Essay on Belinda

Last year, for my Eighteenth Century Trans-Atlantic Feminism class, I wrote a paper on Belinda's Petition. Initially, the plan was to include it in my dissertation, but then both my advisors and me thought against it. So, now I am thinking of turning it into a stand-alone article. So today, when I began to revive some of my research around it, I found couple of things: one, Rita Dove had written a poem on Belinda's petition in her book The Yellow House on the Corner, and Raymond Winbush has published a book called Belinda's Petition. So, obviously, now my article needs some re-orientation too. So, what I am thinking is, writing an article that will be more about how the contemporary social imaginary in US has "read" and "interpreted" Belinda and her petition, and what her petition actually reveals about her. In that way, it will also be a continuation of my dissertation work on memory, re-imagination of history and contemporary significances of slavery. That's why, this bibliography.

Primary Sources:

1. Belinda's Petition

2. Dove, Rita. Belinda's Petition. In The Yellow House in the Corner

3. Winbush, Raymond. Belinda's Petition

Secondary Sources:

Books:

1.Chang, Alexandra. Slavery in the Age of Reason

2.George A. Levesque, Black Boston: African American Life and Culture in Urban America, 1750–1860 (New York, 1994), 32–33, 50 n. 32.

3.Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution, ed. Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman (Charlottesville, Va., 1983)

4.http://tuftsjournal.tufts.edu/archive/2002/august/calendar/royall2.shtml

5.William C. Nell, The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (Boston, 1855)

6.Nussbaum, Felicity A. The Global Eighteenth Century

7. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “Dis-Covering the Subject of the ‘Great Constitutional Discussion,’ 1786–1789,”Journal of American History 79, no. 3 (December 1992)

8.David Kazanjian, The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America (Minneapolis, Minn., 2003)

9.T. H. Breen, “Making History: The Force of Public Opinion and the Last Years of Slavery in Massachusetts,” in Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections on Personal Identity in Early America, ed. Ronald Hoffman, Mechal Sobel, and Fredrika J. Teute (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997)

10.Thomas J. Davis, “Emancipation Rhetoric, Natural Rights, and Revolutionary New England: A Note on Four Black Petitions in Massachusetts, 1773–1777,” New England Quarterly 62, no. 2 (June 1989): 248–63 (“Lawdable Example,” 262)

11.Scott Hancock, “‘The Law Will Make You Smart’: Legal Consciousness, Rights Rhetoric, and African American Identity Formation in Massachusetts, 1641–1855” (Ph.D. diss., University of New Hampshire, 1999)

12.f African American Literature, 1680–1865 (Charlottesville, Va., 2001), 53–55; Emily Blanck, “Seventeen Eighty-Three: The Turning Point in the Law of Slavery and Freedom in Massachusetts,” New England Quarterly 75, no. 1 (March 2002): 24–51, esp. 27–28.

13.Harris, Sharon.Executing Race: Early American Women’s Narratives of Race, Society, and the Law

14. Kaplan, Sidney. The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution

15.Timothy Dwight, The Charitable Blessed: A Sermon, Preached in the First Church in New-Haven, August 8, 1810 (New Haven, Conn., 1810), 22–23.

There will be things to add on to this list, as I continue to work more on this article, but for now, I can live with it. Also, this is the last day of 2009. So Happy New Year to myself and everyone else out there.

Planning My Spring Class

I need to finalize my syllabus for the Spring Rhetoric and Writing Class. Couple of lessons from the Fall Semester:

a. Instead of asking my students to turn in actual journals (that wasn't a very intelligent move on my part), I am requiring them to have a semester-long blog of their own. I will probably make it mandatory for them to have 12 entries, as I did the last time. That should be enough for a 15 week class, and I hope it will help them to learn the art of free-writing a little bit. For me, it's also a way to just make them feel that writing is not something that they should be afraid of. So many of my students come to the class with these mystified ideas of writing.

b. I realized, that the only assignment where my students felt actually excited was the auto-ethnography assignment. And I think, if I have to really think about it, they wrote amazing stories. Stories that dealt with race, class, religion, gender, national borders and in couple of instances, even US Empire. Had it not been for this class assignment, I am sure, most of these would have gotten lost within the routinized structures of their everyday lives. I almost cried when I read through my students' auto-ethnographies. They trusted me enough to tell these stories! But then, I also cannot help thinking, did they at all think about trust in the way I think about it? Or was it just another assignment for them? I mean, I would have assigned a zero if someone failed to turn in their auto-ethnography essay. So, this question of trust is dicey within a classroom situation. Precisely because a classroom is inherently a powered space, and there is no way that one can begin to think about it in a different way within a corporate university. But just to see some of my students so excited to be able to tell their stories, I learnt that this needs to be a more central element of the class I teach in spring. So, right now I am trying to think of ways to do that, without necessarily compromising with the idea of "academic rigor."

Now, so much of what I do is so totally not-glamorous...reading, writing, editing, hunched over on the desk, reading student papers, talking to students, editing their work...but isn't that the idea?

The Second Draft of the Bindudi Story Done

Just finished working on the Bindudi story and send it along to some of my friends for some comments/suggestions/reactions. I always feel this relief once I am done with a draft. And this moment, when I have sent it out to some of my readers, is also one full of anticipation. And then again, there will be that dreaded phase: REVISION. Today, as I was working on this draft, I was thinking, what is it that I am really trying to say in this story. If I have to push myself a little bit away from its fundamental emotional world, I will say, it is about gender, but more than that it is about this vicious circle of violence. The way we often make certain forms of violence totally legitimate. But, I was a little bit surprised to see, how in this story of mine, violence is really institutionalized. There is an inordinate amount of violence inside the school premises. There is violence within family. This is not something I had paid close attention to while writing the story. I was more interested in developing the character, and the plot and the voice. It will be interesting to see if any of my readers pick up on this.

Just finished reading Lee Smith's collection of stories: Cakewalk. What is it about the American South that has produced such great women writers? So, my own favorites in this collection are: "Between the Lines," "Gulfport," "Artists", "Dear Phil Donahue," and the last story of the collection "Cakewalk." Most of these stories are about women stuck within domestic claustrophobia, and trying to find ways out of them. Smith's women are complicated characters, often fucked up, with layers and layers of contradictions, and they try to deal with themselves within those contradictions. Rarely in this collection do we come across characters whose rage is so deep that she leaves it all. So, as I was reading these book, I was also thinking, how does one write about women who have tried to find their voice outside of the family, the contradictions of domesticity? About women who join social movements? About women who engage in political art-making? In this particular collection, Martha Rasnick of "Dear Phil Donahue" is probably the one who comes closest to it, but then, hers is not a "collective" or "political" solution in that sense. Wouldn't it be great if someone did a collection like that?

Will It Help Me to Begin to Send Out a Chapbook-Manuscript?

I have been trying to decide on something. Right now, I do have enough material for a chapbook, but what I would really want to do is, have a more finished manuscript for a full-length poetry collection. Because, I have this feeling, that only in a full-length form, will the stuff I am dealing with, make any remote sense. Besides, I feel, I need to read more, learn more, and know more before I get into the publishing biz. But then, there are some real-world concerns too. Getting a chapbook published will add more publication credits to my name, probably will also get me more attention. So, it can be a little confusing. So far I am tilting more towards just working and learning my stuff better. But it can be a hard call sometimes. Will have to decide within the next couple of days.

"We" Voice In Short Fiction

In one of her interviews, Jhumpa Lahiri, commented on the process of her writing of the story Treatment of Bibi Halder. She said, it had been an attempt on her part to experiment with the "we" voice. I think, in lots of ways, the "we" voice works well for stories set in India, Bengal or for that matter, anywhere else in the Third World. I am not trying to generalize the "Third World" as essentially "collective" and the "First World" as primarily "individual", but I am beginning to think there is a difference in the way the very genre of the short story has developed in a lot of the Third World context and US. I am not sure to what extent, what Barbara Jane Reyes and her other friends call it, the MFA Industrial Complex, that has contributed to it. But, there is definitely a way in which the workshops teach students to read and write short stories. The emphasis is always on one individual, the so-called "change" at the end, the "conflict" etc. Not that these are not essential elements in good story-telling, but there are plenty of short stories in the world which do not necessarily depend on one individual's conflict resolution model. For me, right now, as I am working through this story (A Phuchka for Bindudi), I am also thinking, doesn't the "we" narrative dis-spell this model a little bit?

Because the "we" voice is really trying to narrate an event, a biography through the collective voice of a specific community. And it is doing so precisely because an event or a person stands out. That is, it challenges or at least complicates the communal standards in some way or the other. So, it is almost like through this story, the community is trying to re-assess its own norms. At least, when a writer adopts that "we" voice, that's how I would see what he/she is trying to achieve rhetorically. For me, then, there is almost a kind of dialectical relationship between the individual and the community within this "we" voice in a way that is not always the dominant trend within contemporary American short fiction. So, to get back to Jhumpa Lahiri, she also said in that interview that the "we" voice is inconsequential in a sense. This is what I have been thinking about a lot while revising this story. One of my workshop-colleagues asked an interesting question: who is the protagonist of your story? Bindu Didimoni or this collective "we" voice? My tentative answer is, both. But then, does it really matter if we do not have one clearly identifiable protagonist in a short story? And as I am thinking through this process, I would like to say, unlike Jhumpa Lahiri, I don't want the "we" voice to be inconsequential. If "change" is one of the things that constitutes essence of a short-fiction narrative, or any narrative, I want both Bindu Didimoni and this "we" voice to experience/perceive this change.

Now, the challenge is, how to achieve all of these within the formal elements of a short story. So, without devoting much more time to yapping, it's time for me to turant go back to that.

Working on the Story

This summer I read Faulkner's short story A Rose for Emily, and ever since I have been thinking of writing a story using this "we" point-of-view. I had also been toying for a while to do something with this idea of gendered repression and food. So, this story, A Phuchka for Bindudi, is really this attempt to bring these two together. Or, rather should I say, they came together without my always planning it this way. This "we" voice is interesting: for, it lets the writer explore and experiment with the idea of a gossipy voice, a collectivity and the kinds of voices and discourses it can produce. Consequently, it can also be an effective way of throwing back this gaze on someone who is considered to be an "other" by a specific community. In doing so, the "we" voice almost always de-constructs itself too. Or, one might say, it's basically all about the writer's intervention. A writer uses that "we" voice strategically, just so that s/he can problematize the standards the "we" voice supposedly holds up as un-problemtic, un-violable, or even sacred.

So, today, I worked on one of the scenes of the story. My old hang-out place in Austin, It's a Grind has closed shop, but now there is this cafe called The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaves in the same space. I have been hanging out here for the past hour or so, trying to write this scene. It wasn't there in the original story, but Beth Ann Bauman's suggestion was, a scene like this one, might actually help the readers understand the difference between the protagonist and the other woman in the community. So, that's what I was trying to do today. I am slow these days, I can't do more than one specific aspect of a piece within a single day. My only hope is, slow and steady wins the race. And even if I am being reaaaaaaaaaalllllllllly, reallyyyyyyyy slow, it still counts. Or, at least, it counts to me!

Going Back to Prose

For the last few days, prose has been beckoning me. So, yesterday, after emailing DRR the poem, I finally settled on working on a re-vision of this story I have written for Beth Ann Bauman's workshop at UCLA. The story is loosely based on Raha Didimoni, this formidable teacher of our Balia Nafar Chandra Balika Bidyalaya. I have never been to that school myself, but have enough stories about her from those who went. I have known almost nothing about her, so the story really began as a way for me to explore how can one think of such a figure, and once I went inside the project, Raha Didimoni began to move further and further away, although, I guess, one can still see certain traces of our Garia Station Road if one tries hard. So, yesterday, I spent some time looking through the feedbacks I received. One of them said:

The back-story was too much, too heavy.

And, my reaction is, yeah, you know, we are an ancient people, have known life before capital, have dealt with colonialism, too many famines, genocides etc. On top of that there is gender, caste, multiple religions, a Partition. So, yes, our back-stories are heavy, and involve more that a nuclear family in the suburbia and after-hours fucks in the school-gym and a smoke in the parking lot. You just have to deal with it.

But apart from that, some of the feedbacks, especially Beth Bauman's was dot on. I am hoping to have a revised version of the story by Jan. 1. So that I can send it out to few for feedback.