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Questioning Politics at the Fall Graduate Symposium on Postcolonial Women's Writing
This fall, the US Ethnic/Postcolonial Studies Area Group hosted its first Graduate Student Symposium on Postcolonial Women's Writing. The papers presented came from Pranav Jani's "Postcolonial Literature of Women Authors" class last spring, which focused on novels written by African and Indian women in the last fifty years. Four graduate students from the OSU English department presented papers at the symposium, dealing with issues of narration, characterization, colonization, and globalization.
Gina Gemmel discussed Shamsie's diasporic novel Kartography, which explores the ramifications of Pakistan's 1971 civil war for even wealthy elites who glide above the corruption, violence, and religious intolerance that characterize Pakistani life. Gemmel pointed out that despite the self-consciousness Shamsie demonstrates about elites' need to be politically conscious and active, the protagonist's failure to make an issue of the violence non-elite Pakistani women faced in the 1970s is a fundamental ethical failing of the story. Gemmel used examples of the novel's off-hand mentions of the violence lower-class women face to argue that silences about violence toward women aren’t symbolic, representing the repression of dissenting discourses in Pakistani society. Instead, Shamsie's failures to focus the reader's attention on these mentions points to the novel's failure to expose the class-based nature of the threat violence poses to women in Pakistan.
Dylan Canter's reading of Roy's The God of Small Things, which is set in the rural town of Ayemenem in southern India in the 1980s and early 2000s, questions the whether the radical sexuality Roy's novel is notorious for extends to its homosexual characters. The heterosexual relationships in the novel explicitly rebel against class- and gender-based oppression in Indian society. However, Dylan argues, the two homosexual relationships where adult men prey on young boys questions whether sexuality in the novel should always be seen as erotic and liberating. Although Roy condemns the contemporary situation of sexual abuse her novel depicts, the older man from the other relationship assumes the position of a historical lover, and his home becomes the refuge for oppressed children and lovers. Canter reads Roy's uncomplicated embrace of the historical pedophile as lover as the novel's failure to complicate the homosexual relationships she depicts.
Based on her reading of the first two novels in Zimbabwean author Dangarembga's trilogy, Nervous Conditions and The Book of Not, Candice Pipes traces the progress African literature has made from trying to understand abuse of the African person to an attempt to overcome that suffering. Pipes focuses on the difficulty Dangarembga has moving her female protagonist, Tambu, from victimization to empowerment. To accomplish this progress, Dangarembga is forced to make a gigantic narrative leap in the last page of Nervous Conditions, glossing over decades of Tambu's life to transform her in a matter of sentences from an agentless girl to a self-reliant woman in possession of her own history. Considering Nervous Conditions alongside its sequel, The Book of Not, published nearly two decades later, helps Pipes fill in some of the gaps in the story, but the political and ideological shifts Tambu undergoes in The Book of Not detract from Nervous Conditions' critique of the structural oppression of women face from traditional as well as Western practices and in both colonial and postcolonial Zimbabwe. Pipes' assessment is that Dangarembga still has a lot of ground to cover, ideologically and plot-wise, in the final novel in order to produce a trilogy with both political and narrative value.
Jen Herman examined the significance of physical spaces in The God of Small Things. She argues that Roy's depictions of the natural landscape and sites of human development in Ayemenem are political, not merely aesthetic. Herman traces Roy's description of the geographical effects of British colonization and contemporary globalization, arguing that Roy's narration of the damage colonization and global capitalism have inflicted on the land provides a political critique—via the environment—of the damage inflicted by colonial and global forces.
Professor Pranav Jani said he was prompted to organize the symposium as a forum for these students to present their work by the highly original work the students in his spring postcolonial women's literature class did. This symposium is part an effort by the US Ethnic and Postcolonial Studies Area Group to promote research and discussion in the field by encouraging graduate students to expand and share research they conducted in coursework to "create genuine intellectual communities" at OSU, Jani explained. In the future, the US Ethnic and Postcolonial Studies Area Group hopes to host more forums and use various models of intellectual exchange, including, in addition to graduate student forums, joint graduate/professor presentations and "in-house" exchanges of ideas between faculty members in US Ethnic and Postcolonial Studies.
