Dickens Universe Anti-Racist Pedagogy Panel - "Toppling Statues: Teaching Victorian Literature in 2020" - July 2020

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Virtual Dickens Universe Anti-Racist Teaching Panel 7/29/20

  • Roundtable format: intros, then first question (total of 4 q's), etc. Having another person moderate and frame chat questions.
  • Alisha Walters, Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Alicia Christoff, Sophia Hsu, Ryan Fong (moderator)
  • processing context of toppling monuments in teaching today
  • what kind of relationship to the c19 past do we want to cultivate with our students and ourselves?
  • anti-racist pedagogy resource on DU page l/u
  • #vicpoc community for equivalent of bipoc18, shakerace
  • Intros
    • Alicia: Vic novels in different constellations ("Big Books" freshman class: Middlemarch, vol 1 Proust, Octavia Butler Lilith's Brood)
    • institutional cultural shift not keeping track with demographic shift of students
    • IMPT highlighting in SH class racist portrayal of Asians
    • lack of student expectations is good: "I'm never disappointing someone if I don't teach a super-traditional version of what Victorian culture is thought of"
  • What is impt to you in context of teaching Vic texts?
    • reading these texts as a bulwark against cultural amnesia (construction of idea of race that structures our lives)
    • we don't like to talk about these structures but vic texts generate ah-ha moments
    • emphasizing historical continuities: how vic lit codifies and critiques structures; telling BIPOC students that Vic lit is theirs too (it doesn't seem to be theirs intuitively)
    • how do you relate to this as a person of color, making that explicit
    • modelling a range of affective relationships: not just fandom but also critique, ambivalence, discomfort
    • asking how did it come to be that these are classics or "about race" in a way, that they're somehow neutral?
    • affective richness: i'm blown away and also there's a construction of whiteness that excludes me, opens up their constructedness
    • "why is no one ever talking about the Black people in these texts?" There are a lot of them!
    • There is a position of power in not being the intended/imagined reader of a text
    • Complicated attachment as a personal experience can be a productive point of entry for thinking critically about them, history of reception (in different contexts), Victorian as a potent and complex signifier
      • do an association exercise first and then "googling the Victorians"
  • What needs to be toppled in the teaching of Vic lit? What needs to be built?
    • building cross-disciplinary coalitions
    • it's not a binary opposition of "do we get rid of George Eliot" but about managing complexity: "I love Middlemarch but it's built on violence," Nancy Henry on building of GE's wealth through colonial investment -- (George Eliot and the British Empire)
    • beginning a Vic class with Edward Colson being tossed in the sea with contextual material (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/15/edward-colston-statue-replaced-by-sculpture-of-black-lives-matter-protester)
    • what are we teaching when we teach Vic lit? How invested are we in the content? It'd be great if they retain content but it's the critical imagination we should be encouraging moreover
    • this world only exists because of those things that have been made invisible. You can't have western thought without blackness, they are not separate. The intellectual complexity of these texts but also what's going on in the world right now, e.g., how black men are being discussed in George Floyd moment and Uncle Tom's Cabin. If even a few students can make those connections, that's why we're here
    • the real question is what is the impulse to monumentalization: are we teaching Vic lit to monumentalize it? (Hensley on curatorial reading is helpful here) The desire to monumentalize is what needs to be torn down. Why is there a Dickens Universe and not a Harper universe?
    • also the desire to compartmentalize is what needs to be torn down, eg Dickens and Harper together. Breaking down false separations.
  • What frameworks/approaches do you use for setting up discussions of race in Vic materials, and what do you want students to learn from Vic texts about issues of race?
    • make explicit the politics of canon formation: what can lit in English language say and what can't it say? Minute on Indian Education and Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Birth of a Dream Weaver l/u, gets at "why are we looking at Vic Brit lit in 2020 in the Bronx?" or Seattle, etc.
    • a reading practice that opens up mass erasure
    • it's not going to help to have "diversity week," it's about modeling a reading practice. E.g., the epistemological rationalism of Sherlock Holmes is structurally linked to erasure of blackness, the construction of race, etc.
    • the uncomfortable affective work of encounter with race: our emotional responses to others are a key way in which race is structured and allowed to persist
    • how to denaturalize whiteness: look at Edward Long's c18 text about whiteness about white bodies changing in "exotic" spaces, seeing the malleability of whiteness and how it is structured. They are also more comfortable talking about whiteness than blackness.
  • How do you structure your time in the classroom and how is that tied to antiracist committments?
    • staging having convos with other scholars in my classroom -- showing how she has built community in writing groups. Trusting women of color, who we cite.
    • Giving them chances to write to/with each other. Constellation of mini-papers
    • ways of using minds together, not just about the performance of genius or authority, etc.
    • summative project at end with meta-analytical write-up at the end. Not making everything about the final paper. Drawing Tonga in Sign of Four, highlighting violence
    • team-teaching students and who has expertise, de-centering authority
  • Thinking beyond identification in the ways they read
    • Jose Munoz: identification and dis-identification
    • Multiplicity/assemblage of identification: How many bodies are brought together in this space? How many bodies make one Dorothea Brooke?
    • Why don't you feel like you're the audience? What ways do texts make you feel that way? Reflective writing is important to get at this.
    • Why do you need to identify? When students can't find someone to identify with that's interesting, something to poke at, finding other ways into a text
  • balancing canonical texts with texts by poc or from different periods e.g. Butler
    • moving away from teaching Vic lit by just adding new voices, thinking about ways to decenter whiteness?
    • solution is not just to diversify and add more poc (but that is good too): asking question of what purpose is a text serving in a class? What if you read Lilith's Brood first and then MM? Not just canon and counterpoint. Center Mary Seacole. What is the epistem. frame we're using to put these texts together? Because if you don't ask the question you inevitably center whiteness. Why do we require certain things and not?
  • How do people handle the issue of Victorian texts being racist?
    • it *is* racist and people knew it was racist. Collins and Dickens had very different responses to the India Mutiny.
    • teaching White Man's Burden with several other responses: Brown Man's Burden, Woman's Burden. Not that we're enlightened and also that there were complex reactions then. White Man's Burden written in response to American intervention in Philippines. It's vile and a terrible poem AND it generated important things to think about
    • Victorian Studies has reified a false vision of range of discourses: you have to look for the Harpers alongside the Dickenses, they talk to one another, they existed
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