DOCSLIB.ORG

Beyond Afropolitanism: Representations of African Identities in Select 21St Century African Novels

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Beyond Afropolitanism: Representations of African Identities in Select 21St Century African Novels Beyond Afropolitanism: Representations of African Identities in Select 21st Century African Novels by Hicham Gourgem A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Cultural Mediations-Literary Studies Carleton University Ottawa, Ontario © 2020 Hicham Gourgem Abstract This dissertation explores the theoretical and ideological stakes in contemporary representations of African cultural identities through ―Afropolitanism‖ and ―Afropeanism.‖ The two concepts informed by anglophone and francophone African experience respectively—―Afropolitan‖ and ―Afropean‖—construct cultural dialogue through an over-reliance on a dualized Western-African relation. The study presents a comparative analysis of novels in French and English published at the turn of the twenty- first century by Calixthe Beyala, Sami Tchak, Chris Abani, Teju Cole, NoViolet Bulawayo, and Taiye Selasi. I examine these literary works as instantiations of a paradigm of cultural dialogue that privileges Western culture in contemporary redefinitions of African identities. The study also underlines the efforts by ―Afropolitan‖ and ―Afropean‖ writers to depart from atavistic African self-representation of the 1950s and 1960s generation of African writers to challenge myths of national identity, universality of Western culture, and stereotyping and marginalizing Africans in Western societies. Put differently, this work aims to show how a select group of African writers deploy ―Afropolitan‖ and ―Afropean‖ literary texts to reimagining alternative African identities and ways of belonging that challenge monolithic Western discourse on national identity. Yet, it interrogates the writers‘ model of decolonizing African representations as one that perpetuates the notion of the West as the center. Theoretically, I build on Edouard Glissant‘s concept of Relation and Achille Mbembe‘s rendering of ―Afropolitanism‖ as alternative accounts that diversify cultural dialogue(s) and complicate identities. The ―Afropolitan‖ and ―Afropean‖ texts studied here inadequately engage with the cultural histories of African people. Through a close reading of these literary texts, I delineate how the writers negotiate social identities and belonging of African subjects across race, gender, and social status, and particularly, how they attempt to resist imperial domination through hybridity. i Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor, Nduka Otiono, for his wonderful guidance throughout this dissertation. I am thankful to him for continually encouraging and supporting me through his excellent coaching and through his timely and insightful feedback. I would like to thank my committee members, Christine Duff and Sarah Casteel, for reading the drafts of my chapters and providing thought-provoking comments, suggestions and questions. My biggest thanks to my lovely wife, Imane, who encouraged me to do a Ph.D. and has been so supportive during my project. To my son, my joy and life, Yacoub, for sometimes spending time with me in my office as I write. And to my dear parents, Malika and M‘hamed, who have waited so long for this moment. ii Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................... i Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................... ii Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 4 Chapter 1: Negritude, Postcolonialism, and National(ist) Identities ......................... 33 Chapter 2: “Afropeanism” in Calixthe Beyala’s Le petit prince de Belleville and Sami Tchak’s Place des fêtes. .................................................................................................. 60 Chapter 3: The Global: Home for a Stranger in Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go and Teju Cole’s Open City ..................................................................................................... 87 Chapter 4: Writing Self and Other As “Unhomely” in Chris Abani’s GraceLand and NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names ................................................................ 114 Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 146 Works Cited ................................................................................................................... 155 iii Introduction The representation of African identities has been at the center of African literary production, and approximately since the mid-twentieth century, the modern African novel has addressed cultural identity in light of the colonial realities which many African nations experienced. The older generation of African writers associated with Négritude and anti-colonialism—writers in French such as Ferdinand Oyono, Bernard Dadié, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Camara Laye, Mongo Beti and their English counterparts Chinua Achebe, Cyprian Ekwensi, Ngugi wa Thiong‘o, Ayi Kwei Armah, to name only a few— privilege native/national identities and racial difference, and use binarism as a mode of representing Africa and the West1. The historical, political circumstances of the first half of the twentieth century—including the development of a cultural and militant Pan- Africanism by some black and African writers and activists in the diaspora such as Edward Wilmot Blyden, W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Aimé Césaire, and Léopold Sédar Senghor—significantly shaped the literary aesthetics, themes and representations of African identities by the writers of the 1950s and 1960s2. ―The rhetoric of cultural and racial affirmation,‖ states Irele in ―Dimensions of African Discourse‖, ―involved in (…) [national decolonization] ideologies thus served as the mental levers in the struggle against the objective structures of imperial domination and colonial dependency‖ (50). Although the older generation of African writers of the 1950s and 1960s may differ in 1 In Reading Chinua Achebe (1991), Simon Gikandi shows how Chinua Achebe deploys cultural and moral binary oppositions of Self-Other in Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God. 2 For more on this, see Chielozona Eze‘s Postcolonial Imaginations and Moral Representations in African literature and Culture (2011). Eze emphasizes the role played by nineteenth century black thinkers and early twentieth century Négritude writers in the constitution of an African identity in literature and culture based on racial, cultural and moral dichotomies with Europe. 4 their choices of literary aesthetic, or political and theoretical approaches, they construct cultural homogeneity and binaries of Self-Other. By comparison, since the 1990s, the assigned role of the African writer in national politics and in adhering to the notion of a national identity and literature has considerably waned. A younger generation of African writers emerged who are interested in the themes of transnationalism, immigration to the North, diaspora, and cultural hybridity. Odile Cazenave and Patricia Célérier portray this new ―generation‖ among African writers in French who ―lifted the burden of engagement‖ (138) by developing alternative literary themes, forms, and techniques that reflect their openness to transnationalism and awareness of the global aesthetics in which culture and literature operate. This turn to transnational or global frameworks shows ―the desire on the part of the authors to be identified as writers rather than as people from a specific national, cultural, or geographical origin‖ 3 (5). The efforts by the new ―generation‖ of African writers to free African identities and literature of a national framework corresponds to the notion of world literature as analyzed by Pascale Casanova in The World Republic of Letters (1999). For Casanova, world literature is mainly a space for ―competition among its members (...) to attain the same goal: literary legitimacy,‖ (40) beyond national or political claims to literary value. This understanding of world literature is embraced by some African writers in French who criticize the ideological distinctions of Us-Them embedded in the idea of ―francophone‖ literature. The notion of ―francophone‖ literature as the Other of French 3 Similar arguments have been made by Waberi in ―Les enfants de la postcolonie: esquisse d‘une nouvelle génération d‘écrivains francophone d‘Afrique noir‖ (1998) and Taiye Selasi‘s ―African Literature Does Not Exist‖ (2013). 5 literature involves a binarism that is dismissed by many of these writers who ―resist(...) their marginalization in some exotic literary periphery by living and working out of what continues to be considered the center of the French/Francophone literary and publishing world: Paris‖ (Migraine-George xix). Many writers in French rejected the literary, ideological and creative limitations placed by the ―francophone‖ label and advocated for a world literature in French as a literary space that accommodates their literary and ideological interests. Alain Mabanckou is a case in point, arguing in ―Immigration, Literature-Monde, and Universality: the Strange Fate of the African Writer‖ that African cultures and literature are transnational. He is of the idea that Africa and its cultures can be found on the African continent as well as beyond its boundaries, among its diasporas in the West. Mabanckou believes that world
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Authors on Twitter Greg Myers
    1 Celebrity Studies. 7, 4, pp. 476-492: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19392397.2016.1233708 Everyday oracles: authors on Twitter Greg Myers Lancaster University Most authors participate, reluctantly or enthusiastically, in a cycle of promotion, including book tours, literary festivals, interviews, and now social media. Some authors make regular use of Twitter to post updates about professional activities, comments on events in their everyday lives, news of readings, statements of opinions, photos, links, or retweets. This study examines tweets by ten authors, using corpus linguistic tools to find stylistic patterns characteristic of the corpus as a whole or of individual authors. It then looks at tweets by others that mention the authors or use quotations from the authors in new contexts, creating an on-line presence for authors whether they tweet themselves or not. Authors are subject to the same tension between ordinariness and specialness that others have noted with stars in music, television, or fashion. Literature, because of its assumed cultural position, and its production in private, is sometimes seen as being apart from and opposed to the cultural system of celebrity and promotion. But this cultural position also means the ordinariness of authors is treated as surprising and interesting, while the specialness makes them available to all as oracles. Keywords: celebrity; authorship; everyday life; singularity; quotation, Twitter Novelists and celebrity In ‘The Writer on Holiday’, Roland Barthes explores the ideological contradictions between the everyday lives of writers, as represented in mass media, and their special status in high culture. A writer on holiday is doing just what salaried employees do, 2 taking some time off from work, and yet he or she is still a writer, not a salaried employee.
    [Show full text]
  • Guilt, Shame, and the Generative Queer in Taiye Selasi's Ghana Must Go
    COPAS—Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies 19.1 (2018) Guilt, Shame, and the Generative Queer in Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go Anna-Lena Oldehus, M.A. ABSTRACT: This paper focuses on Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go (2013) and shows how Selasi, by challenging conventional modes of storytelling, creates narrative spaces for characters that queer traditional formations of subJectivity, most prominently by emancipating them from the repressive forms of affect of guilt and shame. KEYWORDS: Taiye Selasi; Queer; Affect; Gender; Transnational Literature Introduction In her TED talk “Don’t Ask Me Where I’m From, Ask Me Where I’m Local” (2014), Taiye Selasi complicates normative and traditional understandings of belonging, origin, and home: “Nike is multinational. I’m a human being. … I’m not multinational, I’m not a national at all. … How can a human being come from a concept?” (Selasi 2014, 00:01:15–00:01:51). In addition to sketching out exclusionary forces that come with the ideas of nations and nation state, she speaks about the concept of Afropolitanism1, which, in her understanding, resists the logic of the nation state (00:03:26) and “privileges culture over country” (00:03:31). In her talk Selasi proposes to organize questions of belonging and origin around the “three ‘R’s’: rituals, relationships, restrictions” (00:06:44). These three steps are designed to locate notions of origin according to experience. Selasi’s proposal clearly works against normative “logics of location, movement, and identification” (Halberstam 1) since they neglect more traditional questions and answers regarding places of origin such as nationality or home country.
    [Show full text]
  • Globality: the Double Bind of African Migrant Writing
    Globality: The Double Bind of African Migrant Writing Mohammad Shabangu Dissertation presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Stellenbosch University Supervisor: Professor Tina Steiner Co-Supervisor: Dr Megan Jones Department of English Studies Stellenbosch University March 2018 Stellenbosch University https://scholar.sun.ac.za Declaration By submitting this thesis electronically, I declare that the entirety of the work contained herein is my own, original work, that I am the sole author thereof (save to the extent explicitly otherwise stated), that reproduction and publication thereof by Stellenbosch University will not infringe any third-party rights and that I have not previously in its entirety or in part submitted it for obtaining any qualification. March 2018 Copyright © 2018 Stellenbosch University All rights reserved ii Stellenbosch University https://scholar.sun.ac.za Abstract In this dissertation, I consider the political implications of the aporetic position of contemporary African migrant writing in the arena of world literature. For this type of writing, forever interpellated by the domain of the world literary marketplace, there is a discernible worldly causality that seems to have exceeded its enunciatory modality. Following Pheng Cheah’s lead, I argue that the selected writing gestures towards a concern with a conception of the world beyond its merely spatial dimension which, at a certain hermeneutic level, would assume that globalisation creates a world. Because of this, I am interested in the more spiritual dimension of the narratives, more abstract than the concrete, visible presence of globalisation’s physiognomy and physical border crossings. More important, this literature’s worldly causality is to be found in those textual moments when it calls into question the very organising philosophy, the temporal force, of our era of globalisation.
    [Show full text]
  • Celebrating Afropolitan Identities? Contemporary African World Literatures in English
    Anglia 2017; 135(1): 159–185 Birgit Neumann* and Gabriele Rippl Celebrating Afropolitan Identities? Contemporary African World Literatures in English DOI 10.1515/anglia-2017-0010 Abstract: Against the background of today’s debate on Afropolitanism, this article discusses three contemporary African novels as instances of world literatures, focusing on their creative modelling of open, non-Eurocentric worlds in motion. Taking existing research in the field of world literature into account, we argue that the affective and effective uniqueness of world literatures only comes to the fore when considering their distinct power to creatively make worlds. We suggest understanding world literatures in terms of their capacity to create open, poly- centric worlds, which enmesh diverse places, multiple temporalities, situated practices and locally grounded experiences into open networks of reciprocal change. In theorizing world literatures as pluralized and multiple, we also try to overcome the privileging of western literature. The final section negotiates how these imaginative worlds interact, intersect and possibly collide with that world which is configured by labelling, marketing and canonizing a specific text as ‘world literature’. 1 “Being African in the World” In the last fifteen years or so a considerable number of diasporic African litera- tures have made their entry into the world literary space, reminding us once again of the complex and volatile dynamics underlying the making of world literatures. Comprising authors as diverse as Teju Cole, Taiye Selasi (born Taiye Tuakli- Wosornu), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, NoViolet Bulawayo and Dinaw Mengestu, these “young and creative cosmopolitan African immigrants” (Hassan 2012: 3) have readily been subsumed by critics under the label ‘Afropolitan’.
    [Show full text]
  • Expressions of African Identity on Twitter Journal of African Media Studies, 11(2): 257-274
    http://www.diva-portal.org This is the published version of a paper published in Journal of African Media Studies. Citation for the original published paper (version of record): Cheruiyot, D., Uppal, C. (2019) Pan-Africanism as a laughing matter: (Funny) expressions of African identity on Twitter Journal of African Media Studies, 11(2): 257-274 https://doi.org/10.1386/jams.11.2.257_1 Access to the published version may require subscription. N.B. When citing this work, cite the original published paper. This article is Open Access under the terms of the Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND licence. Permanent link to this version: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kau:diva-74492 JAMS 11 (2) pp. 257–274 Intellect Limited 2019 Journal of African Media Studies Volume 11 Number 2 © 2019 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/jams.11.2.257_1 DaviD Cheruiyot anD Charu uppal Karlstad University pan-africanism as a laughing matter: (Funny) expressions of african identity on twitter abstraCt KeyworDs Pan-Africanism, a concept that attempts to capture the essence of being an African, #IfAfricaWasABar needs to be reconsidered in the age of social media. In this article, we examine how globalization Twitter users negotiate the question of African identity through humorous hashtag- humour driven conversations. We specifically question whether a new kind of Pan-Africanism identity is emerging on Africa’s Twitterverse through the use of a popular hashtag in 2015, Pan-Africanism #IfAfricaWasABar. In our analysis of tweets linked to #IfAfricaWasABar, we Twitter conclude that Twitter provides temporary solidarity by engaging users in humorous exchanges regarding the sociocultural, political and economic issues that define the African continental condition today.
    [Show full text]
  • National Allegory and the United States of Adichie's Americanah
    “To Be from the Country of People Who Gave”: National Allegory and the United States of Adichie’s Americanah Katherine Hallemeier Studies in the Novel, Volume 47, Number 2, Summer 2015, pp. 231-245 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/sdn/summary/v047/47.2.hallemeier.html Access provided by Oklahoma State University (27 Jul 2015 17:04 GMT) Studies in the Novel ISSN 0039-3827 231 Vol. 47 No. 2 (Summer), 2015 Pages 231–245 “TO BE FROM THE COUNTRY OF PEOPLE WHO GAVE”: NATIONAL ALLEGORY AND THE UNITED STATES OF ADICHIE’S AMERICANAH KATHERINE HALLEMEIER Early reviews of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013) have alternately lauded and criticized the novel for its representation of Nigerians. Writing in Book Forum, Ruth Franklin praises Adichie for writing “a novel that genuinely alters one’s view of the world” (42). Franklin claims that the novel foregrounds her own potential to be “a privileged white woman who does not notice another’s agony,” while also subverting white privilege through its sympathetic portrayal of its Nigerian protagonists (42). Yemisi Ogbe, in contrast, writing in the Chronic Review, contends that, in Adichie’s book, “Nigeria is really ‘just’ the preamble to a place where real self-awareness detonates, to America where life breaks up into many vibrant colours and to Obama” (11). The representation of Nigerians, Ogbe argues, is in turn reductive and cliché; the novel includes “references to the usual suspects of 419 pastors, university lecturers’ strikes and corruption” (11).
    [Show full text]
  • The Nigerian Diaspora in the United States and Afropolitanism in Sarah Ladipo Manyika’S Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun
    African Studies Quarterly | Volume 18, Issue 2| February 2019 The Nigerian Diaspora in the United States and Afropolitanism in Sarah Ladipo Manyika’s Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun SANDRA SOUSA Abstract: This essay explores Sarah Ladipo Manyika’s Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun (2016), one of the most innovative novels of the Nigerian U.S. diaspora, from the perspective of “Afropolitanism.” Occupying a unique place within African writing and African diasporic writing, the novel does not conform to the traditional understanding of Afropolitanism as the celebration of cultural hybridity and transnationalism. Insofar as its portrayals focus on the individual identities and lives of its African and other non-Western characters and their families, the novel further departs from the conventions of earlier Afropolitan narratives, which tendentially center the whole national or racial community. Because Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun rejects the kind of caricature that passes for life in many works of African diasporic literature, it avoids the Afro-pessimism of previous Afropolitan novels, in which the transnational movement of characters occurs as a result of precarious conditions in the home countries, and which forms part of the search for a dream that could be fulfilled by the modernity and the advancements of technology to be found in the host western country. Instead, Manyika’s novel asks readers to dissect meanings between the lines and peel off dense layers of signification. The narrative achieves this nuanced communication of Afropolitanism through its main character, Morayo Da Silva, whose representation extends the cultural politics of Afropolitanism to include subjective politics in the analysis of how we exist in the world.
    [Show full text]
  • MIT X TAU Series: Africa's Cultural Industries
    MIT Center for Intnl Studies | MIT X TAU Series: Africa’s Cultural Industries [NON-ENGLISH SINGING] CLAUDE Hello, everyone. It is my pleasure to host this second webinar that is part of the GRUNITZKY: launch series that we have been crafting, weaving, TRUE Africa University and MIT, MIT represented by the MIT Center for International Studies and MIT Africa. And last week, which was our grand opening, our launch event, we had a panel discussion around the film The Great Green Wall, which we'd shown. And we had six people actually starting off TRUE Africa University slash MIT webinar series. Today is a little bit different, because we have a very, very special guest. And you all know who she is, but I want to introduce her properly in a minute or so. But before we get there, I want to maybe start by telling you who I am. My name is Claude Grunitzky. I am from Togo. I define myself now as a serial immigrant, and I'll explain why that is relevant to this specific topic today. I am a graduate of MIT, and I'm launching TRUE Africa University because I want to help find actionable ways to nurture Africa's talent. As many of you know, 60% of the African population is under the age of 25. Africa is 1.4 billion people. And I keep saying this at every talk-- I keep repeating this as often as I can-- there are more children born in Nigeria every year than in the entire European Union.
    [Show full text]
  • Teju Cole’S Transcendent Navigation of the Diasporic Experience If You Were to Ask Teju Cole Where He Is From, He Would Certainly Tell You
    B20694191 Ethel L. Hersey Prize in American Studies [email protected] Submission - Spring 2017 Amelia Alvarez May 16, 2016 ENG/AMST364 Research Project Assembling a Cosmopolitan Self through Words and Images: Teju Cole’s Transcendent Navigation of the Diasporic Experience If you were to ask Teju Cole where he is from, he would certainly tell you. But he might also add, in response, that your question was uninteresting. More interesting, he might say, is the catalog of places he has been to, the places that now hover in his mind, a cluster of memories trailing behind him into each new place that he goes. A novelist, essayist, photographer, and immigrant, Cole uses words and images to give artful expression to ideas that often surround the immigrant experience, those of displacement and emplacement, the fragmented self, places as palimpsests, and multiple concurrent realities, among many others. Evident in Cole’s work is an attempt to approximate cosmopolitanism, that is, to create the sense that both he and his audience are citizens of the world, not simply beings tethered to single places, times, or stories. Yet beneath this conception of a community of perpetual wanderers is an important recognition of the impossibility of escaping one’s obligation to the past. Cole’s photographs and written commentaries astutely engage with this dynamic, offering up a realm that both transcends the boundaries of reality as well as reminds the viewer of his unique place in the continuous chain of history. Teju Cole was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, raised in Lagos, Nigeria, schooled in Michigan, London, and New York, and now resides in Brooklyn, though frequent travels have rendered hotel rooms informal second residences.
    [Show full text]
  • Copyright by Anima Adjepong 2017
    Copyright by Anima Adjepong 2017 The Dissertation Committee for Anima Adjepong Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Afropolitan Projects: Creating Community, Identity, and Belonging Committee: Ben Carrington, Supervisor Oloruntoyin Falola Gloria Gonzalez-Lopez Jemima Pierre Nestor Rodríguez Afropolitan Projects: Creating Community, Identity, and Belonging by Anima Adjepong, A.B.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2017 Dedication To HOLAAfrica! for throwing me a lifeline when I most needed one; and to the Ghanaian Community in Houston, without whom this project would not have been possible. Afropolitan Projects: Creating Community, Identity, and Belonging Anima Adjepong, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2017 Supervisor: Ben Carrington Abstract: Despite a dramatic growth in the numbers of African immigrants to the United States, until recently, this population has been marginal in studies about voluntary migration and race. Likewise, in mainstream scholarship about black identities, Africa appears as a site of imagination and struggle whilst contemporary Africans are frozen in an unchanging, parochial age. My dissertation addresses the marginalization of Africa and Africans in both race and migration studies through an ethnographic case study of a community of Ghanaians in Houston, Texas. The research considers how questions of religion, race, class, and sexual politics shape the community’s boundaries of belonging. I explore how answers to these questions inform members’ relationship with Ghana, Africa, Houston, and the United States more generally.
    [Show full text]
  • School Summer Reading Summer 2015 Reading Lists
    SCHOOL SUMMER READING SUMMER 2015 READING LISTS Please note: Course specific books (Vth form electives) will be on a separate document and will be sent via email after schedules are released in July. The following are lists of required books that all students must read by the start of classes in September 2015. This list includes a “school text” that all students and faculty will read over the summer. Although you will not have to complete assignments in response to these texts by the start of classes, you are expected to have read the texts closely. In physical books this would entail underlining, making annotations in the margin of the text. For all selections you should be writing down questions prompted by your reading and taking reading notes. In the first week of school, teachers will administer quizzes or in-class writing assignments on the readings. Therefore, it is imperative that the reading be completed prior to the start of school. Please choose any edition of the texts save when the ISBN of an edition is marked. These books are readily availabe on Amazon and at Classbook.com Whatever you plan to do this summer, you must find time to read. If you’re not an enthusiastic reader, these summer months give you the chance to develop the habit of reading for pleasure. If you already love to read, you know that you need to read the way you need to eat or breathe, just to sustain yourself and keep your soul beating. Keep a book on your bedside table.
    [Show full text]
  • Amherst Today
    ALSO INSIDE FALL The 1896 alum 2017 who unearthed our mammoth skeleton is still frustrating and surprising scientists Amherst today. As the College’s first Army ROTC FUTURE student in two decades, Rebecca Segal ’18 is part of the long, rich, VETERAN complex story of Amherst and the military. XXIN THIS ISSUE: FALL 2017XX 20 28 36 Veterans’ Loomis “The Splendor of Days Illuminated Mere Being” FROM THE CIVIL WAR TO AN THE PROFESSOR WHO THE COLLEGE REMEMBERS “ACADEMIC BOOT CAMP” UNEARTHED AMHERST’S ACCLAIMED POET AND THIS SUMMER, AMHERST’S MAMMOTH SKELETON IN LECTURER RICHARD HISTORY OF TEACHING 1923 IS STILL FRUSTRATING WILBUR ’42, WHO DIED MEMBERS OF THE MILITARY AND SURPRISING THIS FALL. BY KATHARINE SCIENTISTS TODAY. BY KATHARINE WHITTEMORE BY GEOFFREY GILLER ’10 WHITTEMORE Inside the College’s Beneski Museum, a local scientist realized that this Tyrannosaurid jaw is different from any other he’s seen. (And he has seen quite a few.) Page 28 Photograph by GEOFFREY GILLER ’10 2 “We take pleasure in First Words A career in pediatric cardiology seeing the impossible inspires a young adult novel. appear possible, and the 4 invisible appear visible.” Voices Readers consider such far-reaching Historian Thomas W. Laqueur, invited to Amherst as issues as China’s one-child policy, a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar, during his October nuclear war and the search for lecture on how and why the living care for and extraterrestrial life. remember the dead. PAGE 12 6 College Row Support after Hurricane Maria, XX ONLINE: AMHERST.EDU/MAGAZINE XX researching bodily bacteria, Amherst’s “single finest graduate” News Video & Audio and more Jeffrey C.
    [Show full text]