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Barnard
Students Learn about Postcolonial World through Literature
and Travel to Ghana's Slave Forts
New York,
NY — Through the prism of literature and a trip to Ghana,
one of the notorious slave-trade sites, Barnard students will
learn about the effects of colonialism on today's world through
a new course this fall. The Literature of the Middle Passage,
developed by Barnard professor and award-winning author Caryl
Phillips, will help students understand the broken connection
between Africa, Europe and the Americas that has led to troubled
race relations for the past 400 years.
Students will examine a wealth of literature that has been produced
as a result of the Atlantic slave trade, including the work
of writers from Africa, Britain, and the Americas. The course
will culminate in a two-week trip to Ghana, what was formerly
Africa's Gold Coast, and the site of some of the most well-known
historic slave-trade sites. The 16 students enrolled in the
course will meet and study with some of the country's most inspiring
writers and scholars at the University of Ghana, and will visit
some of the former slave forts.
"The
concept of the course is to get students here at Barnard to
understand something about not only the world they have inhabited
for 20 years, but the world that they are going to change,"
said Phillips, who was recently named Director of Global Initiatives
in the Humanities at Barnard.
"Issues
like race, migration, multiculturalism are serious challenges,
not just in the United States, but in the Western world today.
If we begin looking at these three words — race, migration,
multiculturalism — through the prism of literature combined
with the emotional and intellectual experience of being in
West Africa, then we will help our students to understand
what they have been through, and orient them towards the future."
The course
will be accompanied by a website, www.barnard.edu/middlepassage,
which will serve as an active record and highlight the work
of the participating authors, faculty and students. Barnard
students and the young Ghanaian writers will contribute essays
and travel logs to the website as the course progresses.
In a recent
talk-show interview on The New Yorkers (Channel 26),
Phillips and two participating Barnard seniors, Manmeet Bindra
and Daiana Feuer, talked about the course and travel to Ghana.
Click on the links in the sidebar to the right to view excerpts
from these interviews.
The goal of the new course is to build lasting relationships
between Barnard student writers and young Ghanaian writers.
Phillips will be a mentor to gifted Ghanaian writers, while
three Barnard students will participate in a "peer-editing"
exchange via e-mail with these chosen writers. In Ghana, both
Barnard students and the Ghanaian writers will present their
work at readings. This special writing initiative is part
of the Crossing Borders program of the British Council,
which provides mentoring to young writers, ages 18-40, in
several African countries.
During the first 12 weeks of the course, students will study
some of the seminal writers from Africa, Europe, and the United
States, including Chinua Achebe, Ama Ata Aidoo, W.E.B. Du
Bois, Joseph Conrad, and James Baldwin, as well as Phillips'
own writing on the topic. The course will be taught by Phillips
with guest lectures by Barnard Professors James Basker, Maire
Jaanus, Assistant Professor Kaiama Glover, and Elizabeth Schmidt.
The international guest lecturers will include prominent Ghanaian
author and former Minister of Education Ama Ata Aidoo and
James Walvin, a British scholar of the history of Atlantic
slavery and Professor of History at the University of York.
The participating
16 Barnard and Columbia students were chosen through a rigorous
application process. The course is primarily offered as a
senior seminar for English majors, but is also open to students
whose major is in a subject related to the course.
The travel
portion of the seminar has been fully funded by The Ford Foundation,
The Carnegie Corporation of New York, The Gilder Foundation,
and individual donors, including Barnard Trustee Myra Montfort
'60 and Helen Breitwieser '90.
Phillips is Professor of English and Henry R. Luce Professor
of Migration and Social Order, and Director of Initiatives
in the Humanities at Barnard, where he has taught since 1998.
Phillips is also Director of the Barnard Forum on Migration,
a series of seminars, lectures, and readings that explore
issues connected to the movement of people from one part of
the world to another. Phillips, who won this year's Commonwealth
Writers Prize for A Distant Shore (Knopf 2003), has written
extensively on the issues of belonging, race and identity
- three central themes that define the core of Phillips' body
of work. Time magazine recently called his work "one
of literature's greatest meditations on race and identity."
For 20 years, Phillips has been writing Africa back into the
broken triangle of discourse -which he says has been reduced
to "a two-lane highway" between Europe and the Americas
- through his books, scholarly work, and mentoring of young
writers here and abroad. Phillips' mission is to help mend
this fractured dialogue by creating cultural and educational
connections, so that we can better understand the make-up
of our own world.
Phillips,
who divides his time between New York and London, frequently
travels to Africa and the Caribbean of his birth, and writes
about the relationships between people of his own ancestry
and those of Europe and North America. In his books, Phillips
has reflected his own experiences as a migrant, blending them
often with those of other writers and characters from different
continents and times.
"In
my own work I have always tried to understand Europe, but
not to the exclusion of Africa; Africa, but not to the exclusion
of the Americas; and the Americas, again back, not to the
exclusion of Europe. Unfortunately, the world in which we
live today, there is a lot of interchange between Europe and
the Americas, and Africa gets left out," said Phillips.
Phillips'
other novels include Crossing the River, which was
short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1993, The Final Passage,
A State of Independence, Higher Ground, Cambridge,
and The Nature of Blood, and two books of nonfiction,
The European Tribe and The Atlantic Sound. He
also writes for radio, television, and film, and has edited
two anthologies.
Phillips
has received numerous awards including the Martin Luther King
Prize, James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Malcolm X
Prize, and has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, Rockefeller
Foundation Bellagio Residency, and a Lannan Literary Award.
He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
For more
information, please contact Petra Tuomi, Office of Public
Affairs at 212-854-7907.
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