By Madeline Walker
With a wry smile, I look back on my first class as a graduate student. I registered for twentieth-century African American literature and eagerly signed up for the first seminar presentation. The task was to comment on the third chapter from Paul Gilroy’s seminal 1993 book, The Black Atlantic, in which Gilroy presents his theory about a transatlantic Black culture that transcends diasporic differences.After a long spell away from university, I was jumping in head first. Little did I realize how deep the pool of knowledge was!
Although I knew a bit about the history of African America (slavery, the 13thamendment to the Constitution, Reconstruction, the Civil Rights era), I was completely unprepared for the kaleidoscope of concepts and ideas I needed to make sense of Gilroy’s jargon-laden writing. In every paragraph, I was confronted with dozens of new terms, for example, “post-structuralist,” “textuality,” and “metaphysics of presence.” What was the difference between “modernism” and “modernity”? What did Gilroy mean by “the politics of authenticity”? Who was W.E.B. DuBois and what was “double consciousness”?
My head was barely above water as I sputtered away. Worse, I had the haunting sense that the professor expected me to be familiar with the context and debates embedded in the book and the class, to breathe underwater. I wasn’t and I couldn’t.
The way I saw it, I had two choices. Quit now, or move forward. I had already quit grad school once in my twenties, and I didn’t want to disappoint myself again. So I chose to move forward. To avoid getting mired in feelings of inadequacy, I simply started where I was. I puzzled through the layers of ideas by making notes, asking questions, looking stuff up, and reading around the subject to build meaning from the chapter. I relied on prior knowledge, basic reference books (dictionary of critical theory, encyclopedia of African American history), the introduction to Gilroy’s book, and book reviews of The Black Atlantic to help me find my feet at the shallow end of the pool. Although my understanding of the chapter had big gaps, I was able to make a reasonable presentation and ask lots of questions as part of my talk. Despite having to catch up my knowledge, I ended up enjoying the class, and a seed was planted. I was inspired to focus on African American literature for my entire graduate school journey.
If you are feeling out of your depth, take heart. Things take time. I just had a chat with a student who was marvelling at how his capacity for reading academic writing has grown over the past three years. Material that he found obscure and dense at the beginning of his program, he now breezes through with high comprehension. But building facility in his disciplinary discourse wasn’t accomplished quickly. We don’t punish children for not learning how to swim quickly; rather, we put water wings on their arms and give them time to get comfortable in the shallow end. So don’t chide yourself for taking the time you need to learn to swim in the sea of knowledge. Things take time.
If you need support in academic communication, including reading to write, writing, presentations, academic integrity, or academic expectations, please see us at the Centre for Academic Communication (CAC). We get it—we’ve been there.
You can drop by our offices in the McPherson Library at the end of the Learning Commons or make an appointment online:
Madeline is the Coordinator for the CAC. She has a PhD in English (20C American Literature). She loves to write and to coach other writers.