Exam #3: Postcolonial Play-Acting

Even though this is being assigned early, treat it like a normal final exam: sit down and give yourself 1-2 hours to complete it.  Of course, you can do it early or work on it on and off during the week.  However, the exam is due by 5:00 on Tuesday.  Just don't look at this as a paper per se; it's not a paper, just a long-answer question on a typical exam. 

Choose ONE of the following scenarios to write a developed response, approximately 3-4 pages double spaced…

1.          You are a high school teacher, and want to teach Kim to your advanced English Literature class.  Unfortunately, the administration, which only knows Kipling from the poem “The White Man’s Burden” (www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/Kipling.html), claims he is a politically incorrect, racist writer who has no place in a modern classroom.  Defend Kim as a colonial text that is critical of colonialism and plays into many important postcolonial ideas and writing.  Use the book for support and be as persuasive as possible—and don’t give in, even if it does cost you your job! 

2.         You are the director of the Indian Ministry of Tourism, and V.S. Naipaul’s book, An Area of Darkness, has just been released to tremendous acclaim.  A great danger of this book is that it can hurt tourism and make the country synonymous with caste injustice and excrement.  Write a response to specific passages of Naipaul’s book challenging his biases and national identity.  For example, many have accused Naipaul of being too “English” and seeing India as simply not English enough.  As an Indian, what cultural arguments can you make against his work that could not only promote tourism, but challenge his indictment of India’s “medieval mind”? 

REMEMBER, make a persuasive argument for Kipling or against Naipaul, and support this with a close reading of the text.  Don’t generalize or gloss over tricky issues; try to confront them head-on using Kipling or Naipaul’s actual language.  Also consider who you are as you write this: an educator who believes in the power of Kipling’s thought…or a government official who is outraged when an “outsider” tells the world the “truth” about India. 

Good luck! 

For Tomorrow: Gracefully (or not) Wrapping Up the Course

Instead of reading more of Naipaul's An Area of Darkness, let's end at Chapter 7 and use tomorrow's class to wrap-up some of the course's ideas.  While I can't hope to provide a last word to the colonial/postcolonial debate, I want to suggest a general sense of what we can take away from the readings and where the issues of a postcolonial society remain to be explored.  I hope to avoid the common misconception that classes are taken "for a grade" and are simply a series of questions and answers; this class, like many of your English classes, is real...the ideas literally shape who writes and how they write, and how other people (in this country, in others) understand what is read.  Any book written in the 21st century can be arguably considered a 'postcolonial' text, as issues of identity, nationality, and power run through every word, character, and chapter.  So we'll do our best to sum up this immense and never-ending debate. 

REMEMBER: your paper is due on Friday IF you want comments by our final exam date; otherwise, it's due ON the Final Exam day, next Tuesday.