English 375

I have removed the Houston Baker reading from the syllabus for Tuesday so that we can finish our discusion of Oroonoko the first-half of class and discuss the Black Atlantic the second-half of class. So, be sure to blog about Oroonoko (if you haven’t already) as well as the Black Atlantic.

See you Tuesday, and thanks for the reminder Richard.

Hey everyone,

I hope you are enjoying the long weekend. I have converted the online versions of next week’s black mariner narratives to pdfs, which should facilitate our discussions of the texts in class.

• A Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings and Surprizing Deliverance of Briiton Hammon, A Negro Man
• The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself
• A Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, A Black
• A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture Smith, A Native of Africa: But resident above fifty years in the United State of America. Related by Himself.

From now on I will convert the online texts to pdfs in order to maintain consistent pagination to facvilitate class discusssions. I have converted Oroonoko; or, the Royal Slave by Aphra Behn into a pdf which you can download here. I will do this for the black mariner narratives we will be reading for next week by tomorrow and post them on the readings page.

I want to draw your attention to a new plugin I have enabled on everyone’s blog: a quick link to a wikipedia entry. If you look at my second comment on Lenore’s blog, you will see this functionality put to use. What does it do? When you wrap a term in double brackets the word in the brackets is automatically linked to the wikipedia entry matching this term. This works well for unambiguous terms like enclosure, mercantilism, colonialism, etc. However, it may not work so well for terms that have several competing references or meanings. For example, if trying to link to the wikipedia article about Thomas More’s work Utopia this method will take you to the term/concept utopia not More’s specific text. In this case, one would actually have to get the url and create a link, which you all know how to do.

A few words on wikipedia as a scholarly resource. Wikipedia is a resource that may be useful for defining and introducing general terms and concepts like those I have listed above. Yet, it is important to understand that the encyclopedia articles are written and maintained by a distributed community of authors who have a sense of ownership of certain entries. In fact, anyone can edit a wikipedia article, but keep in mind that wikipedia is not a democracy so if your edits are irrelevant, poorly written, or inaccurate they will be altered or removed by the existing community for that article. The community of authors drives the information of any artcicle, or series of articles, and their contributions are essential wikipedia’s existence. The Wikipedia, by its very “nature” (how do I mean this?), is a collaborative technology that depends upon an active, productive community of users contributors, and editor -without which it would be defunct.

An excellent example of this collaborative, process-driven shaping of knowledge over time that wikipedia represents can be seen in Jon Udell’s analysis of wikipedia (truly a thoughful piece, but there is some brief explicit matrerial so be warned).

As for our purposes, I wanted to draw your attention to two things that pertain to our readings for tomorrow. First, the wikipedia article about Aphra Behn has a warning stating that the the factual accuracy of the article is disputed. It also provides a link to the “talk page” which tracks this dispute, making the questions, contests and arguments plain for world to see and analyze - amazing on many levels. The second thing is that the other author we will be reading for tomorrow, Richard Ligon, does not have a wikipedia article written about him or his work as of yet. I would like our class to get a sense of how a wikipedia article is created and maintained- we will begin this article tomorrow in class as we are discusssing Ligon’s narrative.

As mentioned in class today at Emily’s behest, there are several different themes (another term for “skins”) your class blog can have. The following link to the WordPress theme browser (developed and hosted by Alex King, one of the creators of WordPress) will give you an idea of the various possibilities available to you. You can search the themes available by using the drop down menu in the upper right-hand corner. Additionally, you can add images and change the color scheme of your existing theme (as I have with this blog). However, if none of these options suit your tastes then you will have to learn css and develop your own!

Finally, keep in mind that some themes may not be compatible with the version of Lyceum WordPress we are running, so let me know what you are interested in and I’ll test it out.

As stated in class, please read the excerpt from Ania Loomba’s  Shakespeare, Race and Colonialism and the the first two acts of Shakespeare’s The Tempest.   Also, do not forget to post questions, ideas and reflections on the readings in your blog by tomorrow morning at 11 am.

Additionally, be sure to post a flickr image tagged with the word “exotic” on your blog. Finally, the comments are now working on everyone’s blog so be sure to try them out by commenting on your classmates’ blog.

This blog will act as a portal page for class discussions, assignments, and announcements. Each of you will also have your own blog wherein you will be expected to regularly post questions, thoughts and reflections about the in-class discussions as well as the readings. I will be checking your blogs daily and using your contributions as the basis for in-class discussion. You will find technical information about using both the blogs and the wiki here.