Preliminary Bibliography On South African Slavery

1. Slavery And Emancipation In South Africa


2. Social Death And Resurrection : Slavery And Emancipation In South Africa

3. Slavery In South Africa : Captive Labor On the Dutch Frontier

4.Slavery In Dutch South Africa

5.Cape of Torments : Slavery And Resistance In South Africa

6. Slave Emancipation And Racial Attitudes in Nineteenth Century South Africa

7.Slavery In Africa : Archaelogy And Memory

8.Public Memory of Slavery : Victims And Perpetrators In The South Atlantic

9.Liberating the family? : gender and British slave emancipation in the rural Western Cape, South Africa, 1823-1853

10.Children of bondage : a social history of the slave society at the Cape of Good Hope, 1652-1838

11.Breaking the chains : slavery and its legacy in the nineteenth-century Cape Colony 12.The Slave Question : Liberty And Property In South Africa 13.Slavery At the Cape of Good Hope 14. Those in bondage; an account of the life of the slave at the Cape in the days of the Dutch East India Company.

::Primary Texts To Be Read For Monograph 1::

1. Kites of Fortune
2. Calligraphy of the Witch
3. River of Smoke
4. Castaway
5. Emprehendora
6. Testimony of An Irish Slave Girl
7. The Kitchen House
8. Onaedo-- The Blacksmith's Daughter
9. All the books on Slavery by Andre Brink, which deserves another list like this one
10. Before We Set Sail

:: Lessons Learnt ::

I learnt a lot from finishing the second draft of the dissertation. But there are four things that I have learnt which I believe are going to help me be a better writer, of things both academic and non-academic :

1. Developing A Regular Writing Practice : When I began writing my dissertation, I was teaching. In fact, my first semester as a dissertator I taught two writing classes. It wasn't that the classes I was teaching were intellectually demanding per se, at least not in the way the dissertation writing was. But it required a different kind of intellectual and emotional work. And I had very little idea how to balance the two. One of my advisors told me, write 15 mins everyday, and I did. There were days when carving out those 15 minutes seemed harder than staying alive. But I tried my best anyway, and I must admit, it did help me reach the goal of a finished dissertation.
   
   
   Of course, there were days when I spent way more than 15 mins. But what having such a goal did for me was that, it really lowered the bars. I would try to put in concentrated 15 mins of writing time, and if I could do that successfully, would consider my day to be a productive one. That way, I did not suffer from the anxiety or guilt of not writing, which, in my experience, really lowers my productivity. In a nutshell, the conclusion I reached is, it is important to develop one's own regular writing practice. Whatever that might be. A 15 min. everyday approach helped me to stay close to the topic of my research and writing, I never really felt too detached from my dissertation. Consequently, I never had to devote time to fall back into the project. This, I have learnt, is crucial. Writing a little bit everyday helps me to stay focused, it gives birth to new thematic problems, it forces me to push myself to think through the conceptual problems of my work on an everyday basis, rather than feeling scared and removing myself from it completely. Last but not the least, it also helped me to break a big project like that of a dissertation into smaller accomplishable goals. And that is what lead me to this first stage towards completion.

2. Distance From My Own Work : Inspite of developing a regular writing practice, there might be days when I will have to take a break. And, that is not only okay, but desirable. Such breaks – whether they extend for a day or two or to a week-- allowed me to develop some critical distance between my work and myself. Consequently, I was able to think through some of the conceptual problems better. Such breaks can also be used up to do further readings which will enhance the quality of the writing project. What is important, though, is to be self-aware of that break, and not fall into the practice of using the idea of a “conscious break” for a LONG period of procastrination.
   
   
3. Giving A Project The Time It Needs : I took exactly three years to write six chapters. I began the project with a plan to write four chapters. I ended up writing six. Not that I changed my original archive of texts, but somehow two of my two original chapters ended up dealing with issues which are really divergent. I felt that they would benefit from chapter breaks. But three years is a LONG time in dissertation-land. And while I know other academics who have written great dissertations in a shorter period of time, I am not unhappy that it took me this long. My dissertation is by no means perfect, I am already making a bibliography so that I can begin to revise it successfully. But it's better today than it would have been if I had defended it last year. The leasson I learnt from this one : writing projects develop their own lives. And sometimes they demand time to marinate. It's best to give them that time.

Caveat : Giving time to a project does not really mean lazing around. No project marinates on its own. One has to prepare the marinate – that is, decide on the spices, the proportions, the other condiments etc., and then actually put the pieces of meat/whatever to marinate in that mixture. So, giving a time to a project basically means working on it and working on it some more, whatever form tha

Dissertation Update and Setting Up Goals

I have finished the entire first draft of my dissertation. Now, I need to get into the dreaded task of revising. I have decided to keep log of work on this blog for that. I need that push to get this work onto its next stage, and I think, keeping myself accountable on this blog will be helpful. So, beginning today, and by this coming Friday, I want to have a revised draft of my chapter on neo-slave narratives in Ghana. The chapter I have now is too long, and one of my advisors suggested that I break it into two. Because of the issues I am dealing with, I think, it makes sense. So, this week, I will concentrate on getting the chapter on transnationalism and the Ghanaian neo-slave narrative out of my way. So, today's goal:

1. type the section on Hartman I have already written

2. read Murphy's conclusion

3. do some research on Osu castle case

4. chalk out an opening for the chapter, focussing on Osu castle

::{Me}::

The past year has been hard in many many ways-- emotionally, financially. But I have learnt a great many things too. Amongst them, my realization about my own work. I have always felt that my academic and creative work are inter-related. But on a regular day, when I am struggling between grading, conversing with crazy supervisors, multiple deadlines, unpaid bills-- I mean, all the travails of an overworked, underpaid graduate student-- it is very very easy to lose track of those lofty feelings. But then, this past year, while struggling to keep sane, I recognized certain things. As much as I struggle with the institutional work of academia, I Love engaging in knowledge production. Knowledge production itself is one of the most profound political acts, and when done in a mindful kind of a way, politicizes and empowers the producer. There are lots of ifs and buts and complexities within the folds of the sentence I just wrote, but this is something I have come to believe in strongly in the last few months. In the same way, the more I engage with creative writing, art-making, I become convinced, writing a poem too is an act of knowledge-producing. A poem acts differently than a piece of academic essay-- on a more affective plane. But then, isn't my dissertation bound to my life-quest? If I didn't necessarily grow up within the politicized, lefty sub-culture, would I have been interested in writing a dissertation on representation of women in slave rebellions? Isn't my dissertation an expression of my pre-occupation with the ways in which philosophies, discourses, imaginations of class-struggle interpellate women? It is. And that is hugely autobiographical in some very fundamental way.

Apparently, the academic work I do, has nothing to do with me per se. I am not working on Bengali women's writing. I am not working on Bengali or even South Asian literatures. Although there is a strong South Asian component in my work. Yes, in amy academic work I branch out. I explore who I am not. What history is not mine. While in my poems, especially in this collection, in my insistent writing of the private-space, of domesticity, a very specific form of post-Partition, post-Naxalbari Bengali domesticity, it is all about figuring out who I am. Writing in, so to say. But then, isn't my dissertation also about figuring out who I am through an exploration of who I am not? The am exists in the guise of not. Besides, aren't the histories of slave rebellions also mine? Who will determine what history is mine and what is not mine? Is there only one way of laying claim to a history? Through a lens of ethnic-national-racial "authenticity"? I don't think so.

So, right now, I want to stop for a minute, and celebrate the fact that I can both move in and walk out. It's a rare privilege to be able to do so. And I AM privileged.

Critical and Creative: Some Reflections

For the past few days, I have been thinking about something: to what extent does my academic work as a literary critic bear any organic-symbiotic relationship with the poetry/fiction writing I do. It is not that I believe that there has to be a mechanical relationship, but still...

For one thing, in my academic work, I branch out. I branch out to places, languages, histories, literatures far away from my own. At least seemingly. In my poems and stories, I come back. I try to interrogate what has been close to me in a very direct kind of a way. I try to probe through my own childhood,my neighborhood, the people I have known in my life, the milieus that have been operative in making me who I am today.

There are times when it seems the two have nothing to do with each other. But then there are times when I recognize it is my academic work that has taught me the meaning of "reading." What it means to "read" texts. What it means to reside within a text. To take one word, one line/sentence at a time. To take it apart to put it back together again. That is precisely the approach that I try to bring to my creative writing. I try to "read" the life around me: my past, the present, the ever-changing landscape. I try to take it apart. I try to put the people in their contexts. Try to "read" them, find out what made them act the way they did. What made them so extra-ordinarily ordinary, yet singular. What made them conform. What made them rebel and how.

I don't know how life would have unfolded if I hadn't really taken up this PhD. I would have read anyway. I probably would have written too. But that's not the point. The point is, doing academic literary criticism gave me the final push towards becoming a writer. It empowered me to find the stories in my own life, and write them. Therefore, I find no contradiction between the "critical" and the "creative" in my life. In that sense, they are perfectly organic and symbiotic.

Nerd!

When I am smack dab in the middle of my despair, I ask myself,what these years of academic training in literary criticism has done for me. It has done a lot. LOT. But more than anything else, it has taught me to be an active reader. An active reader as against a passive consumer. It has taught me to wriggle inside the belly of a text. It has taught me to find space within a text to stretch myself. And now that I have learnt to read this way, my relationship to the "world" and the "text" will never be the same again. I am a more complicated person to deal with now. But also probably....wiser

Collaboration

It's amazing how much of my work-related stuff I figure out when I am actually not working. Like last week in LA. I was taking a walk with my dear friend, MS, a very talented scholar of American Studies. Somehow we ended up talking about Judith Halberstam's book Female Masculinity. MS pointed out to me, that in this book, Halberstam writes as if all forms of female masculinity are liberatory and empowering for everyone at all times. And it is not so. If we begin to see the intersections of race, colonialisms and anti-colonial nationalisms with gender ideologies, the process would become much more complicated. Now, I agree with her whole-heartedly. But I have been struggling for months to put it this simply. It is MS's use of the words "empowering" and "liberatory" that did it for me. Thanks, M. The bottomline is, scholarship, writing etc. etc. although they look and feel like solitary acts, are in reality, extremely collaborative. No art-making, no knowledge production happens in COMPLETE isolation. Period.

MLA 2011 Presentation: Note to Myself

I spent the last weekend in Los Angeles for the Modern Language Association (MLA) Annual Convention. Apart from the fact that I spent time with some of my old friends and scored some free books, I also presented a paper on Ramabai Espinet's novel The Swinging Bridge. During the Q&A session, I got into a little bit of trouble for using the words authentic Indianness. I had written it with the customary quotes and everything, but this is one of the things that people do like to pick on. I mean, honestly. My paper was talking about lots of things--plantation capitalism, gender, impossibility of writing certain histories blah blah blah. I mean, things that I would love the others to pick on. But no, most folks have to pick on that one minor ethnicity question. What to do! But one thing I realized, and this I think is going to be important for my work:

There is no authentic notion of Indianess (or blackness or brownness or anything really), but there is a dominant notion of Indianness. I mean, why "is" and "a, there are multiple dominant notions of Indianness.

So, note to myself: the next time I go back to that paper, I need to make it clear.

Revising Dissertation Chap 2

I am trying to revise chapter two of my dissertation. It is not proving to be easy. It is not that I don't have a grip over what I want to say. I do. But where I am struggling, is how to say it. A lot of the comments I got back from my advisor and the other dissertating colleagues is that, I need to paste more signposts before I launch into specific arguments. That is where I am struggling. It is as if I know where I am taking my readers, but I am not necessarily keen on telling them where I am going to take them. I think, I need to see some other dissertations to see how this has been achieved. Or maybe even book chapters. Natasha Tinsley's book? Christina Sharpe's book? LM's dissertation? That's what I will do tonight. Also, I need to make a quick library trip. Books I need to pick up:

1. Stephanie Li's Book

2. Louise Gluck's Ararat

3. Nationalism vs. Internationalism

Will do that tomorrow morning.