For the purpose of my final paper, I want to look at the pedagogy outlined by the Brazilian educationist  Paulo Freire as decolonial aesthetics. What Freire set out to do in 1970 has long since become a blueprint for political activists, leftist intellectual, teachers, politicians, psychologists, radical theologians- the list is endless, who hope to bring about any semblance of change with the current structures. His work outlines the need to reconceptualize the paradigms of our education system in light of various structures of power and oppression by posing a critical, problem-posing pedagogy. For Freire, literacy or rather how literacy is imparted, had the power to create a free subject. Education was a project that was humanizing when it was critical, dialogical and praxical. It could not be apolitical, for it either created students that conformed to the present system or became ‘the practice of freedom.’ It is this concept- education/teaching as freedom that I  am interested in. While Freire never strictly limits the group he refers to as oppressed, he cites them as the poor in Brazil who are crushed under the rubric of both capitalism and dictatorship. Even so, his understanding of  a ‘death-affirming climate of oppression’ and the subject it produces allows fo the world to use Freire to understand the oppressed under multiple different power structures, including colonial government.  Freire speaks of the dehumanization that is intrinsic to power relations. For him humanization does not take place without dehumanization. His detailing of what this dehumanization looks like and the effect it has on the psyche of the oppressed is emblematic of what Fanon, Memmi and other postcolonial thinkers are writing about. “The conflict lies in the choice between being wholly themselves or being divided; between ejecting the oppressor within or not ejecting him; between following prescription or having choices; between being spectators or actors…This is the tragic dilemma of the oppressed which their education must take into account”. Pedagogy of the Oppressed is decolonial precisely in this act, it demands that the way the colonised are taught about their own community, about their own image, must be done by themselves. For no one understands them better than them: “a pedagogy which must be forged with not for the oppressed (be they individuals or whole people) in the incessant struggle to regain their humanity.”

What makes this an aesthetic to me, more than its applicability to the social, political and economic violence inflicted on the colonised countries, is the ethic of hope that this text is loyal to.  It is a labour of love, at the heart of which is Freire’s uncompromising belief that there is beauty left to redeem and and that the oppressed can make it material. Hope, follows all the texts he wrote in his lifetime and twenty years later he writes the Pedagogy of Hope. 

“From these pages I hope at least the following will endure: my trust in the people, and my faith in men and in the creation of a world in which it is easier to love.” 

This paper will be most probably take the form of a boring old paper (for now).

My project will be drawing on folklore and legends to examine the new forms that the creative expression of the colonized peoples takes as it shifts away from the medieval, ambiguous time frame it has been frozen into. I will be focusing in particular on the unlikely heroes that feature in these songs and legends. The framework for this project is rooted in Fanon’s theory on the emergence of national culture in the wake of anti-colonial struggles. Fanon argues that with the collapse of the colonial institutions, great innovation takes place in folklore- stories no longer allude to “once upon a time”, “a long time ago” or any other obscure time period. The stories now refer to events that can easily take place in the present. Similarly, the stories have a different kind of hero, one who is a social misfit or an outlaw, that point towards new ways of being human. These heroes are rehabilitated and cast in a new, less negative light.

One such legend I will be looking at is the story of Jamalo Sheedi, immortalised in the popular folk song, Ho Jamalo. Jamalo Sheedi too is one of the unlikely heroes that emerge as folk songs and tales are revitalized. Jamalo Sheedi’s story takes place in the late nineteenth century. Not only this but it features a lot of characters we associate with modernity- railways, prisons and British colonial administrators. Jamalo Sheedi is a death row prisoner who takes on the task of test-driving a train across the then newly constructed Sukkur Bridge. This is a task that the British administrators have been unable to find volunteers for. Sheedi agrees to drive the train on the condition that he be released if he successfully completes the journey.  Sheedi manages to beat the odds and crosses the bridge. The British colonial administration is forced to release him and on his return his wife is said to have composed the song Ho Jamalo. Jamalo Sheedi makes an unlikely hero with his criminal past and his wits. Not only this, the story is also unique in how it can be easily placed into a time frame and is not a tale from an ossified past that the colonizer’s literature subjects the stories and heroes of the colonized to.  The project is significant because it will be looking at how stories evolved and modernized with recent struggles and events in the foreground. Although it might be a stretch to see Jamalo’s legend as an act of resistance against the colonizer, stories like these are important because they help show how the folklore of the colonized is a dynamic entity that has the capacity to reinvent and reinvigorate itself.

 

I will be looking for similar legends and stories. Another possible source for this project would be literature on the Thuggee culture in Southern India (might be referring to Philip Taylor’s Confessions of a Thug.

This project will most likely be an essay because it would be referring to secondary sources and tales.

 

References:

Fanon, Frantz. “On National Culture.” Wretched of the Earth.

Finding out that the origin of the zombie myth was among the slaves in the sugar plantations of Haiti instead of the work of some science fiction novelist really sparked my interest. The realisation that this mythical, science fiction monster had a much richer, deeper history than I had ever imagined was surprising, to say the least. At first, I wanted to write my essay on how the myth originated and the symbolism of it among the slaves of the time. But upon doing some research I came across various articles and books analysing the representation of zombies in pop culture today and the symbolism that comes along with it.

Turns out the zombie trope I was most familiar with has not been consistent throughout films since their first adaptation onto the silver screen. Their image has evolved along with the culture of the times they were being written in. Exploring the evolution of the zombie in each era and its representation of cultural anxieties immediately seemed like a much more interesting theme to follow for the purpose of my own research.

This was one of the more popular research topics related to zombies which I came across. So for my essay, I shall trace the evolution of the zombie trope based on cultural changes within the Western world. From emerging out of magic to one band of survivors being stuck in a zombie infested world to viral infections leading to the apocalypse the zombies have had all sorts of origin within movies. We all watch these movies and absorb their content without question but upon taking a closer look they disclose great detail about the society they are produced in, especially their fears and anxieties. Thus, I would like to use this age-old myth which came out of the troubles and fears of the displaced African people, even helped them portray a part of their identity, to explore the ideas and the fears of the Western world today. It will guide me in understanding the identity they create of themselves through their fiction as all fiction always holds true some part of the writer’s identity.

For my final project, I will be writing a piece of fiction. My purpose is to show how redeeming language, specifically the English language, can help decolonize the postcolonial Pakistani. The following explanation will provide a literature review that led me to my current topic. It will illustrate the power of language using Fanon’s texts, elaborate on Bhabha’s idea of hybridity, establish literature as a tool of shaping and reshaping identity, and discuss Rushdie’s ‘chutnification’ as a means of reorienting language and taking ownership of it. It will conclude that by using the colonizer’s language to provide alternate representations of his identity, the colonized is able to claim said language and decolonize himself.

Language is a powerful tool that can be used for oppression or liberation. This is recognized by Fanon in Black Skins, White Masks where he explains how the culture of the white man makes the black man feel inferior and sub human. In order to deal with these insecurities, the black man adopts the white man’s culture. An example of this is black people learning the French language in Antilles. In A Dying Colonialism, Fanon uses a different approach to this adoption of culture. He explains how the Algerians learnt the French language in order to have a shared language for communication as well as to hide their political affiliations so that they could safely start a revolution against the French. The language which had previously made them feel inferior and had been instrumental in their dislocated identities later helped them unite and feel protected. By using it differently and benefitting from it, they seemed to have claimed ownership of it. It was as much theirs as it was of the French because they had both used it for their own particular purposes.

Language is instrumental in shaping identities. Fanon explains the adoption of the colonial language by the black people in an attempt to become white and be treated like real human beings. In doing so, the colonized becomes a hybrid. Homi K Bhabha suggests that a hybrid emerges when there’s a mixture between the colonized and colonizer’s culture. The postcolonial man is a hybrid. In fact, any man in this multicultural world would be a hybrid as we adopt different practices from the diverse cultures we encounter. Bhabha’s hybridity is a bit different in the sense that it involves competing selves and causes confusion and anxiety in the postcolonial subject who no longer knows who he is and where he belongs. Literature provides multiple examples of such subjects. Before elaborating on this further, I’ll establish the role of literature itself in shaping identities.

Edward Said, in Orientalism, shows this by analyzing the oriental discourse and tracing how the Western writers produced and translated fiction about the Orient in the East in order to create and associate a stereotypical identity with them. The lazy, sexually perverse, and backward Orient was meant to contrast with the civilized people in the West. For example, the despot in the Persian Tales is anti-nationalist, a horror for the British nationalists to encounter. The promiscuous women in Arabian Nights are a disgrace to a British lady. Literature was thus used politically to shape and impose an identity by popularizing these stereotypes.

If literature can shape identities according to the colonial agenda, the reverse is also possible. In The Empire Writes Back, Ashcroft et al. theorize Fanon’s description of the black people embracing French language. They state that by appropriating the language of the colonizer, the colonized is able to liberate himself. The process of decolonization, they suggest, should be undertaken through writing in the colonial language. This way the colonized can take ownership of the very tool that oppressed him. Salman Rushdie uses this idea in the form of ‘chutnification’—the combination of words from different languages, specifically English, Hindi, and Urdu in his case. In his novel, Midnight’s Children, he uses chutnification to subvert the colonial narrative. Arundhati Roy does the same in A God of Small Things by combining Malayam with English. Moni Mohsin combines Urdu and English to achieve the same effect in The Diary of a Social Butterfly. The characters in all these novels are hybrids whose struggle is shown in their use of multiple languages. However, none of these characters end up resolving their internal conflicts, perhaps signifying the ongoing process of decolonization. Literature thus has the potential to make space for this decolonization and produce a new kind of identity which is a hybrid but is not struggling, an identity that is stable despite being complex; this is the representation of the decolonized man who takes ownership of the forces that had previously bound him and who feels comfortable in his hybrid body.

This brings me to question at hand: what is left to redeem now? Language. A way of decolonization is to redeem the language of the colonizer by reshaping and reorienting it. How? By using the language to write back to the imperial center with different representations of the colonized or post colonial man. By subverting the narrative of the victim.

That will be my mission for my final project. I aim to write a piece of fiction, set in postcolonial Pakistan and centered on a postcolonial subject who grapples with the anxieties of his hybrid identity. I will depict these anxieties through the form of chutnification in his language.  The plot will revolve around the character’s struggle in trying to take ownership of the language. Whether or not he succeeds fully, I have not decided yet. However, I do wish to show some level of development as far as the decolonizing process is concerned.

“The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.”
-Ralph Elison

For my final project, I will be tracing the history and development of blues music as an art form in conjunction with the African American fight for civil rights, while also highlighting how it has been turned on its head and used by the colonizer against those that produced it.

It’s important to study the blues for two reasons. Firstly, for a large part of the century, blues music was the only mode of expression for most African Americans. With political representation non-existent and their social standing too low to go into disciplines such as academia and journalism, a large number of black Americans conveyed their feelings and emotions through the blues. This was extremely influential in the eventual enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and with artists like Gary Clark Jr. and Shemekia Copeland still rocking, continues to be influential as the African American community continues its journey through the process of decolonization. Secondly, ironically enough, in the cultural appropriation of the blues, we see the colonization of an art form largely founded for the purposes of decolonization. Don’t get me wrong, it is completely normal to be influenced by other artists – that’s literally what inspires most new ones to make music. However, plagiarising (and sometimes, even completely stealing) older black musicians’ songs and passing them off as your own to make millions in profit without acknowledging or paying them a royalty (case in point: Elvis Presley), is not. In this way, in addition to being a very significant decolonial aesthetic, it wouldn’t be inaccurate to say that the blues has been a colonial aesthetic as well.

You can’t fully appreciate a project on any art form without experiencing it firsthand, so I will be adding audio files of some iconic blues songs (and whatever lyrical analysis I can offer on them) to support my claims, strengthen my arguments, and to preserve the emotion with which they were produced (which is impossible to match in writing about them). Moreover, if I am able to find any that is worth adding, I will also include interview footage of notable blues artists. My final project will take the form of a paper with these multimedia resources. However, if I do find that to be too difficult to manage, I might make a documentary of sorts in addition to what I have written.

One afternoon in 1935, a young boy by the name of Riley B. King wanders into the village square of Lexington, a small town in the Mississippi Delta, to witness a great commotion around the courthouse. Curious, he struggles to obtain a clearer view.
“I see them carrying a black body, a man’s body, to the front of the courthouse. A half-dozen white guys are hoisting the body up on a rope hanging from a makeshift platform. The black body is a dead body.”
It is difficult, for us even, to imagine a helpless ten-year-old black boy bear witness to such an event; the aftermath of a lynching that, by design, threatens everything that he is about. Such an account evokes the lovelessness of the blues South; of post-emancipation racialized violence- of the color line that is as dividing and present as ever.
Thirty-four years later, at the Filmore West auditorium in San Francisco, the same boy now going by the name ‘B.B. King’ finds himself, guitar in hand, standing in front of a largely white audience- a sellout crowd of flower-children. He recounts:
“For the first time in my career I got a standing ovation before I played. Couldn’t help but cry. With tears streaming down, I thought to myself, These kids love me before I’ve hit a note. How can I repay them for this love?”
In these two contrasting accounts, we are invited to consider the way in which music, it appears, has contributed to healing. Traumatic, debilitating and impoverishing pasts; how can one imagine reconciliation after such a history? The answer, as Bell Hooks puts it, is ‘mindful remembrance.’ Mindfully remembering feelings and experiences manifesting in the form of the blues, can begin the process of healing. As Adam Gussow beautifully put it, ‘King asks his imagined blues community- we who listen to his music- to participate in his unburdening.’

For my project, I will be writing a paper on the emergence of the blues in Southern USA, or as some have termed it ‘the soundtrack of segregation.’ Blues is a genre of music that emerged as part of the aftermath of the end of slavery: a post-emancipation phenomenon, one could call it. It is therefore not a ‘slave music’ per se, but it finds its roots in plantation songs and African-American work songs. It is a genre of music unique to the African-American experience, evident of why it did not spring up in Afro-Caribbean societies or any other African community. I will attempt to follow the progression of the genre from its origins in work-songs and the early ‘country-blues’ of Robert Johnson, to the appearance of the female-dominated ‘classic blues’ in minstrel shows and tours where now renowned blues figures such as Bessie Smith made their debuts. In the 1940s, an ethnomusicologist by the name of Alan Lomax toured the Southern states of the USA in search of a Black music that was untainted and untouched by whites. For this, he visited several Negro prisons and state penitentiaries where he made field-recordings of the songs sung by the Black prisoners, and it is through the publication of these recordings that the Blues legend Huddie Ledbetter, who we now know as “Lead Belly” was first discovered. These recordings are readily accessible on YouTube and I will be incorporating the lyrical content and various analyses of these in my paper. These field-recordings are what spawned the third, and perhaps the most familiar, manifestation of blues music in the form of ‘urban blues,’ which include the likes of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and later B.B. King.

Blues is a music that was founded on the sorrows of black men and women. I will be dedicating a large portion of my paper to the African-American work song and to African-American folk music. With origins that are difficult to trace, some of these folk songs have been adopted by blues musicians; one of which that holds particular significance to me is Lead Belly’s ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night?,’ a rendition of a folk song which tells the story of a young black girl who is lynched by white men.

The blues carries with it a great burden: a vast history of racialized oppression preserved in the words that are sung and the feeling they are sung with. It is, at times, an expression of grief, but it is also a form of healing- a way of getting by. Early blues and work songs share a common theme: a yearning for freedom and for going home. This is a reference to the ‘new slavery’ that the practice of sharecropping had subjected black men and women to following the end of slavery. Later, following the advent of farming machines, a migration of black folk is spawned and a new era of blues, known as Chicago Blues came into being. For my paper, I will be looking at the music of Robert Johnson, Charlie Patton, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Bessie Smith, Ma Raimey, Lead Belly, and Muddy Waters to name a few, and will attempt to draw comparisons between the lyrical content of these works and the Black American experience of the post-emancipation era. In other words, I will attempt to contextualize the music and will examine the stories behind the music.

If the length of my paper allows me, I would like to also talk about the blues revival of the 1960s and the Newport Jazz Festival of 1960 wherein Muddy Waters recorded one of the greatest live albums of his career, and arguably of all time, playing to an audience of black and white listeners alike. Videos of this performance are on YouTube, for those who might be interested. In discussing this revival of blues in the 60s, I would also like to talk about the whites who adopted the blues, such as the Rolling Stones, and their role in reintroducing blues music and Black blues musicians, such as Howlin’ Wolf, to white American audiences. I will also attempt to cover the changing nature of the music throughout the decades, from acoustic folk-sounding blues to the amplified electric blues we are all now familiar with.

Nkrumah had an economic theory not cultural. So those of us who wanted to create something, belonging to and reflecting just us, had little to inspire us but Negritude…What interested me in finding a kind of authenticity was NOT to create pure decoration but to create a language of visual forms which defined my for myself– Papa Ibra Tall

When words failed to do justice to the cultural and the spirit of Africa, Senghor gave rise to Negritude, which he defined as the “sum of the cultural values of the Black world.” Negritude then gave rise to a new school of arts namely the Ecole De Dakar which celebrated these cultural values through the medium of Arts.

Black painters poured out their feelings on a canvas.  Through these works of arts, the black souls were at complete liberty to express themselves fully. And thus painters like Papa Ibra Tall and Iba N’Diaye began to pursue an aesthetic form that was inspired by the spirit of Negritude. Through their work, they forged their identity in the face of the white men.

My project, will primarily focus on the paintings of the aforementioned painters who are the founding fathers of Ecole De Dakar. By looking at their specific series, I will aim to understand their world view and how they represent Black culture to the outside world. And most importantly how they coalesce their identity.

Through this, I will learn to appreciate how some of the silences that are difficult to articulate can be so beautifully depicted in an art form. These painting not only appeal to the eye but to the heart and mind, which allows it to open doors of imagination, letting the viewer enter the world of the painter. Most importantly, this project will allow me, and hopefully others,  to witness the beauty of the African culture that has remained untouched through all these painful years of oppression and injustices.

My endeavor will most likely take the form of a pictorial essay or a scrap book. In either case, I will try to present these painting in a form a story line shedding light on the life of the black man.

The television series Queen Sugar is produced and often directed, by Ava DuVernay: a black female filmmaker who, in 2018, became the first woman of colour to direct a film with a budget exceeding $100 million. Ava’s work focuses, consciously and unapologetically, on the lives and plight of African Americans- in the context of history as well as the present-day. More often than not, history and the present are intertwined in her work. 

Queen Sugar is particularly important to me because it does not feign sophistication. For a show that revolves around a black family in present-day Louisiana, the focus on racism is not made apparent immediately; the creators have made sure to depict the characters as members of an ordinary albeit dysfunctional family. The plot is straightforward, the characters are flawed, sometimes problematic and therefore relatable, human beings. Yet in all its simplicity, there is a depth to the show that demands acknowledgement. Acknowledgment of a history that has moulded the world one way and not another; acknowledgement of a history that often proves to be a soul-crushing weight; a history that prevents individuals from simply existing as individuals, no matter how hard they may try.

This is where Queen Sugar, in my opinion, strikes an exquisite balance: it presents characters that are so flawed in their humanity and so caught up in their day to day lives, that one often forgets the external factors at play: institutionalized racism, social injustice, sexism and so on. Through what will probably be an essay, I hope to convey how structural constraints ensure that, at the end of the day, no matter how much these characters try to escape this history, or to simply not have it at the forefront of everything they do, it keeps catching up with their reality.

The era of colonization and slavery created a world where even human beings became objects- to be classified, to be subjected ruthlessly to scientific knowledge and suffocating calculations, all of which would create an order to be administered and ruled by the European colonizer. Yet, parallel to this world of restriction and enslavement was another world- of enchantment, of a powerful imagination that possessed a force just as real as the physical world order. This project aims to explore and discover the place where the colonizer and the master could never reach- the mind of the enslaved. These minds were never heard or seen because they survived under the merciless weight of the colonial world and the white European master. And yet, what seems like mere survival was a thriving world in itself, like weeds that find their way out of a strong, space less wall, and grow slowly and silently. In essence, the Master may have enslaved bodies and lands, but failed to conquer minds, the place where the reality of the conquered thrived. This was the place where the enslaved hid and protected their real thoughts and dreams- an imagination just as powerful and real as the outside world. Therefore, this work attempts to understand the dreams of the enslaved, and explore their ability to keep on dreaming. For it was in dreams that they could break free from physical restrictions, where they could run and fly and be liberated. This project aims to show the reality and beauty of the world of slave dreams- a world of freedom situated right within the world of slavery, unnoticed and unstoppable. This is where its ultimate significance lies- for all that the White master professed, freedom had always been growing right under his nose, and grew and grew until it burst out right through his own world.  It is the reality of dreams then, that showed that slavery, racism and colonialism had never won at all.

In essence, the importance of this work lies in the depiction of how the terrorized and enslaved mind can add an invincible beauty to a cruel and ugly world. This invincibility is that of dreams, which are above reality and yet just as real as the world outside. That the ability to dream was not lost or conquered is the soul of a hope that still lingers in the world today- a world that still faces challenges left by slavery. This ability was a way of self-healing while the enslaved suffered, and will therefore always keep healing the marks left by cruelty. It was an immortal force that could not be caught, caged, killed or broken- and will always be so. Dreams are a hope that there is still a way to begin healing.

The most powerful place that protected these dreams within enslaved minds could be the poetic imagination. This project, thus, aims to explore slave songs and spirituals in order to seek where and how this power thrived and what it meant to the enslaved. These songs and spirituals are significant in their imaginative quality and reality at the same time- the only words that encapsulate the surreal thoughts of the enslaved and their secret freedom. These words depict their freedom on a daily basis- while laboring on plantations and while prostrating right in front of the master.

With this power, these songs and spirituals showed how an existing freedom intertwined with hope of freedom and created tunes, images and emotions that were an entire experience on their own. The project chooses to focus on slavery specifically because it brought forth intense physical hardship along with an emotional one and made the ability to dream even stronger. Even while chained, the slaves then could still dance to their own tune. This research will tentatively take the form of an illustrative collection of songs and spirituals, crafted along these themes- with a detailed introduction of an analysis and thoughts on the chosen songs and the experience that they endeavor to convey. It is impossible to recreate that experience or ever understand it fully- but it is imperative to cherish, protect and further immortalize this ability to dream, heal and hope. This is why the songs themselves will only be accompanied by illustrations and no more words than what the enslaved uttered. The invincible beauty of the terrorized mind lies in a world of music, chants, dance, images and tangled, chaotic thoughts. This collection aims to create itself for those who choose to see the powerful reality of disorder and freedom in a perfectly ordered world.

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For my project, I want to focus on how popular post-colonial films/poetry can be thought of in terms of the aesthetics of decolonization. I still have to think about the list of films I want to specifically focus on but for now I am thinking of “rang de basanti” and how I can make an argument on de colonial aesthetics using that film and also relate it to ideas we have been discussing throughout the course of laying claim to the past and in this case a very revolutionary past and tracing it very much within the present. For the poetry, again I need to think of the list that I want to finally work with but for now to convey the idea, I was thinking of trying to understand Amrita Pritam’s poem “aj akha waris shah nu” and Faiz’s “hum k thehre ajnabi” within the aesthetic of decolonization with the foremost question being that of home and where is that home? Also, I want to see how when these poems adapt the musical form, can there be a difference in terms of the aesthetic, that will be interesting to look at.  I don’t really want my project to take a paper form, I think I will make a blog, or an Instagram account dedicated to investigating this aesthetic further. To define what decolonization means and what framework I should use when analyzing these artistic expressions, I want to return to the texts we have been studying in class and explore further texts as well like Biko’s “I write what I like” to have well founded theoretical background. The idea is still half baked but I think it will be interesting to see how some these artistic expressions can resonate with the question of these aesthetics.