Postcolonial Voices: “Can the Subaltern [Woman] Speak?”

In this honors course, my students studied postcolonial women’s writing through the lens of Gayatri Chakrovarty Spivak’s seminal essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” a treatise in which she meditates on the conditions of those on the margins of society.  Here, my students produced literary reviews, infographics, and original spoken word poems that reflect on subalternity. The website also includes the Giving Voice Project, an assignment that required the students to compose research essays and dramatic audio recordings of key passages from their primary sources. The students embedded these dramatic readings within their published essays. Follow this link to access our course website: https://postcolonialvoices.wordpress.com/.

 

Survey of British Literature

On this website, my students published infographics that traced themes in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and Ian McEwan’s Saturday. They also published “Poetry Word Analyses,” essays in which they explored the power of a single word in a poem through its various denotations and connotations. Finally, my students designed an online poetry project comprised of short introductions to a range of British poetry from across the centuries as well as their own original dramatic readings of these poems. The students set their dramatic readings to slide shows of images, which they uploaded as videos to YouTube and embedded in their digital essays. This website may be accessed here: https://surveyofbritishliterature.wordpress.com/.

 

Global Modernisms in a Digital Age

This website is comprised of two digital assignments: literary reviews and infographics. In the first, my students composed multimodal digital reviews of our course readings. Adopting the style of popular media reviews published in The Guardian, they offered snappy surveys and evaluations of our texts. Later in the semester, the students worked in teams to design original infographics of themes from our course materials. Altogether, these publications utilized digital tools to expand our understanding of global modernisms—this movement’s navigation of issues related to race, gender, national identity, and more; https://globalmodernismsinadigitalage.wordpress.com/.

 

Postcolonial Literature and Theory

This website features two digital student projects; multimodal digital reviews of postcolonial texts and podcasts. In this latter assignment, the students utilized postcolonial literature and theory to respond to an original research question. Through the podcast’s conversational form, the students aimed to offer, not a single answer to their research question, but a survey of the range of perspectives on their chosen issue. In both assignments, the students harnessed digital tools to grapple with how and to what effect, as Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin describe, “the empire writes back”—ways that writers took to the page to navigate the tensions of living in a place “changed utterly” (in the words of W.B. Yeats). This website may be accessed here: https://postcolonialliteratureandtheory.wordpress.com/.

 

The Censorship Files: A Study of Texts, Images, and Information

As a class, my students created a digital archive of instances of censorship from around the globe. They composed multimodal editorials that showcase academic research in conjunction with relevant images, legal documents, maps, and more on various banned artifacts/events. The students also conducted personal interviews with a range of experts in the field of censorship studies. They published these interview transcripts and also linked to their interviews in their editorials. The editorials and interview transcripts are both published on our class website, thecensorshipfiles.wordpress.com.

 

Modernism and the Machine

Grouped in teams, my students designed podcasts that explore the relationship between modernism and new technologies at the turn of the 20th century. These podcasts study the range of roles that technological innovations played not only in literature, art, and film, but also in science and culture at large. They also bring modernist preoccupations into conversation with our contemporary anxieties about technology. Our course website, https://modernismandthemachine.wordpress.com/, hosts these podcasts alongside abstracts of their contents.

 

The “Troubles” of Partition: Ireland/Northern Ireland and India/Pakistan

The “Troubles” of Partition is a digital art exhibition designed by my undergraduate students. It features a range of collaboratively-created artwork that studies themes related to Ireland’s and India’s tumultuous partitions. This artwork is paired with original “Artist Statements,” essays that analyze how the students’ visual rhetoric conveys a particular vantage point of partition. Drawing from our readings of fiction, nonfiction, and scholarly sources, these statements together offer not just insight into the students’ artwork and our course readings but also a new understanding of the history and visual representation of partition itself. Our course website may be accessed at: https://thetroublesofpartition.wordpress.com/.

 

English Class Public Projects YouTube Page 

Check out student-produced film projects associated with a selection of the courses above here.