Outside the windows of Beaver Dam High School, snow is piled high, the sky is gray and the air is momentarily still before another winter storm hits southern Wisconsin.
But inside, the 17 seniors in the World Literature class have their focus set far away: on the Caribbean island of Antigua.
The hundred-square-mile island is the setting and subject of A Small Place, this year’s selection for Great World Texts in Wisconsin, a program organized by UW-Madison’s Center for the Humanities that connects university scholars with high school teachers and students across the state through the shared experience of reading and analyzing an outstanding work of global literature.
Jamaica Kincaid opens A Small Place, published in 1988, by exploring Antigua not from the perspective of a resident, as she once was, but from that of a visitor. With a biting voice, she moves readers past the island’s stunning natural beauty to reveal the legacy of British colonialism that officially ended in 1981 but continues on through the tourism industry.
But, Kincaid writes, “you needn’t let that slightly funny feeling you have from time to time about exploitation, oppression, domination develop into full-fledged unease, discomfort; you could ruin your holiday.”
This year, 3,183 students at 31 schools are reading A Small Place, and about a third of them will travel to UW-Madison on April 8 for the Annual Student Conference. Students will present projects inspired by the book at Union South and in poster displays at the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery. And one student from each school will have the exciting opportunity to pose a question to Kincaid after she gives a keynote speech. The author will also deliver a public lecture that evening as part of the Center for the Humanities’ “Humanities Without Boundaries” series.
But in the weeks before the conference, there’s lots of work to be done.
On that brittle winter morning at Beaver Dam High School, Taylor Baumeister’s World Literature students are beginning to turn themes into project concepts. It’s crucial to come up with a strong idea because the projects will determine which 15 students from their class and Rodnika Montoya’s College Literature and Composition class will represent their school at the Great World Texts conference.
There’s a flurry of activity as papers shuffle, students arrange themselves in groups and start sharing ideas. Amid typical teenage goofing and laughing, signs of robust intellectual discussion emerge. Words like “colonialism,” “identity,” “perspective” and “metaphor” rise from the din as students articulate their main takeaways from the book.
“I love the passion of it and how direct she is,” Mackenzie Roeske says of Kincaid’s voice.
Inspired by the contrasts Kincaid so vividly paints between what visitors and residents see in Antigua, Roeske and classmate Mattie Gipson are creating “backhanded tourist destination” brochures for their project. On one side, they’ll tout the public attractions of a place; on the other, they’ll reveal troubling realities such as violence, poverty or educational shortcomings.
“It’s about here are the great things to do, and here’s what’s going on underneath,” Roeske says.
Andy Boschert, who’s working on a group project with classmates Taylor Stobble and Ben Kurth examining the effects of colonialism across the world, says A Small Place has caused him to look at the world differently.
“Some of us go to places and we don’t realize what we’re doing,” he says. “We don’t think about the people who live there.”
“Or what they think of us,” Stobble adds.
Baumeister says the book — the one nonfiction work her students read in the class — has offered students new ways of thinking about places and allowed her to raise topics she might not otherwise address.
“I like how it’s opened up our ability to talk about colonialism,” she says. “It’s not an area we dive into very deeply.”
Fellow English teacher Montoya has found that more personal questions addressed in the book have resonated with her students.
“A lot of my kids latched on to the idea of identity — knowing who you are and where you come from,” she says.
Even though A Small Place is set 2,400 miles away from Wisconsin, Aaron Fai, assistant director of public humanities at the Center for the Humanities, says the book offers plenty of connections students can make to their own lives.
“What’s it like to be a foreigner in your own town?” he asks. “In your hometown, how are things changing? And how are you feeling — welcome or displaced? And when you travel, how does that feel?”