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JANUARY 2005

Caryl Phillips

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. #

 

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