Been giving a fair amount of thought to what I would be teaching, now that I have some time to think about it while I’m not teaching. Some of the stuff I teach has been on my mind this week, in part because I’ve been talking about it and in part because of the piece by Saidiya Hartman in the New Yorker: “An Unnamed Girl, A Speculative History.” I thought how we use the word speculation for so much… is that because it does so much, or because we stay doing the most? Maybe “extrapolation” or “reflection” are better words for what it do.
Anyway, these two classes I’ve enjoyed revisiting a few times for English majors really place questions of Blackness, Diaspora, and historical consciousness at the center of understanding literature and culture. And they have a lot to do with speculation, without being all up in my speculative fiction.
Reading the Racial Past is a course I teach about post-civil rights historical fiction. We read:
- Beloved by Toni Morrison (and view the film)
- Sally Hemings by Barbara Chase-Riboud (pictured, here, is one of her sculptures from the Malcolm X steles series)
- Meridian by Alice Walker: read this review by *Marge Piercy*!
- King by Ho Che Anderson: a comics biography. Not quite historical fiction, but too significant to pass up. Dealing with the form in which the story’s told is a major key…
- Long Division by Kiese Laymon. I love.this.book.
…and many essays/chapters/excerpts. We usually watch more films, too. The questions central to the course come from the writings of Hayden White, Amy Elias, and Salamishah Tillet, so we read that stuff.
Another set of texts:
These are works I teach in a course called Modernity in Diaspora. As its title indicates, it’s animated by the thesis that Diaspora provides a spatial and historical context for the descriptive statement invoked by the notion of modernity. Right? So this is all super-visual. Maybe that says something about the ocularcentrism of modernity, but I’m not entirely sure I believe in that anymore. For sure, the material we work with in this class varies. I can say for sure there’s more to it than what I’m presenting here, because of course. For starters:
- Daughters of the Dust, directed by Julie Dash. Arthur Jafa, director of photography. Your fave could never. Unless this is your fave, in which case, congrats!
- The Return of Sara Baartman, directed by Zola Maseko. That still, depicting her reinterment, is just… it’s a stitch through the whole world.
- The Kingdom of this World, by Alejo Carpentier. We read some of Silencing the Past by Michel-Rolph Trouillot.
- Bellocq’s Ophelia by Natasha Trethewey. She really speaks for herself…