Peripheral Pedagogics: Nadine Gordimer’s “Once Upon A Time”

In this essay, I explore “peripheral pedagogics”– the wholly unforeseen ways of fantasizing others, and learning from them, when English situates young Indian readers of Nadine Gordimer’s 1989 story, “Once Upon a Time.” While students need little help in noticing the story’s realist portrayal of post-Apartheid South Africa, only detailed analysis of crucial passages enables them to appreciate her ironic treatment of folktale cliches and time-worn conventions of children’s stories. Reading Gordimer in a course called New Literatures in English, they see how colonial fantasy meets postcolonial forensics in such partnered narratives; how, further, the teller and her tale reflect mutually gothic fear and the monstrous, both indeed emanating from much the same consciousness. The interpretive light Gordimer casts on Homi Bhabha’s (1988) “Other Question” and the colonial strategies of othering he discusses in The Location of Culture add to their discovery that cliches are to fiction what stereotypes are to social studies. Rather than asking what stereotypes are, the class here begins to ask what stereotypes are for (and why they return to wake us from deep slumber). The actual circumstances of Gordimer’s story are inseparable from its telling. No learning is complete, however, unless the peripheral recognizes that the telling is the story— the one who tells and those to whom it is told share equal opportunity in this learning. Theoretical debates do not count for much if we do not believe that the values we teach are not always at odds with those inherent in such stories as Gordimer’s.