Roundtable by Kate Ozment
Introduction—Talking Back to the Enlightenment: Practicing Anti-Racist Teaching and Learning in Eighteenth-Century British Literature (Roundtable)
DOI: 10.32655/srej.2021.2.2.3
Cite: Ozment, Kate. 2021. “Introduction—Talking Back to the Enlightenment: Practicing Anti-Racist Teaching and Learning in Eighteenth-Century British Literature (Roundtable),” Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment 2 (2): 11-13.
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Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing begins with the story of two eighteenth-century Akan sisters—Effia and Esi—as they stand symbolically above and below a grate in a castle in Cape Coast. The women are half-sisters who never meet and are physically joined only in that moment, unknown to one another, before being separated by an ocean. Above the grate, Effia has just married James Collins, the white British governor of the fort. Effia lives in relative comfort but is separated from her family, culture, and practices and must confront the contradictory dehumanization of and attraction to Black Akan women.1 Navigating this precarious world is hazardous for Effia and the other wives, including Eccoah, who notes, “There are women down there [in the dungeons] who look like us, and our husbands must learn to tell the difference.”2 Below the grate, Esi has been sold into slavery and sits in muck and filth. She and the other women are stacked on one another, raped and assaulted, and beaten until they are moved to ships for transport to the Caribbean. While Effia shudders at the fates of the women, termed “cargo,” below,3 Esi is unable to imagine anything other than the horror of her present, which she refers to as the “Now.”4 The destruction of Esi’s conscious ties to her history dominoes through the generations: her daughter Ness does not learn how to speak Twi or understand its ties to the Akan,5 and Ness’s grandson H does not receive a full name because his mother committed suicide when she was kidnapped and forced into slavery. Yet through the novel, Gyasi explores not only the destruction of the slave system but also the ability of diasporic Akan people to persist, thrive, and eventually come to a place of healing and return.
Among other things, Gyasi’s novel is evocative for readers of eighteenth-century English literature. In a weaving narrative, Gyasi fictionalizes the stories that we cannot tell because of the destruction of family ties and the subsequent lack of documentation or English interest in printing stories of Black resilience.6 Homegoing is resonant with another modern example of engagement with Enlightenment legacies, the 1619 Project. The name focuses on the date the first slave ship traded in North America, and the project combines journalism with creative pieces where authors like Eve L. Ewing, Reginald Dwayne Betts, and Jesmyn Ward reimagine key moments in Black history. The project’s lead author, Nikole Hannah-Jones, explores slavery’s impact on American culture and Black Americans’ contributions to democracy. This focus has unsurprisingly been controversial because centering Black excellence in American culture clashes with national mythmaking rooted in American white supremacy, but it has also won Hannah-Jones a Pulitzer prize.[7] Both the nonfiction and creative pieces work well with Enlightenment literatures; as an illustrative example, Ewing’s reflection on the Black poet Phillis Wheatley powerfully centers the humanity of an ambiguous author.
Homegoing and the 1619 Project frame a literature course on the British Enlightenment at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, and provide a framework for “talking back” to historical literatures. The course’s syllabus features Anglo-American representations of Black and Indigenous lives alongside writings by Black and Indigenous authors. The course also asks students to explore how Enlightenment ideologies were simultaneously responsible for the language of natural rights and equality and the justification for mass enslavement and genocide. For its theoretical grounding, the course pulls from Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic and its subsequent discourse and connects this field to resonant iterations in Indigenous studies with Jace Weaver’s Red Atlantic and Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies.8 We use language about “contact zones” common in colonial studies as we position the work in the course as British identity globally constructed.9
Students interleave reading representations of Black and Indigenous peoples in Oroonoko (1688), The Female American (1767), Obi; or, Three-Finger’d Jack (1800), and The Woman of Colour (1808) with writing by Black and Indigenous authors. Some of these latter texts include Samson Occom’s A Short Narrative of My Life (1768), Ukawsaw Gronniosaw’s Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars (1772), Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects (1773), Ottobah Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (1787), and Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789). Students contextualize these works with traditional secondary literary scholarship and contemporary perspectives: Gyasi’s novel and the 1619 Project. With Gyasi, students find that the novel seems to make explicit what many wish these texts had the ability to do in the period: articulate resistance to dehumanization in a form and language they recognize. With the 1619 Project, students were better able to look back at Wheatley’s careful coding and Cugoano’s meticulous spiritual arguments and recognize these authors’ intentions through the double alienation of eighteenth-century aesthetics and white supremacy operating through print norms.10
The following roundtable features the work of four students who completed this course during the Spring 2020 semester. In a final project, students are asked to think about Homegoing and the 1619 Project in conversation with their reading of eighteenth-century literature. The prompt is open ended and allows students to make any connections they want between eighteenth-century texts and our contemporary perspectives: personal, pedagogical, interpretive, and so forth. These featured essays explore how contemporary perspectives could “talk back” to the past, helping modern readers understand implicit or obscured stories. Gyasi’s text is fiction, and Ewing’s “1773” poem about Wheatley hinges on the word imagine,11 but both works provide catharsis and interpretation as they center a perspective—Black voices—that can feel muted in historical documents.
Like many courses during the Spring 2020 semester, this class was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic with a move to virtual instruction in March, and as most of our students live in the Los Angeles area, we sheltered in place for most of 2020. Because of decreased contact hours and where we were in completing the course readings, the course pivoted to focus more on Black writings in its last weeks. Given the extreme challenges of researching during a global pandemic that had shut down the university’s library, the final project did not require extensive engagement with secondary sources outside of those read in the class. Instead, the prompt asked students to respond personally and thoughtfully to primary sources—historical and contemporary—to center their own voices and perspectives and to articulate their responses to these narratives. Shortly after the course went virtual, the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many others prompted months of protests that resonated with our coursework and increased the exigency of this work.12
In response, these students revised their essays, thinking carefully about the relationship between Enlightenment literatures (broadly defined) and our present discussions about race and equality in the United States and reflecting on the purpose of learning this literature during a global pandemic. Their perspectives, lives, and goals vary widely. They are all women of color with varying ties to American and other cultural, religious, and ethnic identities, and these backgrounds inform their work in different ways. Mindy Lin is a graduate student in English literature, Jasmine Nevarez is a recent graduate of the English BA program with intentions to go into academic curriculum development in California, and Nourhan and Jessica Valenzuela are seniors finishing their degrees in the English BA program. While each differs in their career goals and in their approach to the topic, they all consider how engaging with Enlightenment literature better prepares us to confront the challenges of the present. They think about the legacy of British constructions of identity, humanity, and power and how these constructions have been sedimented in the American school system; what it means to be women of color reading literature that dehumanizes their identities; and what our responsibility is as academics to engage with these literatures through an anti-racist pedagogy.
ENDNOTES
[1] This contradiction has been explored by Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1–14.
[2] Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing (New York: Vintage Books, 2016), 25.
[3] Gyasi, Homegoing, 17.
[4] Gyasi, Homegoing, 31.
[5] Gyasi, Homegoing, 84.
[6] See Simon Gikandi, “Rethinking the Archive of Enslavement,” Early American Literature 50, no. 1 (2015): 81–102, https://doi.org/doi:10.1353/eal.2015.0020.
[7] We feel no need to rehash what is largely a baseless controversy here and give it a greater platform, but addressing the controversy in class was a useful and important part of the lesson.
[8] Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Jace Weaver, The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000-1927 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014); and Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, Second Edition (London, New York, and Dunedin: Zed Books and Otago University Press, 2012).
[9] Kate Ozment would like to acknowledge several individuals for their influence on the development of this class. Shelby Johnson, Megan Peiser, Kerry Sinanan, and Lise-Hélène Smith provided a sounding board for its creation and execution. She has been inspired by many of the generous people using the #bigger6 and #litpoc hashtags, and she is particularly thankful for teaching models from Eugenia Zuroski and the Eighteenth-Century Fiction syllabus repository. Despite this advice, there were faults with this class; they are only hers, however.
[10] For more, see Joseph Rezek, “The Racialization of Print,” American Literary History 32, no. 3 (2020): 417–45 and Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein, eds., Early African American Print Culture (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).
[11] Eve L. Ewing, “1773,” The New York Times, August 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/african-american-poets.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur.
[12] With this article, the authors stand in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and its work for racial justice in the United States.
