All Things ASE
Dr Leila Kamali: Me, My Work, and the ASE Experience.
Dr Leila Kamali (author’s photo).
New tutor Dr Leila Kamali talks about her first semester teaching ‘Contemporary Black British Literature’ for ASE.
I am a scholar of African American and Black British literature, and this term I have had the great pleasure of teaching ‘Contemporary Black British Literature’ at ASE. When I say this is a great pleasure I am not just being polite; it is proving truly refreshing to me to teach at ASE. There are a number of conditions present here which create a very special set-up, and support a lively classroom experience in times when so much of the higher education sector in Britain (and indeed elsewhere) is in crisis.
First and foremost, it is undoubtedly the quite protected nature of students’ experience at ASE which it seems to me sets them up very well to be able to engage fully with both the academic and social aspects of their studies here. Rare indeed today in Britain is it that you will encounter a room full of students who are not forced to work at least one job to support themselves; it is a sad fact that this simple reality has changed the face of what goes on in university learning, and affects the potential cohesiveness of a programme of study.
Add to that the seriousness with which ASE treats its duty of care to students, and you have, in my experience, optimum conditions for learning and development in the classroom.
It has been a delight, in short, to teach a whole module where all the students appear to have read every primary text that has been set, and who attend every class unless they are really sick! Sad that in literary studies this is something to celebrate, but that is where we are at. With the rare position that clearly the ASE cohort find themselves in, I was determined that their exposure to reading Black British literature during their time in Britain would make the most of this opportunity.
I think it is fair to say that my students on the whole had read very little Black British literature before taking this module – why would such a priority necessarily present itself to most young American students? It is my sense that this is precisely why my students chose this module – they are politically conscious young people, who are taking a decolonising approach to their ‘study abroad’. At the end of their short time in Britain, they will NOT be leaving with an unequivocal linking of Britishness with whiteness, and I am pleased and grateful to have been part of that journey.
In my own research and my teaching, my interests are shaped by what I think of as being a ‘diasporic’ consciousness
– in basic terms, a tendency to put diverse experiences and bodies of knowledge side by side and to see what can be learned from the relationship between them. This was indeed the approach of my book, The Cultural Memory of Africa in African American and Black British Fiction, 1970-2000 (Palgrave 2016), which sprang from my PhD work. There, I offered a new approach to ‘reading’ Africa as cultural memory in post-Civil Rights movement era African American fiction and in writing emerging in the wake of Thatcher’s Britain, to locate culturally-specific paradigms for identity in contemporary times. I was honoured that Professor Paul Gilroy, a leading light in the field, named my book “eloquent and insightful” in its “dynamic, new mapping of key texts, cultural intersections, and political movements”.
I am currently writing two further monographs. The first is entitled Places in My Mind: Mapping the Writing of John Edgar Wideman, and examines how various kinds of experiential engagement with geographical spaces, engaged in by this important African American author and by his readers alike, produce the possibility of writing the spirit of forgotten communities back into the landscapes where people and their histories have been perpetually erased from the record. I explore how Wideman creates both a lived and a literary legacy through such purposeful engagement with geographical space.
A further monograph, entitled Narrative and Black Political Activism: The Inner Life of Blackness, explores a focus inspired by the US Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 70s, upon what Blackness might mean away from a racializing gaze. I interrogate the implications of this notion across a range of literary works from Britain, the US and Africa, reading authors including Zora Neale Hurston, Amiri Baraka, Warsan Shire, Jay Bernard and Patience Agbabi, and being acutely concerned with the articulation of revolutionary spirit as a practice embodied by a distinctive relationship with the ‘inner life’.
In shaping the module at ASE which I have been teaching this term – ‘Contemporary Black British Literature’ – I have had the joy and the privilege of sharing with students novels, poems and memoir written by a range of British authors and poets of African, Caribbean and Asian descent, as well as those of mixed heritage.
I was pleased to discover that the students had previously read a certain amount of African American writing, so they came to my class conscious of some of the general debates. I had questions in my mind when asked by ASE to include British Asian writing in this module, being very conscious that ‘Black Britain’, as such, is a quantity which has moved fairly rapidly through different political moments, and that the current political mood is that the term ‘Black British’ refers to people of African descent in Britain only. However, as we have used this module to address both Black and Asian writing in Britain, I have discovered a fascinating approach to the subject.
If the ‘Contemporary’ in the context of this module addresses the post-Second World War period, beginning as it does with Sam Selvon’s 1956 novel The Lonely Londoners which reimagines the Caribbean migratory community in London following the war, the curve which is mapped out by the trajectory of texts we read on the module draws out very specifically the ways in which ‘Black British literature’ of the post-war period has undergone a push-and-pull of inclusion and exclusion of different cultural groups. This module then has turned out to offer students a really nuanced sense of how and why ‘Black British literature’ has often been a more subtle and malleable field in which to discuss cultural and racial identity than politics or other social realms have proven to be. Literature, we have seen, can more greatly tolerate questions and contradictions within the expression of identity than many other sites of discourse can.
Across the course of the module, we have studied Caryl Phillips’s multigenerational historical epic Crossing the River, Linton Kwesi Johnson’s dub poetry, and Jackie Kay’s memoir about transnational and transracial adoption. We have read Andrea Levy’s oppositional narrative of Black and white experiences of the Second World War, Hanif Kureishi’s and Zadie Smith’s takes on assimilation politics in the 1990s, and we finish the module with Jay Bernard’s memorial to the New Cross Fire and Bernardine Evaristo’s unpacking of gender and racial identities today in Girl, Woman, Other.
We have examined tensions and political shifts which have occurred in the conceptualisation of Blackness in Britain, and as has often been the case in my teaching career, I have learned something profound from the teaching experience and the way the students engage with the curriculum. In the case of this module, how assimilation to British sites of culture has worked differently in Asian and Black communities, and across different points in British history, has been a revelation.