Recovering the Colonial, Beginning Again:
Among the many comments received about the early selections collected in The Heath Anthology of American Literature, the plaintive comment, even from early Americanists, about the number of so-called new writers represented there strikes me as most honest and forthright. Indeed, more than a few colleagues in the field have privately admitted that getting over the feeling of stupidity or ignorance is perhaps the biggest hurdle to preparing to teach these early writings. This is a feeling shared by the Heath editors. We feel insecure about seeing names of so many writers about whom we learned nothing when in graduate school and about whom we've learned little since. We remain constrained by our former experiences of success in an academic culture that accepted our white dominant texts, our discursive structures of proto-nationalism, our defensive insistence upon aesthetics and literariness. To some extent, it might be said that in attempting to reconstruct ourselves as teachers of multicultural early American materials we are metaphorically placed in the position of being others in our own land, of having to learn a language (and thus a way of thinking) that is different, new, and, for many faculty, alienating of our former selves.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In another context and speaking about literature of later eras, Toni Morrison has metaphorically called the narrowness of our conceptualizations about the effects of such cultural conditioning upon the study of American literature a form of playing in the dark. 7 For Morrison, as for Orlando Patterson and Valentin Mudimbe, among others, cultural definitions of self and nation, so long presumed to have been white and apart from questions of race/ethnicity, are illusory if not conceived reflexively as a function of racial/ethnic differentiation8 Morrison identifies this as the pattern of thinking about racialism in terms of its consequences on the victim of always defining it asymmetrically from the perspective of its impact on the object of racist policy and attitudes. 9 Put another way, the conception of double consciousness articulated by W.E.B. DuBois suggests the self-consciousness of the racialized subject and the lack of self-consciousness on the part of a racist society. In classes where students have been most thoughtful on these issues, some have talked clearly about and found places in texts (Roger Williams and William Byrd work well here, as does Sarah Kemble Knight) that evidence the anxieties of such cultural dominance. They recognize and want to discuss the burdens that dominance places not just on the groups demarcated as outside the circle but upon those who are supposedly free to speak and act. For those who might feel doubtful or uncertain about entering these matters in the classroom, I can only say that my experiences with students and these materials have been provocative, culturally informed, and instructive in literary terms both for my students and for me. I have found no better context in which to address the obsessive interest in the artificiality of neoclassical poetry and the obvious need for narration (in the popularity of novelistic discourse) in the late eighteenth century, as, post-Revolution, white Americans were grappling with the loss of British national colonial identity and the necessity of averting social chaos. Once they understand the anxiety that lack of place might have presented to whites, students are less surprised at the vehemence with which federal policy was discussed and scientific racism implemented. They are also more self-conscious about how these policies have brought them a legacy of problems which we all, now, must face.
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 7356
Approximate Pages = 29 (250 words per page double spaced)
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