Under the Eyes of Texas

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

Institute, the Humanities Research Center, Research in African Literatures, and that strangely un-African name and center of energy that somehow drew these institutions together, Bernth Lindfors. Others like myself, from South Africa, Malawi, Kenya, Nigeria, Cameroon, made the trip, usually with tenuous scholarship funding, to risk a great deal on the mysterious chemistry that associated Texas with Africa. What a shock we received when we got there. Not only students, but many faculty, spoke an almost impenetrable dialect of English, one which, as J. M. Coetzee once remarked, might as well have come from the mouths of Trobriand Islanders. Papier-mache catde adorned the entrances of bookstores, middle-class cowboys and Generation X punks jostled unkempt sidewalks, and Confederate heroes dominated the quadrangles. Most surprisingly, especially to someone from as embattied a place as South Africa was in the 1980s, in Austin's public spaces there was no sign of any self-consciousness or ambiguity about either a Texan or a national identity. Nor, it seemed at first glance, was there much hand-wringing in the English department, which is where one had to establish oneself if one wanted to work with Lindfors. There they still taught undergraduate cours? es with tides like Masterworks of Literature: British, or more tellingly, Masterworks of Literature: American, although everywhere else the canon, patriarchy, and national identity were in crisis. And the heat, of course, unlike anything in Africa, was unspeakable. So where in this squared-off, seemingly unnuanced intellectual com? plex was African literature? The answer was, in Lindfors's office. It was a haven, a nest, an oasis, certainly not a Mecca, and it would come as a fur? ther shock to discover that there were other students, and a few faculty, who did not even know who Lindfors was. They should have known, since his research output was more voluminous than most, as the English grad? uate students' association discovered when they ran surveys of the faculty through the freshly online MLA bibliographies. As for the Institute, its principal function was to coordinate undergraduate courses on Africa and in Black Studies, and the Humanities Research Center, impressive though it obviously was, had not invested in African literature other than its col? lection of white South African manuscripts from the 1950s and 1960s (a fine collection, but marginal to those with an interest in autochthonous expression). Without exaggeration, one could say that African literature in Texas was Bernth Lindfors.