Fall 2024 Teaching: Virginia Woolf (Grad Seminar)

Short Description: 

Virginia Woolf is a towering figure of the modern novel. She is also a highly influential and accomplished essayist and philosopher, whose arguments continue to be influential to feminism, queer studies, medical humanities, and critiques of militarism, imperialism,  and industrialized capitalism to the present day. This course will do a deep dive into Woolf's fiction and nonfiction, from her early short stories to major novels like Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Orlando, as well as long nonfiction essays, including A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas. Attention will be paid to Woolf's engagement with major historical events (the two World Wars, the advent of women's suffrage, and colonialism/Empire) as well as her literary milieu (the Bloomsbury movement). Various critical lenses for reading Woolf's writing will be introduced at appropriate moments, including feminist and queer theory, psychoanalysis, and medical humanities scholarship, especially linked to Woolf's representations of mental illness (depression, bipolar disorder).

Spring Teaching: Immigrants and Refugees

(I wrote this up for an informal talk at Christ Church Neighborhood House in Philadelphia. I ended up not using much of the actual text of it since the event was a more informal, salon-type conversation. Thanks to Colleen Clemens for inviting me.) 

I’ve been teaching a first-year writing course called “Nation of Immigrants” this spring with a combination of literary texts and films and a strong non-fiction component emphasizing refugees. Earlier in the course we read books like John Okada’s No-No Boy, Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus, and T.C. Boyle’s The Tortilla Curtain, to open up a space of conversation about different immigrant histories and experiences. What are some of the dilemmas immigrant communities face as they follow the path towards acculturation into the American mainstream? What is lost and what is gained along the path to becoming an American?

We used the Boyle novel, which was published in the wake of the Proposition 187 debates in California, as an opening to talk about the huge and yawning problem of America’s undocumented immigrant population. I had the students read debates about immigration in the press at that time (including op-eds by Governor Pete Wilson and others); it was remarkable to see how much overlap there is between what was being said then and what is being said about undocumented immigrants now. I also showed the students Jose Vargas’ documentary, Documented, to give them an example of an undocumented immigrant who looks and sounds a lot like themselves. And we of course talked about how the Presidential candidates have been discussing the issue of undocumented immigrants in the current election cycle.

In the last few weeks of the course we’ve been focusing on refugees. I built the unit around the Mariel Boatlift of 1980, a remarkable event where 125,000 Cuban migrants entered the U.S. without documentation or prior approval, and were immediately granted parole (parole: temporary legal status and work authorization; the first step towards permanent residency). The vast majority of them would later be granted green cards under the Cuban Adjustment Act – a policy which has enabled hundreds of thousands of Cubans to come to the U.S. and gain legal status without the same kinds of resistance experienced by undocumented immigrants from other national backgrounds. While we talked about this unique event in class, I also gestured to my students about the contrast between the American response to this extraordinary influx of immigrants in 1980 and our current response to the prospect of admitting increased numbers of Syrian refugees fleeing the devastating conflict in their home country.

"The Classroom is a Public"

The following is a shortened / excerpted version of a keynote address I gave at the Literature and Social Justice (LSJ) graduate conference held at Lehigh this past weekend (see details here). The topic of this year's LSJ conference was "Public Humanities," and I wrote this to address that particular topic. 

Many of my colleagues and students know me as an enthusiast for social media but in truth I have grown increasingly ambivalent about these services as tools for social transformation. I felt misgivings about giving a boosterish talk that would have aimed to show everyone how great it is to be on Twitter, Tumblr, and various blogs. Finding publishing success via social media and mainstream venues like Salon.com is highly dependent on market forces and ratings/rankings structures that quantify -- or economize -- the fundamental mechanics of communication online. While doing this kind of writing can be very rewarding, writing for commercial venues and ranking-based social media will not, by itself, resolve the "crisis in the humanities." In my talk, I tried a different tack: instead of encouraging attendees at the conference to retrain themselves to be more "public" than they already are, I argued that teaching -- something we're already doing, but don't always value -- is a very important way in which we all already engage with a non-specialist public. What's more, humanities teaching in particular plays an important role in helping to create the next generation of questioning citizens. 

As mentioned, these are excerpts from the longer talk. If anyone would like to see the full text of the talk, please feel free to contact me. 

* * * 

The Classroom is a Public

1. The Idea of the Public Is In Crisis

It’s customary for talks like this to begin with a discussion of how the “humanities are in crisis.” We’ve heard that phrase a lot -- maybe a little too much -- and academics writing in public venues have become very skilled at diagnosing the causes of that problem. And my talk today will speak to at least some facets of what’s ailing the humanities and what might be done to better defend and advocate for the kind of work we do. But I want to start somewhere else: with the stipulation that the idea of the public is in crisis.

In his classic book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Jurgen Habermas put forward the idea of a modern bourgeois public sphere as an intermediary between the private space of individuals and families, and the state.

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Habermas’ idea of the public sphere has been widely and persuasively critiqued, and I’m not too strongly attached to the ins and outs of his argument, especially as pertaining to the putative decline of the public sphere. (Among other things, it seems strange that the era of the public sphere he talks about was one in which women and people of color were by and large excluded at the very period when he claims the public sphere was most effective.) That said, Habermas continues to be helpful in giving us a vision of what a public sphere might look like, where we might find it, and why we might want it. We find it in evidence in a free and independent press, in public spaces where citizens of different socioeconomic strata can engage in free and open debate about pressing issues, and in institutions that are designed to support and sustain it: museums, public libraries, civic centers, coffee houses -- and yes, universities.

Another political theorist who may take us further in terms of providing a useful way of understanding the present-day crisis in the public sphere might be Wendy Brown; her recent book, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, explores the triumph of neoliberal ideology. For Brown,

[N]eoliberalism transmogrifies every human domain and endeavor, along with humans themselves, according to a specific image of the economic. All conduct is economic conduct; all spheres of existence are framed and measured by economic terms and metrics, even when those spheres are not directly monetized. In neoliberal reason and in domains governed by it, we are only and everywhere homo oeconomicus, which itself has a historically specific form. (Brown, 10-11)

Digital Teaching Notes: The "Harlem Shadows" Collaborative Project

This fall, students in the Intro to DH class that Ed Whitley and I co-taught produced a pretty wonderful collaborative digital project they decided to call “Harlem Echoes,” a version of Claude McKay’s Harlem Shadows oriented to a broad, public readership. This project was produced in response to an assignment that I generated for them with help and feedback from Chris Forster and Roopika Risam along the way. The students had some technical help from staff members in Lehigh’s Center for Digital Scholarship. 

This is the project the students in the class produced:

http://harlemshadows.wordpress.com

Major features of the site include:

--Two presentations of the poems in Harlem Shadows, one version that corresponds to the poems in the order in which they were originally printed, and another version that presents the poems thematically.

--All of the poems are thematically tagged based on a set of tags agreed upon collaboratively by students in the class. The site includes a clickable “Wordcloud” of student-generated tags that leads users to lists of poems oriented around specific tags.

--A substantial number of contextual and biographical essays that help bring the poems in Harlem Shadows to life for today’s readers. 

--Students built the site themselves, including menus, graphics, and text. I directed them to use a public domain, “dirty OCR” version of Harlem Shadows derived from the Internet Archive. They proofread and corrected the OCR and produced unique pages for each poem in Harlem Shadows.

Digital Humanities and Social Justice; DH Projects and their Audience

Why Harlem Shadows? 

I am relatively new to formal involvement with Digital Humanities as a field, though I have been floating around the edges of Digital scholarship for many years. As I’ve been studying DH more intensively in recent months I’ve had two distinct observations about the field that I wanted this assignment to speak to:

    

1) While there is quite a bit of scholarship in Digital Humanities that does deal with social justice oriented themes, in its early period the field seemed to be largely oriented towards digitization and analysis of canonical, Anglo-American texts (see my essay from earlier in the fall on “The Archive Gap”). Scholars like Alan Liu have pointed out the strangeness of the fact that while DH ideas and tools were being pioneered in the 1990s, many important scholars in the field seemed not to be very engaged in the intense conversations about gender, race, and sexuality (queer theory, postcolonial theory, and critical race theory) that were also occurring in parallel during that same period of time. 

As a result of my own training and orientation as a scholar, I wanted this assignment to explicitly speak to social justice issues in some way. I believe that minority authors in the Anglo-American tradition as well as non-western authors are underrepresented or overlooked in prominent digital archives, so I had a strong interest in asking students to do a digitization project with an author in that category.


2) It’s been noted that many digital archives and digital thematic collections that tend to be posted online can have very small readerships. Is that because the texts being digitized are too obscure (I doubt it), or is it rather because we haven’t been thinking enough about issues of access and audience in designing our digital projects? What is it that the average web user might be looking for when searching online for particular texts?

My hunch is that the average reader isn’t that preoccupied with a precise digital recreation of the original printed texts they are encountering online. Rather, the interest is much more likely to be thematic (“poems about the resistance to racism”), contextual (“early black poets”), and presentist (“how does this matter today?”). In designing this assignment, I nudged students to consider these issues and build a site that might have an expansive and somewhat revisionist approach to the original material. In our DH class, we did present students with examples of digital archives that were invested in a textualist methodology (foremost being the Whitman Archive), but I at least made it a point to suggest that there might be other models for presenting digital collections to consider.

My Background

I should start by saying that I’m not an expert on the Harlem Renaissance, and indeed for most of my career teaching modernism I have focused on British and Irish modernists rather than American modernism (in my department the teaching of American materials has generally been the province of my colleague Seth Moglen). However, in recent years I have grown more interested in the transatlantic contexts of the early modernist movement (1910-1925), and one especially interesting site along those lines is the Harlem Renaissance – many of whose most important figures spent significant amounts of time abroad.

One upshot of my relative newness to these materials is that I don’t have a ‘set’ approach to teaching Harlem Renaissance literature. Indeed, this assignment emerged out of a process of exploration that I’ll briefly describe before going deeper into the assignment itself.

Genesis

The genesis for this project was my first experience teaching Claude McKay’s poetry in the spring of 2014 in an undergraduate seminar on Transatlantic Modernism. In addition to McKay, in that class I assigned Nella Larsen’s Quicksand for its depiction of Harlem cultural life in a transatlantic context (the biracial protagonist of Quicksand travels to Denmark in the middle of the novel and returns to Harlem with a clearer idea of what her black identity means to her, but without clear answers to the central quandary facing her regarding her love life and career).

As an accompaniment to Quicksand, I had initially assigned McKay’s novel Home to Harlem (1928), only to decide that emphasizing that novel was somewhat of a mistake in this class setting, for two reasons. One problem is that the novel really isn’t “transatlantic.” It does give us an example of a Caribbean intellectual and activist figure who emerges once the novel is well underway, but the novel’s primary protagonist is actually a “street” character rather unlike McKay himself. Secondly, Home to Harlem’s emphasis on street culture, slang, and nightlife could be seen as opportunistic and salacious rather than documentary. I should also add that the novel isn’t exactly a page-turner; it begins to drag around the mid-point, though the depictions of African American porters working on a railroad are interesting in part because we can assume they are derived from McKay’s own time exploring different American cities while working on the Pennsylvania Railroad in the 1910s. Some of McKay’s peers wondered at the time about whether the novel helped or hurt the cause of black literature, and we still need to raise those questions today.

A better bet seemed to be McKay’s rarely-read books of poetry, Harlem Shadows (70 poems; published in New York in 1922) and its shorter predecessor text, Spring in New Hampshire (31 poems; published in London in 1921). We did spend a session in that class looking at some of the poems from Harlem Shadows, and I was struck by both their quality and their potential relevance to a course on transatlantic modernism. Going forward, I expect that I will probably always assign these poems in future versions of Transatlantic Modernism classes I teach, rather than Home to Harlem.

The Assignment in the Context of an “Introduction To Digital Humanities” Course

Ed Whitley and I began planning the department’s first graduate level introduction to Digital Humanities in spring of 2015, and we worked on it much more intensively during the summer.

We knew that we wanted to do a unit on digital archives and thematic collections, and we also knew that this unit should have a hands-on component – a project that involved the students either contributing to an existing digital archive project, or doing a certain amount of work on something new. Because of the intense labor involved in digitizing print texts, we knew we couldn’t ask our students to do too much since we only intended to dedicate about four weeks to this topic.

I had the idea of asking all of the students in the class to produce a collaborative digital edition of Harlem Shadows as an assignment, and in the summer I discovered that Chris Forster (Syracuse U.) and Roopika Risam (Salem State U.) had already produced an elegant digital edition (though it admittedly took me awhile to find it; their site does not show up on the top of Google searches for “Harlem Shadows”). I began corresponding with these two scholars with the idea that students in our course might add materials that could eventually be added to their existing site, or perhaps build a parallel site that might look quite different. This is their site:

http://harlemshadows.org/

I have been especially interested in including biographical, historical, and literary context on any site the students might produce to help readers understand better what it is they are looking at. Thanks to projects like Google Books, the Internet Archive, the Project Gutenberg and the widespread interest in digitization amongst digital humanists, we now have a truly formidable array of digital texts available to us online -- though we still often don’t have very good ways to navigate those texts. Google Books has virtually no metadata and is actually difficult to search. As a result, we now have access to millions of texts, but we need much more infrastructure to help us know what we might actually want to read.  

As my reading and preparatory work took shape, I began to generate a list of possible contextual short essays students could research and write, for upload to the site. Eventually, I presented these suggestions to them:

--We should think about the front page and the entry to the site. Perhaps a student could write an “About” page, which introduces McKay and this book of poems and also has a summary of the new contents we are adding with links to the new content.

--Perhaps a student could write a short bio-critical essay that links to and quotes from specific poems. In order for the links to work, we first need to build a Page for each poem that has a unique Permalink.

--Perhaps students could think about a presentation of the poems in Harlem Shadows  that focuses on their historical importance and influence (esp. “If We Must Die” but also “America,” “Mulatto,” etc) rather than recreating the original presentation of the text itself (in any case, the Internet Archive edition and the Forster/Risam edition already do that).

--I would encourage students to generate tags for each of the poems that might allow visitors to the site to approach poems that focus on certain themes that are of interest to them. So we could create tags for each poem (“Race,” “Harlem street life,” “Gender,” “Capitalism,” “Lynching,” “Jamaica,” “Violence,” “Personal life,” “Family,” “Taboo Love,” “Migration” [or “Exile”], “Possible Queer Subtext,” and so on). We could then display all of the Tags on a column in the right; if the user clicks on a keyword they see a list of poems that match that tag. It may even be possible to build a widget that might dynamically arrange all poems on a given topic for the user: here are the 20 (?) poems McKay published in this period that deal with race. This could be especially useful for students or colleagues who are just looking for the poems dealing with race…

--Max Eastman’s preface to Harlem Shadows is problematic. Do we think it adds value to have the preface presented without editorial comment? Or perhaps we could add a short essay about just the Preface – including the language that some might find patronizing / insulting ? Would we prefer to jettison the preface entirely? (This would constitute a radical departure from the 1922 edition! But we are allowed to do it if we want to.) Between the two prefatory documents in the original Harlem Shadows, I prefer McKay’s own “Author’s Note”; perhaps one option might be to structure the site so that text is more prominently displayed.

--Perhaps a student might write a short essay offering a close reading of the poems that seem to allude to the complexity of McKay’s personal life – specifically his relationships with men (and often white men).

--Perhaps a student might write a short essay offering a close reading of the poems as reflective of an immigrant’s outlook. (Quite a number of the poems are reflections on McKay’s status as effectively a foreigner on American shores, still trying to digest the strangeness of American racism.)

--A student might write a short essay discussing McKay’s often tense relationship to the Modernist movement. He saw himself as a political radical who strongly embraced modernity and progress as leading to liberation and justice. But he was not interested in “modernizing” or radicalizing literary language or literary form. He liked the sonnet form.

--A student might write a short essay describing McKay’s relationship to the Harlem Renaissance movement. (He is considered one of the core members of the Harlem Renaissance group, but he is actually an outlier in some ways. A bit older than other core figures, and different in that he was an immigrant who left Harlem fairly quickly. He actually wrote Home to Harlem while living in Marseille, France!). This essay might also mention a few other major figures and benchmark’s in the advent of the Harlem Renaissance (Alain Locke’s “The New Negro,” etc).

--Images and multimedia. (There are numerous audio recordings of McKay reading poems like “If We Must Die.” We could embed those links into our own site.) Have to consider permissions and copyright.

--And in correspondence with me, Chris Forster had this suggestion:

I would add perhaps one more that folks may wish to explore. Do the poems of Harlem Shadows represent a “toning down” of McKay’s politics? The poems that once appeared alongside the poems of Harlem Shadows in periodicals but which disappear when McKay collects the poems of Harlem Shadows (which themselves are largely a rehash of poems that were first in Cambridge Magazine and then as Spring in New Hampshire… I wrote a bit about those here) are often more radical. “To the White Fiends” disappears; and where is “The Capitalist at Dinner” (a poem which is not anywhere mention in the edition right now—to my horror)? These poems strike a very different note from those published in the collection—and very, very different from the universalist spin McKay puts on “If We Must Die” when he later reflects in the reading here. (Chris Forster)

As you might see from looking at the final product, the students took me up on some of my suggestions (though not all of them); they also had their own quite fascinating ideas for topics to cover. One student focused on the different contexts and uses to which “If We Must Die” has been put (divided into three shorter essays; start here). Another focused on the possiblerelevance of McKay’s poetry to the present-day, Black Lives Matter movement. Yet another student decided to write about McKay’s use of bird imagery, especially with reference to migration and movement. Another wrote about the queer subtext in McKay’s poem, “Alfonso, Waiting at Table.” I also found the essay another student wrote on "spatial poetics" in McKay's poem "On the Road" quite compelling. 

Helping the Students Out: a Bibliography and Scanned Critical and Biographical Materials

To facilitate student research, I gave them my introductory lecture notes on McKay’s early career, with a fair amount of biographical material about McKay drawn from Wayne Cooper’s biography (these were notes I had developed for the earlier course I taught). I also scanned quite a bit of recent scholarship about McKay and made those PDFs available on CourseSite (the courseware platform we use at Lehigh).

I decided to do this because this was not, in fact, going to be a class that was centrally ‘about’ the Harlem Renaissance. I had to operate on the assumption that students would have had little or no background working with McKay prior to taking this course (this proved correct). In a class that was more focused on, say, “Digitizing African American Literature,” I might have asked the students themselves to generate these materials.

Here is the preliminary annotated bibliography that I included in the assignment as well:

Wayne Cooper, Claude McKay, Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance. 1987 (new edition 1996). This remains the definitive biography of Claude McKay. It suffers at times from a somewhat judgmental attitude to McKay, but the bibliography is invaluable. Chapter 3 deals with McKay’s early years – and his relationships with editors like the Eastmans (which led to his breakthrough publication in The Liberator in 1919). Chapter 7 has a considerable amount of material on Harlem Shadows, including background and context (many of the poems in the collection were first printed either in McKay’s earlier book of poetry, Spring in New Hampshire, or in other magazines). There are also brief summaries and discussions of several reviews of the book that appeared at the time in both the mainstream press as well as in Afro-American magazines and newspapers.

Claude McKay, A Long Way From Home. (1938). McKay’s own memoir of these years. There’s a good deal of introductory material from the editor, Gene Andrew Jarrett, including a detailed timeline of McKay’s life, as well as a helpful biographical note.

You might also consider taking a look at various early chapters from A Long Way From Home, including Chapter 2 (“Other Editors” sets the stage for the publication of McKay’s poems in The Liberator in 1919). Chapters 7-13 (very short chapters) deal with the time period leading up to the publication of Harlem Shadows. Chapter 9 has an intriguing anecdote of McKay’s encounter with Frank Harris (editor of Pearson’s), who criticized McKay for not including “If We Must Die” in the (British-published) Spring in New Hampshire: “You are a bloody traitor to your race, sir!” Chapter 9 also has accounts of McKay’s first encounters with peers like W.E.B. DuBois. Chapter 13 has a brief account of the publication of Harlem Shadows in 1922. It was well-received, but didn’t earn very much money. Soon McKay would be off to Russia and France…

Gary Edward Holcomb, Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance (2007). This is the first book I know of to really explore the complexity of McKay’s identity as a (closeted, at least to the public) gay black man and a Communist and apply that understanding to a close reading of his poetry and fiction. Readings of poems from the Harlem Shadows collection are scattered throughout the book. The Introductory chapter and chapter 1 might be important as an intervention in a tradition of McKay scholarship that has tended to see him as first and foremost a “heroic” Harlem Renaissance figure.

Kottis Sree Ramesh and Kandula Nirupa Rani, Claude McKay: The Literary Identity from Jamaica to Harlem and Beyond. (2006) Chapter 3 deals with McKay’s immigration to the United States and how his status as a West Indian immigrant shaped his writing and outlook. This is valuable mainly because it focuses on McKay’s status as a “colonial subject.”

Tyrone Tillery, Claude McKay: A Black Poet’s Struggle for Identity (1992). Chapter 3, “The Problems of a Black Radical,” deal with McKay’s writing during the years that led to the publication of Harlem Shadows.

Terence Hoagwood on the poem “Harlem Shadows” Brief essay in The Explicator (2010). Hoagwood talks about McKay’s appropriation of conventions from Elizabethan poetry – though this poem is actually not a regular sonnet but a “deviant” sonnet.

Adam McKible and Suzanne Churchill, “In Conversation: The Harlem Renaissance and the New Modernist Studies” (Modernism/Modernity 2013). This essay will mainly be of interest to people (if there are any) who are looking into McKay’s relationship to modernism – and the theoretical problems we tend to encounter if we think of African American writing from the 1920 and 30s in the context of transatlantic modernism.

David Krasner, review of The Scene of Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, Performance (Modernism/Modernity 2010). This is a review of a book that looks at McKay’s representation of race in Home to Harlem in light of the rather different strategy we see in WEB DuBois’s writing from the same period.

James Smethurst, “The Red is East: Claude McKay and the New Black Radicalism of the Twentieth Century” (American Literary History 2009) Largely a review essay – looking at Gary Holcomb’s book. Smethurst also summarizes the three novels that Holcomb focuses on. Not a lot here on Harlem Shadows. That said, there is a lot here for people interested in McKay’s relationship to international communism / socialism / Marxism.

Outcomes: What We Learned from Working with the Students and Listening to their Feedback

Surprise #1: The students seemed to find the assignment highly interesting and involving, and spent far more time on it than we had anticipated they would.

Some students in the class initially expressed concerns about the technical aspects of producing a serious website (as opposed to just a blog). We were able to arrange a visit from skilled digital scholars and library staff just around the time students were beginning to work on the project. This gave them a bit more confidence to start working with WordPress, though only a couple of the students in the class had used WordPress in the past. (I should also note that we decided to use WordPress for this assignment rather than something like Scalar precisely because it is so easy to use.)

I had strongly encouraged them to meet outside of class at least once, and as the students began to work they ended up meeting several times (five times in fact!) to make decisions about the intention and design of the site. It became clear that they had truly entered into the spirit of collaboration, often helping each other out with various tasks. One student took special responsibility over site design and technical features. Another student helped get the ball rolling by going through and creating her own list of thematic tags to all of the poems on her own.

Even after completing the first draft of the project, the students continued to talk about the project later, making it clear to me they were still pretty involved in the work of the project. I hope that this early experience with collaborative work will come back and pay dividends for some of the students later in their careers.

Surprise #2: They renamed it. At some point the students decided to rename the project from “Harlem Shadows” to “Harlem Echoes.” This was completely within the parameters of the assignment, though I had not suggested any such change to them nor did I expect them to do it.

I can see two advantages to the decision to change the name of the project. One is that it frees the project from the responsibility of prioritizing a digital approximation of the original text of Harlem Shadows. Harlem Shadows still forms the core of the site, but as the menu design and ordering indicates, the presentation of the poems is only one of the goals of the site the students produced.

The second advantage of the renaming might be that it allowed the students in the class to differentiate their project from the existing Forster/Risam project.

In effect, I see the project in its current form as more a digital thematic collection based on Harlem Shadows than a technical digital edition of Harlem Shadows. 

Surprise #3: They decided to orient the project to student users rather than specialist scholars.  This made sense to me since the students themselves are not specialists in either modernism or the Harlem Renaissance, but I still hadn’t quite expected the extremely helpful background essay one student would write describing McKay’s use of the sonnet form in Harlem Shadows.

Surprise #4: Claude McKay talks more often about “nature” than about “race.” The thematic tags the students produced led to a pretty startling observation: the largest word in the word cloud is actually "Nature” – not “Race.” Admittedly, his discussion of nature is not in a vacuum – many of those “nature” poems are also thematizing social issues such as race and migration – but it still tells us something important nonetheless, and reminds us to be careful in slotting McKay unthinkingly into the ready category of “black activist poet.”

Future Directions

We have yet to make any final decisions about what to do with the project. There is still a hope we might coordinate with Roopika Risam and Chris Forster more intensively. There is also a real idea of continuing to expand the site, possibly by adding further works ourselves (I have a couple of short essays I myself would like to contribute), and possibly by soliciting contributions from scholars who work on Mckay. 

There’s also a question about how we might revise the assignment for future iterations of this class. As I mentioned, students put this all together in the space of a couple of weeks; we had only allocated about four weeks to digital archives and collections towards the beginning of the term. We were using a final portfolio structure for the class and asked students to revise their individual essays as much as possible for that final project. But their subsequent work in the course was on different topics; in the subsequent unit, for instance, we asked them to work with data (text analysis, visualization, mapping, data mining, network diagrams, topic modeling, etc).

In our wrap-up conversation at the end, several students suggested we might coordinate the digital archive hands-on project with the hands-on project related to data. Perhaps the data segment could ask students to apply data and analytical tools to the text that they had earlier digitized and annotated? This sounded like an excellent idea in principle, though practically with such a small text (70 short poems), many data analysis tools and methods simply aren’t very useful or relevant. (Topic modeling, for instance, requires large scale corpora to produce meaningful results.) If we repeat a version of this assignment with a much more substantial primary text, however, some of those data-oriented tools could be relevant.

Spring Teaching Notes: Asian American Literature

This spring I taught an introductory Asian American Literature class for the first time (the proper title for the course was "Asian Americans in Literature and Popular Culture"). To my knowledge, this is the first time a course with this title has been taught at Lehigh University. Below I am posting an overview of the course with some commentary added here and there.

Here are the required texts I put on the syllabus:

John Okada, No-No Boy (1956; not published until 1971. Get the 2014 edition.).
Gene Yang, American Born Chinese (2006. Graphic novel.)
Chang-Rae Lee, Native Speaker (1993. Still my favorite Chang-Rae Lee novel.)
Eric Liu, The Accidental Asian: Notes of a Native Speaker (1998. Surprise sleeper text.)
Eddie Huang, Fresh off the Boat (2013)
Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake (2003)
Amitava Kumar, Bombay, London, New York (2003)

From the above list, I was pleased with my students' response to books like No-No Boy and American Born Chinese. Native Speaker was a bit of a challenge for them (one student complained that she didn't understand what was happening in the plot), though I do think in our class discussions that we got to the core of this strange but still very powerful novel. But the standout winners from the syllabus were Eddie Huang's memoir along with Eric Liu's The Accidental Asian. I'm contemplating writing a longer piece about their respective concepts of "whiteness," perhaps for an academic journal, later this summer.

I should also acknowledge some significant omissions. Other Asian American Lit. syllabi I consulted as I was putting the readings together last fall typically include books like The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston. Here I tend to side with Frank Chin, who leveled a pretty devastating critique of Kingston in an influential rant called "Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake." For related reasons, I nixed Amy Tan from the syllabus as well as my own personal pet peeves from the Indian American side, Bharati Mukherjee and Meena Alexander. I also opted not to try and do Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee, though it's widely popular in Asian American Lit. syllabi, mainly because I worried it might simply be too difficult and abstract for students in this intro-level course to follow.

One consequence of these decisions is that the syllabus is a bit more male-centered, at least with regards to literature, than I would have liked; I'll try and correct that skew next time I do this course. (I am a big fan of Susan Choi in particular, but none of her novels -- at least, none of the novels of hers I've read -- seemed precisely right for this particular course.)

And here are some texts in secondary criticism I assigned:

Ronald Takaki, excerpt chapters from A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America. These chapters helped provide a glimpse of the early history for Chinese and Japanese American immigrants, beginning in the 19th century and continuing through the World War II period.

Susan Koshy, “The Fiction of Asian American Literature” This essay looks closely at the ‘ethnocentrism’ of Asian American studies in its earlier phase. If the field was earlier dominated by Chinese American and Japanese American scholars, is it possible that our understanding of “Asian American” identity as it has emerged has been skewed? Are we sure that South Asian Americans and Southeast Asian Americans fit under the same umbrella as east Asians?

Robert G. Lee, from the book Orientals. We looked at a chapter on the Model Minority myth, and a close reading of the film Sayonara.

I didn't assign anything by Indian American historians like Vijay Prashad or Vinay Lal, but I easily could very well have done that. One of my students is currently writing a final project on the Model Minority myth, and I've asked her to look at some chapters of The Karma of Brown Folk that deal with that subject. 

Films, TV, Popular Music

I thought by underlining the popular culture component of the class that I would draw more students and make the course more fun and lively. The first assumption turned out not to be true -- I only had five students enrolled in the course this go round -- but the second did play out as expected (the course was fun for me to teach, though we'll see in a few weeks whether my students thought so as well). Certainly the fact that this spring we saw the debut and first season of the ABC sitcom Fresh off the Boat gave our discussions of that show (in connection with Eddie Huang's memoir) a special currency. I should also add that I have been working on a book on the filmmaker Mira Nair for a long time, and our discussions of two of her films gave me an opportunity to talk about something I have thought about a lot in terms of research -- but rarely taught.

TV: We spent a fair amount of time talking about Eddie Huang’s memoir in connection with the new ABC TV show, Fresh off the Boat. We also looked at a couple of episodes of The Mindy Project, and talked about the controversy over her main character's choice of love interests (all white men) in the first season.

We talked about about the growing profile of Asian American actors in Hollywood films and on TV, especially for roles and screenplays written by non-Asians for mainstream audiences. We discussed the ongoing careers of Asian American actors like John Cho (from “Harold” in Harold and Kumar to “Sulu” in the new Star Trek movies), Kal Penn, Archie Panjabi (The Good Wife), Aziz Ansari (Parks and Recreation), and a number of others. In connection with our reading of The Namesake, I asked students to think about Kal Penn's own use of a pseudonym in his career in Hollywood. 

While there’s been quite a bit of progress from the early days of Charlie Chan, I also suggested to my students that Hollywood still produces occasional racial / ethnic caricatures that we need to think about and be able to critique. Along these lines, a new Netflix show called The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is the latest show to provoke a controversy over the portrayal of an Asian character. In the old days we had examples like the character “Long Duck Dong” in the film Sixteen Candles, and a whole history of Orientalist caricatures of Asian people in early Hollywood (from the 1930s through the 1970s). Today the caricatures, when we see them, are a bit more subtle. 

Stand up comedians: We listened to clips from comedians like Margaret Cho, Russell Peters, and Hari Kondabolu. Again, there seems to have been some evolution here in recent years. There’s definitely a pretty sharp difference between how Russell Peters handled ethnic material about a decade ago and how Hari Kondabolu does it now. My students found the Russell Peters material stale-sounding and corny (he's trying too hard to be "universal"), and they adored Hari Kondabolu's sharper-edged and more particular orientation to talking about race and cultural difference. (Hari Kondabolu for the win.)

We also struggled a bit with Margaret Cho -- someone who is a personal hero to me and many other Asian Americans of my generation -- in large part because her stand up is simply so sexually explicit and raunchy. But we did at least touch on the "weirdness" of the way she handles Asian accents, especially the character of her mother that played such an important role in her early comedy. 

Popular music: I mentioned and played for my students clips by Far East Movement, Jin, Psy, Awkwafina, Heems/Das Racist, and MIA. My approach in general was to stress that until fairly recently, Asian Americans were essentially invisible in popular music, but that’s changed in a big way in the past decade. I did an extended sequence looking at the evolution of the "Knight Rider" sample, from the original TV show, to Busta Rhymes, to Panjabi MC, and finally to mainstream radio "re-re-re-appropriation" via the Jay-Z/Panjabi MC collaboration. Part of the point here was to show the constant and intense connection in Indian diaspora popular music with African American hip hop and R&B. This dovetailed nicely with our discussions of Eddie Huang, who is invested in Hip Hop in rather the same way. (In the future, could I perhaps do an entire course on this subject? Call it: "Afrocentric Asians" -- a nod to the famous lyric from Nas.)

Film: We looked at early Hollywood representation of Asians in some excerpts from Charlie Chan movies on Youtube. We also looked at the post-World War II film Sayonara (which goes well with John Okada's No-No Boy). We also had dedicated sessions on Justin Lin's Better Luck Tomorrow, Mira Nair's Mississippi Masala, Mira Nair's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and finally, Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino.

Modified Opening Day Spiel

On the opening day I presented to my students a series of general questions that I hoped the course as a whole would be able to explore. Here are those questions in brief.

1--How are Asian Americans defined vis a vis other ethnic and racial communities in the United States? What is the distinction we need to make between “race” and “ethnicity”? Is being Asian (in America) a “racial” identity? How does the concept of race work for immigrant communities (like Asians and Hispanics), in comparison to the concept of race in the African American community? Can race and ethnicity categories change (i.e., many people might casually see Asians as effectively “white” in American society)? Given the large number of cross-cultural marriages and bicultural/biracial people who have some Asian ancestry, what happens to Asian identity in the context of increasingly complex, multicultural family dynamics?

We had some assigned essays specifically dealing with these topics. But for the moment we can start the conversation by looking at the definition below. I pulled the text from the internet, but it matches pretty closely the way most people tend to use these terms:

The traditional definition of race and ethnicity is related to biological and sociological factors respectively. Race refers to a person's physical characteristics, such as bone structure and skin, hair, or eye color. Ethnicity, however, refers to cultural factors, including nationality, regional culture, ancestry, and language. An example of race is brown, white, or black skin (all from various parts of the world), while an example of ethnicity is German or Spanish ancestry (regardless of race). (source: http://www.diffen.com/difference/Ethnicity_vs_Race )

While these are the ‘standard’ usages of the terms, I think it’s immediately clear that there’s some slipperiness and overlap between the terms that can give rise to a certain confusion. For instance, would “Chinese-American” be a racial or an ethnic category, or both? Also, how significant do we think these the “physical characteristics” really are? What do they actually signify about a person, if anything? Aren’t the cultural factors where real (meaningful) differences between us might be found? Why then does race seem to remain so important in American life?

It might also be worth mentioning that a key difference between race and ethnicity in practice might be that the idea of race, because it is founded on (superficial) biological traits, seems permanent, while ethnicity might be malleable. It may be that ethnic identification runs quite strong amongst first generation immigrants (Chinese immigrants who still speak fluent Chinese; Italian immigrants who speak fluent Italian), but doesn’t that begin to shift in the second and third generations? That’s the meaning that I see in the cartoon from Gene Yang above: as a second generation Chinese American, the boy (he is the protagonist of a book-length graphic novel we will be reading later -- American Born Chinese) is interested in self-transformation and self-invention. He doesn’t want to be Chinese like his parents and grandparents; he wants to reinvent himself as an American boy and distance himself from “Chineseness.” On the surface he’s referring to actual “Transformers” (as in, the toys, television cartoons [in the 1980s] etc.), but unconsciously he is actually thinking of his own ethnic identity. This desire to become something else is problematic -- but still important to think about.

2--Does “Asian American” make sense as a category, given the real cultural, linguistic, religious, and even complexional differences amongst different Asian communities?  When people use the word “Asian” in casual conversation, are they really referring to people from Eastern Asian countries (Korea, China, Japan), not South Asians (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh)? [A friend of mine, Manish Vij, felt so passionately about this issue some years ago that he even started a website devoted to the topic: indiansareasian.com!] And what about Southeast Asian countries (Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos…)? On the other hand, perhaps there are commonalities in our experiences as immigrants and children of immigrants that might lead us to find value in even a pretty loose concept of Asian American identity. If so, what are those commonalities?

There’s a really nice thread at the Question/Answer website Quora.com that works through some of the issues, though not from an academic perspective:

http://www.quora.com/When-people-say-Asian-does-it-include-Indians

One of the people responding to the query about whether Indian Americans should be included under Asian Americans posted this helpful quote:

●     In the American vernacular, "Asian" usually refers to someone of East or Southeast Asian descent.

●     In the British vernacular, "Asian" usually refers to someone of South Asian descent.

●     The U.S. government categorizes peoples of East Asian, Southeast Asian, and South Asian descent as "Asian".

●     The U.S. government categorizes peoples of Central Asian or West Asian (Middle Eastern) descent as "white".

●     Historically, Indian Americans have been classified as white, "Hindoo", "Other", and currently, Asian American.

On the first point, the thing to probably keep in mind is that the common (vernacular) usage of a term doesn’t have to line up with a more academic or  sociologically precise usage of a term. Just because most people use the word  a certain way doesn’t mean  we have to. 

On the last point in the bullet-list above, it is true that in earlier periods there wasn’t a category on the U.S. census for "Indian American." Many early (pre-1952) Indian American immigrants understood themselves as “white” and tried to argue that status in immigration-related court cases. But actually, to correct the poster at Quora, the U.S. government would reject this claim, starting with a famous case in 1923 (U.S. vs. Bhagat Singh Thind). In that case, the justices in the ruling decided that a person with a brown skin complexion from the Indian subcontinent was not, in fact, to be legally understood as “white.” At the time, this question had major legal ramifications:

In its decision in the case of U.S. v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923), the Supreme Court deemed Asian Indians ineligible for citizenship because U.S. law allowed only free whites to become naturalized citizens. The court conceded that Indians were “Caucasians” and that anthropologists considered them to be of the same race as white Americans, but argued that “the average man knows perfectly well that there are unmistakable and profound differences.” The Thind decision also led to successful efforts to denaturalize some who had previously become citizens. This represented a particular threat in California, where a 1913 law prohibited aliens ineligible for citizenship from owning or leasing land. Only in 1946 did Congress, which was beginning to recognize that India would soon be independent and a major world power, pass a new law that allowed Indians to become citizens and also established a small immigration quota. But major immigration to the United States from South Asia did not begin until after immigration laws were sharply revised in 1965.

Source: http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5076/

3 --What role have Asian-American communities played in American history and cultural life more broadly? What is the story of the Chinese immigrants from the mid-1800s who helped build the western American railroads? What is the story of the Japanese communities who were rounded up during World War II and held in internment camps because of worries they might sympathize with Japan during the war? (We will look at some historical materials for Thursday that will go over some of this. And the first novel we will be reading, No-No Boy, deals with the status of the Japanese community during and after World War II.)

4--What role are Asian Americans playing in American politics today? There are currently ten Asian Americans in the Congress, the majority of them Democrats from California and Hawaii. Here's a snip from Wikipedia:

There are 10 Asian Americans in the House and one in the Senate, in the second session of the 113th United States Congress.^[28] Representatives Mike Honda, Doris Matsui, Mark Takano, Mark Takai and Senator Mazie Hirono are all Japanese Americans; Representative Judy Chu is Chinese American; Representative Grace Mengand Ted Lieu are Taiwanese Americans; Representatives Bobby Scott is a Multiracial Filipino American; Representative Tammy Duckworth is Thai American; and Representative Ami Bera is Indian American. (Wikipedia)

Two of the country’s fifty state governors as Indian Americans – interestingly, both of them are Republicans (though most Asian Americans are democrats), elected in southern states (Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal and South Carolina’s Nikki Haley). Is their election significant?

What role do Asian American elected officials play, both within Asian American communities, and more broadly? Does it matter how many elected Asian American officials there are? Why do Asian communities tend to skew Democratic?

5--Are Asian Americans at the present moment still a minority deserving of privileges and accommodations along the lines of those that are given to “underrepresented” minorities like African Americans and Hispanics? Or does the fact that many (though definitely not all) Asians come from economically privileged backgrounds mean that Asian Americans need to be understood as a “non-oppressed” minority? Can one be in a relatively privileged social and economic status within American life and still be on the receiving end of racism? A growing number of Asians identify as white or effectively white. (One prominent person who identified at one point as white is South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley; in a census some years ago she marked herself as white. Both of her parents are ethnically Indian.) Under what circumstances might we come to understand Asians as white (or at least effectively white)?

One site where this issue is particularly fraught right now is on college campuses, where affirmative action policies continue to be discussed and debated. I remember being surprised when I learned -- around the time I was applying for college -- that affirmative action doesn’t apply to most Asian Americans (some Asian American groups, specifically Filipinos and Cambodians, can be included under affirmative action policies). Especially in California schools, but also at many elite universities (i.e., ivy league schools and top-tier state universities like the University of Michigan) there is currently a statistical over-representation of Asians. Some colleges are thought to have an invisible and unspoken “max quota” for admitting Asian students (there’s currently a lawsuit against Princeton University initiated by a group of Asian Americans that makes this exact claim). This puts Asian American students in an odd position vis a vis African American and Latino/Hispanic students, who are under-represented at many of those same institutions (they certainly are at Lehigh). Many Asian Americans are in fact opposed to Affirmative Action because they feel it goes against their self-interest. These issues are discussed in this New York Times article from 2012: 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/education/edlife/affirmative-action-a-complicated-issue-for-asian-americans.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Asian-Americans, who make up 5 percent of the population, are the fastest growing racial group, with three-quarters of adults born abroad, according to the Pew Research Center. And they are tangled up in the affirmative action issue in complicated ways.

On the one hand, some ambitious and disciplined students from India, South Korea and China see themselves as victims of race-conscious admissions, their numbers kept artificially low to keep a more demographically balanced campus. A lawsuit pending against Princeton alleges discrimination on grounds that applicants from other ethnic or racial groups were admitted with lesser credentials. The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights also received complaints last year against Princeton and, since withdrawn, Harvard.

On the other hand, Filipinos, Cambodians, Pacific Islanders and other Asian-Americans continue to benefit from policies that take ethnicity into account.

Polls show Asian-Americans divided fairly evenly on the use of affirmative action.

There is even an advocacy group called the 80-20 Educational Foundation that has taken as its mission the elimination of Affirmative Action:

http://www.80-20educationalfoundation.org/

I would encourage you all to read that entire New York Times article I linked to above at some point.

6--How is the role of Asian Americans in contemporary popular culture changing? How are Asian American writers, actors, and other performers bringing the complex and diverse cultural stories of our various traditions into the American mainstream? What might be the significance of the popular rap / EDM group the Far East Movement? Does the fact that ABC has a new show about a Taiwanese-American family called Fresh Off the Boat suggest that Asian culture is now mainstream? Have we made progress in the twenty years since another Asian American sitcom was tried (Margaret Cho’s All-American Girl, which was cancelled after a single season)? Asian actors appear with growing frequency in the movies and on TV – how do we understand this shift (thinking of John Cho, Kal Penn, Lucy Liu, Margaret Cho, Aziz Ansari, etc.)?