|
A Two-Day Institute for K-12 and College Educators June 16th-17th, 2003 UC Berkeley, Barrows Hall  Agenda
| Speakers
| Links
|
|
PRESENTATION
SUMMARIES
|
DAY ONE: AFRICA
EVENING PANEL: Connecting Africa and the Diaspora |
DAY TWO: DIASPORA
|
||
 |
|||
|
DAY ONE: AFRICA
Introduction: "Misconceptions
and Stereotypes" Martha Saavedra introduced the first day's speakers and provided some introductory remarks on imperatives for studying Africa. She maintained that we must look critically at how Africa is used in foreign policy in the United States, at how and in what context it is invoked by international bodies like the UN. She provided a four-part framework for studying Africa: First, Saavedra insisted, we must recognize Africa's diversity - in terms of population, race, gender, geography, ecology, cultures, history, economics, and politics. She includes North Africa within the geographic space "Africa". Secondly, Saavedra challenges us to recognize Africa's modernity. Africa is often invoked as something backward, primitive, behind the times, as if history did not happen there. Saavedra insists, however, that even things that may appear backward to us are the product of history, of choices made. Anarchy in the Congo, for example, is a modern phenomenon and has to do with world phenomena in which we in the US are very much involved through the products and resources we consume. We cannot separate Africa from the history of the modern era. Thirdly, Saavedra reminds us that when we approach Africa we must understand that we can only see it through our own experiences, through our own lenses. These include our history of slavery and imperialism in the United States. And finally, Saavedra argues that because our own economy
is so powerful in the world today, and, by extension, because American
culture also plays a powerful role in the world, American culture and
American racial relations become part of the way that Africans see themselves
in relation to us. She cites research on hip-hop and on exchanges between
African and Western cultures as research sensitive to this dynamic.
David Gutelius presented the challenges and rewards associated with studying Islamic Africa. He emphasized how important it is today that students and teachers take on thesw challenges. In fact, Gutelius argues, there has never been a more exciting time to study Islamic Africa. He pointed to a huge collection of Islamic manuscripts recently discovered in Africa. This collection reveals much about the type of Islamic learning being conducted in Africa in the 8th century. However, the notes written in the margins of these manuscripts also tell us much about the lives of those who used these manuscripts centuries later. Marginal notes in this most recent find, for example, tell the story of a family exiled from Granada to Timbuktu. Furthermore, these notes provide information that can be used to help date them, like observations about a meteor shower that has been dated precisely. Despite the wealth of new sources surfacing about Islamic Africa, Gutelius laments that these areas of Africa have been largely neglected by research. More large manuscript finds have been made recently in East Africa and in the Comoros Islands. None of these finds would have been possible without excited researchers. Gutelius charges the teachers present with the responsibility of educating these future researchers. In addition to manuscript finds, sources for studying Islamic Africa come in variety of forms. Markets reveal Islamic stories in vernacular languages. Islamic Africa also reveals itself in pop music on the continent and in hip hop in Paris and Marseilles. Art provides yet another source. Much can also be learned from Islamic grassroots organizations that critique corrupt governments in Africa today. Gutelius insists that we must help students to understand how both Africa itself and the role that it plays in the world are changing. Africa is the largest new front in the war on terror launched by President Bush and his allies. African governments eager to accept US funding for fighting terrorism increasingly repress Islamic grassroots organizations. In particular, these governments, backed with US funding, target those Islamic organizations that pose a potential political threat to incumbent leadership. Thus, there is, since 2001, a new generation of Islamic leaders who employ radicalized discourse when they accuse their elders of coddling up to national government and, by extension, to the West. Gutelius cites here the near overthrow of the government of Mauretania by Islamic groups and the arrests of Islamic leaders made by the government in an attempt to suppress their political rivals. Other examples in which African governments have used US anti-terrorism funding to suppress their Islamic political rivals include Morocco and East Africa. Gutelius warns that it is easy to get swept up in the contemporary view of Islam as inherently dangerous. He reminds his audience that as educators we are interpreters of Islam for wider communities and must encourage greater understanding. He provided an overview of past research on Islamic Africa and demonstrated how this past research produced the "Other" invoked by the likes of President Bush in contemporary discourse on Islam in Africa. He begins with Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798 in which Napoleon brought with him Islamic "experts" - namely scholars who could read Arabic. Gutelius maintains that these people had a huge impact on "knowledge" about Islam in Europe. These scholars wrote about Islamic societies as locked in a certain civilizational logic and as belonging to a civilization that was now in a perpetual state of decline. Such scholarship helped facilitate colonialism. Scholars participated in colonialism by gathering intelligence and quelling rebellion while also writing Egypt's past. The past that they constructed for Egypt became the model for French colonialism in Africa. Using these colonial sources to understand the history of Islamic Africa is clearly problematic; yet, because of the scarcity of sources, they are widely used to do just this. They can in fact be used productively if done so critically and in conjunction with a range of other sources. However, this is often not the way in which they are used, particularly by policy makers. Most government analysts rely on books and scientific instruments to inform them about Islamic Africa. Few of these people speak anything other than European languages. The Bush administration routinely ignores people with first-hand knowledge of the histories and cultures of the people with whom its policies engage. This administration consistently condemns non-secular aid organizations when they have Islamic affiliations. Yet, the administration does not condemn similar organizations with overt Christian affiliations. Gutelius reminds us that students have only heard about Islamic Africa as part of the so-called "Islamic menace". Only bombings and other shock news stories about Islamic Africa make the headlines. Such limited coverage serves particular political purposes. We need to provide students with alternate and informed images of Islamic Africa. In so doing we must encourage students to ask their own questions and help them to develop their analytical abilities and reasoning skills so that they can create new interpretations. Most of all, we need to give them specific strategies for sifting through the information on Islamic Africa that they receive from television and print media. Gutelius' presentation evoked a wide variety of questions from audience members. When asked why African families might send their sons to Koranic schools, Gutelius maintained that these schools often provide the only avenue for Muslim children to gain education and literacy. Many of the poorest families are Muslim in African countries with multiple religions. Beginning in the 1970s, Saudi Arabia started funding the establishment of Islamic schools and Islamic infrastructure in West African countries. Since then, several generations of Africans have been educated in Islamic schools in places like Khartoum and Saudi Arabia. There is an increasing movement, especially in West Africa, to build native Islamic institutions because people educated in Islamic schools abroad return and criticize local Africans for practicing non-Orthodox practices. Many local schools emerge because they reject the Wahabi way of teaching Islam. One audience member asked how non-Islamic governments deal with Shari'a, which provoked a discussion about the nature of Shari'a. Gutelius explained that Shari'a is not Islamic law but is built on local consensus and has to do with the degree to which local leaders will respond to Islamic law in Mecca. Thus, it is an expression of how local leaders should abide by Islamic practices. The interface between national governments and Shari'a produces a complex problem. Often, there is disagreement within communities about how Shari'a works. The discourse is shaped by the national governments' interests at a particular moment. Aid organizations and international politics also influence the way governments' respond to Islamic leaders. A middle school teacher said her students often ask if women are eligible to become qadi. Gutelius explained that not all communities have qadi, leaders who deal with issues relating to law. Qadi must have demonstrated proficiency with whatever accepted body of law the community practices, but must also know the traditions of the prophet and must have the Koran memorized. A qadi must also be an astute mediator. This person is not generally elected but is appointed by community elders. Women are not generally appointed to this position, though Gutelius maintains that there are exceptional cases, especially in Africa, in which women do become qadi. When asked about the relationship between Islam in Africa and forms of Islam expressed by black Americans, Gutelius suggests this as an area in need of future scholarship. He estimates that probably no more than 5-7% of African Americans who arrived on this continent were Muslim when they arrived. However, he cites evidence that these slaves were often given roles of high responsibility, and were therefore in a position to convert other slaves in the New World. On the other hand, slave families were dispersed in the Americas and mass conversion to Christianity in the south damaged Muslim communities. Gutelius recalls a document where a man attempted to remember and record the Koran for himself so that he would not forget it. He produced an autobiography about how hard life was for him as a Muslim slave in the Americas. When asked how teachers can best present positive images
of Islam in Africa and in the diaspora to their students, Gutelius advocates
that teachers invite local Islamic leaders to come talk to students
about their Islamic beliefs. Gutelius believes that when studying Islamic
Africa it is best, wherever possible to use primary materials. He cites
the strong Muslim community in the bay area as producing this possibility.
Tabitha Kanogo gave a presentation on the continuities and disruptions that characterized European colonialism on the African continent. Kanogo provided an overview of the diverse interpretations that scholars have offered to explain what colonialism in Africa was all about, how indigenous people experienced the colonial period, and what lasting impacts colonialism had on both Europe and Africa. Colonialism was a brief interlude in the sweep of African history. But, Kanogo maintains, it was very significant, leaving indelible impressions on populations in Africa. Kanogo briefly outlined different perspectives from which scholars have approached Africa's colonial history. One viewpoint suggests that from the outset colonialism was imposed from external sources. Colonialism was about domination that cut across, social, political, and economic fields. It imposed values and cultural practices, brought in from an external population group, and, in the process, much was destroyed. Colonialism, this perspective maintains, penetrated all aspects of a colonized person's being. Kanogo summarizes colonialism according to more recent scholarship as a dialectical encounter - a meeting of minds, of populations, of civilizations, of groups of ideas and peoples with agency. Rather than simply the story of one group dominating the other, everything about colonialism was contested and characterized by ambiguities. Africans did not take the colonial situation lying down. In certain situations they had in the upper hand in what seemed like a situation of domination. For, colonialism meant the coming together of different populations with often very different objectives, different notions of respectability, and different resources to control in the unfolding relationship. Though the colonized rarely dominated militarily, those without military power could still shift the terms of the relationship in subtle ways. Africans resisted colonialism overtly, employed passive resistance, collaborated with Europeans, and developed a spectrum of relationships with colonial powers that don't fit neatly into these categories. African societies were very vigorous in defending what they believed in. But some also sought out new ideas that they saw as potentially beneficial, including western medicine and literacy. Lots of syncretism occurred between older sensibilities and newer colonial sensibilities. Scholars like Jean and John Comaroff argue that in certain ways even the colonizers themselves and their daily practices were reshaped as a result of the colonial encounter. Kanogo emphasized the short period in which the majority of European colonization in Africa occurred. Before 1880 less than 10% of Africa was under colonial rule. Yet, by 1910 less than 10% of Africa was free from colonial rule. European economic activity in Africa dated back 300-400 years before this time. The most concentrated period of European activity in Africa was the trans-Atlantic slave trade, from the mid 15th C to the mid 19th C. Why then, Kanogo asks, the sudden change in the relationship between Europe and Africa at end of 19th C? She maintains that we must look at what was happening in Europe during this period - the political, economic, and social processes of change in Europe that required that energies be directed to a new theater - to understand Europe's new interests in Africa. By end of 19th century, Europe is feeling good about itself. Many nations have industrialized. The Austro-Hungarian empire collapsed and new nations were created. Europe develops a condescending attitude towards the rest of the world. It compares the accomplishments of the rest of the world to the specific valued accomplishments of Europe. It has experienced a religious revival. The spread of Christianity becomes a big concern of expansionists into Africa. With increasing economic competition between European nations and with France's loss of Alsace-Lorraine to Germany, Europe becomes too small a theater for these tensions to play themselves out. Conquering territory abroad provided a way, Kanogo suggests, for France to massage its ego. Individual leaders like Belgium's King Leopold sought to realize his own personal ambitions through colonial conquest in the Congo. In this light, Kanogo argues that the economic motivation was the key impulse for the scramble for the colonies. European nations sought to control potential markets, not realized markets. In addition to extracting mineral and agricultural resources for industrial production in Europe, European sought to fashion African tastes to create new markets for European manufactured goods. Infrastructure is put in place for extracting resources and channeling them to coast and for bringing in manufactured goods. The monocultural production encouraged during the colonial period damaged local African economies. Colonialism involved questions of land distribution, the introduction of new currencies, tensions between pastoral practices and agricultural cultivation, changing gender roles, new religions, new means of accessing power, and new commodities. Colonialism played itself out differently in white settler colonies and where there are different types of mineral deposits. Rarely is industrial production in Africa a major concern of European colonial powers. European colonizers suppressed industry in Africa and did little in the way of transferring technology to Africa. Different European powers approached colonialism with different understandings of their relationship to the colonized. Sexual relations between Portuguese and indigenous women were encouraged as a means of creating a more "refined" population. French colonizers thought they could create black French men. Yet the British do not want to think about the possibility of social equality between Africans and Britons. If Africans embraced the spirit of capitalism and the protestant work ethic, they could become upwardly mobile British subjects, but never British. Kanogo summarizes colonialism in Africa under the following broad themes: conquest, the consolidation of the colonial presence, the establishment of new political systems, urbanization, new social networks, and burgeoning nationalisms. Kanogo asks, how does gender play itself out in the colonial context? Nationalism in Africa, Kanogo argues, was not born of positive feelings of unity among Africans except as against a colonial power. Therefore, differences that exist during the pre-colonial period resurface in the years following independence. Kanogo shares the reflections of a range of scholars on
the colonial legacy. Colonialism redrew boundaries, divided ethnic groups
with national boundaries, deposed certain kings and wiped out certain
chieftainships, created other chiefs, created new judicial systems and
civil servants, and, in some instances altered the role of women in
local political systems. And yet, many African indigenous religions
have survived and are even seeing resurgence today, in the form of new
syncretisms - continuities and discontinuities.
Tetteh A. Kofi started off the panel with a framework for thinking about Africa. He noted that although the panel is about political systems, there are no political scientists on the panel. He noted that in the past few weeks there had been reports in the press about recent research findings regarding the African origin of our species. He said, "It was always thought that Europe discovered Africa, but now we know that's not true. The Ethiopians got to Africa long before Europeans got to Africa." He characterized African development is a saga (complicated by recent events of the last 500 years) and pointed out that the long and complicated history has made it more difficult to understand. He considers Africa as a continent that has been in the service of the West, although it is the home of the first homo sapiens, and the great civilization of Egypt. We can say it was the first continent to be stabilized and therefore characterize it as the oldest continent in the world. He said that we currently often hear discussions about Africa phrased as "What is Africa's problem now?" or "How can Africa catch up?" Professor Kofi told the audience that in 1400, King Henry of England sent a letter to the King of Abyssinia asking him to help England to fight the Muslims. 400 years later, England invaded Ethiopia and killed Ethiopians. He thinks this was one of the greatest atrocities in history, because if Ethiopia had survived, they would have been an example to the rest of Africa and the continent wouldn't have been colonized so easily. He concluded that the biggest problems in African history are in the last 25 or 30 years, in which development strategies have been in the hands of the World Bank and the IMF. Corrie Decker, a graduate student in the history department, started her session by asking the participants to look at the blank maps of Africa that Professor Kanogo passed out during an earlier session and see how many African countries they could name. Decker's talk was about Kenya. She said that the topic of the panel, political systems in Africa, might lead one to think about current states. However, the topic of her talk was the colonial state of Kenya. She believes it is important to revisit colonial states to understand the context of present activities. She is particularly interested in the concept of colonial development between 1920 and 1945 (roughly the interwar period). Her conclusion was that although Africans had little impact on the colonial council, Africans were still able to influence state policies. In 1929 Britain's colonial development act focused on activities to promote British aims. There was a transition in 1930 to 1931 in which conflicting views of development were discussed. There was a conference about economic development, but other political problems arose at the conference. A new question that arose at the conference was how to create an educational system for a "mixed" population (that is, a population that included white settlers and black indigenes.) At issue were the aspirations and demands of the locals. The British emphasized colonial government through indirect rule, that is, they governed the national level state, but individual Africans were most often administered in their own native courts. In actuality, the system was put in place because of the lack of officials in the early colonial period. At this conference Britain was considering the feasibility of uniting the administration of the East African colonies in a federation of Kenya, Uganda, and Tanganyika. Kenya was the sticking point. The three African representatives on the council wanted more African political rights, in particular they requested native education. Africans felt far away from the government, and requested participation in government, a logical prerequisite for development as they understood it. The link between access to information and economic development is clear in the statements of the Africans. The Africans were looking for "free" education rather than an apprenticeship system. (This is related to the debate at the time about the need for vocational vs. literary education). The African representatives all argued against a separate system, and demanded to be included in literary education to get closer to the site of political power. The Africans spoke of Britain as "our father" but this was most likely manipulative oratory. The committee refused the idea of an East African union so as to avoid the spread of this demand for political rights, but they suggested that Africans in Kenya be granted more representation, at the governor's discretion. The Europeans were impressed by the desire for education (for both men and women). These issues had not been on the European agenda, but became part of the British agenda due to the lobbying of the informal African representatives. Direct African representation didn't come until 1944. Several of the British members of the committee were convinced by the testimony of the African representatives of a new vision of development. The point of this story is that colonial policy wasn't created in a vacuum, rather it was created on the ground in struggles, dependent on a plurality of voices. The goal of this kind of historical work is to explore the various ways Africans contributed to the making of the colonial state. Benjamin Gardner, a graduate student in the Geography department, started by asking what images came to the mind of the participants when they think of East Africa? He noted that students are probably most familiar with things like: the Serengeti, the Maasai, Swahili, the Olduvai Gorge. The topic of his talk was environmental politics, and in particular the Serengeti, and the fight over the Ngorongoro area. Students often ask, if Africa is so rich in resources, why is it so poor? When we talk about politics, it's not just about decisions at the capital. Politics is a daily struggle over access to resources, material and discursive. The environment is one of the most important arenas for political struggle in Africa. For Gardner, the key question is: Who owns land and natural resources? And the possible teaching points he outlined were
The area of Gardner's research is the border between Tanzania and Kenya. He works with the Maasai, a group of pastoralists, moving with cattle to follow the grazing land, and living off the products of their cattle. These people were persecuted under colonialism because it was harder for the colonial state to use their labor. Pastoralists didn't always want to sell their cows, so the colonialists didn't see their way of life as economically productive. Now the Maasai are spoken about the same way we might speak about the need to save an endangered species of animal. He talked about the conservation paradigms operating within colonial policy. The main issue was balancing conservation and customary rights. Colonial scientific forestry drove Tanganyika's forest policies in the 1930's 40's and 50s. The argument at that time was that indigenous people should not be given free access to forests because it reduced government revenue. The also argued that free access to subsistence resources helped keep African wages depressed. Furthermore, the livelihood essentials such as fuel wood and building poles could be obtained by the labor of women and children rather than through cash purchase. Most pressure for conservation came not from colonial
resource professionals but from conservation societies in England (for
example, the Society for the Preservation of the Fauna of the Empire
(SPFE).) British conservationists promoted the creation of National
Parks as the best model of wildlife preservation. They argued that population
growth and over-hunting were major threats and that separating people
from the forest would protect natural resources. They also made moral
arguments to save wildlife for a greater good, equated conservation
with civilized ethics or managing natural resources. He told us about the site of his research: Ngorongoro. This area was first occupied by Maasai pastoralists around 1600. The savannah range and forest habitat supports large wildlife and livestock populations. Poor soil and low rainfall make it marginal agricultural land and the land has been primarily managed by pastoralists. In 1940, Serengeti National Park was created under the game ordinance act. The pre-existing rights of native residents were preserved though regulated to some degree. The colonial government hoped that the Maasai would move out of the park voluntarily if they provided resources such as water for the cattle, but it didn't work. This led to the criminalization of certain Maasai practices. The independent post-colonial government relied on foreign currency from national parks, so were not likely to change the system too much. (25% of the total land mass of Tanzania is regulated as national park land.) Though tourism is increasingly touted as a development solution, the problem is that the tourists are fickle and can always go somewhere else (e.g. due to a fear of terrorism). Modern day struggles over the land are playing out in a very political way. There was a new law in 1998 entitled the Wildlife Policy of the United Republic of Tanzania. The laws make these lands community conservation zones, but people are resistant. Gardner works with the Pastoral Women's Council who are struggling against the government's plan. Also arguing for indigenous rights that might be guaranteed by the United Nations. In discussing the Cultural Politics of Conservation, we need to ask the following questions: Who frames the argument? Which history is valid? What are the political tactics? Gardner concludes that the African landscape is produced through political, economic, and cultural processes. There are no simple solutions to the tension between colonial conservation and the needs of local communities. Teachers might use this material to compare the land issues of Native Americans in the U.S., aborigines in Australia, and the Maasai in Kenya to look at the different ways in which these groups are struggling for rights. Saida Hodzic, a graduate student in the anthropology department, gave a talk about Ghana. (She noted that the California curriculum teaches about the Empire of Ghana, which was actually in present day Mali.) She started with a quote by African Anthropologist Achille Mbembe: "Thinking rationally about Africa is something that has never come naturally." If the media says Africa is traditional and we, as scholars, say Africa is modern, we are not changing the terms of the debate. The challenge is: Can we teach about an African country not under the sign of lack or failure? Ghana was a British colony for about 80 years. It was governed under the system of indirect rule (which Corrie Decker mentioned earlier). Native authorities were created in places where they didn't already exist. The British imagined that African society was naturally ruled by chiefs and other big men. In places where they couldn't find their imagined African society, they created it. The cities were governed differently from the rural areas. The port areas were ruled by the British and the interior was ruled by chiefs. By the 1920s, the educated Ghanaians were saying that they should rule instead of the chiefs. Ghana was the first sub-Saharan country to gain independence. After independence in 1957, Kwame Nkrumah began to question the role of the chiefs. The importance of chiefs was virtually extinguished in the 50s and 60s. (The British created, and Nkrumah extinguished.) Those who remained chiefs had to play into the hands of the national government. It wasn't until 1992, under a new constitution, that chiefs were allowed to play a prominent role in politics. Hodzic noted that in the present day, more chiefs are running for political office, and more intellectuals are trying to become chiefs. Her research question is: what is tradition given this changing political landscape? NGOs (Non-governmental organizations) can't be underestimated as political players, and international players are also governing many aspects life and economics in Ghana. She discovered that traditional authorities are experiencing a kind of boom, and that the driving force behind this phenomenon is the World Bank. In an effort to decentralize political power, the World Bank has a project to help traditional rulers in the Ashanti region. It is a kingdom that has existed for three hundred years, ruled by a king educated abroad in the US and the UK. She showed a handout from the World Bank on the "Promoting Partnerships with Traditional Authorities Project." The goals of the project are: To buttress traditional authorities in socio-economic development, to strengthen the capacities of traditional authorities to improve health and fight HIV/AIDS, to improve the financial capabilities of the traditional administration, to support programs to preserve cultural heritage, and to codify traditional laws. This project is promoted by the World Bank as part of a move towards political decentralization. This project raises several questions for Hodzic: What
is tradition? What does it mean that the World Bank is sponsoring this
project? Is it really decentralizing, if the money is going to one kingdom?
Is this community-based development? How much community participation
is there? Who has been sidestepped in this program (e.g. the government
of Ghana)?
William Carpenter is a seventh grade teacher at Enola D. Maxwell Middle School. He presented ways of using the epic story of Sundiata to introduce students to West Africa. His goal was to look at power and authority in the literary piece, Sundiata. To Sundiata, he claimed, power is influence among his peers, and in his social and political context. William found that reading narrative was the most effective way to give his students a feeling for Africa. The Kingdom of Mali emerged as a power from 1200 to 1500 controlled the gold and salt trades. Most of what we know is from Arab scholars, they wrote a great deal but much of it is slanted and full of prejudice. Muslims dismissed the early kings as pagans and therefore unworthy of recognition. He emphasized the influence of griots. Griots are counselors to the king, they inform the king of his lineage, and inform the king of prior events in history. He started with an ice-breaker to get at the importance of lineage. Everyone had to tell the person next to them about their name and how they got their name. He linked this to identity, saying, "Your lineage is your identity. That's what we're going to communicate through narrative in the story. You are the griots in your classrooms. You are the archives." Daouda Camara read aloud the introduction to the Sundiata epic. Next, William introduced the characters. Each group assigned itself characters and did a reading of the Sundiata epic in play form found in their binders. Different tables were given different scenes to act out before the group. After the performance, William referred to his handouts. The handouts included questions about how a leader perceives power, what are the underlying practices of power, and how was society organized. (Each teacher can develop questions appropriate for his or her own students.) His conclusion was that Sundiata was stockpiling different types of power. He reviewed a chart he used in studying the Sundiata epic (included in the folder), and shared a book on how to study the epic hero.
He reviewed the Foreign Language Learning Standards, and focused on the five elements:
He said, "I can't teach any topic about Africa if it has no connection to my students. I try to learn a lot about what is happening with them now. I always look for a springboard to get me into the topic." For his demonstration, he told a story, "Beneath the Baobab Tree." An old man was sitting under a Baobab tree, waiting to share the knowledge that comes with age. A young man stopped on his way from Matam to Thiemping and asked the old man under the tree if the people in Thiemping are kind, caring, generous people, or are they mean and frowning? The old man asked "Are the people you left behind in Matam, are they kind and generous or are they mean and frowning?" The traveler replied that they were always mad and didn't treat him well, that was why he was leaving. The old man said, over there behind the hill in Thiemping, you will find them frowning too. A young girl named Fatima came by the next day, and asked the same question. The old man asked Fatima to think for a while. Are the people in Matam kind and generous or do they frown all the time? Fatima said, they are good people and they always smile, but when it comes to religion they have problems. The other day I went to the DMV and they told me to take off my veil. In school, they want me to take off my veil as well. That's why I am moving to Thiemping. He had the participants break into three groups, and instructed them, "You are the wise old man. I want you to decide what the old man will tell Fatima. There will be no right or wrong answer to this. The end of the story as I know it may not coincide with the end that you imagine, and that's OK. Also, I want you to come up with a moral for the story." Each group responded as follows: Group Two: We had a similar response. It was simple to us until Islam was introduced. Moral: we create our own reality. OR people are people wherever you go. Group Three: We know Fatima was Mohamed's wife. Maybe she had a mission to spread Islam? Moral: you experience what you see. Daouda explained that this is a story that is told by the griots when one is leaving the village, say to go to the city to study. He said, "I don't know how many times I heard this story growing up. Here's the conclusion as I know it." The old man said in that village in Thiemping, you will find kind and generous people, smiling all day. The moral of the story is that a community is nothing but a group of different people. What you bring to the community is what will make the community smile all day or frown all day. The story came from Africa. It is an old story, changed to suit current events. He took the story of Fatima from a current French newsmagazine. In order to use this in the classroom, he would bring the magazine out and the class would discuss the issue. The questions might be: What does French law have to say about wearing a veil in public? What does Islam say? One could also do a whole discussion about immigration. One could ask, could the trench coat kids wear a trench coat and go to school? Can someone wear a KKK hood and come to class? Maybe you want to compare the new French laws that say in public you cannot wear your veil and the case of someone the woman in Florida who didn't want to take off her veil for her DMV photo. Do we say, when in Rome do as the Romans do? At times would we consider compromise? He said that the most important message to the group was to take one piece of what you have to teach and make a connection to Africa. He said he hated it as a student when someone wanted to give a lecture or teach something without letting him know why it was important to him. If you don't make it interesting and useful, the message won't go through. He asked the assembled group to brainstorm ideas and share
ideas for how they were thinking about using the topics discussed throughout
the day in their classes. For example, how could one use colonialism
in class?
A young man asked earlier in the day, how does one teach a subject like colonialism (or the holocaust) without being too passionate or angry about it? If you take on a touchy subject with all your anger, you might just create a new group of angry people. One participant gave her experience of teaching difficult subjects. She said, "When I was young, I was taught about slavery first by white teachers who were guilty about it. Then I was taught by blacks who were angry about it. So finally, we just didn't want to talk about it. So, what I do in my class is talk about slavery in China, or ancient Rome." Another participant responded, "It upsets me when
I hear people say 'well, there was slavery everywhere.' For me the only
way to counter that is to see myself as an agent of change, and to discuss
how the remnants of slavery still exist today in the schools (for example
in tracking.)" EVENING PANEL: "Connecting Africa and
the Diaspora" Sylviane Diouf is a historian at the Schomburg Research Center in New York. Her talk was about connecting Africa and the African diaspora in general terms. Although she is a historian, rather than talking about history, she talked about current times. Dr. Diouf said that what we are seeing today is a repeat of the phenomenon in the 18th century when a large population of Africans was brought to the U.S. She cited statistics that there are more Africans living in the U.S. today than the number that were imported during the slave trade. Close to 8% of black people living in the US are foreign born, and that figure rises to 30% in New York. The number coming from the Caribbean has doubled in the last decade. What is the impact of this new and massive transnational migration of people? With this large immigration of people, we are confronting practically ideas about race, class, identity, blackness, and African-ness. The coming together of these concepts reveals a great diversity above and below these concepts. There is often a strategic silence about what this means. Although everyone faces a similar racism, people cling to their own models from their own history. If we look at the Africans who are coming to the U.S. now, we see that race and racism don't have much significance in Sub-Saharan Africa. So, people come here and learn racism. People who come here don't understand the subtle aspects of racism. Or people think that it is at the level of the individual, they don't understand that it's woven into the system. Blackness has various interpretations. Blackness in the U.S. means anyone with any black ancestry. When we look at Africans who migrate to the U.S., they don't identify as blacks, rather they identify as Africans, or Nigerian or Senegalese or what have you. To be African on the other hand means to have a particular history and culture. Historically, Africans have not understood Europeans in racial terms. Rather they have used terms denoting foreignness to describe Whites. Which means that people of African descent living in the west are called "Tubab" etc., which is often quite a shock to black Americans who go to Africa. For Africans, African-ness means a social and cultural belonging. Here in the U.S. it's more about race and origin. Also important is the issue of class. There is a great degree of separation between black ethnic groups because of socio-economic differences. Africans in the US are the most highly educated group in the U.S. by far. The Africans in the U.S. today are part of the brain drain. They have higher incomes than African-Americans or Caribbeans and they tend to live in areas that reflect that. They are usually not active in the political struggle here, but they are usually active financially in political struggles in their countries of origin. There is a tendency in the U.S. to only have a notion of the African diaspora as the slave trade. Today, in Africa, when people are talking about the African diaspora, more and more what they are talking about is not the slave trade but contemporary brain drain. This diaspora is 700,000 here, 150,000 in Australia, hundreds of thousands in the Middle East. These have a very direct impact on the lives of people in Africa because those people contribute a lot to the development of their countries. Nigerians abroad send $180 billion dollars home annually, far greater than the amount of U.S. government aid to Nigeria. Is the first diaspora still relevant in the contemporary context? If so, how can it be made more pertinent? We need to look for more innovative ways in this second diaspora to look at the diversity in classrooms. People are asking questions about how to do that. What forum would be appropriate to start exploring the commonalties and differences and to understand each other's histories. The goal is not to exaggerate or diminish the commonalities and differences, but rather to understand the things that might be pertinent. For example: Will common problems associated with race outweigh the issues having to do with national origin? How will blackness evolve in the future, as globalization is changing our geographies, and changing the idea of diaspora? (This question is especially pertinent in Europe, in countries that were not destination countries of the first diaspora, like Italy or Germany.) Dr. Diouf concluded that we have to start thinking about these new realities in the diaspora, so we can make the old and the new a totality of experience that is more relevant in today's world. During the question and answer period, someone asked, "Why don't we see the same pattern of Africans banding together here to start businesses and start banks that we see with other groups of immigrants?" Dr. Diouf answered that she sees a lot more of it on the East Coast than on the West Coast. Also she noted that there are variations by country of origin. Many don't see themselves staying here long term and so send most of their money home. But there are mutual aid societies set up by African immigrants so they have been able to open some businesses in redlined areas. David Theo Goldberg is the Director of the University of California Humanities Research Institute. He started by pointing out that the day of the conference, June the 16th, is also the anniversary of the rise of the youth of South Africa in 1976 in Soweto and elsewhere. He saw this is a prescient moment for connecting Africa and its diasporas. Those 27 years represent the exact amount of time that Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisilu were wrongfully convicted of terrorism in South Africa. (We might also, he suggested, use this as an opportunity to think of what it means to be accused of terrorism wrongfully.) The idea of Africa emerges as an effect of colonialism, in the wake of Europe thinking of itself as a unified whole or entity. In the fifteenth century, the pope says "we in Europe" in a way not seen before. In the wake of that coherence another coherence is created, that which is the other, or Africa. In a way, those coherencies have stuck. This coherence covers over great differentiations (as it does in Europe). He encouraged the audience to think in the plural, noting that there are many Africas. For example there is a great difference between supra- and sub-Saharan Africa, and the Africa of the east and of the west. There are something like fifty major different linguistic groups, with many sub groups and dialects running into the thousands. There are significant cultural differences across the continent. Just as there are various Africas, there are various African diasporas. Indeed, these diasporas have quite a long history. The 1800 census of London numbered 1 million people, and about 2% were people from Africa. People from Africa are not given an iota of mention in European history. For example, the history of Amsterdam doesn't mention African people though they had a significant presence. Throughout Europe you see the effect of African people on visual culture (in wallpaper, signage, music, etc.). Africa's diasporas are multiple and differentiated. Africans think of themselves as experiencing racism when coming to the U.S. For example, many Nigerians living in the U.S. say, "I had no experience of racism until I came to this country." He always found this puzzling. Africa has a long history of colonialism, and to say there was little or no experience of racism strikes him as quite odd. But it speaks to a truth. The racism faced in coming to the U.S. or Europe is significantly different from the kind of racisms experienced under the boot of colonialism. Having said that, it's important to think in terms of internal and external connections and relations. A couple of examples: The influences don't go in just one direction. They go in at least both and maybe all directions. The New Negro as part of the Harlem renaissance influenced ideas of negritude and others among the new African intellectuals. And of course the anti-colonial social movement was about decolonizing the imagination and bounced back to the Americas in the form of the civil rights struggle. In thinking about connections between Africa and its diasporas, he likes to think about coalitions. In 1994, he was teaching in the state university in Phoenix. He would get called to talk on local news programs and so on. He got called to talk about the end of apartheid and the first elections. The South African government established polling booths in other countries in which South Africans had migrated (L.A., S.F, N.Y., London) and some in Arizona. When he said he wouldn't be voting, the producer was horrified. He said, "I married an American, my child is American, it's not for me to tell South Africans what to do", and so the producer didn't use him in the program. The point of this story is that Mandela understood something: he was shoring up a population that had lost a connection to South Africa. When one thinks of the shift from the OAU to NEPAD, one sees that interest groups around economics and politics are forming in this kind of transnational way. What does Africa have to say to the diaspora and what does the diaspora have to say to Africa? The first is the kind of epidemics of violence and disease that are ravaging Africa, e.g., AIDS. Many of these wars and famines and deaths are related to the colonial era, some are related to new globalization. He also mentioned the arts, by which he meant not just the visual arts, but music, writing, film, and the like. Africa has played an enormously important role in the Western world. The story has often been told of the development of cubism arising from an African art show in Paris. Great writing has emerged out of Africa: Ngugi wa Thiongo, Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Nadine Gordimer, etc. He ended by saying that Africa has something to teach us about censorship. Africa has suffered and continues to suffer enormous problems with censorship. One only has to think of Zimbabwe. He mentioned a short story by Ken Saro Wiwa, "The Day African Killed its Sun," published the day before he was killed on trumped up charges in Nigeria. We can learn from Africa about censorship in these dangerous times in the U.S. He recounted the story of two black suited men peering into the classroom of a young lecturer at U.C. Irvine. They brought out of the class a young man who had failed to fill out his papers correctly. This event sent a chill through the students about what could be discussed in the class. On this anniversary of the South African intifada, we might take that lesson to heart. Pedro Noguera is the Judith K. Dimon Professor in Communities and Schools at Harvard University, and a former Professor at the Graduate School of Education at U.C. Berkeley. He started his comments by noting that it is refreshing to see a conference on education that is focused on content. It compels us to realize that teaching is intellectual work and that is an important change. We often think of teaching as a technical work, compliance with certain legal mandates, delivering a curriculum. Professor Noguera said that the most important question of the conference is, "How do you take these ideas, and take them back to schools?" If your assignment is to take what we've talked about tonight and design a lesson plan for Castlemont High school, that's a tall order. It's a whole other step to think, "how will I use this knowledge to inspire them, help them, and get them to acquire skills?" He thinks the translation of the content to the classroom is where we often fall short. He shared that in his own teaching, he uses Africa and the diaspora in a comparative approach. He finds that adding the experience from another country makes the material come to life, for example comparing the end of slavery here to the Haitian revolution. It's a way to get kids to contemplate and situate themselves in a discourse. The knowledge is not by itself valuable. It is only valuable if young people can use the knowledge to inspire themselves to change their situations. The biggest failure of African studies and African American studies is that we've failed to make that connection. It is not simply content that moves young people. It is content that is connected to their experience, and content that allows them to see how they can change their communities. He also uses a comparative perspective when talking about race and education. He mentioned Caribbean countries that have a higher literacy rate than the U.S. (Barbados has a literacy rate of 96% and US has a rate of 80%). In the Caribbean, being black is not an obstacle to success, and not an obstacle to speaking a number of languages. To really mank an impact he brings up Cuba. They educate more doctors per capita, they have universal pre-schooling, and all of this on an economy based solely on sugar and tourism. A comparative perspective can be useful in framing the issues and moves us away from thinking that there is something wrong with the kids. He quoted an anecdote from the book Young, Gifted, and Black. A grandmother attending a school board hearing said to them, "you know what, the farmers don't blame the corn when the corn don't grow." Yet we blame the kids all the time when the kids don't achieve. It says a lot more about the history of racism in this country when the kids don't learn. In the African American experience, education has always been central to the experience of liberation, to the extent that there were laws against teaching blacks to read and write. If you read a scholar like John Ogbu, he would argue that that history doesn't exist. He would argue that they come from a culture that doesn't value learning. You hear that it's either genetics or culture. A focus on success, and a focus on the role that education has played, is important. When we look closely at the history, we see that there
are four dimensions that have to be present to change lives. When we think about the identities of young people, we should be skeptical of the ways we use race. The young people we work with in urban settings are raced, but we all know they are more than those categories. If we fall into the trap of allowing those categories to influence how we see them, we replicate their underachievement. We have to see how race is used as a tool of oppression, and patterns the way we treat kids. We have to be careful of how we treat culture. There is an increasingly simplistic notion of culture in education. On the East Coast, 30% of the kids are black, but not born in this country. Their cultures are in flux, their cultures are changing in front of them. Think of culture as everyday experience, the way they make sense of the world around them. Background is less important than culture as lived experience. We need to also be careful about how we approach the application of ideas. That is, is it simply about education to get a job? Should we be talking about other reasons for an education? For many of them a job may not be a big enough incentive. We may need to let them see how they can use education to improve their communities, and help their families. A colleague of his helped kids to set up businesses in the school where he worked, because that's what the students wanted. They ended up starting a business cleaning up empty lots in Oakland. High school students would bid to do work because the city of Oakland required it. The issue becomes how to address the pressing needs of the students. They had a need to put money in their pockets, and they needed to learn about writing and math skills. The more we can do that kind of thing the more education can become important to young people. Also, music and performance can be used to reach them. And the shame is that those are the first programs cut. A lot of kids are not good at sitting and listening passively. The cemetery approach to learning is not working. This is a very difficult time in public education, and the situation in Oakland is maybe the most dramatic. It's a time when in the name of leaving no child behind, we have a president who will test them to kingdom come. Much of what was covered at this conference will not be on the test. Education should never be reduced to preparing kids for a test. An empowering experience will allow them to learn the skills and pass the test. Dr. Noguera considers that the most important work we can do. John Rickford is the Martin Luther King Jr. Centennial Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Director of African American Studies at Stanford University. He started his talk by noting that it was fifty or sixty years ago that Herskovits published "The Myth of the Negro Past." The main idea of that book was that there was little continuation between Africa and the diaspora. (In recent years there has been a resurgence of this Anglicist idea, the idea that African American language came from England.) On the other hand, Lorenzo Dow Turner published "Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect" which explored vibrant Creole forms. People debated how many African words are there in Gullah, a South Carolina dialect. In fact Turner found over four thousand Africanisms in the Gullah dialect. The point is that African and Creole elements are really all around you in language and culture. Professor Rickford wants us to be on the lookout for these elements. Of course, one doesn't look for them as static retentions, but as dynamic creations. In research paper by Professor Rickford, he and a colleague looked at knowledge of "sucking teeth," in the U.S. They administered a questionnaire to both whites and blacks to determine their knowledge of this cultural practice with roots in Africa. They found that most whites didn't know it, most West Indians knew it, and all West Africans knew it. This is a practice that is very ordinary, but it has a historical significance. He next directed out attention to the South Carolina and the Georgia Sea Islands. This area is a rich resource for the study of African elements in African American culture for a number of reasons. In these areas today, the population is 90% black. Africans came to this region a lot later than in other areas of the U.S. The islands are very isolated, so less enculturated over time. In these areas we see basket weaving and basket making similar to the craft in West Africa. There are interesting commonalities in the patterns of woodcarving and the nets used for fishing (circular nets that are almost identical to nets in the West Indies and West Africa). He found that women wore double belts to hitch up their skirts because it was supposed to give them extra strength in a form similar to that found in West Africa. He also saw the practice of carrying large loads on the head and the use of a kata or pad used on the head for carrying. Very interesting are continuities in the practices of religious worship. There are similar dances, especially in Pentecostal churches. Similar body language, and counter clockwise movement could be found in church anniversary celebrations. In these celebrations ushers come from a number of churches and do special dances. This is a vibrant and alive custom. There is also a similar syncopated clapping as part of the service. He told a story about a steel guitar player encountered in research who said that he had a dream that told him to get a guitar and play, and when he picked it up he already knew how to play. This echoes the importance of dreams in West African cosmology. He showed slides of the pews in the balcony of a black church in Savannah. The balconies were often where the black populations were put. In that church one sees a kind of writing which the deacon called "African spirit writing." In the basement one sees diagonal marks on the floors in the shape of a Congo cosmogram, a well-established notion. These symbols are part of a larger cosmology of belief. It looks on the surface like Christian iconography, but it is not. It is about a cycle of life starting in the east, moving to the west, and then down to the underworld. This is reflected in the counterclockwise dancing in churches. The Congo cosmograms found in the church are some of the best examples anywhere. It is a form also found in Jamaica. Turner found that Gullah names corresponded to African naming traditions. In fact there were many similarities in language (e.g. the use of the locutive copula.) He also described the use of "da" and "does" for habitual actions. This is important to understand the use of "be" in African American language as in "He be walking." Professor Rickford recommended a video entitled "The Language you Cry In" about the connection between a song from a Gullah community and the same Mende song in a village in Sierra Leone. A woman in South Carolina knew the song, and explained that she had been told by her grandmother "you will need this song to recognize your relatives when they come back." In the film the American and the African woman both sing their version of the song. The film is a powerful demonstration of the links between Africa and the diaspora. Professor Rickford concluded that we can see many connections between Africa and Africa-American and Caribbean language and culture. He suggested to the teachers present that they get their students to do family histories by tape recording the oldest member of their family (like the Foxfire tradition). It's also good to take students to other parts of the country and other parts of the world to see other types of black people. During the question and answer period, a participant said
that she saw a direct connection between African Americans and Africa,
especially in the Bay Area, but that she hadn't seen that reflected
in the comments of the panel. Dr. Rickford responded that a lot of people
feel that connection, even if they can't point to examples. He characterized
that as part of his work. He gave the example of step dances and other
fraternity and sorority rituals. He said those connections become clearer
when one goes somewhere else (like South Africa) and sees a kind of
familiarity. Diaspora, Day Two Introduction: "Africanisms
in the Diaspora: Identity, Culture, and Religion" Percy Hintzen provided an introduction to the study of the African diaspora. He invoked Bob Marley to define diaspora as exodus, a movement of people with a sense of origins rooted in Africa. Diaspora involves a notion of belonging - belonging to a homeland to which diasporic people are not resident - and of displacement. At the same time, diaspora is produced through a sense of connectedness. Studying diaspora involves investigating how people understand these connections and thinking critically about why people have developed this connected identity. Why have people thought of themselves not in terms of where they live but in terms of their historical origins, despite generations away from this place of identified origin? There is an essential relationship between diaspora, identity, and race. Hintzen reminds us that the notion of race as a biogenetic reality emerged only at the end of the 19th century with scientific racism. At this time racial identity becomes fundamentally rooted in genetics and biology. Today, there is a fundamental connection between race and diasporic identity. A person cannot be white unless s/he has some claims to origins in Europe. But why, Hintzen asks is there this intimate connection? Why do people think of themselves in terms of race and diaspora? Hintzen chalks it up to modernity. The modern world continues to be organized in terms of movement. This began with new technologies that allowed people to go all over the globe, to move goods and services across the globe for profit. Who could move and who could claim belonging to what space came to define the modern world. The decision about who deserves all the benefits of the modern world relates to race. Hintzen cites insufficient resources mobilized in response
to the crisis of AIDS in Africa as an example of this phenomenon. In
parts of Africa, the rate of HIV infection is now between 25-30%. In
many respects a related phenomenon, every day in Africa there are approximately
40-50,000 people who die of hunger and starvation. Hintzen believes
that the massive mobilization of resources and technology to contain
SARS, a disease that has killed less than 1000 people, all of them located
in the so-called modern sectors of the world, relates to race, to who
routinely benefits from the modern world and who does not. The homeland remembered and invoked by African diasporic
identity, is not a real homeland but an imaginary one. The imagery of
Africa changes over time and place. This allows people who are so excluded
to develop alternative senses of belonging and subjectivity - an alternative
to feeing that they don't deserve the benefits of modernity. "The Aesthetic and the Political
in Popular Music" Jocelyne Guilbault demonstrated how music, a medium in which it is relatively easy to encourage students' interests, can be used to trace African connections and continuities throughout the diaspora. Music can express many things that otherwise cannot be said and that are otherwise marginalized. Music is a social field used to control and to influence, but it is also a privileged space in which to express affinities. Guilbault chooses to focus on the performance of music. Through the aesthetics of performance, one can express the political and hopefully effect changes. Most of us know music through its stars. Thus, biographies are often used in education. Biographies have been used to construct hero figures and role models. But, Guilbault argues, if we understand ourselves in transnational space, we have to address individuals in all of their complexities. We can choose aspects of biographies that are inspiring for students. However, it is equally important to show how some figures that have promoted politics of hope have also been recontained. Certain musical gestures or movements can actually start to mobilize and inform people about rights in ways that will help their particular lives. But, these gestures are often recontained by the very politics they are supposed to change. For example, Bob Marley's music in now used to advertise soft drinks. His music has been recontained to serve those interests that have not served the people who Marley tried to mobilize with his music. Sometimes to attract students' attentions we focus on biographies that express lots of eccentricities. In so doing, Guilbault warns, we run the risk of seeing eccentricities as merely that. Very often these signal the emergence of new subjects, of the possibility of changing the ways things are done. To speak about aesthetics, about value judgments is to speak about politics. Guilbault looks at the processes of identity production. She is interested in the conditions in which music is produced and the type of work that music tries to do. She showed a video of Wyclef Jean singing at the 9/11 Tribute to Heroes concert. Jean, a Haitian-American, attracted lots of attention at this tribute because he sang Bob Marley's "Redemption Song" while wearing the American flag. His performance challenged Americans to recognize a larger American community that had been deeply affected by the tragedy of 9/11. He adopted a song that had been written for a different purpose about a different struggle and in so doing reminded Americans that for many African-Americans, terror in the US did not start on September 11th. Guilbault charges us to look at who was selected to perform at the tribute concert and why. Why for example, was Wyclef Jean chosen from so many people? Who was not chosen? Maybe the producers at that time more than any other wanted to show a politics of inclusion, despite the fact that this counters the experience of so many Americans. When Wyclef Jean sings Bob Dylan's "Knocking on Heaven's Door", he draws together African diasporic connections. Guilbault plays both Dylan and Jean's versions of this song so that listeners can experience the changes in lyrics and performance Jean makes. Jean's version of Dylan's song once again draws connections between the terrorism of 9/11 and that terrorism perpetrated on the streets of the US in black and Hispanic communities. Jean employs the African musical practice of call and response and, in so doing, conjures up many communities in one song. Where Dylan sang about an officer of the law putting down his gun and rejecting his line of work, Jean pleads for someone to take away the guns from the streets of black communities. His version of the song has far more emphasis on beat, percussion, and call and response. In the style of a griot, Jean's version allows people to comment, to answer back to his chorus, and to add their comments. Guilbault argues that the problem for minorities in America
today is not visibility. We see minorities on TV and in the media. The
major problem is that the conditions in which minorities live in this
country have not changed despite their media visibility. Therefore,
when we play this song for our students, we need to go beyond making
someone or some community visible. We must discuss the conditions of
music production, of knowledge, of what comes to be valued in this country
and under what circumstances. It is when students of popular culture
can address these conditions that we can begin to address the system
that oppresses so many people.
Angela Davis drew connections between three social movements that she sees as intrinsically connected: the anti-slavery movement of the 19th century, the movement to abolish the death penalty, and the movement to abolish prisons. She began her talk with some reflections on the first time she read Chapter 10 of Frederick Douglass's autobiography, the chapter entitled, "Learning to Read". She argues that every child should know the passage in which Douglass realizes that reading and education represented "the direct pathway from slavery to freedom." The passage situates the quest for education as a struggle for freedom. Even though slavery was abolished almost a century and a half ago, we are still, Davis maintains, in need of agendas that center the struggle for education as a social movement. It is important to create frameworks for students to insert themselves into the history of social movements in this country and to help them to imagine themselves as participants or beneficiaries of these movements. In the south, prior to the abolition of slavery there was no such thing as public education. Thus, both blacks and whites benefited from the struggle for public education in the aftermath of slavery. However, Davis argues that the movement for reparations today is an indication of the extent to which the movement to abolish slavery was not completed. It was abolished abstractly, negatively. But for abolition democracy to emerge, there would have to be both economic and political revolution. During the period of radical reconstruction in the immediate aftermath of slavery, black men experienced some of this, but the Rutherford-Hayes compromise ended radical reconstruction. Davis provided a series of ways of encouraging students to think critically about social movements. She argues that by demonstrating the connections between contemporary social movements and social movements of the past, we can help students to think of themselves as connected to these histories of struggle. We need to fight against the notion that history is "that of which I was not a part." The US is the only industrialized country in the world that continues to routinely use the death penalty. It is important, Davis maintains, for students to recognize that in other countries our continued use of this practice is seen as bizarre. Students need to ask, why are we living with an archaic form of punishment in this country? Efforts to abolish the death penalty in the US have largely focused on the racism of the death penalty and, more recently, on the race of the victims. But, Davis insists, we can think about the death penalty in ways that can help us understand how we continue to live with the legacy of slavery. What is important is not just that the death penalty targets people of color, but that the institution itself was preserved through slavery. Initially, the invention of the prison during the American Revolution was seen as an alternative to capital punishment. As such, it was supposed to render obsolete both capital and corporal punishment. During the 1800s, states increasingly abolished the death penalty for offenses other than murder, but did so only for white people. While slaves could receive the death penalty for 71 different crimes while whites could receive it for only one. Thus the institution of the death penalty was preserved in and through slavery. Even with the abolition of slavery, the death penalty was continually used disproportionately for black people. Today, campaigns against the death penalty include the innocence movement against wrongful convictions. Davis argues, however, that we need to be critical of this movement as a protest against the death penalty, because the focus on innocence creates a guilty population that ostensibly deserves the death sentence. This movement tends to bolster the permanence of the death penalty in situations where culpability can be proven through DNA. Davis critiques life without possibility of parole as an alternative to the death penalty. She argues that a movement to abolish the death penalty ought to be considered in a movement to abolish prisons. She believes it is time to consider other forms of punitive justice. Laws that used to connect race and punishment in an explicit way no longer exist. But, the fact that someone comes from a racially marginalized community has a great deal to do with whether or not s/he will go to prison. We must encourage popular conversations about whether on not the prison crisis threatens the future of democracy. Davis sees education as the most important alternative to incarceration. In the recent budget, Governor Davis increased the prison budget but not the education budget. There is an important connection between the struggle for education and the prison crisis that would shift resources from prisons to institutions of education, but would also challenge the degree to which the institution of the prison is serving as a model for institutions of education. Davis cites the emphasis on discipline and security in the form of police and metal detectors in schools as examples of the influence of the prison model on schools. We must disrupt this connection between schools and prisons. Davis briefly discussed her current work with women prisoners in the Netherlands. One of the challenges of education today is to encourage students to think about themselves as part of global communities and to help them understand the globalization of capitalism. If we go into a prison in Sweden, we'll see black people and people from the Middle East. One of the problems in the aftermath of 9/11 is that people didn't know how to think of themselves as anything other than American. Representations of prisons in the media persuade us that we know what prison is like and what prisoners are like. These discourses prevent us from thinking and forming solidarity with different people. Even if we are progressive we think of prisoners as people who have done something that merits their current situation. We must encourage people to think critically about what they most take for granted, those things they depend on for their sense of the world. An audience member asked Davis what she felt would be the best alternative to the current prison system. Education, Davis believes, is the major alternative. We have to figure out how to devote more resources to education. If we make the mistake of thinking about alternatives to prisons as occupying the same footprint as the prison, providing one alternative to all of the various reasons why people are in prison, then we won't find an alternative. We can't transfer two million prisoners to another institution. We need to think about a range of institutions that right now don't have anything to do with the criminal justice system. In addition to schools, facilities for recreation could play an important role. These institutions ought to be available to people if they are going to think of themselves as valuable in a community that has a future. Free drug rehab centers should be available to everyone. As it stands, places like the Betty Ford Center are only available to rich people. Why, Davis asks, is the first question always, what's going to happen to the murderers and rapists? They are not the majority of the people in prison. We need to consider forms of restorative/reparative justice. These forms of justice are not based on punishment and inflicting violence. Davis cites the relationship fostered by Amy Biehl's parents with their daughter's killers as an example of restorative justice. "This may be the way they are, but it is not the
way things are supposed to be," Davis's mother once told her. It
is possible to change the world, to make things different, and it is
important for educators to impart this sense of agency to their students,
to instill the sense in their students that they can contribute to efforts
to create a very different world.
Gina Dent introduced the graduate student panel. Dent emphasized that people who study literature often approach literature from other academic disciplines. Based on their own experiences in the classroom, graduate students made suggestions about how diasporic literature might effectively be taught in the classroom. Sarita Cannon, a graduate student in the English department, investigated a series of texts using two approaches that she sees as important for teaching African-American literature. The first approach emphasizes that teaching African-American literature is tied to the history of that literature. Cannon sees teaching this literature as an opportunity to provide her students with a cultural education they might not get elsewhere. The second approach recognizes that texts can be understood in terms of a number of literary traditions, not necessarily African-American. Cannon emphasizes that these two approaches to teaching African-American literature are not mutually exclusive. The first text Cannon discusses is The Life of Oka Tubby. Tubby was born to a slave owner and slave mother. The slave owner frees his mother and brothers, but Tubby remains a slave to his family. He adopts the name Oka Tubby (not his given name) when he takes on the persona of a doctor who preaches and plays music throughout the region. The book was written by Tubby's wife, a Montauk Indian. It serves as an autobiography through which Tubby performs a certain identity. Tubby tries to pass as a Montauk Indian as many blacks tried to pass as white. The book addresses issues rarely dealt with in literature, including slave ownership by free blacks and the history of solidarity and conflict between Native Americans and blacks in the US. Black soldiers were among those soldiers who practiced the removal and slaughter of Native Americans on the frontier, while some Cherokee owned slaves. Cannon suggests the following as a possible assignment for students reading this book. Students could interview an elderly person, write both their life story and an analysis of the process of transcription. Students could then be asked to reflect on how transcription is similar to translation. Cannon proposed a series of questions that students should consider when reading the writings of Du Bois and Booker T. Washington: How do the literary approaches of these two writers reflect their personal backgrounds? Du Bois grew up free, went to Harvard, and preached the value of a liberal arts education for farmers and the immediate equal rights for blacks and whites. Washington, on the other hand, a son of former slaves, advocated vocational training for blacks and insisted that blacks should be humble and accept segregation for the time being. Where is the common ground between these texts? What does it mean that these writers wrote at a time when lynching was a daily practice in the US South? What was it like to be a black intellectual in this environment and how did it affect their views? How, for example, did the white patronage of Washington's schools shape or stifle his discourse? The voices of black women activists of the same period have been muffled. In what ways did their opinions differ from those of their male counterparts? Such a discussion could lead to a discussion of the role of black intellectuals like Cornell West and Henry Louis Gates in contemporary society. What factors or histories influence their discourses? Cannon shared her own experiences teaching Cane, a book of short stories, poetry, and drama by Jane Tumor published in 1923. The book reflects the shift from rural life to northern urban industrial culture experienced by many black families. It is a high modernist text. Cannon has had her 10th grade students do art projects where they drew central images from the text. She recognizes that it is an ambitious text to assign because of the range of literary styles adopted by the author. Cannon argues that the book can be read alongside the writings of Harlem Renaissance poets, but also alongside the works like Elliot's The Wasteland. By reading Cane and The Wasteland together, the student will be exposed to two different post-WWI visions of western culture. Finally, Cannon discusses ways of teaching Rita Dove's Darker Face of the Earth. The play retells the Oedipus myth on a South Carolina plantation. The play is most often taught in courses on Greek drama. What, asks Cannon, are the implications of a black woman reappropriating this myth for the 20th century? How is Dove redefining tragedy? The play has two endings: students could be asked to write their own ending to the play and then to discuss how different endings change the nature of the play. Alternatively, Cannon suggests, students could be asked to write a short story in Dove's style. Antoinette Chevalier, a graduate student in the English department, studies Victorian literature in light of the theoretical issues usually associated with diaspora, such as racial passing. She is particularly interested in looking at how white Englishmen perform the diasporisms displayed by so-called Black Victorians - South Asians, Chinese, and West Indian immigrants - in Victorian literature. Also, how and when do US phenomena like lynching appear in Victorian literature? She is looking at how blackness is used in literature to strengthen white characters. Sherlock Holmes is made a more powerful detective when he travels in disguise, as it is only disguised as "black" that he can transgress the spaces of London's subaltern classes. Chevalier focuses most of her discussion on Wilke Collins' Moonstone. She investigates those involuntarily displaced subjects and those subjects who intentionally displace themselves. Not all diasporic states, she argues, are involuntary. White Englishman can perform in a changing cultural terrain in late Victorian Britain. The English subject doesn't have to be exiled to experience displacement. Displacement can be strategic when coupled with the need to assume liminal placement, as is the case with Sherlock Holmes. In late Victorian London, there lived many immigrants from the British colonies, particularly around the docks in London's East End. The East End became the locus of an urban primitive in the white imaginary. White Britons feared the effects of these people on the metropole. Yet, we see a certain compulsion to dissolve such borders in late Victorian literature. The popularity of black face minstrelcy in Britain serves as one example. Black face depicted the plantation scene, captivity, and enslavement, but also allowed for the benefits of blackness. English beggars often dressed as escaped slaves to get more sympathy and donations. Black face was born on the docks in Britain. These egalitarian spaces are the same places in which characters in the Moonstone realize successes and failures in performing liminal identities. The book aligns street kids with darkest Africa and blackness, depicting kids covered in dirt so they became "dark like Africans". In the Moonstone, Gooseberry could enter more spaces because of the dark skin he had acquired from living on the street. Gooseberry has features like large rolling eyes typically associated black face minstrelcy. Likewise, when the sergeant comments on Gooseberry's cleverness, he says "its not cotton wool in his ear," associating him with the woolly wig of black face performers. Gooseberry is the native informant. He is adept at surveillance, visible but not seen. Ablewhite, on the other hand, a gentleman, blackens his face and dresses as a black sailor in order to escape the attention of his own class but fails. A thin line of white is visible around his blackened face. Chevalier emphasizes the special place that the ship has in notions of diaspora. She suggests that maritime locomotion is perhaps one space where blackness is privileged. Ivy Mills, a graduate student in the African Diaspora program at UC Berkeley, offered ways in which we can rethink African history and culture through Chinua Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart. She chose this novel for her discussion as it is the most widely taught African novel in American high school classrooms. Mills suggests that students approach African literature in the classroom with a number of desires. Some are looking for an exotic other. Others seek reaffirmation of a glorious African past. Still others are looking for explanations for the ills affecting Africa today. African students are often looking to this literature to provide more information about their own histories. These discourses, Mills maintains, are all linked because they all seek to ascribe a unitary unit "Africa". This presents some important challenges for teaching: how can we emphasize African diversity and still mediate students' desires? Achebe's book, Mills argues, can help students cultivate a critical approach to looking at the African past. However, this requires that students engage in a close reading of the novel. The novel has multiple levels. The first level, or dominant level, provides a look at pre-colonial Ibo culture and the changes it experiences through the introduction of colonial rule. The second level, or the subterranean level, which can be glimpsed through its minor characters, serves to disrupt the notion of Ibo culture as an overly-integrated whole. Students need to recognize pre-colonial culture as heterogeneous and complex. The rules and norms of Ibo culture were in fact subject to critique. We can view this critique through the discourses of some of the novel's minor characters. Obierika represents such an alternative, Mills argues. Ibo culture in the novel emphasizes a manly ideal. The main character Okonkwo believes in this ideal in a literal sense. Yet, a close reading of the novel shows that Ibo culture is in fact more flexible than Okonkwo understands it to be. Obierika is a device in the text, a heuristic structure. Okonkwo is doomed as the cultural hero who misrepresents his own culture. Obierika is the critic of Ibo culture and survives the advent of colonial rule. Most reads of this novel miss the pre-colonial discrepancies in Ibo culture revealed by Achebe. Mills gives examples in the text where we can clearly see the different relationships that the two men have with their culture. Obierika is not the only character to critique Ibo cultural norms. Okonkwo's son is also critical of Ibo culture. He becomes one of first converts to the missionary's church. The colonial church did not create tensions in Ibo society but exploited pre-existing tensions and displaced persons from within the society. Okonkwo sees the world as rigidly divided in gendered terms. Obierika challenged this rigid understanding of gender roles. Okonkwo's maternal kinsmen also challenge him to think of women's suffering and not to aggrandize his own. Mills reminds us that the novel depicts Ibo culture as having its own legal rationality, its own economic system, and its own pre-colonial religion. Thus the text provides an alternative to those representations of pre-colonial African cultures as primitive posited by colonial authorities. Reclaiming the complexity of the African past provides the basis for alternative identity claims in the present. However, Mills argues, to be content with Things Fall Apart as merely a representation of Ibo culture at the moment of colonization is not enough. The novel should be considered in the context of the mid 1950s when it was written. Positing positive African identities was an important part of creating national identities. In this novel, we can hear challenges to the overtly masculine elements in the nationalist movement. We can also use this text to think about the different ways Africa gets represented today. We need to problematize the notion that we can have unlimited access to African culture. In her discussion of the three presentations Gina Dent offered some sources for investigating the academic usage of many of the terms that surfaced in the presentations. Such texts included the Dictionary of Cultural Studies, Dictionary of Postcolonial Studies, and South African Keywords. She maintained that it is important to figure out how to introduce things like racism and sexuality to students when there are students from many different backgrounds in the classroom. Intertextuality is a way of talking about how works of literature comment on each other and invoke each other. Achebe's novel communicates directly back to other canonical works. It includes references to Joseph Conrad. Comparisons have been made by the publishers to Greek tragedy. How much, Dent asks, are we recapitulating to a canon? Sometimes we need to step away from the materials we are teaching and to be explicit with students about why we are teaching the materials we are teaching, why they curriculum is the way it is. We can even ask students these types of questions. Dent has asked these questions of her fourth grade students with productive results. Students might finish reading a book and say that they thought of themselves in a certain way and didn't recognize "themselves" as they were represented in the book. An audience member asked Mills to expand on how we might teach gender in Things Fall Apart. Mills restated that there are critiques of the treatment of women within the text. It becomes clear in the novel that Okonkwo has over-simplified the very complicated gender divisions within the society. When reading the novel, we should encourage students to look at which women characters are privileged and in what way. We can look at how gender is produced at different moments. What definition of masculinity and femininity is invoked at different moments in the text? Often teachers have paired the text with that of a woman writer to investigate gender in the novel. But Mills argues that students shouldn't depend on women to provide the feminist text. We can read gender in Things Fall Apart. When asked about using translated literature in the classroom, multiple panelists emphasized that talking about translation can be really useful in talking about identity in life and in literature. Living in an English-only state means that many people are living in translation all the time. Students should be encouraged to think about what this means. An audience member asked about using popular literature
in the classroom. Dent says that sometimes when she teaches women writers
she uses pop writers too. She feels it is good for students to challenge
these categories. Oprah's Book Club means that students know literature
that we expect them to know. We can talk with students about why they
know certain works, about what defines a popular work, and about what
defines literature.
She started with a map of Africa, and the names of four rivers: the Nile, the Congo, the Euphrates, and the Mississippi. She asked a volunteer to come up and locate the three African rivers on the map. Next she put up a poem by Langston Hughes, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" (included in the folder). As an English teacher, she wanted to know about the metaphors in the poem, and the tone. We started with what we know, that is, where the rivers are located. On each table there was a piece of paper and a marker. Each group was asked to think about an image from the poem and draw it. They were also asked to put some of the words from the text on their picture. Each group held up their picture in turn and described it for the participants. First was the poet's head with the images floating above. Second was the poet's body, with the rivers as veins flowing through the heart. The third group gave written instructions, something like a father time looking back on his life in different eras in different places. Fourth was one big river with the poet's soul moving down the river. Fifth was water moving, musical notes, and sad-faced Lincoln. Sixth was about the line "my soul has grown deep like the river" and represented the soul as a willow tree, nurtured by life experiences. Seventh was the poet's body with different parts of the poem represented in different parts of the body. Eighth was a hut near the Congo. The point of that exercise was to visualize the poem. People talked about the poem in the big group and talked about it in their small groups. It helps kids who are visual learners connect with the text. She asked the group, "What is the link to the diaspora?" Some of the answers given are: The fact that he goes from one place to another. The rivers are the links, because they are in each of the places he moved. The poem spans distance and time. The rivers are a sense of home or salvation, but rivers have also been used as the inroads for colonization. Also that no matter what happens to him, the rivers will still be flowing. She repeated a quote from one of the morning sessions, diaspora refers back to your origins, no matter how far back in time. From the foreign language standards, setting the stage was putting up the map of Africa. Guided practice was what they did at the table. The assessment might come in an evaluation of the writing students do later. Meryl Siegal teaches at Laney College and at the University of San Francisco, and is an alumna of the U.C. Berkeley Graduate School of Education. She started by showing a course outline for English 1A at a community college. Different teachers interpret the outline differently. She | |||
TOP