Category: colonization

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“How does it feel to be a white man?” William Gardner Smith’s “The Stone Face”

Working on my syllabus for my upcoming “Black Expatriate Writers in France” class, I came across William Gardner Smith’s The Stone Face (1963), and even though the course focuses on Southern France (Marseille and Nice), I decided to include Smith’s novel, which is set in Paris, because of its depiction of French colonial racism against Algerians and itd depiction of the Paris Massacre of … Read More “How does it feel to be a white man?” William Gardner Smith’s “The Stone Face”

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Omar ibn Said

In every class, I choose to teach a few new texts that I have never read. Sometimes this will include one texts. Other times it will include more. For this semester, in my multicultural American literature course, I chose two new texts that I had never read before: Hala Alyan’s Salt Houses and Omar ibn Said’s 1831 narrative. I plan to write about each … Read More Omar ibn Said

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Exploration and Colonization in John Cheever’s “The Swimmer”

At the end of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), Nick Carraway goes over to Gatsby’s dark, empty house then heads down to the beach where he sprawls out on the sand and begins to think about the past, the time before he or Gatsby or Tom and Daisy or anyone else built enormous structures on East Egg and West Egg. He becomes … Read More Exploration and Colonization in John Cheever’s “The Swimmer”