A Sense of Place for Midwesterners of Color: A Podcast from ENGL 650

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For Fall 2023, I’m teaching ENGL 650 “Readings in 20th- & 21st-Century American Literature” as “Multiethnic Literatures of the Midwest.”

Centering Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) Midwestern stories and authors, the course invites us to explore our perceptions and misconceptions about America’s heartland and to discover the rich diversity of the region. In reading novels, short stories, essays, and poetry about BIPOC experiences from BIPOC perspectives, we gain some insight into the racialized dynamics of region and the regional dimensions of racialization alongside the creative capacities of BIPOC writers, which creates space for alter-narratives of region, nation, and empire.

As a scholar who works on literary and cultural representations of Filipinxs in the Midwest, this course is such a joy to teach as it gives students material evidence to imagine what they intuit: that the region they inhabit is not the exclusive domain of Whiteness. And for BIPOC students, such a course is affirming of their existence.

To give students an opportunity to reflect on and critically engage our texts, and to encourage them to recognize connections across our first set of texts focused on 20th-century authors, I asked them to respond to the following prompt:

In her introduction to [Langston Hughes’s novel] Not Without Laughter, writer Angela Flournoy summarizes the novel’s plot as a “chronicling [of] the upbringing of Sandy . . . as he struggles to forge an identity outside of the boxes the white and black worlds have put him in, [sic] and tries to find stability within his increasingly unstable home” (ix–x).

In his preface to the first edition of Scent of Apples: A Collection of Stories, writer Bienvenido N. Santos reveals, “sometimes I cannot distinguish between [the] characters [in my stories] and the real persons I have known in America” (xviii).

In her introduction to The House on Mango Street, writer Sandra Cisneros asks, “How can art make a difference in the world?” (xviii).

Considering Flournoy, Santos, and Cisneros’s prefatory remarks, write a 1,000–1,200-word essay (~3 ½–4 typed, double-spaced pages) OR record a 3–4-minute podcast (6–8 minutes if recording with another classmate) that presents an argument about BIPOC Midwestern storytelling in response to the following prompt: How do 20^th-century multiethnic literatures shape our perceptions of BIPOC Midwesterners, of what it means and/or feels like to be a person of color in the Midwest?

Your essay or podcast should compare and contrast the formal, thematic, and/or contextual strategies in two of the following texts to arrive at your main argument: Langston Hughes’s novel Not Without Laughter (1930), Bienvenido N. Santos’s short stories set in the Midwest from Scent of Apples (1979), and Sandra Cisneros’s novella The House on Mango Street (1984).

Over the last few years, I’ve started to give students choice in medium to express their ideas so they can respond in ways engaging to them and relevant to skills they want to develop. While perhaps more laborious for students to craft and more open-ended for me to assess, such creative digital media has yielded more impactful learning and has inspired me to interpret familiar texts in novel ways.

Although I have assigned video essays in the past, this is the first time I’ve explicitly assigned a podcast, or audio essay, as an option and have had students take up the offer. During my sabbatical last academic year, I listened to several podcasts and thought students could produce similar content.

Margo Losier (MA ’25) and Gabe Padua (MA ’25) collaborated to compare how Cisneros and Santos present immigrant of color characters who carry the burden of having to find community in externally perceived White spaces, giving listeners a sense of how immigrants of color make and keep place. Metanarratively, their podcast is an artifact of diverse Midwestern storytelling and brings to life what it means and feels like to be marginalized in the Midwest.

Listen to Margo and Gabe’s fabulous podcast here:

—Tom Sarmiento, Associate Professor / Director of Undergraduate Studies