Teaching and Research on Bharati Mukherjee 'S JASMINE
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Appendix4 Teaching and Research on Bharati Mukherjee ’s J ASMINE and T HE H OLDER OF THE W ORLD Below are the results from an email survey and Internet searches regarding the teaching of and research on Mukherjee’s Jasmine and The Holder of the World. In 2005 I sent an emailed survey to the top- 15 rated English departments in the country asking professors if they taught either book and in what context. I then did both a Google search of syllabi that include these novels as well as a Modern Lan- guage Association bibliography search for publications on each. It is evident from the results that Jasmine is taught more frequently and more frequently in a national context, and written on more frequently and discussed more frequently in a national context than Holder. I repeated these searches in 2007 and 2010 and got comparable results. Teaching Results of Survey on Jasmine and Holder, compiled July– September 2005: English Departments Surveyed: University of Pennsylvania, Yale Uni- versity, Princeton University, Harvard University, University of Cali- fornia Berkeley, Stanford University, Cornell University, Columbia University, University of Virginia, Duke University, University of Chi- cago, Johns Hopkins University, University of California Los Angeles, Brown, University of California Irvine. 166 Reconstituting Americans Top 15 English Departments by scholarly quality of faculty and edu- cational effectiveness as evaluated by the National Research Council and reported in Educational Rankings Annual. Ed. Lynn C. Hatten- dorf Westney. New York: Thompson Gale, 2005. Scholars of American literature, postcolonial literature, Asian Ameri- can literature, and 20th century literature from each department surveyed. • Total number of professors surveyed: 183 • Total number of responses: 113 • Total number of professors teaching or advising teaching on Jas- mine: 14 • Total number of professors teaching or advising teaching on Holder: 3 Topics of classes in which Jasmine was taught: On the Asian Ameri- can Subject (Undergrad), Freshman Literature/Writing (Undergrad), Multiethnic US Literature (Undergrad), Ethnicity in American Lit- erature (Grad), World Literature (Undergrad), American Upward Mobility Stories (Undergrad), Feminist Theory (Grad and Under- grad), Postcolonial Women’s Writing (Undergrad), Fiction of the Americas (Undergrad), Writing and Displacement (Grad and Under- grad), Fictions of Cultural Difference (Undergrad), Ethnic Literature (Undergrad), Post– World War II American Immigration Literature (Undergrad), Asian American Literature (Grad) Topics of classes in which Holder was taught: Genre (Grad), Ameri- can Literature and World Religions (Grad), American Literature in a Transnational Context (Grad and Undergrad), Contemporary Ethnic Women’s Fiction (Grad and Undergrad) Results of Google search for “Jasmine, Mukherjee, syllabus” and “Holder of the World, Mukherjee, syllabus” 2005: “Jasmine, Mukherjee, syllabus” produced 101 results; “Holder of the World, Mukherjee, syllabus” produced 36. Results of Google search for “Jasmine, Mukherjee, syllabus” and “Holder of the World, Mukherjee, syllabus” 2007: Teaching and Research on Bharati Mukherjee 167 “Jasmine, Mukherjee, syllabus” produced 829; “Holder of the World, Mukherjee, syllabus,” produced 61. Results of Google search for “Jasmine, Mukherjee, syllabus” and “Holder of the World, Mukherjee, syllabus” 2010: “Jasmine, Mukherjee, syllabus” produced 49,700; “Holder of the World, Mukherjee, syllabus” produced 31,600. Analysis of findings: Jasmine has been taught more often to under- graduates in classes looking at identity and American literature whereas Holder is more likely to be taught in a global context and to be taught to graduate students. Research Results of Modern Language Association bibliography search for arti- cles on the two novels 2005: Jasmine 44; Holder 10 Results of Modern Language Association bibliography search for arti- cles on the two novels 2007: Jasmine 58; Holder 17 Results of Modern Language Association bibliography search for arti- cles on the two novels 2007: Jasmine 75; Holder 23 Locations of publication for articles on the two novels: Jasmine: Women, America, and Movement, Contemporary American Women Writers, American Literature, The Immigrant Experience in North American Literature, International Women’s Writing; Holder: Postcolonial Theory and the United States, ARIEL, Borderlands, Inter- cultural Encounters- Studies in English Literature. Analysis of findings: Jasmine has been treated as an “American” text, which represents a female, minority experience, whereas Holder has been categorized for the most part as postcolonial, cosmopolitan, 168 Reconstituting Americans multinational, or denationalized. The exceptions to this are the arti- cles that treat Jasmine as postcolonial, published in places such as Cross- Cultures and Hybridity and Postcolonialism. However, this does not diminish the fact that of the two novels Jasmine appears more available for and amenable to a nationally oriented reading. Notes Introduction 1. I am thinking of citizenship here not simply as a patriotic category or a chosen mode of identification, but instead as something similar to Lauren Berlant’s description of it as “an index for appraising domes- tic national life, and for witnessing the processes of valorization that make different populations differently legitimate.” Citizenship, says Berlant, “is continually being produced out of a political, rhetorical, and economic struggle over who will count as ‘the people’ and how social membership will be measured and valued” (Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997], 20). I could have, and in places do, use the word “subjecthood” in place of citizenship but I more often choose citizenship in order to stress the modern national- ist dimensions of the rhetoric I am describing (as “subjecthood” tends to imply a position under monarchical government, as distinct from democracy); this choice also highlights the way in which the US popu- lation’s “participation” in government does not require any particu- lar act that engages their rights as citizens such as voting but requires simply an unconscious acceptance of one’s own benefits as American and the corresponding worldview that accompanies that acceptance. Citizenship remains an important category of social analysis because, as Bernard Murchland has argued, even though “the driving forces of modern society . do not encourage a very strong sense of citizen- ship . [W]e are beginning to realize that this weak sense of citizen- ship may be at the root of many of our social pathologies.” Bernard Murchland, “The Rigors of Citizenship,” The Review of Politics 59, no. 1 (1997): 127. 2. I am not suggesting that no one is doing work on multiculturalism but rather that the term multiculturalism is often equated with the great production of work on identity and diversity in the 1990s. Part of the impetus for turning to cosmopolitan and globalized models is the frustrating ideological reification, discussed later in this intro- duction, of ethnic, racial, gender, and sexual identities in the broader American (multi)cultural public sphere. As early as 1995, David Hol- linger was arguing that while “multiculturalism is a prodigious move- ment . its limitations are increasingly apparent” and calling for a 170 Notes “cosmopolitan- inspired step beyond the multicultural.” David Hol- linger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 1, 4. 3. Here, I use “the sixties” as shorthand for the civil rights movement, black nationalism, second- wave feminisms, the red power movement, the Asian American movement, the Chicano movement, and all other identity- based politics that emerged in and around that decade. Fol- lowing Cornel West, I use the sixties “for interpretive purposes,” not as “chronological category which encompasses a decade, but rather a his- torical construct or heuristic rubric which renders noteworthy historical processes and events intelligible” (Cornell West, “The Paradox of the Afro- American Rebellion,” Social Text 0, nos. 9/10 [1984]: 44). Also, I am not suggesting that conflicts between liberal and multiculturalist political ideologies do not arise in other nations. This is a problematic ideological position shared by many nations in the late twentieth and early twenty- first centuries. However, in this book I am focused on the particularities of the US case related to its historically idealistic rhetoric of equality and its history of racially based restrictions on citizenship. As Evelyn Glenn has argued, the “struggle [between equality and inequal- ity] has been particularly intense in the United States, where tension between a professed ideology of equality and inclusion— the so- called American Creed— and a ‘deep and common desire to exclude and reject large groups of human beings’ has marked every stage in the history of American citizenship.” Evelyn Glenn, “Citizenship and Inequal- ity: Historical and Global Perspectives,” Social Problems 47, no. 1 (2000): 1. 4. Louis Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955) is the foundational work that theoretically established liberalism as a central tenet of American social and political thought. Though his thesis has been challenged by theorists such as Bernard Bai- lyn (The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution [Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1967]) and J. G.