An icebreaker

Introducing the silly bus…

“Professor, why is this not on the syllabus?”

A lot of the formative art I consume and hold dear to my heart do not appear — SURPRISE! — on any assigned reading list. Maybe because they’re too weird, un-neatly categorizable, or not cis-white-straight-male-dead “canonical” enough for school or undergrad education in the U.S. Or maybe because certain texts and certain gaps just never came up. At the top of my head, I think of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s genre-defying, experimental magnum opus Dictee. So does Fernanda Melchor’s violent, brutal, and throbbing novels on the violence in Mexican society. Or Japanese-British pop star Rina Sawayama’s album that’s an invocation for queer diasporic women. What syllabus makes room for these texts, transnational and cross-medium, to exist in conversation with each other?

This syllabus does.

So what do I exactly mean? Does this mean we’ll only be examining “marginalized” voices? Voices of the disadvantaged? Of the non white, the poor, the disabled, the systemically aggrieved? Is silly bus a mission to decolonize and de-elitify the syllabus? Picking and choosing minoritized nations and cultures against the backdrop of Western scholarship? Well, not exactly.

In fact, I was inspired by Sumana Roy’s essay “Beyond the Guilt Tax,” published in The Point Magazine, which critiques the nonproductive, nongenerative underbrush of the post colonial syllabus and curriculum. Roy points out that not every work on the syllabus has to demonstrate some oppressive power structure, holster up a literary theory or concept, or expose some grave moral concern about the reader’s positionality. Although it is veering this way, the syllabus should not be reduced as a canvas to practice a sort of “affirmative action” for “unknown” and “unheard stories” of the so-called-and-deemed disadvantaged. Because then, in what space can art be allowed to just be indulgent and joyous and probing?

I began this newsletter by asking myself: What kind of art is worth syllabizing? What is the art we don’t think of teaching? How can I provide alternatives to the central, expected texts we engage with?

Roy writes:

Literature about the moment, about the everyday, is rejected: comedy, laughter, pleasure—the postcolonial subject must not be seen partaking of these contraband things. The syllabus often reminds me of what our hostel matron used to say: don’t smile and show your teeth when praying.

Here is the space where the syllabus remains to be decolonized—not through an ethics of substitution but one of addition.

Redesigning the canonical syllabus into something more global, inclusive, and challenging, doesn’t mean burning everything down. There’s some bastardization involved, yes, but that’s the point, eh? (Hence the dumb “silly bus” name) How can you learn if you’re not surprised or slapped in the face?

There’s also something to be said in burning the division between academic writing and “public” writing. The first time I took a literary theory class, I remember feeling so stupidly incompetent because I couldn’t understand anything. (native English speaker here) There’s a couple things I learned from sorta-eventually(!) grasping these theories. There’s nothing wrong with you; there’s something wrong with the ways that language is communicated and ideas are circulated. Think you don’t belong here? You do. I’ll make sure of it.

Without further ado, in silly bus, here it is: a syllabus of artists and works that don’t exist just to be critically examined, moralized, or feel guilty as a contemporary reader. I hope that you find something meaningful here. Especially for readers whose lived experiences elide mainstream narrative plentitude or visibility, I hope that you find something formative, a nudge, a gesture; to affirm that simple existence, wherever you are, is not any less valuable or radical than the “canon.”

Join the class

Be a student, truant, auditor, or friend. Come read, think, and opine with me.

Have questions? Or things to say? Connect with me on Twitter at @qbinwrites.