word abstracts for papers or panels.Deadline soon!!
For further information, immediately contact Prof. Rosemary Gray at rgray@postino.up.ac.za.
Our aim is to bring together people who use English as a primary means of communication and ask them to concentrate on the theme AFRICA IN LITERATURE. Communicating ideas, mythologies and dreams remains one of our most empowering human activities.In bringing people together from different cultures, generations, nationalities, perspectives and disciplines to concentrate on a theme like this one, we believe we encourage conversation, mutual exchange and hope in a time of global conflict. The exploration of ideas of Africa represented in many literatures is a rich topic for consideration.There is another powerful view of Africa as representing the writer’s very blood, bones and cells.
We hope such radically different understandings of Africa as represented in literature will stir up vigorous discussion. But Okri rightly concludes that “beneath the strife of our age, internecine warfare, tribal antagonisms, religious intolerance, racial violence, the disharmony of the sexes, beneath all these lurks the most ordinary discovery that we are human, and that life is holy.”
Papers addressing such topics as the following are invited: colonialism and post colonialism; History and its literary representations; prison experiences; civil war in Africa; Writing the nation; Gendered representations; representing Africa in letters/diaries/personalia/ biographical ways; Hegemonic narratives; Religious perspectives in the representations of Africa; diaspora; literary criticism: Africa in literary theory; Landscape: Land as motif; oral literature and storytelling.
