Abstract

My paper is on the effects of religious imperialism in Ireland and Africa, more specifically the stories Cal and Things Fall Apart. In this paper I will cover the background of imperialism in the areas along with some basic background on the two main stories I will be looking at.

I will start by looking at Things Fall Apart, and how the plot revolves around religion and how the story is affected by the sudden appearance of Christianity in their society. Afterwards I will discuss the effects on the main character, Okonkwo, and how his decisions were changed after Christianity took a foothold among his people.

Second I will discuss Cal in the same manner, discussing the plot and how it is affected by the turmoil between Catholicism and Protestantism in Ireland, followed by how Cal's decisions were changed as well by conflict he witnessed.

I will finish up by looking into how the experiences with religious colonialism in the stories are similar, as well as how they are different, bringing up how the stories and characters are altered as the religious conflicts go on for longer periods of time. The main example will be the comparison between how the earliest phase of religious colonialism is experienced in Things Fall Apart, when first contact with the other religion is made, versus the ongoing conflict in Cal's Ireland.

This will all be held together by combining examples in the book with others found in my research, as well as historical background of the two areas covered in the novels.

Plans for the Final Project

I plan to do the written paper for the final project, and I wanted to use Cal as one of my main sources because it was my favorite book this semester. I was trying to think of a topic that I could argue and after talking with Julie I decided to go with religious colonialism, the effects of other cultures imposing religious beliefs on an existing one. I plan to use both Cal and Things Fall Apart as the sources for this argument, along with the five scholarly sources I have found.

I am still open to a few suggestions but for right now I was thinking about arguing that religious colonization has been a main source of conflict. I know I want to focus on conflicts as it was a central them in Cal and TFA, I'm just not sure if my way is the best way to word it.

Works Cited

Achebe, Chinua. "Things Fall Apart." Things Fall Apart: A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Francis Abiola Irele. New York: Norton, 2009. 3-117.

Maclaverty, Bernard. Cal. New York: Norton, 1995.

Mitchell, Claire. "Behind the Ethnic Marker: Religion and Social Identification in Northern Ireland." Sociology of Religion 66.1 (2005): 3-21. EBSCOhost. Local University Library Service, Washington State University Lib. 3 Dec. 2009 http://ntserver1.wsulibs.wsu.edu:2055/scripts/wsuall.pl?url=http://ntserver1.wsulibs.wsu.edu:2077/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=16803373&site=ehost-live
Mitchell's paper covers religious background specifically in Northern Ireland, which will provide good comparisons to Cal. There are some statistics of how many people are Protestant vs. Catholic as well which I can use.

Murdoch, Norman H. "In Darkest Africa: Martyrdom & Resistance to Colonialism in Rhodesia." Journal of Third World Studies 22.1 (2005): 211-232. EBSCOhost. Local University Library Service, Washington State University Lib. 3 Dec. 2009 http://ntserver1.wsulibs.wsu.edu:2055/scripts/wsuall.pl?url=http://ntserver1.wsulibs.wsu.edu:2077/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=17240324&site=ehost-live

Nelson, Robert H. "Environmental Colonialism: 'Saving' Africa from Africans." Independant Review 8.1 (2003). EBSCOhost. Local University Library Service, Washington State University Lib. 3 Dec. 2009 http://ntserver1.wsulibs.wsu.edu:2055/scripts/wsuall.pl?url=http://ntserver1.wsulibs.wsu.edu:2077/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=10112478&site=ehost-live
I chose to use Nelson's paper as a source because it covers some good historical background to the religious reasons that people colonized Africa for, and how it affected the people there as Christianity was forced on them.

Pappé, Ilan. "Zionism as Colonialism: A comparative View of Diluted Colonialism in Asia and Africa." South Atlantic Quarterly 107.4 (2008): 611-633. EBSCOhost. Local University Library Service, Washington State University Lib. 3 Dec. 2009 http://ntserver1.wsulibs.wsu.edu:2055/scripts/wsuall.pl?url=http://ntserver1.wsulibs.wsu.edu:2077/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=35301454&site=ehost-live

Singh, Amardeep. "A Pisgah Sight of Ireland: Religious Embodiment and Colonialism in Ulysses." Semeia 88 (1999): 129-147. EBSCOhost. Local University Library Service, Washington State University Lib. 3 Dec. 2009 http://ntserver1.wsulibs.wsu.edu:2055/scripts/wsuall.pl?url=http://ntserver1.wsulibs.wsu.edu:2077/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=6315342&site=ehost-live
Singh uses some excerpts from Joyce's Ulysses, and while I didn't choose to cover Joyce, there are some very good information in the paper that specifically relates to the religious conflict in Ireland.

Thoughts on Dubliners

I couldn't quite get into the stories we read in Dubliners. I've always been a fan of stories that have a little more action and I get bogged down when there is paragraphs of description about someone's house. It's nice sometimes to use that description to make the reader really imagine what the place looks like, but I think Dubliners just had too much. By the time I was done reading about what a bookcase looked like I almost forgot what was going on in the plot at the time.

In Araby I was able to get into the story a little more because there was a little more action and plot movement, the story is still very short though so it's hard to get a whole lot out of it.

In A Painful Case the early few pages were very slow due to the amount of description forced upon us, and not until about the bottom of page 91 does the plot start moving forward as Mr. Duffy started meeting the woman.

I am just looking forward to reading Cal and hopefully since it isn't a collection of short stories there will be more plot movement to keep it interesting and not paragraphs upon paragraphs of details that are really more in depth than what is needed for a 10-20 page story.

Lahiri and Lisa's English 110 Class

So after reading the blogs from the English 110 class it sounds like quite a few people have said that they think nothing really happens in Lahiri's stories. While the stories do seem relatively simple, they do have a lot more depth to them than I first expected, and I must say I really liked them. Short stories in general have to leave information out, and I think Lahiri did a great job of deciding what we could infer ourselves and what needed to be spelled out.

To me, some of the best stories are the ones that make me think and have ideas you have to dig for underneath the fairly straight-forward main plot. Katie mentioned in her blog that Lahiri's stories focus greatly on character development and not as much on plot, and I'd have to agree, but I don't agree with her that it means the reader can't be affected emotionally. I can say just going by the discussion we had in class that some people really got into "A Temporary Matter" when the characters have to deal with the knowledge of Shukumar admitting to holding their child at the end. Given how short the stories are I think Lahiri showed a great amount of character depth which allowed for emotional attachment that couldn't have been done by just forwarding the plot.

Hannah also mentioned her thoughts on how Lahiri's stories analyze how Indian culture views American culture, and I'd agree that the stories take that view. The thing that surprised me was looking at the back of the book and finding out Lahiri never even lived in India, and was born in England and moved to the United States. This raised some questions for me. Can we still look at these stories as if they were from an Indian point of view, or is it what an American thinks an Indian point of view would be? Are these stories accurate representations of Indian culture if the author doesn't know any more about it than what she has possibly studied in other books? This could also be why so many of her stories take place in the United States or involve American characters in them.

Language Matters

Ha Jin's stories are riddled with themes and examples that deal with communism and oppressive government, relating to his life spent in China. For this reason he was forced to make the decision to write in English as he points out in his article. He is correct that if he wrote in Chinese these stories would have never made it past the censorship to be read by the people.

In his first story, Saboteur, Ha Jin takes on the theme of oppressive government and the abuse of power with the Chinese Police. The story covers the police provoking Mr. Chiu and his wife to give them reason to arrest him. They then abuse their power further by fabricating a whole file of evidence and other problems that they accuse Mr. Chiu of having in the past. The police then proceed to tie up Fenjin out in the scorching heat as punishment for no reason other than speaking his mind to them. Stories like this as well as his others that deal with communism vs. capitalism could never make it past Chinese censorship. The government officials in the Chinese Communist Party get to take their power and essentially mold the people into the perfect citizens that they want, by choosing exactly what the public has access to and how they should behave.

Ha Jin mentions Conrad in his article, and he brings up a good point that Conrad made a tough decision to write in English versus Polish. To write about colonialism to a Polish audience wouldn't make much sense. Poland was not a colonialist nation, so many of the readers there would not have understood the depth of the story and many of the themes of Heart of Darkness. By moving to England and writing the story in English he was able to establish himself as the go-to writer for post-colonialism, a position he never would have imagined if he wrote in Polish. Without Conrad as a base for post-colonial writing, the genre would have drastically changed, and authors like Achebe wouldn't have likely written anything.

Eyeballing Imperialism

I couldn't help but think about the words at the beginning of Spivak's essay. I never really thought about how novels of the same time period as Jane Eyre could have been influenced by imperialism and allowed it to affect the story. As Spivak says, "the role of literature in the production of cultural representation should not be ignored" (WSS, 240).

How does society affect how people are portrayed in stories like Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre. Spivak's argument seems to be that you must take into account where a novel is written before you can really analyze it. A novel written in England for readers there is going to portray England in a good light, and often could end up leaving out the ugly details of what really might have happened.

If we look at novels more closely like this we could see how a story like Jane Eyre could leave out enough that Jean Rhys could create an entire story based on the Bertha character. Wide Sargasso Sea shows the racial struggles that occurred on the island of Dominica and how many whites were discriminated against after the abolishment of slavery. You would most likely not have read about the events of the burning of Antoinette's house and the acting out of the blacks on the island if it were a novel written by someone who was born and lived in England. I can understand why British readers would not want to see whites put down by other races, they are used to novels that show the positive aspects of imperialism and colonialism, that Europeans are superior and are going to Caribbean islands to bring prosperity and salvation to the natives. After all, authors want to sell their novels, so they want to appeal to their audience.

I know now that I will really look at the perspective given by a novel and who wrote it before I read it. You cannot take one story as an entire account as to what happened in an area at the time, you must look at both sides before you can truly understand.

Wait, who is that person related to again!?

So thanks to the explanations in class today I think I finally got it straight on who is who in Wide Sargasso Sea. I must admit I was a little confused when the author introduces almost a dozen characters in the stretch of 25 pages.

I took a history class last year that covered Central and South America so I have already learned about Creoles and some of the racial tensions in the area, so to read this short novel was a quick refresher on the area and what happened in the 1800's. Ultimately I was surprised to see how the whites are being portrayed as the lower class now unlike in other novels. I'm so used to seeing racism go from whites to blacks in these novels of the time period that to see it go the other way caught me offguard. If you think about it, it just proves that racism tends to go towards minorities, no matter what race they are. The race that is in the majority almost always is the one that tries to push their superiority on the other races.

I look forward to reading the rest of Wide Sargasso Sea to see how these situations pan out with race in the storyline. I think I will like some of these novels in the Carribean since I have some knowledge of the area from my history class I took.

"Things Fall Apart" and the Misconceptions About the Native African People

After reading "Things Fall Apart" after "Heart of Darkness" I can understand why they are so often tought together in many college classes around the world. In many ways they are two sides to the same story. You can imagine some of the nameless African slaves from "Heart of Darkness" having lived in a village from "Things Fall Apart" but never being able to have their story heard.

Up until "Things Fall Apart" was written, almost all of the novels that involved Africa were much like Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," portraying natives as savages or animals and not even human. There was never a story that portrayed African's as people just like Europeans, they were always slaves to be used and were never given a voice or a backstory. European novels would talk about the exploration and colonization of Africa and all the riches that were being found there. Then came "Things Fall Apart," and finally native Africans were given a much more accurate depiction of their lives, and people around the world could really start to analyze past works such as those from Conrad and other authors.

One of the greatest examples that Chinua Achebe gave of the portrayal of native African's in previous European novels was the last paragraph of "Things Fall Apart." When the District Commisioner thought about the book he was going to write and how he could include the story of Okonkwo killing a messanger and then hanging himself, he figured:

"One could almost write a whole chapter on him. Perhaps not a whole chapter, but a reasonable paragraph, at any rate. There was so much else to include, and one must be firm in cutting out details. He had already chosen the title of the book, after much thought: The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger" (117).

This one paragraph really sums up Achebe's thoughts on previous novels involving Africa and it's people. The European colonists show up thinking they know everything, that they can sum up a person's entire life story in a couple sentences, and then title the work to show that they are superior because they were able to pacify these primitive people. Looking back on the novel, "Things Fall Apart" seems to have the ultimate goal of getting the reader to really consider previous novels such as "Heart of Darkness" and think about how they portray the natives. Achebe is trying to break the common views of these African people being primative and animal-like, and if we hope to move on as a species, we must continue to analyze these past novels and realize they only cover one side of a story, while the other side might be equally as important.

Should We Read "Heart of Darkness?"

Racist views, derogatory terms, oppression, and slavery are all present in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness." To question whether we should read it is a worthy thought to follow, but to truely analyze it you have to think of it from both the point of view of a present day reader and that of a reader back near the turn of the 20th century when the book was origionally released.

Living in the present day we can consider ourselves far more enlightened compared to how we know people were treated throughout history. The civil rights era has past and for the most part racism has been conquered with the exception of a few bad peas in the pod that is society. We can look at people of all race, gender, and beliefs equally, whether we agree with them or not, while in the 1800's these thoughts were far from reality. We may read "Heart of Darkness" now and consider it a racist view of how white colonialists are superior to anyone with a different color skin.

Back in the time Conrad wrote his most famous work, these racist beliefs were commonplace, and as people grew up they were pressured into these thoughts by others in society as well as by their parents teaching them. To read "Heart of Darkness" in the 1890's you would have seen nothing wrong with it.

Today we read the short novel and are given the chance to analyze it much more thoroughly based on the knowledge we have gained on the issues of race and equality. We have the opportunity to read a popular text and reflect on how things were a little over a century ago and see how far we have come. That analysis is why we should continue to read "Heart of Darkness" if for no other reason than to prevent history from repeating itself.

Darwin and "The Darkness"

If all nineteenth century racists believed what Darwin believes, that we are all the same species, and all the races are equal, would they have hated themselves just as much as they hated black people back then?

So many questions come up when I read Heart of Darkness and Charles Darwin's "On the Races of Man" about race and if we all are the same, with such minor differences that it's pretty much only cosmetic, why all the hate? I guess it's because I'm alive in the 21st century and was brought up to view everyone equally. I am able to read articles such as Darwin's objectively and decide for myself whether I agree with the ideas. Other questions arise as to what house parties must have been like at the Darwin household, and what was discussed, or whether people wanted to punch Darwin because his views contradicted their racist ones.

Darwin specifically points out in his article the similarities between races across the world, and that ideas of evolution being based on geographical location are most likely false. He states examples of people living in two completely different climates looking exactly the same, giving the example of the Esquimaux people who "live exclusively on animal food; they are clothed in thick fur, and are exposed to intense cold and to prolonged darkness; yet they do not differ in any extreme degree from the inhabitants of southern China, who live entirely on vegetable food, and are exposed almost naked to a hot, glaring climate" (216).

Darwin also goes on to explain the similarities of races across the world, saying "the spreading of man to regions widely separated by the sea, no doubt, preceded any great amount of divergence of character in the several races; for otherwise we should sometimes meet with the same race in distinct continents; and this is never the case" (215). This theory states that we must have come from the same beginning race and split up around the world before becoming more diverse.

In Heart of Darkness, the opression and enslavement of blacks in Africa paints a graphic picture of how misled views of one race being superior, or viewing whites as a stronger species leads to unneeded violence. Many times in the short novel, African people were called savages or referred to as animals, as if they were completely different from the Europeans that ventured into their homelands. These ideas Darwin brings up about us all coming from the same race in early stages of human evolution makes you have to think about the past and wonder how people could believe these things, or if they ever tried thinking through these beliefs of racial superiority. If people believed that we were all the same except for a few cosmetic differences, would any of these past events have happened?

Introduction

Hello everyone, my name is Neil Fastabend. I am a super-senior at WSU since I switched my major from computer science to DTC and set myself back a couple years. I switched majors mainly because I just couldn't take the computer programming any more, it wasn't fun and I knew I didn't want to do that for a living.

I enjoy working on and with computers, and have built so many that I lost count. I am the go-to guy in my extended family for anyone that has computer problems, and since I have over 20 relatives from my father's side of the family in the Tri-Cities, it keeps me pretty busy.

I am a pretty laid back and easy-going guy, and enjoy just conversing in general. Hoping to have a good time in ENGL 373 this semester.