Word: englishness
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...would be nice to think that his case was exceptional. But it is the burden of Caryl Phillips' latest searching meditation on outsiders in England that Turpin's story is much too typical. Beside him, in the triptych that makes up Foreigners: Three English Lives, is the story of Samuel Johnson's Jamaican servant, Francis Barber, who ended up in penury, though Phillips' narrator remembers him as "at one time, probably the foremost negro in England." Then there's the story of David Oluwale, a Nigerian who stowed away as a teenager to come to England in 1949, dreaming...
Ever since the first of his 12 books, 22 years ago, Phillips has been trying, with unusual seriousness and concentration, to rewrite English literature by filling in the gaps, the black holes, in the country's official story of itself. In The Nature of Blood, for example, he gave us Othello's story in the Moor's own voice; in Cambridge, he bestowed the name of the august English university on a doomed West Indian slave. His view does not overlook class or other races - in Foreigners he points out that more than 2,000 Jews fought for Britain...
...What does the music of four English lads have to do with these very American eruptions? Nothing. They were back home, or in the studio, or off in India with the Maharishi. Pasting Beatles songs onto this storyline makes no more sense than scoring every Western set in the 1870s with the arias Verdi was composing at the time. At least the Cirque du Soleil's Las Vegas Beatles show, Love, was set in Liverpool and found recognizably English equivalents for Penny Lane and Eleanor Rigby's cemetery. The NBC TV drama American Dreams, also set in the '60s, wove...
...English Department does its students a disservice by setting them up to measure a Gish Jen or Toni Morrison against the cultural standards of a Marlow or a Swift—while some Western European standards may inform their writing, the same literary tradition does not wholly apply to these authors, who descend from a canon remarkably distinct from that of old European or English works. Students will be even less equipped to approach works of authors such as Tsitsi Dangarembga, who writes in English, but whose national and cultural experiences are informed by situations far different from those...
...department needs to shake off its narrow perspective, and allow for a broader definition of the canon and its place in undergraduate education. Not only would this move it away from an old-fashioned, West-centric viewpoint; it would also teach English concentrators to think critically about the canon itself as a cultural artifact, rather than a set of literary scriptures...