Exotic or authentic? Faith Smith grapples with representations of Caribbean and African-American cultures
By Donna Desrochers
Students who take Faith Smith's classes in literature may never see the Caribbean quite the same way again.
They become what the associate professor of English calls "cultural readers," people who've learned to see through exotic or idealized depictions of the region. Although, ironically, it may be these images that attract some of her students in the first place, she admits.
"As academics you don't want to question the reasons why students come to your classes - you're just glad to see them. But I think for some it's the factor of Africa or the Caribbean being exotic, something they get from the travel sections of newspapers. I would hope that after 12 weeks we'd start to see how that might be problematic," says Smith, who's taught a variety of courses in African and Afro-American Studies and English and American Literature since joining Brandeis six years ago.
Smith's introductions to the region's thinkers - the poets, novelists, and essayists, are a way of sharpening students' thinking about race, culture, and identity. A native of Jamaica, she's interested in how immigrants or children of immigrants cope with the anxieties and tensions of living in a new nation and how they incorporate the culture left behind. "There is a way in which immigrants pass onto their children notions about the homeland as pure, unspoiled space. It functions as a kind of imaginary foil against the hardships of the new nation. Hopefully in our class we can see the problems with that too," she says.
Smith has published articles on Caribbean literature and culture in periodicals such as Small Axe, a journal of cultural criticism, and South Atlantic Quarterly. Her eagerly awaited book, Creole Recitations: John Jacob Thomas and Colonial Formation in the Late Nineteenth-Century Caribbean will be out this year (University Press of Virginia). The first book-length study of the influential Trinidadian teacher and civil servant, the project was part of her "every waking moment for a very long time," an experience that gave her a way to think about 20th century Caribbean literature.
Edwidge Dandicat, Jamaica Kincaid, and Paule Marshall are some of the Caribbean writers Smith draws on to explore contemporary themes of the diasporic experience - issues of exile, political repression, and the drive towards cultural wholeness. Reggae lyrics, advertising, and film also figure into her scholarship, as do economics, politics, and tourism. "The Caribbean is many things," says Smith, and her work exposes the multiple forces behind the packaging of the region.
Smith is currently editing an anthology about gender and sexuality in the Caribbean context. A recent presentation to the Modern Languages Association explored another interest: how Caribbean identities are created on the Internet. She shared her observations of Web postings after Sept. 11. In more extreme cases, Smith says she found jokes about how such attacks could never happen in the Caribbean "because our buildings are not tall and our airlines are never on time." These may appear as crass representations of Caribbean culture, but to Smith they're signs of anxiety - the exile's struggle for identity. "Most of these messages were posted by Caribbean people who no longer live in the Caribbean," she points out.
"It's a type of insecurity," adds Smith. "It's a way of trying to stabilize what makes "us" truly Caribbean, particularly in a new space where people can't tell anymore that you're not from somewhere else. These kinds of projections are limiting, but no more so than those Americans might have about America, or any nation might have."