ANALYSIS
By Nomalanga Mkhize, Rhodes University, Sarah Pett, University of Cape Town and Xolela Mangcu, University of York
The debate about curriculum and staff diversity is gaining momentum at some South African as well as British universities.
Some have challenged the dominance of dead white men in university literary studies departments. But what would a more diverse, less Eurocentric reading list look like in different disciplines? Three academics offer their suggestions.
Sarah Pett, SOAS; University of York (English)
When it comes to teaching, I'm particularly interested in two things. The first is constructions and deconstructions of whiteness and white privilege. The second involves complicating some of the myths that surround canonical texts and contexts.
I'd love to teach Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah. Reviews have been mixed, but I lapped this up when I read it. I particularly like how Adichie uses the digital in this novel, and how she frames Peggy McIntosh's white privilege questionnaire. The possibilities for classroom discussion offered by this novel are endless.
I thoroughly enjoyed Carli Coetzee's Accented Futures: Language Activism and the Ending of Apartheid. Its short, wide-ranging chapters are excellent springboards for classroom discussion. The book brings some of the unspoken problems in South African literary and academic culture to the surface.
Reading parts of this alongside older material, like Njabulo S. Ndebele's Rediscovery of the Ordinary (1991), as well as some of the articles that emerged this year around the Franschoek Literary Festival by Thando Mgqolozana, Siphiwo Mahala and Eusebius McKaiser, for instance, would make for a great postgraduate seminar.
My favourite session on the Global Shakespeare module I teach at SOAS has to be the seminar on Shakespeare's Othello. In the UK, we're taught at school that the play is primarily about race and was particularly radical because the early modern audience wouldn't have seen a black person before.
This is completely untrue. The introduction to Gretchen Gerzina'sBlack London: Life Before Emancipation is a very readable account of how diverse our capital was in Shakespeare's time (and after), while the Walters Art Museum's open access catalogue Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe offers a rich selection of essays and images that further prove this.
Together they provide an accessible and engaging backdrop to classroom discussion, in which we explore how race is in many ways a minor detail in a play centrally concerned with status, gender relations and masculinity.
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