Interview with Barnard Professor
Caryl Phillips
By Nazneen Malik
Recently, sixteen Barnard students returned from a ten-day
trip to Ghana as part of a senior seminar course entitled Literature
of the Middle Passage, the brainchild of award-winning author
and Barnard English Professor, Caryl Phillips. This new course
is an innovative approach to illuminating the fragmented dialogue
between Africa, the Americas, and Europe and its resulting
effect on race relations by transforming an intellectual classroom
experience into a lasting emotional and cultural experience.
Phillips, who is the
Henry R. Luce Professor of Migration and Social Order and
the Director of the Barnard Forum on Migration, developed
the course as a response to a growing need to address the
issues of race, migration, and multiculturalism that are
inherently prevalent in an increasingly global society. “I
began to devise a course which involves students reading
literature,” explains
Phillips, “but then a key component would be to take
them to the place that was reflected in the literature and
hopefully meet some of the people they had been studying.” To
Phillips, a book is a bridge between societies, between histories
because it is written in a global language. It is the product
of lived, day-to-day experience.
Unlike traditional study
abroad programs that typically lack curricular continuity,
Phillips wanted a course that would be fundamentally based
in the classroom but had the added bonus of travel. After a
two-year period of devising the course, formulating student
selection criteria, and raising adequate funding, his idea
became a reality.
Prior to the trip,
students studied works from prolific authors such as Ama
Ata Aidoo, Joseph Conrad, W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin,
and Chinua Achebe. They analyzed songs from musicians Curtis
Mayfield, Bob Marley, Stevie Wonder, and Marvin Gaye from
a package of lyrics Phillips put together himself. Students
also had access to books written by Ghanaian authors that
are typically difficult to acquire since a majority of them
are not published outside of the country. “Sometimes they
aren’t even printed and I asked the writers themselves
for the books,” says Phillips. Through the magic
of the Internet, young Ghanaian writers were paired with
Barnard students and participated in email exchanges
of their work. The website created for the course served
as a place for students to share their feelings and reactions.
Initially, candid conversations
regarding race were not as easy to tease out as Phillips
had presumed. It seemed the remedy to the perceived reluctance
of students to openly discuss issues concerning race and
class was the trip to Ghana itself. “I
thought literature would do it,” says Phillips, “but
I need to find some strategies to make the conversations
that do happen in Ghana, happen in the classroom and
not wait until we get to Ghana to really open up.”
Nevertheless, Phillips regards
the course as a success. Although he would love to see the
course replicated in other colleges and universities he does
point out that it would be expensive. “But
I saw something that teachers don’t normally
get to see,” he
says, “I saw them [students] change. They are
now familiar with the light, the heat, the people,
the culture, the food, the different races there;
they now see the human face of Africa that you never
see when you turn on the television.” It
is for this reason that Phillips is slightly more
hopeful about the future because an experience such
as this is one that has a lasting impact on the lens
through which we view the world. #
