Chaucer buff gets sidetracked exploring Southeast Asia's long post-colonial novel
Kathy Hewett-Smith is a medieval literature scholar who found herself captured by contemporary Southeast Asian literature 10 years ago when she traveled to India on a faculty seminar.
“The trip was so mind-expanding for me. I returned home curious about contemporary literature in India and began reading for pleasure. I was surprised to find that there were actually lots of literary similarities between the medieval writings I’d studied for years and contemporary post-colonial Indian writings,” Hewett-Smith said.
In their books, modern day Indian authors struggle to describe the complex relationship between divinity and every day life and to depict the ways in which their country was transitioning from old ways to new. Their books handle homelessness and other social issues with some of the same detail that writers like Geoffrey Chaucer used six centuries ago.
“I studied literary theory in graduate school, which essentially means that I was trained in the methodologies and skills to conduct textual analyses of literary texts. So, while it’s hard to transition from one field of literature to another, I felt well prepared,” said Hewett-Smith. “It’s the same thing we do for our students—teach them skills they can then apply broadly to a range of disciplines and careers after they graduate.”
Before long, Hewett-Smith had amassed such a strong background in Southeast Asian literature and culture that she began supplementing the courses she taught in early British literature with courses in Southeast Asian literature and even an introductory course in Southeast Asian studies, designed for students pursuing an international studies major.
As she kept reading and studying, a number of contemporary Southeast Asian novels hit the American market. A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth had been published in 1994 and was read widely in the United States, despite its intimidating 1,488 pages. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy was published in 1997, won the Booker Prize and shot to the top of the New York Times' Best Sellers List. Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance was published in 2001 and showed up on every American reader’s bedside table when Oprah Winfrey named it her December 2001 book club selection.
As Hewett-Smith kept reading and teaching, she noticed a trend. The novels were all exceedingly long.
“At first it seems like an obvious statement, but beginning in the early 1980s with Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children through to the turn of the century, Southeast Asia is producing almost exclusively gigantic novels. It’s a marked difference from most contemporary literature, which if anything is getting pithier,” Hewett-Smith said.
Hewett-Smith thinks there may be a cultural explanation for the hefty novels. So she’s started to look at the cultural conditions that would inspire writings of such length.
“The books typically give deeply detailed descriptions of social conditions. One possible explanation is that the writers felt a responsibility to educate westerners about a culture that had been inaccessible to them until recently. Another hypothesis is that India has a rich epic tradition and that the books are a throwback to the epics of the country’s past. A third possibility is that these books reflect the state of the post-colonial novel, still intrinsically tied to Britain’s Victorian tradition, the genre of the Empire.”
Hewett-Smith is on sabbatical this spring conducting research for a new book-length project that will explore the long post-colonial novel.
Since her first trip to India, Hewett-Smith has made six more, in some cases trying to get to the bottom of the country’s contemporary literary tradition and in other cases, to educate her students and provide one-of-a-kind research opportunities for them.
She has led the University’s Quest course: “Global Cities” three times, taking groups of students to Bombay and Shanghai to study the nature of newly emerging global cities, cities in developing countries that are so invested in global development that they have produced mega urban areas that are no longer identifiable as local places.
“Ten students travel together, all representing different majors on campus. They spend two thirds of the semester completing academic research at Richmond that relates to their discipline and the destination city. Once there, students spend two weeks completing field research. Everyone returns and compiles research projects that are just incredibly interesting and diverse,” said Hewett-Smith.
Students are eager to get into Hewett-Smith’s courses, especially those that include an international component, though they’ve learned they must be careful about juggling their other commitments. She has a habit of assigning lengthy readings.