This is one of those What We Did During the Lockdowns notes. Worth sharing now - because there are links with current projects....
Notes January 2021
Radical Approaches Reading Group, led by Lola Olufemi
I track the work of the Poetry Translation Centre because I am interested in translation - and the importance of translation in our world, in the past and today.
I have gone on about this elsewhere, but briefly...
The Poetry Translation Centre has helped me to clarify my thinking about translation, interpretation, textualization, transcription, reading/writing, literacy/orality, poetry/lyric/song, all of which I regard as parts of that continuum of processes to do with the arts of the word. See, for example, the work of Susan Bassnett and Maria Tymoczko.
I have never been able to coincide with PTC meetings in London. In the crisis year 2020, as events moved online, I said to myself that I would try to become involved with Poetry Translation Centre online events, as they appeared.
When the Radical Approaches Reading Group, led by Lola Olufemi, was advertised by the Poetry Translation Centre I signed up at once. I am not sure that I understand how this Reading Group fits in within PTC policies. I can report that the Reading Group did everything that I wanted. It was a great help, as I developed - in isolation, during the Covid crisis - some of my own thinking, on the issues covered by the Reading Group...
We were asked to read 6 texts. Some of these texts were already known to me, some were new to me. Presumably the texts were chosen by Lola. I have no quarrel with the choice of texts. Someone who knows more than I do - about the literature, the debates, the discourse - had to make decisions.
There is a straightforward translation aspect to the 6 texts - since many of them were originally written and published outside the English language.
There follows some of my notes on my experience of the Reading Group and my experience of the texts. I am going to keep this write-up simple and schematic.
So, to each text I give 2 brief notes... 1. one positive comment, 2. one negative comment...
Week 1 - October 4 2020
Wretched of the Earth - Frantz Fanon
First published 1962. My generation was very influenced by Sartre (and etc...) - which I still think was a Good Thing. So we well know Sartre's Introduction to Wretched of the Earth...
John Drabinski's article on Fanon in Stanford EP is good...
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/frantz-fanon/
1. Fanon's observations about ways in which a group, or a person, absorbs negative observations.
Examples, the long term influence of Fanon - mention Glen Coulthard's Red Skin, White Masks (2014) and Hamid Dabashi's Brown Skin, White Masks (2011), the similar-yet-different forms of colonial experience in indigenous North America (Coulthard) and the Middle East (Dabashi). I have just been reading a book about psychiatry in South Africa - Fanon critique built in.
I commissioned and published a chapter on Fanon and Irish experience...
Greenslade, Liam. 1992. "White Skins, White Masks: Psychological Distress among the Irish in Britain." In The Irish in the New Communities, edited by Patrick O'Sullivan, 2:201-25. The Irish World Wide. London & Washington: Leicester University Press.
2. The problem of violence, as violence is in effect encouraged by Fanon.
There is now a huge background literature on this. And we have to negotiate the arguments - about manly self-respect, indication of non-consent, the blood of martyrs.
Eventually you will find yourself in a room with someone who is justifying the murder of children.
Week 2 - October 18 2020
Decolonisation is not a Metaphor - K
Wayne Yang, Eve Tuck
1. Great title. First published 2012, in Volume I, Number 1 of the journal Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society. And really got up and running that journal, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society - and since then that journal has been ploughing an interesting, and important, if lonely, furrow, the personal experiences of young academics from 'indigenous' and minority backgrounds.
2. I have followed further the work of Tuck and of Yang. The 2012 article leaves up in the air the question of the ownership of land. I see no attempt to take that further - to look at countries and communities where there HAS been redistribution of land. For example, Ireland. With obvious dangers. Like, we might, yet again, create a small farmer peasantry, tied to the land. 'Decolonisation' might not be a Metaphor - I suspect that here 'Land' is a Metaphor.
See...
https://www.aqs.org.uk/land-questions-in-the-21st-century-postcolony/
Week 3 - November 1 2020
A Small Place - Jamaica Kincaid
First published 1988
1. I know Jamaica Kincaid's work - she was a regular staff writer for New Yorker magazine. Very good writer - but very much in that New Yorker style. A style which, of course, she helped shape.
The only one of the 6 texts that you could say was a good piece of writing. You could use this text to teach writing. Some wonderful, confident effects.
2. I did offer some thoughts about the problems Jamaica Kincaid gave me - speaking as an Incredibly Unattractive, Fat, Pastrylike-Fleshed Man.
See...
Frederick, Rhonda D. 2003. "What If You're an 'Incredibly Unattractive, Fat, Pastrylike-Fleshed Man'?: Teaching Jamaica Kincaid's 'A Small Place.'"
College Literature 30 (3): 1-18. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25112735.
In another part of my working life I am in touch with Evelyn O'Callaghan of the University of the West Indies. Evelyn and her colleagues have just produced
O'Callaghan, Evelyn, and Tim Watson. 2021. Caribbean Literature in Transition, 1800-1920. Caribbean Literature in Transition. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dalleo, Raphael, and Curdella Forbes. 2021. Caribbean Literature in Transition, 1920-1970. Caribbean Literature in Transition. Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Two fat volumes. Jamaica Kincaid mentioned once. Briefly.
So, has Jamaica Kincaid simply become a Returned Yank?
Week 4 - November 15 2020
Coloniality of Gender / Toward a
decolonial feminism - Maria Lugones
First published 2010
1. This was the text that gave most trouble to our reading group. I am used to reading this sort of material - as I say, my generation, Sartre, influence. I had to go away and read more Maria Lugones before coming back to this particular text - which I now see as part of her struggle with and within a certain strand of male-dominated Latin American anti-colonial theory - and its 'indifference' to violence against women. See...
Lugones, Maria. 2016. "The Coloniality of Gender." In The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Development Critical Engagements in Feminist Theory and Practice, edited by Wendy Harcourt, 13-33. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK.
2. The level of abstraction within this particular text becomes absurd.
Abstract nouns are unpacked by means of a sequence of further abstract nouns. Some of those abstract nouns I have problems with - portmanteau packages with which I do not agree. But, I am reminded of a moment in Mary O'Brien's book...
O'Brien, M. 1981. The Politics of
Reproduction. Routledge & Kegan Paul.
...where she pauses to explain why feminists must master and use elite abstract thought.
Week 5 - November 29 2020
Decolonising Methodologies - Linda
Tuhiwai Smith
First published 1999. The copy I have is the second edition 2012.
1. The first part of this book is strong - the ways in which standard academia and standard academic disciplines have failed us. I have found this very helpful.
2. The second part takes us into strange places - and down pitfalls that are always waiting for us. The Saintly Us syndrome. The uncritical valuing of 'traditional' cultures, and putting 'tradition' into conflict with 'modernity'.
At one point I think Smith fails completely - there is a brief reference to the 'myth of the Moriori', p159 in the second edition. I think we know what is going on - there is a standard settler and colonizer discourse within New Zealand.
But Smith just dismisses the notion of the Moriori, without background - and without acknowledging the existence of people who would regard themselves as Moriori...
See
King, Michael. 2017. Moriori: A People Rediscovered. First edition was 1999. The Maori conquest of the Chatham Islands in 1835 is pretty well documented - and figures much in the work of theorists like Jared Diamond. I do not think that the issues can simply be dismissed. Racism distorts anti-racism.
Week 6 - December 13 2020
Silencing the Past, Power and the Production of History - Michel-Ralph Trouillot
First published 1995. The edition I have is 2015 with Foreword by Hazel V. Carby
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2015. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press.
1. Power shapes knowledge - though, oddly, Foucault is not referenced. Perhaps not odd - from Haiti to North America, this Trouillot book is really a good exploration of the politics of the US Census, and US ethnic politics. And the politics of the US Census affects us all.
2. I have followed Trouillot a bit further - I may do more. Indeed, there are oddities. There is a recurring anecdote of the young woman - I assume a woman of colour - who questions Trouillot, his course and the approach. One version of the anecdote is on page 70 of this text. Another young woman appears on page 71. I am not sure that the concerns of these young women have been addressed.
In another part of my working life - and Mary O'Brien is again relevant here - we have been discussing the ways in which organised religion is mostly about the control of women's bodies. Young women, women of child-bearing age, are always a minority. Perhaps they are a persecuted minority.
My thanks to Lola Olufemi and the member of the Reading Group - the experience was very helpful to me, climbing out of illness into activity.
My thanks to the Poetry Translation Centre.
Patrick O'Sullivan
Visiting Professor of Irish Diaspora
Studies, London Metropolitan University
Patrick O'Sullivan's Whole Life Blog http://www.fiddlersdog.com/
Archive https://www.mediafire.com/folder/ooj5btdttc9y4/Documents
Archives of the Irish Diaspora List,
1997-2017 http://idslist.friendsov.com/
https://britishmusiccollection.org.uk/composer/patrick-osullivan
These Notes were written in January 2021, placed here on my blog October 2024.
