Category Archives: Uncategorized

Birth of a Dream Weaver: A Writer’s Awakening

Posted on by under Decolonizing the Mind, Uncategorized

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is in the incredible position as a writer to have experienced the transition of Kenya from a colonized state to a free and independent African state, a historical shift that is extraordinarily influential to his writing. As a college student studying English Literature at Makerere University in Uganda, Ngũgĩ could see the power of language first hand. In Birth of a Dream Weaver, he writes, “The English Department was the house of the language of power in the colony” (3). It taught the language and perspective of colonial rule through English Literature and language to African students. For some students, this would be a tool to transform them into neocolonial intellectual leaders instilled with colonial biases and mindsets. For others like Ngũgĩ, however, the education provided by the coloniser would be turned into a weapon of critique and resistance.

It struck me how the freedom provided to Ngũgĩ in college, in contrast to his previous schooling, allows him to make choices about when to engage with certain materials. On one occasion, Ngũgĩ decides to drop his religious studies class after finding out that it was merely a study of Christianity in which the professor was hostile to deviating opinions or ideas. Choosing not to participate in classes he deemed unproductive was not something he could do a Alliance High School, so this is a brand new experience of academic independence for him. He writes, “That was my first exercise of my academic and religious freedom, and it felt good” (33). It is encounters like this that inspire Ngũgĩ to write a novel as an undergraduate and hold separate reading groups for students outside of English Literature classes so they may speak freely about the texts and criticise them openly. So, I find it incredibly notable how Ngugi and some of his peers were utilizing the critical thinking and advanced writing skills they received from missionary and government schools to develop their anticolonial ideologies.

Ngũgĩ would go on to use these thoughts and conversations to inform his future writing and grow into one of the most prominent African anticolonial writers. I wonder how Ngũgĩ’s activism would be different if he had received less education or different forms of it. I think one of the reasons he was able to remain so critical of the Ugandan college education was his trips back home to Kenya where his family and community were being displaced by colonial rule. While traveling back and forth between Uganda and Kenya, he could get an accurate image of the effects of colonization. Unlike some others, he did not distance himself from the reality of colonial rule, but rather paired his awareness of it with the tools he was receiving at school in order to become a powerful anticolonial intellectual figure.

Works Cited

Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ wa. Birth of a Dream Weaver: A Writer’s Awakening. The New Press, 2016.

Decolonising the Mind

Posted on by under Decolonizing the Mind, Uncategorized

In Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986), Wa Thiong’o provides a wealth of critique, analysis, and observations of postcolonial African language politics. Throughout the text, he supports his claims with relevant anecdotes, historical evidence, and personal accounts. It is in the chapter “The Language of African Theatre,” though, that he provides the most tangible and detailed example of the strength of literary tradition in African culture. In this section, he shares how the Kamĩrĩĩthũ Community Education and Cultural Centre came into being and demonstrates how the surrounding community was able to use the space it provided in order to create a socialized production based in Kenyan cultural and literary tradition.

By contrasting the Kamĩrĩĩthũ Community Education and Cultural Centre with past attempts at radicalizing the nation of Kenyan Theatre, he successfully communicates just how special the Kamĩrĩĩthũ Centre was in its ability to embrace community culture and participation. Wa Thiong’o aptly states that Kenyan theatre movements in the early seventies could never be truly inclusive of the country’s culture or break free from its colonial confinements because even the most radical scripts were written in English and from the perspective of the petty-bourgeoisie (see section IV). It was also confined literally within the walls that colonists had forced Kenyans to perform art in when they eliminated the popular cultural stage found in free and empty public spaces. No longer allowed to perform out in the open, Kenyans could only perform within enclosed spaces which were often inaccessible to the peasantry. Here, he provides explicit evidence for how colonial strategies hoped to remove the oppressed peoples from their linguistic and cultural traditions, breaking their bond with their history and cultural identities.

The Kamĩrĩĩthũ Centre, however, broke from these oppressive structures. Performed in an open-air space, the productions were performed using the Gĩkũyũ language, allowing the content, actors, rehearsals, and perception to be steeped in the linguistic tradition on the community in which it was performed. The community was able to participate actively in the discussion and rehearsal of the productions, including the reintroduction of forms of dance, song, and mime characteristic to the people’s traditions. The Kamĩrĩĩthũ Centre’s success in embracing the peasantry language and culture allowed the participants an accessible education on the content and form of theatre. For a people disempowered by colonialism through strategic denial of education, this became a powerful, uplifting experience.

The fate of the Kamĩrĩĩthũ Centre, however, demonstrates how threatening colonial powers see a unified, culturally intelligent people. As Wa Thiong’o explains, the Kamĩrĩĩthũ Centre was outlawed by the Kenyan government in 1982 after they rose to national popularity. This instance is a direct example of Wa Thiong’o’s own point that colonizing powers left countries to be independent, but only after establishing an elite, neocolonial class which still held the values and views of the colonial regime. The new regime’s values were established through systematic education of select groups with western thought and in exclusively western languages. So, these powers become threatened by a people reconnected to their linguistic, and therefore cultural and historical roots. The Kamĩrĩĩthũ Centre, though razed to the ground by the government, could never be fully threatened or destroyed by the neocolonial government because their theatrical tradition was never rooted in the space itself, but rather the unity of the group, its culture, and its artistic values. The real threat to the regime, then, is a linguistically and traditionally unified people, something Wa Thiong’o consistently advocates for throughout his texts.

 

Hello!

Posted on by under Uncategorized

I’m a student at Agnes Scott College majoring in English Literature and Political Science with interests in both journalism and environmental justice. Through my Senior Capstone research project, I am exploring the topics of ecofeminism in black American women’s autobiographical writing.

In my time at Agnes Scott, all of my work has focused on uplifting the narratives of underrepresented groups in both literature and environmentalism. Once I graduate, I hope to continue advancing these interests in thoughtful and creative ways.

As the Environmental Justice intern for Agnes Scott’s Center for Sustainability, I am designing our 2019 Year of Climate Justice which will feature a line-up of programs which aim to create more discussions and awareness of environmental justice topics in our campus community.  Previously, I worked with the Center for Sustainability, generating engaging online content for their new website and assisting the team in writing their 2018 STARS (Sustainability Tracking and Review System) report, which was given a Gold rating by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education.

From 2016 to 2018, I acted as the Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief for Her Campus, an online magazine at Agnes Scott, I managed a team of writers to produce daily content for the Agnes Scott community. During that time, I interned with Creative Loafing, Atlanta’s award-winning alt-weekly magazine, where I was published both in print and online. In the fall of 2017, I had the opportunity to intern with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), writing feature stories about their community outreach through the College/Underserved Community Partnership Program (CUPP).

Thank you for visiting my website. Please feel free to look around!

Contact:

elizabethhopewolfe@gmail.com

Leadership 101 – Final Reflection

Posted on by under Journeys and Global Leadership, Reflections, Uncategorized

This reflection was originally published April 4, 2016, on another platform. 

 

The discussions, readings, and exercises done in this class have informed my contributions to the final project by displaying the connection between arts and leadership, developing my personal definition of collaboration, and preparing me for the advantages and drawbacks of collaborative work.

Before this class, I have only had experience in performance art in the form of theatre, but this class introduced me to visual art and another form of performance art. The introduction to Womanhouse gave me a fantastic primary example of women using collaboration to fulfill an artistic vision. It also provided methods for collaboration that I could use in the final project. Inspired by the circular discussions of Womanhouse, we attempted to keep the discussion as equal as possible, not appointing a leader of designating specific roles. Everybody was free to contribute any ideas that they wished. In the brainstorming phase, we shared our common experiences of struggling in the arts, sharing stories and finding shared feelings. I think this created a great initial atmosphere of sharing and equality. Like Womanhouse, we discussed each barrier among the group but split roughly into smaller groups to create the slides about barriers on our particular topics (the ones we wrote our passion papers on). Maura Kelly’s article, Does Artistic Collaboration Ever Work?, helped me to realize that when leading a collaborative project, it is necessary to create something that is a combination of each person’s style and ideas. So, it became easier for me to let go of ideas or opinions that others did not think should be in the final project. For example, I was very passionate about the use of figures to portray the barriers but had to let it go in order to make the project better suited for the group. While looking at all of the pieces that we discussed in class, it became apparent to me how relevant art is to documenting history while also invoking future change. It takes a true leader to recognize an issue and take a stand through their art. Leadership through activism can be challenging, but I think the strong examples we saw in class, such as Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Homeless Projection: A Proposal for Union Square, it was easier to be inspired by our issues and create the final project.

My personal opinion about collaboration before this class was that the easiest way is to appoint people roles, often with one or two sole leaders. However, this course has caused me to expand my perspectives on collaboration. Realizing that my leadership style may have been close-minded, I have since been to workshops on developing leadership styles, and am trying to make a more conscious effort to expand my collaboration skills. The discussion format of some of our classes has opened my mind to the perspectives of others, which became useful in the group meetings in which we spent a majority of the time discussing and debating opinions. Heather’s presentation on Defining and Interrogating Collaboration started my thinking on how I should prepare for the final project, making sure to do my Passions Paper well and to always do my work for the group on time, in order to be prepared and considerate of them. The course led me to think of collaboration, not as a focus on just the final product, the project, but the importance of the processes and interactions that led up to it.

Heather’s other presentation on the benefits and pitfalls of collaboration prepared me further for the process of collaboration to achieve the final project. Acknowledging that there are pitfalls was necessary to avoid frustration in the group discussions. At one point, a group member became extremely upset when we began discussing the topic of technology, leading others to become passionate as well. This is a situation in which a pitfall of collaboration became sacrificing a part of our project in order to give another group member what they are passionate about. However, there were many benefits, one of which was the input of a variety of original ideas that one person could have never come up with on their own. In the end, because of the collaborative nature of our project, it was entirely unique.

Journeys: New York Final Reflection

Posted on by under Journeys and Global Leadership, Reflections, Uncategorized

I feel that I learned a lot more than I had expected to in fulfilling my Global Citizenship goals. I wanted to focus on the first learning goal: evaluating social issues and identifying instances and examples of global injustice and disparity. I thought that I was going to have to search for and interpret works that were subtly suggesting social change or injustice, but instead, I discovered entire collections and exhibits dedicated to strong comments on social injustice, such as Agitprop! in the Brooklyn Museum of Art. It was very interesting to see how each issue was represented, not just in a painting or sculpture, but through multimedia efforts, utilizing videos, posters, papers, and handouts. In viewing, analyzing, and discussing these exhibits with my peers, I also engaged in another learning goal: to discuss and interpret world issues and events. For this goal, it was very easy to act on all of my methods because I enjoyed staying in front of the pieces and absorbing them, as well as revisiting them later and posting about them on Instagram or my WordPress. In the museums, I made an effort to seek out these exhibits for the purpose of my project, going to them first before another piece or collection I was interested in. This made me realize how self-motivated activism really is because even though it is available to us, we must realize it and seek it out, despite other things we could be doing that are easier or less rewarding. Continue reading →

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