Thinking Activity : Unit 2 : Comparative Studies : Todd Presner, ‘Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline’.

Hello, I am Himanshi Parmar, student of MK Bhavnagar University. This blog i have written as a response to Thinking Activity, Which is a Part of my academic Work. Which we get after each unit. In this blog, i am going to discuss briefly about Two articles, 1) Susan Bassnett, “What is Comparative Literature Today?” Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction. 1993, and 2) Todd Presner, ‘Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline’ in Ali Behdad and Thomas eds. A Companion to Comparative Literature’ 2011, 193- 207.

Article - 1

What is Comparative Literature Today? By Susan Bassnett

Article - 2

Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline by Todd Presner.

About Todd Presner

Todd Presner is Chair of UCLA’s Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies and serves as Special Advisor to Vice Chancellor Roger Wakimoto in the Office of Research and Creative Activities (2018-present). Previously, he was the chair of UCLA’s Digital Humanities Program (2011-21), and from 2011-2018, he served as the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Director of the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies. From 2018-21, he was Associate Dean of Digital Innovation. He holds the Michael and Irene Ross Chair in the UCLA Division of the Humanities. His research focuses on European intellectual and cultural history, Holocaust studies, visual culture, and digital humanities.From 2005-2015, Presner was director of HyperCities, a collaborative, digital mapping platform that explores the layered histories of city spaces. It was awarded one of the first “digital media and learning” prizes by the MacArthur Foundation/HASTAC in 2008. Click to read more.

Video recording of Article explanation.

After five hundred years of print and the massive transformations in society and culture that it unleashed, we are in the midst of another watershed moment in human history that is on par with the invention of the printing press or perhaps the discovery of the New World. With the invention of the printing press, communication, literacy, and the state of knowledge completely changed, providing the conditions of possibility for the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the age of Humanism, and the rise of mass media. Innovations in print technology became the very instrument for producing, sharing, and transforming humanistic and scientific knowledge. Analogously, with the opening up of the New World, not only were the profound limitations of conventional knowledge and epistemologies exposed, but the “discovery ” reconfigured  for better and for worse the entire surface of the earth, enabled the ascendancy of rationality (and it's deep link to barbarism), gave rise to new economies, provided the seedbed for colonialism, and was the prerequisite of the modern nation - state.Both the impact of print and the “ discovery ” of the New World were predicated on networking technologies, which not only enabled the dissemination of knowledge into new cultural and social spheres, but also brought together people, nations, cul tures, and languages that were previously separated.

Nicholas Negroponte in his Wildly optimistic book Being Digital (Negroponte, 1995) asserted These technologies of networking and connection do not necessarily bring about the ever - greater liberation of humankind.For they always have an underbelly : Mobile phones, Social networking technologies, and perhaps even the hundred - dollars computer, will not only be used to enhance education, spread democracy, and enable global communication but will likely be used to perpetrate violence and even orchestrate genocide much the same way that the radio and the railway did in the last century.

Paul Gilroy analysed in his study of "the fatal junction of the concept of nationality with the concept of culture” along the “Black Atlantic, ” voyages of discovery, enlightenment, and progress also meant, at every moment, voyages of conquest, enslavement, and destruction. Indeed, this is why any discussion of technology cannot be separated from a discussion about formations of power and instrumentalized authority.

N. Katherine Hayles ponder various possible futures for Comparative Literature in the second decade of the twenty - first century – how to rouse ourselves from the "somnolence five hundred years of print".There is nothing neutral, objective, or necessary about the medium of print ; rather it is a medium that has a long and complex history connected to the formation of academic disciplines, institutions, epistemologies, and ideologies, not to mention conception of authorship and scholarly research.

 While the materiality of the vast majority of artifacts that we study as professors of Comparative Literature has been print, the burgeoning field of electronic literature has necessitated a reconceptualization of “materiality as the interplay between a text ’s physical characteristics and its signifying practices.” Hayles argues, for permission to consider texts as "embodied entities"and still foreground interpretative practices.

Walter Benjamin in The Arcades project (1928-40; 1999)  it is necessary, I believe, to interrogate both the media and methodologies for the study of literature, culture, and society.

Electronic literature offers a significant and multivalent possibility for exploring the future of Comparative Literature. By situating the transformation of the literary vis - à - vis a set of issues that have emerged over the past decade in the “Digital Humanities.” the Humanities, including history and art history, literary and  cultural studies, and the humanistic social sciences, such as anthropology, archaeology,  and information studies. In fact, these issues, brought to the foreground in the digital  world, necessitated a fundamental rethinking of how knowledge gets created, what knowledge looks (or sounds, or feels, or tastes) like, who gets to create knowledge,  when it is “done” or published, how it gets authorised and disseminated, and how it  involves and is made accessible to a significantly broader (and potentially global)  audience. The Humanities of twenty - First century, has potential to generate, legitimate, and disseminate knowledge in radically new ways, on a scale never engaged in a global knowledge - creation enterprise.

Digital Humanities is an umbrella term for a wide array of interdisciplinary practices for creating, applying, interpreting,interrogating, and hacking both new and old information technologies.Digital Humanities is an outgrowth and expansion of the traditional scope of the Humanities, not a replacement or rejection of humanistic inquiry. The roll pf humanist is more critical at this historic moment than perhaps ever before, as our cultural legacy as a species migrates to digital formats and our relation to knowledge, cultural material, technology, and society at large is radically re - conceptualized.humanists that we should turn to help us to understand, critique, compare, and historicize, and evaluate the explosion of "born digital" publications.

According to Jeffery Schnapp and Todd presner in “ Digital Humanities Manifesto, ”- it is essential that humanists assert and insert themselves into the twenty - first century cultural wars, which are largely being defined, fought, and won by corporate interests.

Robert Darnton (2008) points out, represents the beginning of the fourth information age not the first. Far from the providing the right answers, the Manifesto was an attempt to examine the explanatory power, relevance, and cogency of established organizations of knowledge, largely inherited from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and to imagine creative possibilities and futures that are built on long - standing humanistic traditions.Robert Darnton’s assessment seriously that we are now in the fifth decade of the fourth information age in the history of humankind. Although the Internet is barely forty years old and the World Wide Web is barely two decades old, it is striking to ponder the sheer volume of “ data ” already produced. It is evident that we are producing, sharing, consuming, and archiving exponentially more cultural material, particularly textual and visual data, than ever before in the history of our species. While much of this data is not “ literature ” and may not be studied under the conventional academic rubric of “ Comparative Literature, ” it brings into stark relief the constitution of the tiny canon of print artifacts with which the field currently engages.

The central issue is the fact that the artifacts constituted by the world of print are comparatively different – in terms of material composition, authorship, meaning - making, circulation, reading practices, viewing habits, navigation features, embodiment, interactivity, and expressivity – from those artifacts constituted by digital technologies and which “ live ” in various digital environments.

It is to insist on the multiplicity of media and the varied processes of mediation and remediation in the formation of cultural knowledge and the idea of the literary. Just “ studying ” the technologies and their impact, Presner believes that we must actively engage with, design, create, critique, and finally hack the environments and technologies that facilitate this research, render this world as a world, and produce knowledge about who we are, where we live, and what that means.We will have to design and employ new tools to thoughtfully sift through, analyze, map, and evaluate the unfathomably large deluge of data and cultural material that the digital age has already unleashed.

Franco Moretti ’ s provocation, is to consider Comparative Literature as a “ problem ” (not a canon of objects, a theoretical position, or a particular medium) that “ asks for a new critical method ” (Moretti, 2000 : p. 55) to analyze both the print world in the digital age and the digital world in the post - print age. The “ problem ” of Comparative Literature is to fi gure out how to take seriously the range of new authoring, annotation, and sharing platforms that have transformed global cultural production. Digital media are always hypermedia and hypertextual.

Hayles points out in her recent study on the transforming power of digital humanities, even if we were to read a book a day for our entire adult life, the upper end of the number of books that can be read is about twenty - five thousand, and this does not even take into consideration the reading and composition of digital forms of data and cultural material.

Presner discusses the three futures for “Comparative Literature ” in the Digital Age.

1] Comparative Media Studies

The forgoing terms were originally coined in 1965 by the visionary media theorist, Theodor Nelson, in his early articulations of the conceptual infrastructure for the World Wide Web. For Nelson, a hypertext is a:

'Body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a 

complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or 

represented on paper [ ... ] Such a system could grow 

indefinitely, gradually including more and more of the world ’ s 

written knowledge.'

Comparative Literature be practiced when literature and scholarly work are created, exchanged, and critiqued in a multimodal environment such as the Web? And, at the same time, how do we as scholars develop methodologies that appreciate and evaluate the media - specifi city of every literary or cultural artifact, including print? Comparative Literature as Comparative Media Studies foregrounds the formal material qualities of the surface structures upon which inscriptions are made, the technical processes of reproduction and circulation, the institutional mechanisms of dissemination and authorization, the reading and navigation practices enabled by the media form, and the broad cultural and social implications for literacy and knowledge production. It investigates all media as information and knowledge systems that are bound up with histories of power, institutions, and governing and regulatory bodies which legitimate and authorize certain utterances, while screening out and dismissing other.

Comparative Media Studies also implies that the output or scholarly “ work ” is not uni - medial and might not even be textual. It draws attention to the design and interrelationship of every unit of the argument, whether a page, a folio, a database field, XML metadata, a map, a film still, or something else. Comparative Media Studies enables us to return to some of the most fundamental questions of our field with new urgency: Who is an author? What is work? What constitutes a text, particularly in an environment in which any text is readerly and writerly by potentially anyone?

2) Comparative Data Studies

Work of Lev Manovich and Noah Wardrip - Fruin, the field of “ cultural analytics ” has emerged over the past five years to bring the tools of high - end computational analysis and data visualization to dissect large - scale cultural datasets. Comparative Data Studies allows us to use the computational tools of cultural analytics to enhance literary scholarship precisely by creating models, visualizations, maps, and semantic webs of data that are simply too large to read or comprehend using unaided human faculties. performing “ close ” and “ distant ” analyses of data, Comparative Data Studies also radically broadens the canon of objects and cultural material.

Jerome McGann argues with elegant analysis of “radiant textuality,” the differences between the codex and the electronic versions of the Oxford English Dictionary.

The “data” of Comparative Data Studies is constantly expanding in terms of volume, data type, production and reception platform, and analytic strategy.

3) Comparative Authorship and Platform Studies

While the radically “democratizing” claims of the web and information technologies should certainly be critically interrogated, might it is incontestable that the barriers for voicing participation, creating and sharing content, and even developing software have been significantly lowered when compared to the world of print. And more than that, collaborative authorship, peer - to - peer sharing of content, and crowdsourced evaluation of data are the hallmarks of the participatory web known as the world of Web 2.0. We no longer just “browse” and passively consume predigested content but are actively engaged in the production, annotation, and evaluation of digital media and software thanks to the open - source movement.

James Boyle points out, there are many corporate entities eager to regulate the public domain and control the “commons of the mind."

Conclusion

Michael Gorman, former President of the American Library Association (qtd. in Stothart)

Presner believes-

Wikipedia represents a truly innovative, global, multilingual, collaborative knowledge - generating community and platform for authoring, editing, distributing, and versioning knowledge.

To date, it has more than three million content pages, more than three hundred million edits, over ten million registered users, and articles in forty - seven languages.This is a massive achievement for eight years of work. Wikipedia represents a dynamic, flexible, and open - ended network for knowledge creation and distribution that underscores process, collaboration, access, interactivity, and creativity, with an editing model and versioning system that documents every contingent decision made by every contributing author.

I hope my blog will be helpful to you, Thank you.

Thinking Activity : Unit 2 : Comparative Studies : Susan Bassnett, “What is Comparative Literature Today?”

Hello, I am Himanshi Parmar, student of MK Bhavnagar University. This blog i have written as a response to Thinking Activity, Which is a Part of my academic Work. Which we get after each unit. In this blog, i am going to discuss briefly about Two articles, 1) Susan Bassnett, “What is Comparative Literature Today?” Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction. 1993, and 2) Todd Presner, ‘Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline’ in Ali Behdad and Thomas eds. A Companion to Comparative Literature’ 2011, 193- 207.

What is Comparative Studies?

The studies which reveal similarities or differences between different markets, countries, aspects of companies, etc. They help to illustrate links and dissimilarities between these different elements. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, 

"Comparative Literature is the study of the interrelationship of the literature of two or more national cultures usually of differing languages and especially of the influences of one upon the other."

   In another words Comparative Literature is traditionally known as the study of two or more literatures in comparison (English and German, for example) and their multi-dimensional components which may encompass aspects such as the historical, gender, economic, cultural, social, philosophical, religious, and linguistic factors of the distinct cultures being analyzed.

Comparative Literature focuses on the study of literature from different cultures, nations, and genres, and explores relationships between literature and other forms of cultural expression. Comparative Literature poses such questions as, What is the place of literature in society? How does literature as a form change over time, and in relation to other forms of making art? How does literature shape and respond to values, social movements, or political contexts? Read more. 

1] Susan Bassnett, “What is Comparative Literature Today?” 

About Susan Bassnett

Susan Edna Bassnett, FRSL (born 21 October 1945) is a translation theorist and scholar of comparative literature. She served as pro-vice-chancellor at the University of Warwick for ten years and taught in its Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies, which closed in 2009. As of 2016, she is Professor of Comparative Literature at the Universities of Glasgow and Warwick. Educated around Europe, she began her career in Italy and has lectured at universities in the United States. In 2007, she was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.Among her more than twenty books, several have become mainstays in the field of literary criticism, especially Translation Studies (1980) and Comparative Literature (1993). A book on Ted Hughes was published in 2009. Another book edited by Bassnett is Knives and Angels: Women Writers in Latin America.Bassnett's collaboration with several intellectuals in a series of book projects has been received well. In 2006, she co-edited with Peter Bush the book The Translator as Writer. In addition to her scholarly works, Bassnett writes poetry which was published as Exchanging Lives: Poems and Translations (2002). Click to read more.

Article - 1

1]Susan Bassnett, “What is Comparative Literature Today?

The article begin with the simple question : What is Comparative Literature? And the answer given is that Comparative literature involves the study of texts across cultures, that it is interdisciplinary and that it is concerned with patterns of connection in literatures across both time and space. The journey of comparative literature begins with a desire to move beyond the boundaries of a single subject area that might appear to be too constraining, at other times a reader may be impelled to follow up what appear to be similarities between texts or authors from different cultural context.

Matthew Arnold in his Inaugural Lecture at Oxford in 1857 said that :

"Everywhere there is connection, everywhere there is illustration. No single event, no single lecture is adequately comprehended except in relation to other events, to other lectures."

As per Susan Bassnett it might be argued that anyone who has an interest in books embarks on the road towards what might be termed comparative literature ; Reading Chaucer, we come across Boccaccio ; we can trace Shakespeare's source materials through Latin, French, Spanish and Italian; We can study the way Romanticism developed across Europe at a similar moment in time, follow the process through which Baudelaire's fascination with Edgar Allan Poe enriched his own writing, consider how many English novelists learned from the great nineteenth - Century Russian writers, compare how James Joyce borrowed from and loaned to Italo Svevo, When we read Clarice Lispector we are reminded of Jean Rhys, who in turn recalls Djuna Barnes and Anais Nin. There is no limit to the list of examples we could device.

Critics at the end of the twentieth century, in the age of post - modernism,still wrestle with the same questions that were posed more than a century ago :

• What is object of study in comparative literature?

• How can comparison be the objective of anything?

• If individual literatures have canon, what might a comparative canon be?

•How can a comparatist select what to compare ?

• Is comparative literature a discipline? Or is it simply a field of study ?

• Or is it simply a field of study?

Since the 1950s we have been hearing all too frequently about what Rene Wellek defined as 'The Crisis of Comparative Literature'.

Further Susan says that Comparative literature as a term seems to arouse strong passions, both for and against. As early as 1903, Benedetto Croce argued that comparative literature was a non - subject, contemptuously dismissing the suggestion that it might be seen as a separate discipline. But Croce's argument was totally different, the argument was that the term 'Comparative Literature' was obfuscatory, disguising the obvious, that is, the fact that the true object of study was literary history. Max Koch, founded and edited the two German Comparative Journals, Zeitschrift fiir uergleichende Literatur (1887-1910) and, studien zur uergleichenden Literaturgeschichte (1901-9).

Croce claimed he could not distinguish between literary history pure and simple and comparative literary history. The term, 'Comparative Literature', he maintained, had no substance to it. But other scholars made grandiose claims for comparative literature. Charles Mills Gayley said that the working premise of the student of Comparative Literature was :

"Literature as a distinct and integral medium of thought, a common  institutional expression of humanity; differentiated, to be sure,  by the social conditions of the individual, by racial, historical,  cultural and linguistic influences, opportunities, and restrictions, but,  irrespective of age or guise, prompted by the common needs  and aspirations of man, sprung from common faculties,psychological and physiological, and obeying common laws of material and mode, of the individual and social humanity."

François Jost in 1974 claimed that 'national literature' cannot constitute an intelligible field of study because of its 'arbitrarily limited perspective'.

 Jost, like Gayley and others before him, are proposing comparative literature as some kind of world religion. The underlying suggestion is that all cultural differences disappear when readers take up great works; art is seen as an instrument of universal harmony. Moreover, the comparatist must possess special skills :

Wellek and Warren in their Theory of literature, a book that was enormously significant in comparative literature when it first appeared in 1949,

Comparative Literature... will make high demands on the linguistic proficiencies of our scholars. It asks for a widening of perspectives, a suppression of local and provincial sentiments, not easy to achieve.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, high-flying graduate students in the West turned to comparative literature as a radical subject, because at that time it appeared to be transgressive, moving as it claimed to do across the boundaries of single literature study.

In 1969, Harry Levis urging more practical work and less agonizing about the theory. But Levis proposal was out of date. By the late 1970s a new generation of high-flying graduate students in the West had turned to Literary Theory, Women's Studies, Semiotics, Film and Media Studies and Cultural Studies as the radical subject choices, abandoning Comparative Literature to what were increasingly seen as dinosaurs from liberal - humanist prehistory.

comparative literature began to gain ground in the rest of the world. New programmes in comparative literature began to emerge in China, in Taiwan, in Japan and other countries. However not on any ideal of universalism but on the very aspect of literary study that many western comparatists had sought to deny: the specificity of national literatures.

According to Swapan Majumdar -

‘It is because of this predilection for National Literature - much 

deplored by the Anglo-American critics as a methodology - that Comparative Literature has struck roots in the Third World nations and in India in particular.’

Ganesh Devi goes further, and suggests that, comparative literature in India is directly linked to the rise of modern Indian Nationalism. Comparative literature has been 'used to assert the national cultural identity' in 1993.

Majumdar points out that, what Indian scholars call western literature, regardless of geographical precision, includes those literatures which derive from Graeco - Roman matrices via Christianity, and he termed English, French, German, etc, as 'sub - national literatures'.

Homi Bhabha sums up the new emphasis in an essay discussing the ambivalence of post- colonial culture, suggesting that:

‘Instead of cross-referencing there is an effective, productive cross- cutting across sites of  social significance, that erases the dialectical, disciplinary  sense of 'Cultural' reference and relevance’.

Wole Soyinka and a whole range of African critics have exposed the pervasive influence of Hegel, who argued that African culture was 'weak' in contrast to what he claimed were higher, more developed cultures, and who effectively denied African history.

Caribbean critics have challenged the refusal of a great deal of Western literary criticism to accept the implications of their literary and cultural policy.Terry Eagleton has argued that 'literature, in the meaning of the word we have inherited, is an ideology.Terry Eagleton's explanation of the rise of English ties in with the aspirations of many of the early comparatists for a subject that would transcend cultural boundaries and unite the human race through the civilizing power of great literature.

Work of Edward Said, pioneer of the notion of 'Orientalism', has provided many critics with a new Vocabulary. Said's thesis, that,

The Orient was a word which later accrued to it a wide field of meanings, associations and connotations, and that these did not necessarily refer to the real Orient but to the field surrounding the word.

Zhang Longxi's 'The myth of the other: China in the Eyes of the West'. In which it is argued that for the west, China as a land in the Far East becomes traditionally the images of ultimate other'.

The growth of national consciousness and awareness of the need to move beyond the colonial legacy has led significantly to the development of comparative literature in many parts of the world, even as the subject enters a period of crisis and decay in the West.

Ganesh Devy's argument that comparative literature in India coincides with the rise of modern Indian nationalism is important, because it serves to remind us of the origins of the term 'Comparative Literature' in Europe, a term that first appeared in an age of national struggles, when new boundaries were being erected and the whole question of national culture and national identity was under discussion throughout Europe and the expanding United States of America.

The rush of books on post - colonial literature at the start of the 1990s reflects a new intrest in this hitherto neglected area of study. The opening statements of

'The empire writes Back in clude the following phrase: 'the term "Post - Colonial"... is most appropriate as the term for the new cross - Cultural criticism which has merged in recent years and for the discourse through which this constituted'. What is this but comparative literature under another name?

Another rapidly expanding development in literary studies, and one which has profound implications for the future of comparative literature, is 'translation studies. Comparative literature has traditionally claimed translation as a sub-category, but this assumption is now being questioned. The work of scholars such as Toury, Lefevere, Hermans, Lambert and many others has shown that translation is especially significant at moments of great cultural change.

Evan Zohar argues that extensive translation activity takes place when a culture is in a period of transition: when it is expanding, when it needs renewal, when it is in a pre-revolutionary phase, then translation plays a vital part. In contrast, when a culture is solidly established, when it is in an imperialist stage, when it believes itself to be dominant, then translation is less important. As English became the language of international diplomacy in the twentieth century (and also the dominant world commercial language), there was little need to translate, hence the relative poverty of twentieth-century translations into English compared with the proliferation of translations in many other languages. When translation is neither required nor wanted, it tends to become a low status activity, poorly paid and disregarded, and  the implications of this process have come and increasingly to be studied by people working in the field of translation studies.

Thus to conclude Susan says that Comparative literature has always claimed translation as a sub-category, but as translation studies establishes itself firmly as a subject based in inter-cultural study and offering a methodology of some rigor, both in terms of theoretical and descriptive work, so comparative literature appears less like a discipline and more like a branch of something else. Seen in this way, the problem of the crisis could then be put into perspective, and the long, unresolved debate on whether comparative literature is or is not a discipline in its own right could finally and definitely be shelved.

I hope my blog will be helpful to you, Thank you.

Thinking Activity : Poems (African Literature)

Hello, I am Himanshi Parmar, student of MK Bhavnagar University. This blog i have written as a response to Thinking Activity, Which is a Part of my academic Work. Which we get after each unit. In this blog, i am going to discuss about themes of some chosen poems. The poem is part of African literature and our syllabus.

1] You Laughed and Laughed and Laughed by Gabriel Okara.

poem

In your ears my song is motor car misfiring stopping with a choking cough; and you laughed and laughed and laughed.

In your eyes my ante- natal walk was inhuman, passing your "omnivorous understanding" and you laughed and laughed and laughed

You laughed at my song, you laughed at my walk.

Then I danced my magic dance to the rhythm of talking drums pleading, but you shut your eyes and laughed and laughed and laughed

And then I opened my mystic inside wide like the sky, instead you entered your car and laughed and laughed and laughed

You laughed at my dance, you laughed at my inside. You laughed and laughed and laughed.

But your laughter was ice-block laughter and it froze your inside froze your voice froze your ears froze your eyes and froze your tongue.

And now it’s my turn to laugh; but my laughter is not ice-block laughter. For I know not cars, know not ice-blocks.

My laughter is the fire of the eye of the sky, the fire of the earth, the fire of the air, the fie of the seas and the rivers fishes animals trees and it thawed your inside, thawed your voice, thawed your ears, thawed your eyes and thawed your tongue.

So a meek wonder held your shadow and you whispered; "Why so?" And I answered: "Because my fathers and I are owned by the living warmth of the earth through our naked feet."

About the poem 

"You Laughed and Laughed and Laughed" is a poem by Nigerian writer Gabriel Okara.One of the most popular in his oeuvre, it is a frequent feature of anthologies, such as A New Book of African Verse edited by John Reed and Clive Wake (Heinemann African Writers Series, 1985). "The piece belongs with the best of Senghor's nostalgic verse," wrote Michael J. C. Echeruo in a tribute to Okara on the occasion of his 70th birthday, "with the militancy of many of David Diop's lyrics, and certainly with J. P. Clark's 'Ivbie', another of my favorite African poems. Okara's poem is more relaxed than these, however, more ironic, less tortured. In some ways, of course, it is less urgent, less strident, less involved. If Clark's 'Ivbie' was complex and for good reason, You laughed, and laughed, and laughed seemed also appropriately straightforward: proud without arrogance, hurting without showing it, and blunt without rudeness." The first of Okara's poems that it was Echeruo's pleasure to read, it was also in his opinion the most enduring. The poem is sometimes wrongly attributed to South African writer Dennis Brutus. Click to read more.

Or watch video for more understanding.

Themes of the poem

1) Cultural Conflict

The poem is written by an African poet Gabriel Okara. Africa was one of the colonized country like Asian countries. In this poem we feel suffering of African people and humiliation of western people on African people. Both western people and African culture has big cultural conflict. They have culture differences along with geographical differences. African people are close to nature and living within the nature, jungle and other. But Western people are portrayed more materialistic.

African culture - Close to nature.

Western culture - Materialistic

There are conflict of superior and inferior among Western and African people. British people think themselves superior for their white complexion and think others inferior because they are black. And though thought African people inferior, everything that belongs to African Culture / people are inferior and disgustful for them. For example here in poem we find lines like,

You laughed at my song, you laughed at my walk.

You laughed at my dance, you laughed at my inside. You laughed and laughed and laughed.

Here, the laughter of British people is satirical or we can say disgustful laughter on African Culture and people. In other case we find that Gabriel Okara defending his people and his culture but somewhere he became judgemental. He expecting Western to don't judge African culture but He himself judging Western culture by saying that they are materialistic and their laughter is ice-block laughter, while their laughter is more pure and not ice-block laughter. In this judgement we find pain of unacceptable behavior of western towards Africans. This how we find cultural conflict in this poem by comparing Laughter of Western people and African people.

2] Modernism

In this poem modernism Shawn through use of 'Motor Car'. The line we found is,

In your ears my song is motor car misfiring stopping with a choking cough; and you laughed and laughed and laughed.

This is the very first line of the poem in which poet says that their songs are like 'motor car misfiring stopping with a choking cough', motor car here is not only symbolism of modernity but also of Luxurious lifestyle of Western people. African people are more close to nature and following traditional lifestyle, like dancing, singing for entertainment. while Western people are More Modern and using luxuries for their Amenability.

3) Colonialism

The poem is written by African poet Gabriel Okara representing his nation's culture and his people's suffering as a colonized country. The poem suggesting that how Colonizers make colonized people inferior for having black complexion. Also they thought themselves superior because they believe that they have white skin because god made them from their own skin while colonized people were black and brown because they were burned in the fire of hell. By making colonized people belive this, they Sepulchralize colonized people.

Also here in the poem 'Laughing' by Western people is like mental torture. They laugh on African culture, their people's dance, song, walk, inside etc that make them feel inferior. Okara says that,

'your laughter was ice-block laughter'.

It showing that somehow African people mentally tortured by this laughing of White people.

4) Nationalism

The poem also representing nationalism. African people are always close to nature. As we see here in this video

While Western culture is industrial. Being close to nature is representing African nationality in this poem. The poem lines like,

fire of the eye of the sky, the fire of the earth, the fire of the air, the fie of the seas and the rivers fishes animals trees and it thawed your inside

In this lines we find use of many natural sources like sea, eyes of the sky means Sun, fire, air, rivers, fishes, animals, trees etc. This all natural sources representing that how African people are very close to nature and nature is representer of African culture.

Also we find reference of ancient people and nature of Africa in the poem. Here is the line indicating it,

So a meek wonder held your shadow and you whispered; "Why so?" And I answered: "Because my fathers and I are owned by the living warmth of the earth through our naked feet."

Also in poem we find reference of 'Magic Dance', which reflecting superstitious nature of African People.

5) Racism

The poem is all about pain and suffering of black people as a colonized under white colonizers. In the poem, poet says that, whites laugh on African people's walk, dance, songs, inside that is sarcastic laugh on their existence. White thinks that their culture, songs, dance, manners, behavior everything are superior, and rest are inferior, for example African people. Not only in Africa but in each country that Britishers colonized, they made them belive that they are superior and others are inferior. They thought themselves superior because they believe that they have white skin because god made them from their own skin while colonized people were black and brown because they were burned in the fire of hell. Racism is one of the most prominent theme of poem.

2] Live Burial - Wole Soyinka

Poem

Sixteen paces

By twenty-three. They hold

Siege against humanity

And Truth

Employing time to drill through to his sanity

Schismatic

Lover of Antigone !

You will? You will unearth

Corpses of yester-

Year? Expose manure of present birth?

Seal him live

In that same necropolis.

May his ghost mistress

Point the classic

Route to Outsiders' Stygian Mysteries.

Bulletin:

He sleeps well, eats

Well. His doctors note

No damage

Our plastic surgeons tend his public image.

Confession

Fiction ? Is truth not essence

Of Art, and fiction Art?

Lest it rust

We kindly borrowed his poetic licence.

Galileo

We hoped he'd prove - age

Or genius may recant - our butchers

Tired of waiting

Ordered; take the scapegoat, drop the sage.

Guara'l The lizard:

Every minute scrapes

A concrete mixer throat.

The cola slime

Flies to blotch the walls in patterned grime

The ghoul:

Flushed from hanging, sniffles

Snuff, to clear his head of

Sins the law

Declared that morning's gallows load were dead of.

The voyeur:

Times his sly patrol

For the hour upon the throne

I think he thrills

To hear the Muse's constipated groan.

About the poem

click to read about poem

Themes 

1) Sadism

The poem is about Wole Soyinka's personal experience of being imprisoned by Colonizers. The poem representing sadism. In the poem we find how guards torture prisoners mentally and physically, what kind of narrow place provided them to live.very first line being with,

Sixteen paces

By twenty-three.

Sixteen paces by twenty - three is a narrow space given to prisoners in the prison. Also they were under strict watch by guards.In the poem we find reference of three guards and how they torture poet and other prisoners. 1) Guara'l The lizard : who split over poet's prison wall to make him feel uncomfortable. 2) The ghoul: who easily hanged / kill prisoners without any regret. 3)The voyeur : who only comes for patrolling when poet is on his toilet seat. This all thing is somehow make poet and other prisoner sad. The title of the poem 'Live Burial' is also indicating sad tone of poem.

2) Greek Mythology

The poem involves Greek Mythology of Schismatic

Lover of Antigone. click to read about Antigone.

In the poem this myth represented by the lines like,

Schismatic

Lover of Antigone !

You will? You will unearth

Corpses of yester-

Year? Expose manure of present birth?

Through this myth poet trying to show that how they are living like a dead in prison.

3) Imprisonment

The poem is all about poet's experience in prison. Very first line discovers space of prison.

Sixteen paces

By twenty-three.

This is a very narrow space to walk to live. The poet says that this prisons 'They hold Siege against humanity, And Truth Employing time to drill through to his sanity'. No humanity we found by this narrow space. Also guard's treatment with poet and other prisoners in prison is also very bad and cruel.1) Guara'l The lizard : who split over poet's prison wall to make him feel uncomfortable. 2) The ghoul: who easily hanged / kill prisoners without any regret. 3)The voyeur : who only comes for patrolling when poet is on his toilet seat.

In the poem poet use  word 'plastic surgeons' which is for guards or reports who report that in prison all the pensioners are sleeps well, eats well, no damage, whereas situation is totally opposite of it. Here are the lines,

Bulletin:

He sleeps well, eats

Well. His doctors note

No damage

Our plastic surgeons tend his public image.

This all things showing Imprisonment of poet and his suffering as a prisoner.

I hope my blog will be helpful to you, Thank you.