Confessions: The consolations of literature
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Confessions: The consolations of literature
Jyotsna G. Singh Department of English, Michigan State University, Lansing, MI, USA.
Abstract This ‘confession’ begins with my journey as an early modern, Shakespearean scholar, from India to the Anglo-American academy. The Anglo-centric world that I entered was not particularly welcoming. However, my personal ‘otherness’ prompted my early critical interventions as I (among other scholars of color) began to view Shakespeare within the context of the emerging colonial and globalizing imaginary as well as the racial typologies of early modern England. Today, a more diverse (albeit still small) cohort of scholars is a broadening the contexts and contents, including topics covering productions of difference via a wide range of intersectional theoretical lenses. However, even as early modern studies are becoming more inclusive, liberal politics are stifling the rich Renaissance literature within identity politics and agendas, often not even historically grounded. An unintended consequence of this liberal agenda is that it encourages students to study literatures closely aligned to their own ethnic/racial group. And as we teach literature to nurture students’ identities, the danger lies in approaching literary works as sites for therapeutic effects. Instead, we should turn to literary works to imaginatively understand the productions of difference. In early modern studies, for instance, plays like Othello and The Tempest historicize and make visible anti-black racism, misogyny, patriarchy, and colonial servitude and exploitation. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2020) 11, 345–352. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-020-00179-4
As a graduate student coming from India, why did I choose to study the English Renaissance, the high canonical literature of the West?
2020 Springer Nature Limited. 2040-5960
postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies www.palgrave.com/journals
Vol. 11, 2-3, 345–352
Singh
Prior to coming to the US, I was familiar with some playwrights such as Shakespeare, Marlowe, Webster, with the poems of Milton, as well as with a sprinkling of cultural texts such as Sidney’s Defense of Poesy and Puttenham’s The Arte of Poesie But I did not feel any particular affinity with early modern literature. The works did not ‘speak’ to me. Thus, when I came to the US to do my Ph.D., my interests lay more in contemporary times, particularly in twentieth-century American literature, specifically confessional poetry by Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, and others. Toward the end of my course work, I also was drawn into Indo-Anglian literature by one encouraging professor. This was the germinal stage of what today we call postcolonial studies, and it would have been an essentialist ‘niche’ for me to launch my career as a student from India. I did not realize then (as I do now) that just because Indian literature was closer to my lived experiences, it was not necessarily the best and only option for me! In both these avenues of specializat
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