Abstract
In this essay, I explore “peripheral pedagogics”– the wholly unforeseen ways of fantasizing others, and learning from them, when English situates young Indian readers of Nadine Gordimer’s 1989 story, “Once Upon a Time.” While students need little help in noticing the story’s realist portrayal of post-Apartheid South Africa, only detailed analysis of crucial passages enables them to appreciate her ironic treatment of folktale cliches and time-worn conventions of children’s stories. Reading Gordimer in a course called New Literatures in English, they see how colonial fantasy meets postcolonial forensics in such partnered narratives; how, further, the teller and her tale reflect mutually gothic fear and the monstrous, both indeed emanating from much the same consciousness. The interpretive light Gordimer casts on Homi Bhabha’s (1988) “Other Question” and the colonial strategies of othering he discusses in The Location of Culture add to their discovery that cliches are to fiction what stereotypes are to social studies. Rather than asking what stereotypes are, the class here begins to ask what stereotypes are for (and why they return to wake us from deep slumber). The actual circumstances of Gordimer’s story are inseparable from its telling. No learning is complete, however, unless the peripheral recognizes that the telling is the story— the one who tells and those to whom it is told share equal opportunity in this learning. Theoretical debates do not count for much if we do not believe that the values we teach are not always at odds with those inherent in such stories as Gordimer’s.
Highlights
An Indian classroom of postgraduate students is a confluence of richly fascinating narrative streams
As a matter of fact, it always does better than the twenty-odd official languages of India in helping young debaters look beyond their municipal and parochial pickets
When English sets the scene of instruction and largely determines the terms of their reading, Indian students see better for themselves how stories told, retold, and untold by others mesh with their own socio-economic realities of life and art
Summary
An Indian classroom of postgraduate students is a confluence of richly fascinating narrative streams. From on, urged us to look way beyond those socio-cultural stereotypes and literary clichés that work on the osmotic principle of thicker and thinner fluids where it is assumed that a powerful imperial English will always cast non-English peripheral selves as slow, corrupt and corrupting, that the edifying fiction of the empire will help slow people on the periphery catch up with the civilized centres of learning in good time It is not for nothing I argue, that Gordimer plays off social stereotypes against narrative clichés in telling us this bizarre “bedtime story.”. The resistance to finding out that the other is the same,” Johnson adds, “springs out of the reluctance to admit that the same is the other” (178)
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