This year we chose to connect our efforts with the many class-focused initiatives on campus — the Hop's Class Divide project, the Dartmouth Centers Forum theme of the same title, and others. Our non-fiction selections all were chosen with class matters in mind, while in both the fiction and film categories some of the texts explicitly explore or reveal class dynamics and issues, while others have different central concerns but can fruitfully be read through a class-focused lens. In this way we hope that readers and viewers with diverse interests will find ways to engage with the materials while simultaneously being encouraged to be part of this campus-wide attention to the ways socio-economic class shapes our world and lives.
Schedules and information for participants.
NON-FICTION
Jeannette Walls’ memoir, The Glass Castle, leaves the reader both stunned by the tragic circumstances of her childhood and awed by her strength. Walls writes in manner that is not touched with anger or self-pity as she describes her parents’ neglect and depicts alcoholism, depression, and socio-economic injustice with an acute eye and an astonishingly resilient heart.
The Price of Admission, by Daniel Golden, exposes exactly that: the "price of admission" into a good college, primarily Ivy League schools. This eye-opening account unabashedly identifies schools and critiques their practices.
Unbowed tells the story of Wangari Maathai who attended primary school at a time when Kenyan girls were not educated; went on to earn a Ph.D.; became head of the Dept. of Veterinary Anatomy at the U. of Nairobi, and founded Kenya's Green Belt Movement.
We Are on Our Own is a moving WWII graphic novel/memoir by Miriam Katin that relates the story of how she and her mother, Esther Levy, fled Nazi persecution. Katin's sensitive, softly expressive drawings and straightforward storytelling effectively convey both horror and rare quiet interludes.
Class Matters explores class issues by reproducing articles and feature stories from a New York Times series on social class in America and its implications for the way we live our lives. The writers explore how class — defined as a combination of income, education, wealth, and occupation — influences destiny in a society that likes to think of itself as a land of opportunity.
FICTION
Our fiction selections feature the voices and experiences of young people whose lives are shaped by social, political, and personal complexity.
Mark Twain’s classic, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, (considered by many to be one of America’s first great novels) and the much lesser-known Ellen Foster by Kaye Gibbons both provide sustained investigations into black/white relations in the American South — and both do so primarily through the eyes of a child.
In The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, Mark Haddon’s narrator, Christopher Boone, investigates his own autism, the lure of math and patterns, and a mystery that reveals traumatic family secrets.
Secrets are also at the heart of Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel/memoir, Fun Home, a coming-of-age story (set in the family business, a funeral parlor) in which the narrator reconciles her own identity with her father’s closeted homosexuality.
Narrated in the voice of a fifteen-year-old, Chaim Potok’s The Chosen draws an intensely compelling portrait of boyhood friendship and the pressures put upon it by religious sectarianism, history, and the violence of the Holocaust.
FILM
In When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, Spike Lee records the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. This four-hour documentary reflects the national debate that followed in the storm's wake over issues of race, class, and poverty, urging the viewer to join the ongoing discussion about the leadership, social, and economic crises that attended this overwhelming disaster. Contains explicit language and images. Will be shown in two parts, each followed by a film group meeting.
Rabbit Proof Fence is a powerful true story of hope and survival. At a time when it was Australian government policy to train aboriginal children as domestic workers, young Molly Craig decides to lead her sister and cousin on a dangerous 1,500 mile adventure along the rabbit-proof fence that bisects the continent and will lead them home.
In Blood Diamond an ex-mercenary turned smuggler and a Mende fisherman, amid the explosive civil war overtaking 1999 Sierra Leone, join for two desperate missions: recovering a rare pink diamond of immense value and rescuing the fisherman's son, conscripted as a child soldier into the brutal rebel forces ripping a swath of torture and bloodshed across the alternately beautiful and ravaged countryside.
Children Without Childhood/Mexico: Back Door to the Promised Land. This documentary demonstrates the drama of millions of desperate people that try to cross the USA border every year, focusing especially on children from families in poverty. The documentary features testimonial voices narrating personal suffering and touches on the issues of violence, labor, and prostitution.
2006-2007 Program
This year's theme is "Immigration, Borders, Nations," an exploration of a living mosaic of people, cultures and hope. The intention behind this selection is to capture the range of immigrant experiences – the excitement, hardship, dignity, and determination of individuals and families whose transitions from one nation to another marks a significant transformation in their lives. Participants can choose to read either fiction or nonfiction books or watch films. Groups meet five times during the year, beginning in December and continuing through May. DRG is free, and books and films are provided by IDE, as are funds for refreshments at the meetings.
NON-FICTION
By the Lake of Sleeping Children: The Secret Life of the Mexican Border byLuis Alberto Urrea - This novelistic portrait of Tijuana garbage pickers and dump dwellers is variously funny, sad and startling. Americans who think that they have encountered real poverty in the south Bronx will be in for a shock when they read this book. Urrea reveals the fascinating lives of resourceful Mexicans living along the border.
Among the White Moon Faces by Shirley Geok-lin Lim - a courageous and affecting account of Malaysian girlhood and of the making of an Asian-American woman, writer, and teacher. Lim reveals the poverty and violence of her childhood in colonized and then war-torn Malaysia after her father’s business fails and her mother abandons the family, leaving her to travel the road toward womanhood alone.
Alphabet in My Hands by Marjorie Agosin - A lyrical account of the award-winning poet's life in exile, first as a Jew in Chile, then as an immigrant in America. This journey of discovery – as much internal reflection as exodus across continents and decades – poetically intertwines cultural dissonance, family, and community.
Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barak Obama - When Obama learns of the death of his African father, whom he hardly knew, he is compelled to trace his unusual family history. He writes movingly about being raised in Hawaii by his white mother, his years at Harvard, his illuminating visit to family members in Kenya, and his work as a community activist in Chicago.
FICTION
Digging to America by Anne Tyler – An Iranian American woman after thirty-five years in this country must finally come to terms with her “outsiderness.” A luminous novel brimming with subtle, funny, and tender observations that cast a penetrating light on the American way as seen from two perspectives, those who are born here & those who are still struggling to fit in.
Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri - The rituals of traditional Indian domesticity, curry-making and hair-vermilioning, buttress the characters of Lahiri's stories. Often finding themselves in Cambridge, MA, or similar but unnamed Eastern seaboard university towns, Lahiri's characters suffer on an intimate level the dislocation and disruption brought on by India's tumultuous political history.
La Perdida by Jessica Abel - Carla Olivares, a young Mexican-American woman, goes to Mexico City to try to get in touch with her Mexican side. She's got her own, distorted ideas about what that means. She’s nervous about coming off like an outsider and guilty about being a privileged"conquistadora."
The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston - A beautifully written fictionalized memoir of growing up Chinese American. Kingston distills the dire lessons of the mesmerizing "talk-story" tales of China. Her America is a landscape of confounding white "ghosts"--the policeman ghost, the social worker ghost--with equally rigid, but very different rules. Like the woman warrior of the title, Kingston carries the crimes against her family carved into her back in testimony to and defiance of the pain.
FILM
Maria Full of Grace dir. Joshua Marston- María Álvarez, a 17-year-old Colombian, works in sweat shop-like conditions at a flower plantation to help support her family. After finding herself pregnant and being unjustly treated by her boss, she quits. On her way to Bogotá to find a new job, she gets offered a position as a mule – one who smuggles drugs by way of swallowing drug-filled pellets.
Fear and Learning at Hoover Elementary dir. Laura Angelica Simón - In 1994, California voters approved Proposition 187, a ballot initiative denying public education and health care to all undocumented immigrants. Simón, a Mexican immigrant and fourth-grade teacher at Hoover Elementary School in Los Angeles, was devastated and felt motivated to make a film about the impact of this initiative on her school.
Lost Boys of Sudan dir. Megan Mylan - Orphaned as boys in one of Africa's cruelest civil wars, Peter and Santino survived lion attacks and militia gunfire to reach a refugee camp along with thousands of other children. From there, remarkably, they were chosen to come to America. Safe at last from physical danger, they find themselves confronted with the abundance and alienation of contemporary American suburbia.
Saving Face dir. Alice Wu - The story of a lesbian, Chinese-American doctor in Manhattan and her pregnant, unmarried mother. Wu’s film faces taboos and the clash between first and second generation immigrants with a loving look at this mother-daughter relationship while sublimely exploring the relationships between the settled Chinese-American community in Flushing Meadows, Queen, NYC, a Chinatown oasis.
Diversity Reading & Film Group Steering Committee
Connie Prior - x63197, Giavanna Munafo - x63197, Shawn O'Leary - 650-1553
Ana Merino - x62140, Enrico Riley - x61736, Dale Turner - x60324
Nariah Broadus - x63188
2005-2006 Program
This year the focus will be on religion and politics in conjunction with the College’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration. The opening selection is a series of articles and excerpts which present contemporary issues related to religion and politics, focusing on the United States experience. The graphic-format books Maus a Survivor’s Tale and Persepolis present the historical context of the Holocaust and the Islamic Revolution through the lives of survivors, while the film Muslims provides an overview of the political forces at work among Muslim communities throughout the world. The controversial subject of teaching evolution in schools is portrayed in The Scopes Trial and the film Inherit the Wind. Religious beliefs are emphasized in the narratives Days of Awe and Desirable Daughters, which illustrate aspects of Jewish-Cuban-American and Hindu-Indian-American cultures. African-American religious history and struggles are represented in the books This Far by Faith and Go Tell It on the Mountain, and the film Forgotten Fires, while the poems from Spoon River Anthology invite us to examine social, political and religious aspects of early 20th century American life. In the Light of Reverence examines several contemporary Native American communities’ efforts to protect sacred lands against private property rights and other competing claims.
Maus a Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History, by Art Spiegelman - Told with chilling realism in an unusual comic-book format, this is more than a tale of surviving the Holocaust. Spiegelman relates the effect of those events on the survivors' later years and upon the lives of the following generation.
Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi - A wise, funny, and heartbreaking memoir of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. In powerful black-and-white comic strip images, Satrapi tells the story of her life in Tehran from ages six to fourteen, years that saw the overthrow of the Shah's regime, the triumph of the Revolution, and the devastating effects of war with Iraq.
The Scopes Trial: A Brief History with Documents, by Jeffrey P. Moran - In 1925, Tennessee schoolteacher John Scopes was arrested for teaching Darwin's theory of evolution in violation of state law. This book analyzes the trial and its impact on the moral fiber of the country and the educational system.
This Far by Faith: Stories from the African American Religious Experience, by Juan Williams - A journey into African-American religious history, beginning with slavery through the emergence of free black churches; the rise of black nationalism and urban religious traditions in the early 20th century; the civil rights movement; and the embrace of new religions.
Days of Awe, by Achy Obejas - A Jewish-Cuban-American novel in which the protagonist searches for her Cuban roots. Gorgeously written, this narrative digs deep into questions of faith, conversion, nationality and history, exploring philosophical issues in human terms.
Desirable Daughters, by Bharati Mukherjee - This novel is both the tumultuous portrait of a traditional Brahmin Indian family and a contemporary American story of a woman who has in many ways broken with tradition but still remains tied to her native country.
Go Tell It on the Mountain, by James Baldwin - A fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Baldwin uses the spiritual and moral awakening of 14-year-old John Grimes during a Saturday night service in a Harlem storefront church as a frame to lay bare the secrets of a tormented black family during the depression.
Spoon River Anthology, by Edgar Lee Masters - In this 1915 collection of poems, Masters tells the stories of the dead--through their own posthumous words--in the fictional town of Spoon River. The stories are well told and often harsh, as the dead of Spoon River carry their passions and commitments to their graves. Each free-verse monologue stands as an epitaph for the person speaking, yet the poems are ultimately about life, not death.
Forgotten Fires, dir. Michael Chandler - This documentary investigates the 1995 burning of two black churches near Manning, South Carolina, by a young convert to the Ku Klux Klan. It thoughtfully explores crucial questions like: how does this kind of violent hate seep into seemingly peaceful communities?
In the Light of Reverence, dir. Christopher McLeod - This film documents the stories of three indigenous communities and the lands they struggle to protect: the Lakota of the Great Plains, the Hopi of the Four Corners area and the Wintu of northern California. A moving exploration of environmental-spiritual crisis, it reveals the clash of worldviews between adherents of private property and those of sacred land.
Inherit the Wind, dir. Stanley Kramer - The fictionalized story of a Tennessee teacher prosecuted for teaching the theory of evolution in a public school. The film, nominated for four Oscars, explores a central and recurring crisis in American culture – the debate over creationism versus evolution.
Muslims, dir. Graham Judd - This film explores the influence of culture and politics on religion, and provides a deeper understanding of the political forces at work among Muslims around the world. Filmed in Egypt, Malaysia, Iran, Turkey, Nigeria and the United States, Muslims looks at diverse interpretations of Islam among Muslim people.
