The class thus far focuses our attentions on British (L)iterature; years 1660 to 1815. Due to this “border”, we are set upon reading texts that waver around a very select couple of themes. If you’re judging by the years and the country you can probably put two and two together and figure out what those things are: Colonialism (yes, the colonized and the colonizer). The two go hand in hand. Yes, there is probably more to this time period but how effective would that be when it comes to teaching you what the time was really about.

Despite the historical works, we have gotten through our first full-length text: Oroonoko: The Royal Slave. The title’s quite ironic isn’t it. It is as it sounds, and that is a completely fictional narrative of a royal African man tricked into slavery and his life thereafter.

Now the question is posed. What does a student from NYC reading this feel from the matter? Better yet how do the “histories” from the text connect to the communities that I currently identify with and see throughout my time in NYC?

The historical facts behind these works are tales of slaves and slave master.

As for what I see as the truth… well, it is that the last wave of colonialism is one of the major reasons and causes for the displacement of millions of hue-mans, especially those of Afrikan descent. Plainly saying, this new regularity of the randomization of birthplace versus birth location by phenotype is due to the effects of Britain’s hand in colonialism. Colonialism forced the path of “evolution” and for that we have the world in which we exist today.

A New York City is the exemplar set for the world of what a successful melting pot in a Utopian-esque land could look like. NYC has had influx of people from everywhere on this planet. It is one of the most famous places in the world and the populace of immigrants show. To me, NYC shows what it could’ve looked like if people were given the natural choice to go across seas and leave their homes for the purpose of work instead of the brutish ways of the past during England’s (and friends) golden hour. Whilst Oroonoko’s tale and the other texts are portraits of the time period, it is unrealistic to expect any such thing from the blood thirsty but in a city with an account for everyone on the planet, it really brings to mind what the possibilities could have been had things been approached differently.