The Social Struggles of Contemporary Black Art

Teaching Situation and Rationale

I teach at a magnet school in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It has a diverse student body, ranging from those students who help support themselves and their families to those who are extremely wealthy. Specifically speaking, at Booker T. Washington High School, our current student body is 35% African American, 36% Caucasian, 3% Asian, 13% Hispanic, 9% Multi-Race, and 4% American Indian, with 38% of our population on free and reduced lunch. My classroom reflects this diversity. Also, the two classes I teach, Pre-AP English II IB-MYP (focus on World Literature) and AP Language and Composition (focus on American Literature), have students with ranging abilities, so it is important that I differentiate and scaffold my instruction, as well as build in some flexibility for those students who need it. This unit will be written for my Pre-AP English II IB-MYP  classes, but I feel like the information and texts will be useful for other grade levels as well.

Before I start Things Fall Apart, I show Chiamanda Adichie’s TedTalk “The Danger of a Single Story.” In this talk, Adichie discusses how important it is to hear many different stories about a particular place, person, or history to truly understand that place, person, or history.³  She also points out that stories have power and who controls those stories can control people and their opinions. By starting off with this, students are armed with the importance of looking at different points of view. After this discussion about the danger of a single story, I then introduce the novel and the historical context of imperialism and colonization, explaining that we are going to be reading a story from the viewpoint of the colonized.  In many cases, this novel is usually the first exposure students have to African Literature since most of their literature education has been Eurocentric. This novel serves as a nice bridge from that typical Eurocentric educational setting to a broader, more World Literature-focused classroom that aims to expand students’ knowledge and experience, focusing on different global perspectives, diversifying the often used canonical teachings of a Western education. In an article from Postcolonial Studies, Emad Mirmotahari discusses how “Things Fall Apart brings the English canon and African literature into dialogue.”⁴ Purposefully juxtaposing the stories of the colonizer and the colonized will, hopefully, push students to seek out works outside of the typically taught Western canon, thereby expanding their worldviews.