FIFTEEN QUESTIONS
THE HARVARD CRIMSON JANUARY 27, 2023
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Glenda R. Carpio is Chair of the Department of English, a Professor of African and African American Studies, and lecturer for the flagship freshman literature course Humanities 10, otherwise known as Hum 10. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Fifteen Minutes: Why did you want to teach [Hum 10] when you came to Harvard? Glenda R. Carpio: I think one of the major reasons why Hum 10 is so important is that it allows us to rethink the Great Books course. That template is so problematic. I think about what it would be like to convey to first-year students coming in the importance of literary history, the importance of deep thinking across time, in different genres, that we still really believe in that. I think Hum 10 at Harvard has tried — especially in the last few years — to really revise that structure to provide for students the benefits of Great Books courses without its Eurocentric biases. Of course, you can never quite get away from it. We repeatedly get criticisms from students that it doesn’t include this and doesn’t include that, but I don’t think you could ever have a perfect Hum 10.
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FIFTEEN QUESTIONS: GLENDA CARPIO ON HUMOR, HUM 10, AND THE FAILURE OF “SUCCESS” STORIES THE CHAIR OF THE ENGLISH DEPARTMENT sat down with Fifteen Minutes to discuss rethinking the literary canon and immigrant narratives. “I was the lucky one, I survived,” she says. “What happens to those who are undone by the violence of having to be uprooted?” BY JADE LOZADA CRIMSON MAGAZINE ASSOCIATE EDITOR
GC: There’s a spectrum, and one part of the spectrum is if you’re an immigrant and you’re at Harvard then you are the poster child of the so-called American Dream. So I think in that way Harvard is a kind of marker of a very well-rehearsed mythical story. And I think there’s a lot under that that’s more complicated. If you’re an immigrant at Harvard you also have a kind of
FM: Why did that lead to English and African & African American Studies as your specific areas of scholarship? GC: With my eighth graders in Compton, we would listen to books and read along, so that those who couldn’t really read could hear, and they started to be able to know stories about Malcolm X or Frederick Douglass, or really hear ideas and concepts that they didn’t associate with school. They associated school with doing time. For them, the carceral and school were very much interlinked.
I think some of the bigger questions that my students and their lives there made me ask led me to specialize in African and African American Studies and to writing about Black humor, which has a whole different set of intellectual questions about why we laugh. It’s such a big part of the human experience. I wanted to explore that and see how humor has been used not just as a coping mechanism, but also as a way of protesting without falling into sentiment or falling into straight aggression.
FM: I’ve heard that there is a really good conversation that happens around the idea of the immigrant success story and how immigrants are treated in the United States generally. I’m wondering what you think about that. What are the questions that you ask your students in the conversation you start?
FM: Where do you think Harvard fits into this spectrum of immigrant narratives from acculturation to really being a social and political examination of how the country works?
Compton looked to me and felt to me like Guatemala, and it made me ask really big questions about why. I was teaching eighth grade my first year, and I had students who were basically illiterate. They couldn’t really read and write, and they had a great deal of shame about it. And I really asked myself, “We’re like a half-hour drive from Hollywood, and what disparities of wealth and power — how?” So I think that made me want to go to grad school and understand America, not as the place that I longed to acculturate into but as the phenomenon that includes so much injustice within this democratic structure. So for me, Compton was a real school.
I wanted to explore that and see how humor has been used not just as a coping mechanism, but also as a way of protesting without falling into sentiment.
We need to think about things like undocumented migration. We need to think about how climate is already impacting migration.
GC: When you think of immigrant literature, you’re likely to think of a story about how one comes to America and makes a life in America. And, for me, I think that’s been a really important story and needs to be told again and again. But I do think that that acculturation plot papers over other major concerns that people are writing about when they write about immigration. We need to think about things like undocumented migration. We need to think about how climate is already impacting migration, and I think keeping with stories that are about a singular person or community doesn’t give us the broad perspective that we also need to understand migration. Some of my research in this area has informed our discussions in seminar. I hope it’s an invitation for students to be curious about a whole set of artists who are not writing the acculturation plot and are employing different formal means to get us to think about migration in connection to climate, to politics, to economics, and not just the Bildungsroman of someone’s individual life or a community trying to acculturate.
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FM: My very last question is if you could tell me something that no one knows about you? As in, no other writer.
JOEY HUANG—CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER
social tax — do you really belong at Harvard? Experienced from the other side, there’s a sense of, it doesn’t feel like an American Dream at all. It feels like something else. It’s very challenging. It’s a comforting American myth for those who are not immigrants, but see immigrants at Harvard. The underbelly of that is much more complicated for people who are actually immigrants at Harvard. And then somewhere in the middle of that spectrum is the reality that Harvard is also a place that hasn’t embraced migration as much as it could as an area of inquiry. With the restructuring of arts and humanities — I’ve been part of the committee with Dean Kelsey — we’re really thinking about how we need to make that more of an area where students can come and understand migration from different vantage points. Not just from literature, from economics, or from politics, but really investigate this area of life that’s so affecting the world. FM: I want to know a little bit more about your own immigration to the United States and what that was like for you.
GC: I came to the States when I was 12. I didn’t speak English, and that was really rough, because 12 is a hard age for anybody. I went to middle and high school in Westchester, New York — not very diverse. In high school, some really stupid people used to nickname me Taco Bell. It’s really rough stuff that can leave marks — I mean, really nasty, you know? I think it’s really important to understand just how much migration hurts psychologically, emotionally. But I also think that it’s important for me not to dwell on those things publicly, because I am one of the many, many people who have suffered, and sometimes I think the plot of acculturation is solipsistic. Acculturation takes the suffering that you go through and says, “Yes, but look I’ve survived, and I’m successful!” I’m less interested in that and more interested in the millions of people who don’t make it — like what happens to those who undone by the violence of having to be uprooted, often separated from families, living under what I call carceral migration, which is the kind of waiting for papers, being undocumented. I think it behooves us to look up and see what I call in my book “mi-
grant solidarity.”
But I also think that it’s important for me not to dwell on those things publicly, because I am one of the many, many people who have suffered.
FM: How did your experience in high school and your initial years in the United States bring you to the Teach for America program? GC: In college, I remember I didn’t want to go work for “the man.” I have to do something, right? So I went to Compton. I was only 21 and, as an immigrant, I had traveled from the so-called third world to the first world. But I hadn’t actually seen how the third world can be within the first world.
GC: This is pretty personal, but I had to divorce my family, which is very painful, so it made me have to think about the concept of family. I think that when it works, it’s amazing. I have many dear friends, and their families are so lovely, and I’m invited to be part of that. I think when family works, it’s an amazing institution. But when it doesn’t, it also shows you that it can be a very oppressive cultural institution. Even though it wasn’t easy, it did show me that you don’t have to follow societal norms. If your wellbeing is challenged by that norm, that norm needs to be gone. FM: Thank you for sharing that. I’m glad I asked, because I think I’ve met a lot of students who could benefit from hearing that advice. GC: I think we should be able to say more about that. It’s often not because people are evil. It’s just that people have intergenerational trauma. And it gets to a point that somebody has to break it.
FM Fifteen Minutes is the magazine of The Harvard Crimson. To read the full interview and other longform pieces, visit THECRIMSON.COM/ MAGAZINE
