Where Is the "Other" in This Class?

Kabir, Ananya Jahanara, 1970-

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East,

Volume 27, Number 3, 2007, pp. 641-646 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cst/summary/v027/27.3kabir.html

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Where Is the “Other” in This Class?

Ananya Jahanara Kabir

n this essay I discuss some strategies for dealing with what may be broadly termed
“cultural difference” in the classroom. I teach at the School of English at the Univer-
sity of Leeds. The department prides itself on being the first institution in the United
Kingdom to begin teaching, in the 1960s, what was then called “Commonwealth literature.”1
This phrase has now been replaced by the term postcolonial, in keeping with changing trends
in how the “other” is thought about in the text.2 The term Commonwealth implied a family of
literatures, which, however different from each other (and from the canonical centrality of
English literature from England), were broadly united by something in “common.” The word
postcolonial, one could argue, blows the cover of this “something” by prioritizing the “colonial”
that is the root of the commonality. Yet by the edginess of the “post” it also obfuscates that
commonality and thus increases the sense of a literature of estrangement. The postcolonial
poses, above all, as a literature of the “other.” But, as my title asks, what is the pedagogic status
of this other?3 How might the subject positions of those teaching postcolonial texts interact
with the subject positions of those being taught? How may one calibrate, for one’s own learn-
ing processes as a teacher, the difference that emerges out of the material gaps between the
places where the texts originate and the place they are being taught in? Where, in short,
should the other be located in the class: the teacher, the students, or the text? And can this
sense of a slippery, mobile other be mined for a usefully critical pedagogy, one that enables
both students and teachers to think both through and in difference? In considering these
s o f 
questions, I (in the spirit of the colloquium at which this essay was first delivered) concentrate
tu di e
on the ways in which a concept of “area studies” can inflect and dialogue with what I call, for iv eS
rat d 
p a an
the sake of ease, the “general postcolonial.” ca
C om fri
  ,A
  A si a
 
  o u th s t 
  and
 
  S Ea
This essay was presented at the Colloquium on Diaspora Stud- 2.  For the move from Commonwealth to postcolonial,
    le
ies, Area Studies, and Critical Pedagogies at the University of   see John
the associated theoretical and political implications,   idd
  eM
Toronto, April 2006. McLeod, “From Commonwealth to Postcolonial,” chap. 1  in  his   th
    7  
  00 9
1.  The opening statement of the Web site for the Leeds Postco-
Beginning Postcolonialism (Manchester: Manchester University
  . 3, 2 7 - 03
Press, 2000).   No 2 00
lonial Studies Centre, a research grouping housed at the school,   2 7, 0 1x- s s 
ol. 92 Pre
reads, “Many of the milestone events in the history of Common- 3.  The use of the word other within my essay’s title alludes to    V
it y 108
  /
  .12 15 i v er s
wealth literary studies took place at Leeds in the 1960s, from the Stanley Fish’s groundbreaking Is There a Text in This Class? The    10 U n
oi ke
ground-breaking 1964 conference on Commonwealth Litera- Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
      d Du
  b y
ture to the founding of The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, University Press, 1980). 07
20
from the formation of ACLALS (Association of Commonwealth  ©
 
Literature and Language Studies) to the creation of a special-
ist Chair of Commonwealth Literature.” See Leeds Postcolonial
Research Group, www.leeds.ac.uk/english/shared/lpsc/profile 
.htm. It must be clarified at the outset that this essay deals only
with undergraduate teaching at the School of English, Univer-
sity of Leeds, and not with postgraduate teaching and doctoral
supervision. 641
 6 42 Mapping the Terrain
It will be useful to begin by presenting the struc-
ture of postcolonial teaching at Leeds and ex-
plicate it in the context of the way the province
of English literature is schematized and carved
out for pedagogical consumption. At Leeds, lit-
erature is arranged under broad rubrics such as
  Medieval, Renaissance, Civil War and Restora-
t i ve
ar a tion, Eighteenth Century, Victorian, Modern,
mp
Co
f  American, Contemporary, and Postcolonial.4
ie so
tu d
Each category is considered “equivalent” in
S , 
A si a terms of teaching faculty (at least one professor,
u th  
So t he several lecturers and senior lecturers, possibly
a nd some externally funded postdoctoral fellows,
frica
A st and graduate students). Each subject-group
Ea
d le team teaches a “core module,” and its indi-
d
Mi
vidual members offer “optional modules” that
reflect their individual interests and specializa-
tions. Both core and optional modules are com-
petitively chosen: that is, the more attractive
they look, the more students sign up for them.
However the core modules are ring fenced to
a certain extent, in that there are three cores
preassigned to each semester of undergradu-
ate study, of which students have to choose one.
Thus it works out that in the first semester of
each academic year, about one-third of the level
3 (final-year) undergraduates sign up for Post-
colonial Literature, which is one of the most
popular core modules on offer. Many of these
students simultaneously opt for a postcolonial
optional module in that semester offered by the
staff teaching postcolonial literature. Several of
the same students also sign up for postcolonial
optional modules in the second semester of that
year, or do an undergraduate dissertation on a
postcolonial theme. All these decisions have to
be made at the end of the previous academic
year, before the summer break. In other words,
it is extremely common for many Leeds under-
graduates to consciously plan their final year of
their degree as a postcolonial one.
From this summary of student choices it
would seem that the postcolonial enjoys a high
profile at Leeds, and certainly the healthy stu-
dent numbers for the postcolonial courses sup-
port this assumption. But how do these students
know about the postcolonial in advance? First,
they know through the blurb in the students’
handbook, such as the following for the postco-
lonial literature core module:
This module introduces students to an exciting
and challenging range of literatures in English
which have emerged in the second half of the
twentieth century from areas of the modern
Commonwealth: India, Africa, Australia, the Ca-
ribbean, New Zealand. It provides them with the
opportunity to explore a rich selection of texts
from different cultural contexts, and to engage
with related issues, such as representations of
cultural identity, the uses of history, (post)na-
tional and gender politics, cross-cultural trans-
formations, migrant aesthetics, the impact and
problem of postcolonial theory. 5
Second, they hear about it through the students’
rumor mill: the core and optional modules have
accrued a kind of “pedagogic capital,” and stu-
dents are keen to insert into their final year at
least one of the legendary postcolonial modules
on offer (whether this is the equivalent of arm-
chair ethnic tourism is something I consider
below). Third, they know through the structure
of the level 1 modules, where the aim is to equip
the students with the tools needed to carry out
successful undergraduate studies in English lit-
erature. The compulsory first-year modules used
to be called Strategies of Reading and Litera-
ture, History, Difference; since 2004 – 5 they have
been replaced by Prose: Reading and Interpre-
tation and Poetry: Reading and Interpretation.6
What remains common is a substantial presence
of writers they will gradually learn to recognize
as postcolonial: for instance, Derek Walcott,
whom I taught to first-year students both under

4.  For the periodization of English literature, and
some of its history, see James Simpson, “The Melan-
choly of John Leland and the Beginnings of English
Literary History,” in his The Oxford English Literary
History, vol. 2, 1350 – 1547: Reform and Cultural Revo-
lution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); for a
more general discussion, see Lawrence Besserman,
ed., The Challenge of Periodization: Old Paradigms
and New Perspectives (New York: Garland, 1996).
5.  For a full description, see School of English, Uni-
versity of Leeds, Core Module Choices Level 3, www 
.leeds.ac.uk/english/undergrad/modules/3013.htm.
6.  For Prose : Reading and Interpretation, see
School of English, University of Leeds, Elective Mod-
ules Level 1, www.leeds.ac.uk/english/undergrad/ 
modules/1130.htm; for Poetry: Reading and Inter-
pretation, see www.leeds.ac.uk/english/undergrad/ 
modules/1120.htm.
Literature, History, Difference and Poetry: Read-
ing and Interpretation. But Walcott reappears,
in the form of his poem Omeros, in the postco-
lonial core module, where, if I may put it in this
way, he is more aggressively “postcolonized.”7
He is also taught by my colleague offering an
optional module on the Black Atlantic (Memo-
rializing Slavery). 8 In other words, those stu-
dents who sign up for these modules at the end
of their second year already have an embryonic
idea of studying Walcott as a postcolonial poet.
The third year offers them several opportunities
to contextualize him postcolonially in different
ways. It is to this array of contextualizations that
I now turn.
Trajectories, I:
From English Literature to Postcolonial Literature
Derek Walcott’s first appearance in the level 1
module Reading Poetry and his second one in
the level 3 module Postcolonial Literature may
be considered as outlining a trajectory of move-
ment from a sweeping sense of English litera-
ture to a more focused understanding of post-
colonial literature. One might argue that this
narrowing focus is one of the pedagogical aims
of the degree: the inculcation, in students, of
an understanding of not only what the “liter-
ary” is in general but also what is specific to dif-
ferent kinds of literature. Yet I would maintain
that a tension remains in the conceptualization
of a writer such as Walcott: does he exemplify
literature’s universality or its singularity? Does
he stand for poetry’s ability to transcend local
circumstances or remain rooted in them? Inas-
much as Walcott’s poetry itself enacts all these
contradictions, it cannot escape these questions,
but it is possible for an uncritical pedagogic
practice to blunt this critical poetic edge. I do
not mean to suggest that teachers are irrespon-
sible; rather, it is the constraints of structuring
a course that constantly threaten to dissolve dif-
7.  Derek Walcott, Omeros (London: Faber and Faber,
2002).
8.  For the module’s full description, see School of
English, University of Leeds, Option Modules Lev-
els 2 and 3, www.leeds.ac.uk/english/undergrad/ 
modules/32138.htm. The term Black Atlantic refers to
Paul Gilroy’s seminal work, The Black Atlantic: Moder-
nity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press, 1992).
ference into not uniformity per se but a series 643
of uniform boxes whereby difference may be
rendered teachable. Hence moving from the
context of “great poets,” where Walcott is boxed
along with Seamus Heaney, William Carlos Wil-
liams, and Shakespeare, one arrives at the con-
text of “great postcolonial authors,” where he is
reread alongside Chinua Achebe, Salman Rush-
Ananya Jahanara Kabir 
Where Is the “Other” in This Class?
die, and Patricia Grace, among others. 9 This
realignment, it is imagined, will enact the ways
in which Walcott must be reclaimed from the
province of poetry for the province of a political
poetics. Here, issues such as resistance through
poetry, the canon as literary heritage, writing
versus doing, and the poet’s responsibility and
alienation gain new meaning, or so it is hoped.
This enactment is, however, what is often
assumed to happen through the mere fact of re-
packaging Walcott as postcolonial. Yet it is the
students who often ensure, through an intuitive
critical reading, that Walcott’s “otherness” is not
reduced to a mere pedagogic commodity. In
one of my seminar groups during the academic
year 2005 – 6, I experienced a veritable rebel-
lion of a group of students who wanted no truck
with a “positive” reading of Walcott. Rather
than work out how Walcott sublimates, in and
through poetry, poetry’s own violent legacy as
part of the apparatus supporting colonialism
and slavery, they insisted on reading Walcott for
traces of his profound inability to negotiate pain
and guilt. Even his looking to the regenerative
capacities of nature was dissected as evidence,
not only of his failure to transcend history,
but, more damningly, of his failure to acknowl-
edge to himself the possibility of such failure.
I encouraged them to voice these reservations,
while cautioning them always to support their
claims with details from the text. Rather than
be discomfited by the group’s skepticism, I was,
naturally enough, delighted. Here were ten un-
dergraduates who had moved from the studium
9.  This account of reading Walcott alongside “great
poets” pertains only to the first year (2004 – 5 ) of
teaching Poetry: Reading and Interpretation, when
each of these poets was read through a specific, sep-
arate anthology. From 2005 – 6 onward the practice
has been to follow the fifth edition of the Norton An-
thology of Poetry.
 644 of reading Walcott to being pricked by a punc-
tum.10 The trigger was a student from Mauritius
who had been reading her postcolonial texts in-
creasingly from the perspective of a descendant
of indentured laborers from India but whose
growing awareness of her subject position had
created a misalignment and a particular anger
  with Walcott. Her anti-Walcott outburst was, in-
t i ve
ar a terestingly, picked up by a chorus of other stu-
mp
Co
f  dents: one Jewish and another of Gujarati East
ie so
tu d
African heritage. What was even more reveal-
S , 
A si a ing was that this was a group made up entirely
u th  
So t he of women. I sensed an escalating awareness of
a nd solidarity in difference that gained in articula-
frica
A st tion because of the enhanced solidarity of gen-
Ea
d le der and that was redirected at me, the teacher
d
Mi
who was recognized as being similarly different
and not allowed to recede into teacherly neu-
trality. The coalescing of divergent othernesses
enabled us to momentarily reclaim the critical
edge to Walcott.
Trajectories, II:
From Postcolonial Literature to Area Studies
I believe this momentary reclamation was also
enabled by the possibility of the students to en-
counter the postcolonial Walcott in the more
specialized setting of the optional Black Atlan-
tic module in which he is also taught. In other
words, the presence of Walcott within the gen-
eralized core module of postcolonial literature
is fruitfully offset by his presence within more
context-driven, regionalist modules. The ratio-
nale behind these modules is in fact one very
similar to area studies, though this particular
term is not explicitly used. Those teaching the
postcolonial core module, which attempts to
take in the broad sweep of the postcolonial,
claim expertise in the postcolonial that is de-
rived from a specialization in a particular post-
colonial area, where area is literally understood
as “geopolitical region.” Thus there are special-
ists of Africa, the Caribbean, New Zealand, Can-
ada, and, in my own case, South Asia.11 These
are broad categories in themselves, and when
probed further, they atomize into specific legiti-
mizations being sought from narrower area spe-
cializations. Thus, in my own case, South Asia
rests on work done within the ambit of India,
although there are liminalities of categoriza-
tion that my work consciously solicits (e.g., my
choice of work on a threshold moment of de-
colonization, the Partition of India, or on a con-
tinuing postcolonial problem area: Kashmir). In
other words I am claiming that area studies, or
close work with a certain region, grants me a
pedagogical license to teach “the postcolonial.”
Here, then, I am sketching out a relationship of
dependency between the general postcolonial
and the particular area of specialization. It is in
this relationship that a certain critical potential
lies, whereby the category of the other, particu-
larly the other in the class, may be both located
and saved from reification.
I now substantiate this claim by turning to
a module that I have taught in Leeds for the past
two years (academic years 2004 – 5 and 2005 – 6),
Remembering Partition. I also taught a prelimi-
nary version of it during a semester spent on the
Faculty of English at the University of Califor-
nia, Berkeley. Of my entire teaching load, both
undergraduate and postgraduate, this course
is my personal favorite. Currently, I teach the
following texts in this course: Ritu Menon, ed.,
No Woman’s Land: Women from Pakistan, India and
Bangladesh Write on the Partition of India (New
Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2004); Saadat Hasan
Manto, Mottled Dawn: Fifty Sketches and Stories of
Partition (1947 – 55), trans. Khalid Hasan (Delhi:
Penguin India, 1997); Amitav Ghosh, Shadow
Lines (London: Bloomsbury, 1988); Attia Ho-
sain, Sunlight on a Broken Column, new ed. (1961;
London: Virago, 1988); Bapsi Sidhwa, Ice-Candy-
Man (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1989);
Salman Rushdie, Shame (1983; repr., London:
Vintage, 1995); Manju Kapur, Difficult Daughters
(London: Faber, 2000); Khushwant Singh, Train
to Pakistan (1949; any edition); and Siddhartha
Deb, Point of Return (London: Ecco, 2003). The
module description is as follows:
10.  Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on
Photography (London: Vintage Classics, 1993).
11.  See here the account of research undertaken by
the postcolonialist specialists of the School of En­
glish, at Leeds Postcolonial Research Group, www 
.leeds.ac.uk/english/shared/lpsc/people.htm.
 The freedom struggle in colonial India created
two new nations as the British departed in Au-
gust 1947: India and Pakistan, differentiated
on the basis of religion. This event, “Partition,”
led to massive migrations, horrific violence, and
the destruction of families, homes and cultures.
What does it mean when independence is gained
at such traumatic cost? The question continues
to haunt personal and collective memories,
complicating relationships between individuals,
communities and nations. This module explores
how Partition is remembered within short sto-
ries and novels—what is chosen to be forgotten,
and what is emphasized through narrative form.
We will read authors from India and Pakistan,
ranging from 1947 to the present. Representa-
tive films on Partition will also be screened for
additional context.12
As the texts and authors (apart from Rushdie)
are likely to be unknowns to the module’s pro-
spective students, it is the blurb that they re-
spond to when choosing the module. I now con-
sider briefly what they might read between its
lines.
Returning to the Subject
In my wording of the module blurb, I con-
sciously chose terminology that both empha-
sizes the geopolitical specificity of this module
and reaches out to “issue-based” modules that
students will have encountered elsewhere. The
critical terminology of trauma studies that
permeates the blurb is deliberately deployed,
particularly the accent on memories and me-
morialization, while there is an attempt, too, to
loop back to literary issues of form and genre.
In short, my module blurb attempts a simulta-
neous process of location and dislocation—of
location in literary and trauma studies, of dis-
location through South Asia. Precisely this
process is the aim of the eleven weeks that fol-
low. As it might be noted, the word postcolonial
does not appear in the module blurb, and the
12.  For the module’s full description, see www.leeds  15.  I have discussed this issue in “Gender, Memory,
.ac.uk/english/undergrad/modules/3438.htm.
13.  Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (London: Vin-
tage, 2006).
14.  The particularity of South Asian modernity is now
an emergent scholarly focus among historians, liter-
ary historians, art historians, and cultural theorists,
as the recent work of Dipesh Chakrabarty, Sumathi
Ramaswamy, Christopher Pinney, and Arjun Appadu-
rai testifies.
alignments sought therefore are thematic, cut- 645
ting across the breadth of English literature as
it is conceptualized within the academy today,
rather than anchored in postcolonial literature.
Of course, it is always helpful pedagogically to
have students in the course who take the post-
colonial literature module, particularly because
I lecture on the Partition of India as a traumatic
Ananya Jahanara Kabir 
Where Is the “Other” in This Class?
event in that module, in connection with Anita
Desai’s Clear Light of Day. In addition, the issues
surrounding contemporary South Asian Mus-
lim subjectivity as raised by Rushdie’s Satanic
Verses (also in the core module) further coalesce
with themes in Remembering Partition.13 But
on the whole, the module enables them to de-
velop an idea of what forms the modern South
Asian subject in the shadow of a trauma specific
to South Asia.14 This year, furthermore, I found
myself mining the texts for evidence of the
“South Asian modern” and asking in class what
it means for South Asian authors to probe the
dialectic between “tradition” and “modernity,”
often aligned to that between “community” and
“individualism,” through the task of remember-
ing the Partition.
This emphasis, if not obsession, on the
demands of community versus those of mo-
dernity makes a considered inflection of theo-
retical models of trauma and memory drawn
particularly from Holocaust studies a most nec-
essary pedagogic intervention in the teaching
of a South Asian collective trauma. While I use
those models to familiarize my students with a
cultural world that seems dauntingly unfamiliar,
their own reading of the texts makes them real-
ize how difficult it is to map Eurocentric theo-
ries of trauma and memory onto a South Asian
set of texts and issues.15 Thus a constantly con-
trapuntal reading practice through the eleven
weeks of the semester keeps the other in the
class while making its presence a familiar one.16
This juggling of familiarity and otherness has to
Ages: Translating Cultures, ed. Ananya Jahanara Kabir
Trauma: Women’s Novels on the Partition of India,” and Deanne Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Mid- versity Press, 2005).
dle East 25 (2005): 177 – 90.
16.  The idea of a contrapuntal reading practice was
most famously developed by Edward Said, particu-
larly in his Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf,
1993); for a recent discussion, see Ato Quayson, “Trans-
lations and Transnationals: Pre- and Post-colonial,” 
in Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle
 646 be marked by vigilance if it is not to lapse into students undergoing certain battles with the self
the comfort zone of classroom backpacking. It as they go deeper into the texts of the module.
is always easier for students to assume that any- These battles are all the more prominent when
thing from South Asia is bound to be unfamil- they happen to embody family histories that,
iar, alien, and, plainly and simply, “different”: in some way or other, deal with the Partition.
“The postcolonial is another country: they do Hence each year my class has yielded examples
things differently there.” Far more difficult for of students who “pass” in a variety of ways but
  them is to accept the familiar lineaments and who “come out” with their family’s Partition
t i ve
ar a preoccupations—with modernity, with memory, stories in the course of the semester. Engaging
mp
Co
f  with the subject as formed at the interface of with the psyche of South Asian texts enables the
ie so
tu d
the individual and the group—that contour the class as a whole to rediscover themselves as sub-
S , 

A si a other. An insistence on historical particularities jects formed out of complex histories. In turn
u th  
So t he that are automatically foregrounded through this realization helps them to step outside the
a nd a focus on the region (in this instance, South classroom and see with new eyes the evidence,
frica
A st Asia) thus helps modulate the tendency toward literally on their doorsteps, of the South Asian
Ea
d le marketing the postcolonial as “exotic” because diaspora, created because of the tensions of mo-
d
Mi
“other.”17 The difficulties of grappling with the dernity and decolonization, of which the Parti-
demands of the module then generate their tion was such a traumatic effect. I like to believe
own sense of pleasure and reward. that engaging with “the other in the class” helps
them reengage more thinkingly with the other
outside the class.

I conclude with some comments regarding

the students I teach in this module. At what
in the United Kingdom is called a “provincial,
redbrick university,” outside of the “golden tri-
angle” of the universities of London, Oxford,
and Cambridge, the School of English gets a
minuscule proportion of overseas undergradu-
ates (although this is not the case at the gradu-
ate level).18 Undergraduates are drawn from all
across the country, with a significant minority
from the north of England and a large propor-
tion from nonelite schools (though it would be
misleading to de-emphasize the presence of stu-
dents from the latter). Ethnic minority students
of South Asian heritage are present, but, given
the multicultural nature of the community in
which the university is situated and the compo-
sition of its overall student body, are underrep-
resented.19 More accurately, perhaps, ethnic mi-
nority students in the School of English present
themselves in consciously “mainstream” ways.20
Given this basic composition of the student
body, it is always interesting for me to note the

17.  On this topic, see Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial
Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge,
2001).
18.  The character of the “redbrick” university, of
course, has been most effectively, if ironically, cap-
tured by David Lodge in his Changing Places trilogy
of novels.
19.  For British Asian communities in West Yorkshire,
see Sean Mcloughlin, “Writing a British-Asian City:
Ethnicity, ‘Race,’ Culture, and Religion in Accounts of
Postcolonial Bradford,” in A Postcolonial People: South
Asians in Britain, ed. N. Ali, V. S. Kalra, and S. Sayyid
(London: Hurst, 2006).
20.  The most visible index to this relationship to
“mainstreaming” is the decision to veil, and the
type and extent of veiling, by British Muslim female 
students.