Comment from Nandita Ghosh

Is it possible that the five books deemed significant and therefore studied by American undergraduates will of necessity be the same as those studied by students in Lesotho?

What emerges from the survey is very revealing: the books most strongly recommended as essential reading for undergraduate college students are the Bible, The Odyssey, and The Republic.  The question is not that these books are valuable, for indeed they are.  The question is: how did knowledge of these books spread across the world in the last two hundred years?  For an answer we would obviously have to look at the missionary activity and the processes of imperialism, which resulted in 85% of the globe under European control by the middle of the 20th century.  As a consequence of this process, the books valued by the colonized culture did not get translated very easily back into the culture of the colonizer.  The process was obviously uneven.

With this history of uneven borrowings as everyone's heritage in the world, the significant question is what kind of global education does Fairleigh Dickinson want to attempt? To what texts should the students be exposed? What kinds of confrontations with cultural difference and engagements with the other shouldwe in the FDU community facilitate in order to be citizens of a world in which our mutual relationships are broadcast with a degree of intimacy unheard of hitherto in our histories?

Nandita Ghosh is assistant professor of English specializing in postcolonial fiction and and poststructuralist discourse.