My friends and I often play the board game Settlers of Catan. If you are familiar with the game, you know that it is an harmless way to pass an evening with good company... or is it? The last game we played I thought, "wait a minute. Isn't it likely that an island as bountiful as Catan would have indigenous peoples inhabiting it?" My roadbuilding took on a whole new meaning...
I mention this mostly as a joke, but it is an honest feeling that has emerged in me (I hope) as a result of exposure to decolonizing discourse.
Two quotes stood out from me from Appleman's book this week. The first is from Appleman herself, who states that "Africa and East Asia [were] the primary geographic targets of European colonialism" (p. 88). This is a curious claim. It certainly makes one wonder why the Americas are excluded from the list, considering the largest ever genocide of indigenous peoples took place in the "New World." Only a few paragraphs further down the page, Appleman writes of a "Western society that wishes to make peace with its own history but is unwilling to acknowledge its own exercise of idealogical suppression." It seems by omitting the colonizing of Amerindians from her list, Appleman herself is committing a form of ideological suppression.
The second passage that caught my attention was quoted from Peter Barry:
"If we claim that great literature has a timeless and universal significance, we thereby demote or
disregard cultural, social, regional, and national differences in experience and outlook, preferring
instead to judge all literatures by a single, supposedly 'universal' standard." (p. 89)
When reading this, I immediately thought of reading To Kill a Mockingbird in high school English class. For me, this novel simply did not connect with my experience. I had no shortage of exposure to racism (although never the subjective experience) growing up in the inner city of Saskatoon. However, this experience was not reflected in the pages of Harper Lee's novel. The racism I observed in "the alphabets" of Saskatoon in the 1990s did not connect with the racism described in 1930s Alabama. The context of oppression makes these cases fundamentally different. Moreover, reading the text through a postcolonial lens can change Atticus finch from a noble, omniscient father, to another bearer of the white man's burden, saving those who cannot save themselves with the power of superior white intellect.
Throughout Deeper Reading, Gallagher references the "universal truths" (p. 39, for example) that must be uncovered when reading literature. The term "universal truths" always makes me cringe, not only because I do not believe there are universal truths that are pan cultural, but also because the alleged existence of "universal truths" has lead the vanguard of justifications for brutal and enduring colonization.
It is interesting and valuable that you have taking the postcolonial theory further than a lens that is to be used when reading literature. I am familiar with the game Settler of Catan and this was a great example of how there is so much more to deconstruct. In regards to your experience with "To Kill a Mockingbird", I think that there is a danger of picking texts for students that can be unfamiliar to their own experiences. On one hand we want our students to be exposed to works that present ideas and worlds that are different from their own; however there is the danger that students might not see a bigger picture from these texts or cannot connect the information with their prior knowledge. I find that the literature that I studied in High school that had themes of colonialism and racism were also in worlds other than my own. It is not that these works are not valuable but I do think that students in Canada would benefit from works that incorporated Aboriginal perspectives and Canadian colonialism. As I am learning how to chose literature to introduce to students I am finding that it is important to incorporate a variety, in this case I agree that it is important to remember how the contexts of oppression make the stories very different for different groups of people.
ReplyDeleteI was just playing Catan and had the exact same idea. My once-harmless exploitation of mineral resources and monopolization of new islands took on a sinister hue. Good stuff!
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