Teaching the Caribbean

Incorporating the Texaco Wiki in Undergraduate Courses

This document outlines two ways to incorporate the Texaco Wiki in undergraduate courses:

1. As a tertiary, contextual resource, and 
2. As a digital humanities research project. 

Both approaches guide students to explore processes of knowledge production in the context of the Caribbean and can be used in conjunction with the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC, www.dloc.com). Instructors teaching language and translation courses may also contribute to the Texaco Wiki by having students translate wiki articles from English into French or Créole.

Background

The Texaco Wiki responds to certain pedagogical challenges to teaching the novel Texaco to college undergraduates in the 21^st century. Although Texaco is an important text in French Caribbean studies, it can be a very difficult book for students to grasp. First, the cultural and historical context of the African Diaspora and French colonization in the Caribbean is unfamiliar to the majority of university students, unless they are from the Caribbean or have kinship ties there. And second, Texaco is a notoriously challenging novel, told in a non-linear style, and infused with French Creole language. The Texaco Wiki was born from these challenges, inspired by the goals of engaging students in research on the Caribbean and making the historical and cultural context of Texaco more accessible to anyone on the internet.

Accessibility of information is important because much of the history of Afro-Caribbean peoples was intentionally erased in the process of European colonizing projects. Ramón Grosfoguel identifies both the European “conquest of the Americas” and “the enslavement of Africans in the Americas” as not only genocidal acts but also acts of epistemicide: “the extermination of knowledge and ways of knowing” (74). These “conquests were both military and epistemological/ideological,” meaning that knowledge was erased intentionally through state-sanctioned violence as a means to both establish and maintain colonial power (Hall & Tandon 11). Because written historical artifacts from the Caribbean tend to center the European colonial enterprise, much of the Afro-Caribbean heritage has survived through oral transmission, or has been lost. 

Jessica Marie Johnson has noted that “the brutality of black codes, the rise of Atlantic slaving, and everyday violence in the lives of the enslaved created a devastating archive” that primarily documents the pain and death of black people, when they are included at all. She argues that digital humanities can be an extension of social justice movements and freedom struggles for racial equity and liberation. Roopika Risam has issued a call to action, writing that the “ability to create new knowledge is imbricated in a relationship between culture and power; just as cultural production has been marshalled in the service of oppression, so too can we take it back” to ensure that knowledge in the digital archive does not simply replicate colonial oppression, white supremacy, and patriarchy (140-1). By creating a publicly accessible digital body of knowledge around the novel Texaco, the Texaco Wiki both engages student writers and website visitors in this project to represent the full humanity of enslaved Africans and their descendants. 

The wiki format emphasizes networks of identity and knowledge, which are central to Chamoiseau’s project of Créolité, or Creoleness. Along with his collaborators Jean Bernabé and Raphaël Confiant, Chamoiseau wrote “In Praise of Creoleness” to represent the Creole imaginary and to resist European and white supremacist definitions of what it means to be black and mixed-race in the Caribbean: 

Neither Europeans, nor Africans, nor Asians, we proclaim ourselves Creoles. . . . Our history is a braid of histories. . . . Because of its constituent mosaic, Creoleness is an open specificity. It escapes, therefore, perceptions that are not themselves open. Expressing it is not expressing a synthesis, not just expressing a crossing or any other unicity. It is expressing a kaleidoscopic totality. (886, 892)

This assertion of a Creole identity resists any singular definition of culture, nationality, race, or ethnicity. The metaphors of the mosaic, braid, and kaleidoscope acknowledge the multiplicity of identities, cultures, language, and histories that were combined and took on new forms as a result of colonial projects in the Caribbean. In Texaco, Chamoiseau uses similar metaphors to describe the role of Afro-Caribbean storytellers, who create “a convergence—a coherence” from the fragments by assembling them into a narrative mosaic (386). In this way, Creoleness preserve the epistemic gaps produced by colonialism—and reminds us of the violent means through which epistemicide was carried out—while also generating new forms of cultural and artistic expression. With the framework of Creoleness in mind, the Texaco Wiki facilitates knowledge acquisition about the Caribbean while embracing multiplicity in the questions asked, sources consulted, and authors involved. It is built on a process that Mark Sample has called “collaborative construction” in which “students are not merely making something for themselves or for their professor. They are making it for each other, and, in the best scenarios, for the outside world.” In this way, the wiki itself represents an iterative process of collaborative creation that always remain unfinished. As scholars and students of Caribbean literature from across the globe contribute to the Texaco Wiki by writing, editing, and translating articles, it can become a more accurate, inclusive, and ethical digital resource.

Description of the Novel Texaco

Texaco is a novel about Afro-Caribbean peoples establishing self-determined spaces in the postcolonial world, the potential for marginalized communities to resist oppressive forces of assimilation, and the power of storytelling to create change. Marie-Sophie Laborieux is the protagonist. She tells the story of approximately 200 years of history on the island of Martinique, from the 19^th century through the 1980s. During this time, two important socio-political changes occur: first, enslaved Africans and their descendants gain legal emancipation but struggle to achieve true freedom due to rigid racial hierarchies; and second, the island of Martinique moves from the status of a colony, becoming assimilated into the French state. 

The title, Texaco, refers to a community that Marie-Sophie establishes on the outskirts of Martinique’s capital city Fort-de-France. She and others build humble, precarious homes from discarded crate wood and fibre cement sheeting on land that is owned by the Texaco oil corporation. The community is considered to be an illegal occupation, which is violently and repeatedly torn down by the police. It is an act of storytelling that finally stops the violence and prevents complete erasure. When an urban planner visits the settlement with the intention of razing it once and for all, Marie-Sophie tells her story and recruits him to her cause. Her story inspires the urban planner to secure the community’s existence through official legal recognition and to extend public services like electricity, running water, and sewers to Texaco. 

The novel Texaco is narrated as a series of second-hand embedded narratives and references to fictional archival sources, all compiled by a fictional alter-ego of the author called Oiseau de Cham. The structure mimics the transition in African Diasporic literature from oral history and storytelling to writing and publishing. The challenging narrative structure of Texaco is an important feature, because it dramatizes a form of postcolonial knowledge production by marginalized groups whose stories have been left out of the official colonial archives. It demonstrates alternative ways of understanding the colonial past by including more voices and perspectives, along with all of the resulting ambiguities, tensions and complexities. 

Sorting out the epistemology and ontology of narrative knowledge in Texaco is like peeling the layers of an onion: there seems to be no definitive origin of narrative truth. Estelle Tarica describes the narrative structure as “twice-told tales re-framed and transcribed by multiple ‘authors’” (46). And although Mustapha Marrouchi claims that Chamoiseau “creates puzzles that cannot be solved or even fathomed,” we can still find structure and meaning within the interplay of the narrative layers (347). I will describe the layers of narrative in their chronological order of production, although the reader of the novel does not necessarily encounter the information in this sequence:

• Before 1930: Esternome Laborieux (father of Marie-Sophie) orally tells his life story to his daughter, starting before he was conceived by enslaved parents. 
• 1965: Marie-Sophie writes down her father’s story from memory in a series of notebooks. In the novel, these fictional notebooks have been archived in the Shœlcher Library in Fort-de-France, Martinique and we read excerpts that have been selected and organized by Oiseau de Cham.
• Early 1980s: Marie-Sophie tells the story of her life and her father’s life to the urban planner when he arrives in Texaco; the novel Texaco begins at this point.
• 1985: The fictional Oiseau de Cham visits the community of Texaco and records Marie-Sophie’s story; this is the version of the story that becomes the novel Texaco. 
• Late 1980s: Oiseau de Cham contacts the urban planner to request his notes from the early 1980s visit to Texaco; like Marie-Sophie’s journals, we read excerpts from these notes that have been selected and organized by Oiseau de Cham. 

Finally, the fictional author figure Oiseau de Cham compiles the various sources of the story and explains his process and interventions in the epilogue. That concludes the (fictional) story of how the very real novel Texaco came into being.

Lesson Plan #1: A Tertiary Contextual Resource for Texaco

Students use the Texaco Wiki to learn about unfamiliar cultural and historical references as they read and interpret the novel Texaco. They will explore epistemology of the novel Texaco, processes of knowledge production in the context of the Caribbean, and their own positionality. 

Learning Objectives: 

• Use contextual information in the wiki to Clarify the story and historical setting of the novel Texaco.
• Explain representations of colonial oppression and anti-colonial resistance in the Caribbean through close reading of Texaco.
• Analyze the narrative epistemology in Texaco through the lenses of colonial erasure and strategic opacity that resists assimilation.

Required Content Knowledge: 

Epistemology is the philosophical study of how we know what we know. 

• The way that we write and talk about the world influences what we know about it. 
• The people who create the historical records do so from their own perspective and positionality. Bias is built into all of our knowledge systems. 
• Everyone does not get to contribute to the historical records equally or in the same ways. So there are gaps in our knowledge.

The narrative structure of Texaco is nonlinear and indefinite. It draws our attention to the ways that official historical records and personal histories both contain gaps. Any attempt to map the story onto a linear historical timeline will be incomplete and requires interpretive choices. We will systematically try to define what can be known about the struggle for freedom in the African Diaspora as it is represented in Texaco, what cannot be known, and where we have to read between the lines or use our imaginations to understand the story.

Instructions for Students:

As you read the novel Texaco:

1. Keep track of what information you know about the story and how you know it (epistemology). A sample Template for Exploring Epistemology in Texaco is provided below
2. Search the Texaco Wiki and Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC, www.dloc.com) for contextual information: 
   • What questions were you able to answer through searching the wiki? 
   • What couldn’t you find? What gaps remain? 

Teaching and Learning Activities: 

The following discussion topics and summative assessments are suggestions. Instructors are encouraged to modify them to meet the needs of their courses and learners. When developing a schedule of readings and assignments, keep in mind that students need ample time to read Texaco, grapple with the narrative structure, and search the Texaco Wiki. I have had success in my courses assigning approximately 35 pages of Texaco for each hour of in-class time per week. 

Suggested Topics for Class Discussions: 

Consider using a structured discussion format, such as a fishbowl, in which students are assigned the role of facilitator, discussant, or observer.

1. How are the following represented in Texaco? 
   • Globalizing forces of colonialism and capitalism in the Francophone Caribbean during the 19^th & 20^th centuries
   • Afro-Caribbean people fighting for freedom and creating spaces of autonomy 
   • The roles of memory and storytelling
     
2. Texaco is a story of transitions. Find and analyze examples of the following transitions:  
   • Rural  ⇢ urban
   • enslavement ⇢ freedom
   • colony ⇢ assimilation
   • oral ⇢ written
     

3. Unpack the layered meanings of the word Texaco: 
   • An American petrochemical company
   • A geographical space of resistance and community in Fort-de-France, Martinique
   • Marie-Sophie’s secret name
   • A novel written by Patrick Chamoiseau
     

4. Unpack the narrative form and epistemology of Texaco:
   • How do we gain access to this story?
   • Who speaks, writes, and edits? 
   • How does Chamoiseau represent this multi-generational and multi-lingual narrative of stories passed down orally over time then written down?
   • Whose voices are missing or are filtered through the words of others?
     

5. Explore knowledge production and narration as a way of asserting power in Texaco: 
   • Identify Gaps: What information is included and what is missing?
   • Explore research methods for filling the gaps: Consult the Texaco Wiki and the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC, www.dloc.com). 
   • Some gaps in Texaco cannot be filled and remain unknowable. Locate examples and hypothesize about what is at stake. 

Summative Assessments to Check Student Understanding:

1. Small Group Presentations: This assignment asks students to demonstrate their learning by teaching their peers. Divide students into small groups (2-4 students per group) and assign each group a topic related to Caribbean history and culture represented in Texaco. Each group will prepare a 15-20 minute presentation on their topic and then pose 2-3 discussion questions to their peers. 
   
2. Self-Reflection Essay (500-750 words): At the end of the unit, students write an essay examining what they have learned about the history of colonialism and resistance in the Caribbean. This essay should include a positionality statement in which the student situates themselves in relation to the materials studied. Instructors can provide the following quote to help students explore their own positionality: 

Lesson Plan #2: A digital Humanities Research Project

Students can contribute to the Texaco Wiki by writing new articles or by editing or translating existing articles. This project is designed to let students explore a topic that interests them, to guide the development of research and writing skills, and to provide alternative ways beyond exams and essays for students to demonstrate their knowledge acquisition. This project-based learning experience is also an opportunity for students to think about their roles as knowledge producers, and to reflect on their own positionality with respect to Caribbean history and culture.

Instructors can request access to edit the website using the Contact Form. Please request access at least one month before students will need to access the website. 

Learning Objectives:

• Identify wiki content that is missing, inaccurate, unclear, or in need of expansion. 
• Analyze representations of a specific topic or theme through close reading of Texaco. 
• Explore and Select archival and peer-reviewed sources to support interpretation.
• Synthesize information from Texaco and research to Compose a new wiki article or Edit an existing article. 

Teaching and Learning Activities: 

Instructors can remix or combine the following activities with those presented in Lesson Plan #1 above. 

Each student will research and write 1 wiki article (500-750 words) or revise/expand an existing article. Students will work with an assigned group to revise, edit, and link their articles to other wiki pages. 

This is a major project that will span several weeks. The project is broken into segments to help students manage time and so that peers and the instructor can provide feedback to improve the work. 

1. Topic Assignment: As a class, generate a list of wiki topics to write or edit. What topics do students want to explore in more depth and detail? What questions can be answered, but are missing from the wiki? Where is information in the wiki missing, incorrect, incomplete, or needs a citation? Students select the topic that they want to research and write or edit. Instructors are encouraged to use discussion topics d) and e) above as points-of-departure for student research projects. 
   
2. Topic Research:
   • Find examples of the topic where it appears in the novel Texaco. 
   • Search your university library to find peer-reviewed scholarship. Instructors are encouraged to collaborate with librarians to access research guides and trainings that will help students to find and evaluate scholarly sources. 
   • Locate archival primary sources in the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC, www.dloc.com). 
     
3. Write a 500-750 Word Wiki Article. Each wiki article should: 
   • Provide background/contextual information about a topic that helps readers better understand the novel Texaco.
   • Interpret the novel Texaco by citing and explaining examples of the topic that appear in the novel. 
   • Cite specific passages from the novel, peer-reviewed scholarship, and/ archival primary sources. 
   • Use MLA style for in-text parenthetical citations and the works cited list. 
     
4. Writing and Revision Process: Hold a peer editing workshop where students provide feedback to one another on their article drafts. A sample peer-editing worksheet is provided below. Students should incorporate feedback from peers and then submit the revised article to the instructor for further feedback. 
   
5. Log into WordPress: Students receive an email to set up their account. They will be assigned a password and can change the password if they want to.
   • Log in here: https://iris.siue.edu/texacowiki/wp-login.php
     
6. Publish Revised Wiki Article on the Website: 
   • This video explains how to navigate the WordPress dashboard and how to edit posts: https://youtu.be/QigrGaNMGJ0?si=iTFwNMhU_m5eGGRF 
   • Note: I create a post for each wiki topic on the website, give it a title, and create blocks for the article text and Works Cited information. 
   • On the dashboard, find the correct post and open it. 
   • Copy and paste the article text into the post.
   • Click the “Update” button in the upper right-hand corner of the page to publish the article.
     
7. Final Editing of Articles in Groups:
   • Edit for clarity and readability:
     • Do paragraph topic sentences highlight “take-away” messages?
     • Does the introduction provide an overview of the information in the article?
   • Proofread: Check for typos, spelling & grammar errors, etc
   • Check the Works Cited list and the in-text citations for accuracy & MLA formatting
   • Add 3-5 hyperlinks to other articles within the Texaco Wiki
     • Here’s a tutorial: https://ithemes.com/tutorials/adding-links-in-wordpress/ 
   • Add the names of all students in the group to the Editorial Collective list. 
     
8. Add images that are freely available in the public domain: 
   • Google Image Search: Select “Usage Rights” > “Creative Commons Licenses”
   • https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
   • https://free-images.com/
   • https://pixabay.com/
     
9. Reflection: After students have published their wiki articles, assign a short writing assignment or facilitate a class discussion on this process. See the “Self-Reflection Essay” prompt above for ideas. 

Using the Texaco Wiki in Conjunction with dLOC: 

The following lesson plans outline multiple ways to use the Texaco Wiki in conjunction with digital archival sources that are accessible through the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC). Exploring the archives with undergraduates can facilitate experiential learning about the process and power structures of knowledge production and colonial erasure. Students are encouraged to use multiple search strategies and to think about how different search terms produce different results. Likewise, instructors can guide students to think critically about the sources they discover, how the archive can fill gaps in the novel Texaco, and where gaps in the archive still exist. 

A Note on Languages: Archival sources produced in Martinique or metropolitan France will mostly be written in French. Because English is the lingua franca of the Texaco Wiki, archival sources from the Anglophone Caribbean may also be useful. Students should explore archival materials from beyond Martinique and evaluate their applicability to the context of Texaco. This is an opportunity for students to approach the archival sources from a critical perspective and to evaluate similarities and differences between the archive and the world of the novel. This comparative approach can become an opportunity for students to explore how Texaco represents Caribbean history and culture in a generalizable way, while also noting differences between Caribbean islands and nations in the archival materials they discover. 

Learn how to search dLOC: https://youtu.be/Cac8I6iL95Q?si=oIKWJ8IvphpNkFdT 

The following dLOC collections may be useful starting points: 

Braga Brothers Collection  Caribbean Newspapers Create Caribbean Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator Early Caribbean Digital Archive

Florida State University Libraries, dLOC Manioc Maps: Caribbean UCF: Digital Library of the Caribbean Vodou Archive

Acknowledgements: 

The Texaco Wiki would not exist without the thoughtful and collaborative work of my students at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (SIUE). An early draft of these lesson plans was developed at the Caribbean Digital Scholarship Summer Institute (CDSsi) at the University of Miami in June 2024. I am grateful for the instructors and participants in CDSsi Critical Digital Pedagogy track for their generous sharing of knowledge and support for the Texaco Wiki project. The SIUE Interdisciplinary Research & Informatics Scholarship (IRIS) Center provides both web hosting for the Texaco Wiki and guidance to ensure compliance with best practices in digital humanities ethics. This project is funded in part by the Digital Library of the Caribbean and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. 

Template for Exploring Epistemology in Texaco

Instructions: Use this template to keep track of events and information in Texaco and to prepare for class discussions. Be sure to note page numbers in Texaco where you find information that can help you reconstruct the timeline of the story. Also note any articles in the Texaco Wiki or archival materials in Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC, www.dloc.com) that helped you define events in the novel or fill in gaps in your own knowledge. 

Page #	Definable Events	Evidence for Definable Events	Undefinable Events	Knowledge Gaps

Writer:                                                                               Peer Editor:

Date: 

Wiki Article Draft – Peer Editing Worksheet

Instructions: Read the article draft all the way through. Then, read it a second time and answer the following questions. You may make notes and suggestions directly on the draft. 

I. Genre

1. What is the article topic? 

2. Is the draft written and organized in the style of an encyclopedia article? 

• What is working well? 
• What could be improved? 

II. Evidence

3. What evidence on the topic from the novel Texaco is presented? 

• Does the author provide quoted citations from the novel?
• Does the author explain what the examples mean and help us understand the topic? 

4. What evidence from scholarly sources and real-world data is provided as background/contextual information about the topic? 

• Does the author provide quoted citations from the scholarly sources and real world data?
• Does the author explain how the information help us understand the novel better? 

5. Does the draft cite sources correctly using MLA style?

• In-text parenthetical citations
• Works Cited list

III. Paragraph Structure

6. Does each paragraph start with a topic sentence that summarizes the paragraph? Or is the paragraph topic sentence hidden in the middle or the end of the paragraph?

7. Do the paragraphs focus on one idea each, or do paragraphs change topics midway through?

IV. Comments and Suggestions

8. What is working well in the draft?

9. How can the writer revise this draft to present a more coherent and persuasive article? 

10. What other suggestions or comments do you have for the writer? 

Works Cited

Bernabé, Jean, Patrick Chamoiseau, & Raphaël Confiant. “In Praise of Creoleness.” Translated by Mohamed B. Taleb Khyar. Callaloo, vol. 13, no. 4, Autumn 1990, 886-909.

Chamoiseau, Patrick. Texaco. Translated Rose-Myriam Réjouis & Val Vinokurov. New York, Vintage, 1997.

“Fishbowl.” Learning for Justice. https://www.learningforjustice.org/classroom- resources/teaching-strategies/community-inquiry/fishbowl .

Grosfoguel, Ramón. “The Structure of Knowledge in Westernized Universities: Epistemic Racism/Sexism and the Four Genocides/Epistemicides of the Long 16th Century.” Human Architecture, vol. 11, no. 1, Fall 2013, 73.90.

Hall, Budd L. and Rajesh Tandon. “Decolonization of Knowledge, Epistemicide, Participatory Research and Higher Education.” Research for All, vol. 1, no. 1, 2017, 6–19. DOI 10.18546/RFA.01.1.02.

Johnson, Jessica Marie. “Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads. Social Text 137, vol. 36, no. 4, 2018, 57-79. DOI 10.1215/01642472-7145658. 

Marrouchi, Mustapha. “Two Thinks at a Time.” Atlantic Studies, vol. 6, no. 3, 2009, 345-56.

Risam, Roopika. New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy. Evanston, IL, Northwestern University Press, 2019.

Sample, Mark. “Building and Sharing (When You’re Supposed to be Teaching).” Journal of Digital Humanities, vol. 1, no 1, 2011.

Takacs, David. “How Does Your Positionality Bias Your Epistemology?” Thought & Action, Summer 2003, 27-38. http://repository.uchastings.edu/faculty_scholarship/1264.

Tarica, Estelle. “Patrick Chamoiseau’s Creole Conteur and the Ethics of Survival.” International Journal of Francophone Studies, vol. 13, no. 1, 2010, 39-56