[This is part of a continuing series of posts on a class I teach at Plymouth State University, "The Outsider". I am one of many people who teach the course, and each instructor fits their own ideas and interests into a fairly general catalogue description. All the posts related to this one can be found via the Outsider label. Eventually, I'll even update the course's website, since it's now completely out of date.]
The
last time I blathered on about my ideas for The Outsider, I was still a few weeks away from having to order the books for the class, and so the syllabus was still very much in flux. I hadn't even plotted it out day by day, so I didn't know if I could fit in all the various books I was thinking about fitting in.
After reading my post, the great and glorious
Aaron Bady sent me a note, since much of what I was thinking about -- representations of the idea of "Africa" in colonial and then post-colonial fiction -- was stuff he's spent a lot of time studying. I felt a little embarrassed, because he actually knows what he's talking about, and I'm just following yet another of my many obsessions (really, I should rename this blog The Dilettante). But this obsession has been with me for at least a decade, and though there have been years in that time when I've not indulged it, it always comes back, and whenever it does it comes back stronger than before. (Actually, no. The strongest moment was a period of about three days when I was determined to visit and analyze the entire inventory of every bookstore in Nairobi. That was a period of temporary insanity. It
began innocently and miraculously, but then...)
Anyway, Aaron made a marvelous suggestion: "What about Tarzan?"
Tarzan is something Aaron knows a bit about, and more importantly, he's thought about Tarzan using just the sorts of templates and questions I want to use to think about that iconic guy. Aaron kindly sent me a paper he's working on about the Tarzan image and phenomenon, and I promptly plundered it for references and started burrowing (and Burroughsing ... ugh, sorry) around in the Plymouth State library, the Dartmouth library,
Google Books, and, when desperate or particularly intrigued, various used book dealers.
My basic concept of the course is one I soon discovered is discussed in detail in a wonderful book,
Artificial Africas: Colonial Images in the Times of Globalization by Ruth Mayer. Or, rather, Mayer writes about some of the ideas I'll be using during the first half of the course: How, for instance, do people who come into the place they (or their authors) think of as Africa then represent that idea of Africa to their audiences? Or, to make it more obvious how the course material and course title go together: What happens when outsiders come in and start telling stories about the place they've come into? Do the stories they tell work to assuage their feelings of outsiderness, or even to reconfigure them as the
insiders and the people who are natives as the
outsiders? (With a colonialist mentality, is
everything outside Europe or the USA? And so no matter where they are, will a European or American always be, or at least assume themselves to be, an insider?) And then, in the second half of the course, we'll turn things around a bit and look at other perspectives -- the empire writing back, to use the familiar postcolonial phrase. Finding ways for the silenced to speak, the erased to be recovered. For the insiders who have been represented as outsiders by colonialism to reclaim their insider status. (Or, I will ask the students eventually, is the binary itself too limiting? What does it hide from us?)