Syllabus Overview

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This course on “Nineteenth-Century Women’s Literature: Undisciplining White Feminism” was designed for upper-level undergraduates at Kalamazoo College, a small liberal arts school in Michigan. While it bears some of similarities to the more traditional, lower-division survey courses that I teach on the nineteenth century—in that the class is expected to cover a range of literatures from across the historical period designated in the title—this course is also designated as an “Applied Theory” course within the our English curriculum.

These classes are meant to build on an introductory-level course on literary theory and criticism that all majors are required to take and helps students prepare for advanced work in upper-division capstone seminars and their senior theses. As such, they are expected to include substantial engagement with secondary sources. Furthermore, since this course focuses on women writers, this course also counts as an elective for Kalamazoo College’s Women, Gender, and Sexuality program.

The primary work of the course is to examine how the imperial projects of Britain and the United States intersected with codifying norms and structures around gender and sexuality. In marking the nineteenth century as an era of colonial expansion in both contexts and ongoing Black oppression in the midst and wake of enslavement, the class brings together a range of materials that illuminate the roles that women played in building, shaping, debating, and contesting these processes. In so doing, the course troubles any monolithic understandings of the category of “women,” as we read texts by racially-diverse writers who offer complex views about race and imperialism that are grounded in their own cultural contexts and identities.

In designing the course, I had two interrelated aims related to the broad work of “undisciplining.” First, I wanted to foreground the voices of women of color in the nineteenth century, and, second, I wanted to explicitly interrogate the whiteness that has historically defined the established literary canon of women’s literature. Bolstered by the theoretical insights drawn from Indigenous, Black, and Postcolonial feminists, the class proceeds from the assumption that women of color have used literature to produce complex accounts of race, gender, and imperialism and envisioning ways that these structures could resisted and unmade.

By centering examples from these traditions, it becomes possible to understand how white womanhood functions as a site of racial and colonial power, even in moments where patriarchy and misogyny are exposed and critiqued. By remaining attuned to these dynamics and nuances, the class resists positioning works by women of color as simply responsive or supplemental to the white texts of the period. Indeed, they become the critical apparatus where we grapple together as a class with our own imbrication within the histories of colonialism and where we work to imagine what collective liberation means in the broadest sense.

The course executes this work by working through three units. Within each of these units, we read the first, second, and third volumes of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, respectively, but ground our discussions in materials from three different racial and/or colonial contexts: Indigenous North America, the Black Atlantic, and South Asia.

Before we begin reading Jane Eyre, Unit 1 and the course opens by looking at Edward Said’s famous articulation of contrapuntal reading, which serves as a broad framework to help students understand how we will be placing our various texts alongside one another throughout the course. Importantly though, we read Said with the treaties that defined (and continue to define) the relationship between the United States and the Anishinaabe nations of the Three Fires Confederacy, who include the Ojibwe, the Odawa, and the Bodéwadmi. Since Kalamazoo College was founded in 1833 on the reserve lands that were stolen from the Bodéwadmi leader Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish and his people, this juxtaposition allows us to acknowledge the colonial processes that condition our classroom space and to contrapuntally read the College itself.

The rest of the first week is then spent looking at work by two prominent Anishinaabe theorists and writers, Leeanne Betasamosake Simpson and Robin Wall Kimmerer, as well as poems by Bamewawageshikaquay (or Jane Johnston Schoolcraft) that were written in the early nineteenth century. Through these readings, we work to collectively grapple with our own relationships to the place of Kalamazoo and our embeddedness in its colonial history, while also learning how we might begin to unsettle them.

These discussions lay the (quite literal) groundwork for our comparative reading of Jane Eyre and the account of Yankton Dakota writer Zitkala-sa’s experiences at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, focusing on their parallel explorations of girlhood and education. In these discussions, the resonant scenes of trauma and physical abuse come into focus, and we focus on how both Jane and Zitkala-sa use first person narration as a mode of self-determination and articulation.

At the same time, by situating Zitakala-sa in a wider Dakota and Lakota context, we are able to see the very different outcomes that the two texts construct for its central figures, with Jane seeking to move into a position of authority within the hierarchy of Lowood and Zitkala-sa moving towards more collective-based activism and advocacy for Native communities. Out of these conversations, we begin to note Jane’s investments in individualized access to structures of power that is a defining feature of what has come to be known as “white feminism.”

In Unit 2, which includes the sections from Brontë’s novel that feature Jane’s initial courtship with Rochester and the revelation of Bertha, we conduct a series of conversations about the marriage plot and the ways that Black women writers were examining its affordances and possibilities in the context of enslavement and emancipation. By reading the well-known narratives by Harriet Jacobs (Linda Brent) and Mary Prince about their enslavement alongside anonymously published The Woman of Colour and Frances E.W. Harper’s Iola Leroy, this unit provides a diverse array of texts that showcase how Black women were interrogating the how race structures gendered experiences of marriage and sexuality, while simultaneously theorizing presenting alternative modes of collective and individual freedom. Informed by the critical work of Barbara Christian, Hortense Spillers, Brigitte Fielder, and Koritha Mitchell, these Black-centered texts help to not only place the racialization of Bertha and her Jamaican origins within the broad context of the Black Atlantic, but also showcase how Jane’s trajectory in the novel is one made possible only by virtue of her whiteness.

This discussion then transitions into Unit 3, where we turn to South Asia, to consider the women who would have been subjected to Jane’s missionary efforts, had she chosen to marry St. John Rivers. Anchored by Chandra Mohanty’s classic essay “Under Western Eyes,” the class turns to Krupabai Sattianadhan’s Saguna, which Narin Hassan has read as a re-writing of Jane Eyre and recounts the semi-autobiographical story of a woman whose parents converted from Hinduism to Christianity. As Saguna navigates the consequences of religious conversion in her marriage prospects alongside her pursuit of a medical education, the novel reveals the stakes and consequences of colonial missionary efforts.

This pairing is then triangulated with Rassundari Devi’s Aamir Jiban (which is read in translation), which recounts the author’s journey of self-education and gaining literacy as a married Bengali woman. Since Devi’s text is completely disinterested in British colonialism, it highlights how nineteenth-century women in South Asia expressed forms of self-determination and levied sharp critiques of patriarchy without the intervention of or recourse to Western feminism. By turning then in the last class day to Rokeya Hossain’s “Sultana’s Dream” and the illustrations of it made by contemporary Indian-American artist Chitra Ganesh, we end by focusing on the ways that women of color have long been dreaming up their own futures that can, in turn, inspire and inform our own actions and strategies in building a more just world together.

Beyond its content, the course also strives to enact a commitment to the practices and principles of undisciplining by using a labor-based grading contract. While it is a far from perfect method for fully addressing systemic privileges and hierarchies in the classroom, I have found that it helps to shift my grading relationship with students away from naming what they have done “wrong” in their writing to focusing on how they can grow and learn within the term. This helps to mitigate the way that traditional letter grades often over-reward those students who have come into my classroom with greater structural advantages and preparation. It also has the additional benefit of creating a greater equivalency between my different assignments, which include traditional analytical essays, collaborative group activities, and reflective writing. In so doing, students are able to showcase their learning within our collectively built learning community more dynamically and with greater agency.

Works Cited

Christian, Barbara. “The Race for Theory.” Cultural Critique, vol. 6, Spring 1987, pp. 51–63.

Fielder, Brigitte. “The Woman of Colour and Black Atlantic Movement.” Women’s Narratives of the Early Americas and the Formation of Empire, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 171–85.

Hassan, Narin. “Jane Eyre’s Doubles: Colonial Progress and the Tradition of New Woman Writing in India.” Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic after Thirty Years, University of Missouri Press, 2009, pp. 111–26.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Milkweed Editions, 2013.

Mitchell, Koritha. From Slave Cabins to the White House: Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture. University of Illinois Press, 2020.

Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” Boundary 2, vol. 12, no. 3; vol. 13, no. 1, 1984.

Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. Vintage, 2013.

Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance. University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics, vol. 17, no. 2, Summer 1987, pp. 64–81.

Emplacing Race, Gender, and Empire Series

This cluster of syllabi is organized somewhat differently than the others that are featured on Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom (UVC). Instead of assembling independently constructed syllabi around a shared topic, geographic site, or theme, this cluster grew out of a conversation that took place at the 2023 North American Victorian Studies Association conference, where Yangjung Lee expressed interest in adapting a course created by Ryan D. Fong to her own local and institutional context. Although this genesis means that the two syllabi included here share many common features – not the least of which is an investment in understanding the connections between race, gender, and empire in the long nineteenth-century – the cluster provides one case study of how any syllabus on UVC might be revised and resituated to meet an array of institutional needs. These can include customizing text selections in ways that speak to the site-specific histories of a particular university or tailoring the content to address particular student populations and curricular requirements.

Developer Biography

Ryan D. Fong is an associate professor of English at Kalamazoo College, where they are also affiliated faculty in the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Program. He is book project, Unsettling: Indigenous Literatures and the Work of Victorian Studies, is under contract with SUNY Press. This project analyzes nineteenth-century Indigenous literatures from A’nó:wara Tsi Kawè:note, Aotearoa, Mzansi, and Noongar Boodjah. Work related to this project has been published in Victorian Studies, Victorian Literature and Culture, Victorian Periodical Review, and Eighteenth-Century Fiction. Fong is one of the founding developers of Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom.