SOURCE: Grobman, Laurie. “Toward a Multicultural Pedagogy: Literary and Nonliterary Traditions.” MELUS 26, no. 1 (spring 2001): 221-40.

[In the following essay, Grobman explores how multicultural literature has—or has not—been integrated into the teaching of modern literary theory, commenting that, “[w]hen we allow and encourage our students to consider a text in its many literary and nonliterary traditions, we bring students into the debates of multiculturalism.”]

INTRODUCTION: MULTICULTURAL CRITICAL BACKGROUNDS

Over the last two decades, coincident with the broadening of the literary canon, multicultural scholars have produced a vast amount of critical and pedagogical literature. Despite these advances, though, and despite a broad consensus about the moral and political goals of our work in and out of the classroom—that we have, as Doris Davenport suggests, a “moral imperative” (66) to teach it—we lack a coherent pedagogy. John Alberti accurately asserts that multicultural scholarship has adequately addressed changing the texts we bring to class but inadequately addressed what we do with those texts in the classroom (xi-xii). Our natural inclination leads us to familiar ways of reading and teaching, but most scholars now recognize that conventional methods may not work in a multicultural literature classroom. However, the responses to this recent awareness provide little guidance, as each seems to exist in isolation, or even counterpoint, to the others. With this fragmentation in multicultural criticism, we lack a coherent framework for creating pedagogy.

A brief look at Maxine Hong Kingston's China Men can exemplify what I mean. An extremely difficult text primarily due its cross-cultural contexts but also a powerful and important story of the long-ignored experiences of Chinese-American men in America, China Men poses significant challenges for instructors and illustrates the larger problem of multicultural pedagogy.

Western-based critical studies of the narrator's male ancestors tend to focus on narratives of exploration and discovery in the spirit of rugged individualism and the making of America. This theme is initially raised through the first interchapter, “On Discovery,” which concerns early Chinese immigration to America in search of the Gold Mountain, and then reinforced again in “The Ghostmate,” which follows “The Father from China.” In this light, BaBa, both protagonist and antagonist in China Men, is a Gold Mountain sojourner, willing to risk it all in search of the American Dream. Like many others, BaBa is lured to America by the stories of the Gold Mountain, retold and relished in China:

“On the Gold Mountain, a man eats enough meat at one meal to feed a family for a month,” said Great Grandfather. “Yes, slabs of meat.” The hungrier the family got, the bigger the stories, the more real the meat and the gold. … “America—a peaceful county, a free country.” America. The Gold Mountain. The Beautiful Nation.

(42)

In many ways a prototypical immigrant, BaBa, who re-names himself Ed upon his arrival in America, buys into the ideals of America and what it means to live the American Dream, claiming the land as his own. He is lured by America-as-opportunity, the American spirit of rugged individualism. Making it to (and in) America takes wit, endurance, and the will to survive, as his story attests.

Western readings of the narratives of exploration and discovery in China Men can also compel revisionist analyses. As Walter Cummins suggests, Kingston raises two fundamental questions: What happens to those who search for freedom and prosperity but fail, and does political and economic freedom for some necessitate the exploitation and dehumanization of others? (141-42). Cummins argues that in “The Adventures of Lo Bun Sun,” Kingston revises features of William Defoe's Robinson Crusoe; specifically, Kingston emphasizes Sing Kay Ng's reunion with his father, whereas this reunion was ancillary in Robinson Crusoe. Perhaps Kingston intends to provide an antidote to Lo Bun Sun's rejection of his family and tradition. Cummins, however, argues otherwise, claiming that not only is Sing Kay Ng a cannibal, but also that family love does not necessarily resolve the limitations of self-contained individualism, given the “hostile environment of the wider world” (144). Unlike Crusoe (and Benjamin Franklin, whom Cummins sees as the American version of Crusoe, despite differences), the China Men cannot sever their ties to home and to their families, evidenced in Kingston's text by the ghosts living and dead.

Western discovery narratives also provide important contexts for interpreting the story of Kingston's grandfather, Ah Goong, who along with other China Men made major contributions to the building of the transcontinental railroad. However, a mainstream feminist perspective offers a further lens through which we might interpret China Men. Kingston presents China Men with dignity and physical prowess, the strength they exhibited in the demanding physical work of cutting through the granite mountains. However, mainstream feminist criticism problematizes what King-kok Cheung calls the “rhetorics of conquest” in the story of Ah Goong (109). In the wake of Annette Kolodny's landmark work, feminist critics have long argued that settlers of the New World depicted the continent as a woman, sometimes an Indian maiden, arms generously open, offering the riches of the new land to prospective immigrants. Much of the language associated with the conquest myth suggests this equation: the “fertility” of the “virgin land” and the “birth” of a new nation, for example. But much of the association of the “dual maternal and sexual aspect[s]” of the land is misogynistic and violent (Kolodny, “Land” 169). Kolodny's assertions can make sense of Ah Goong's explosion of pent up sexual energy when he masturbates into the valley below: “He grew a habit: whenever he was lowered in the basket, his blood rushed to his penis, and he fucked the world” (133). Moreover, Kingston chooses language of violence in her descriptions of the men's work: they were to “hack a farm out of the wilderness” (98), and as they did so, “the mud ran like blood” (103).

But there is an alternate way to interpret the aggressiveness and heightened sexuality of Kingston's male ancestors: through a Chinese-American lens. From its earliest inception, the Asian American literary enterprise has worked to unravel and counter stereotypes of the emasculated Chinese-American male and create Chinese-American masculinity by revising images of the feminized China Man. Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Asian American Writers, a defining moment in Asian American literary history, describes the “white stereotype of the acceptable and unacceptable Asian” as “utterly without manhood. Good or bad, the stereotypical Asian is nothing as a man. At worst, the Asian American is contemptible because he is womanly, effeminate, devoid of the traditionally masculine qualities originality, daring, physical courage, and creativity” (Chin 14-15). The tradition of Asian American literature, as constructed in and evidenced in Aiiieeeee!, focuses on stereotypes of male impotence and the attempt to reconstruct masculinity and heroism.

Kingston counteracts these stereotypes by giving her father and other China Men a voice; she not only tells their history but also simultaneously creates their identity and dispels Western stereotypes of the quiet, inscrutable Asian. As such, she writes within the Asian American literary tradition, as represented by Aiiieeeee!, through the rejection of the dual personality and the re-construction of Asian American manhood.

Finally, however, the intersection of race and gender might compel a reading of China Men through an Asian American feminist lens. The exploitation of China Men and their simultaneous exploitation of the land raise issues relevant to an Asian American feminist perspective, for China Men “at once employs feminist strategies and inverts certain feminist preconceptions” (Cheung 102). Specifically, Kingston uses silence as a strategy to emphasize the parallels between the plight of China Men in America and Chinese women throughout history, what Shu-mei Shih refers to as “double commentary” (65), a simultaneous critique of white racism and Chinese sexism. This discursive strategy is evident in BaBa's journey to the United States, which involved many of the same indignities women in Old China face upon marrying: changing one's parentage, changing one's name, and the feelings of entrapment and fear of a fate beyond one's control. Moreover, the men are housed on a floor below the women, which they perceive as deliberate humiliation by their white captors:

“The women are up there,” the father was told. Diabolical, inauspicious beginning—to be trodden over by women. “Living under women's legs,” said the superstitious old-fashioned men from the backward villages. “Climbed over by women,” It was bad luck even to walk under women's pants on clotheslines. No doubt the demons had deliberately planned this humiliation.

(Kingston 55)

Clearly, Kingston derides the men's feelings of superiority over women.

The example of China Men thus illustrates the need for a broad-based study of this and other ethnic texts. By studying the text through multiple cultural and critical prisms, instructors avoid falling into the trap of convenient but single-minded approaches. In a sense, this strategy updates Gerald Graff's widely recognized “teach the conflicts” pedagogy, a call for involving students in the “conflicts occasioned by new interests, ideas, and constituencies” to enable them to function in our culturally diverse world (10). Though a significant contribution to multicultural pedagogy, “teach-the-conflicts” now tells only part of the multicultural story. In advocating that we make conflicts the center of pedagogy, Graff focuses on the “either/or choice we have been offered between teaching Western or non-Western culture,” concluding that “in a culturally diverse society, a wide range of cultures and values should and will be taught” (14). It is at the “points of intersection” with the dominant culture, he argues, that we should be teaching or understanding multicultural texts, as his example of Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart demonstrates (15).

Graff's position may no longer be tenable as ethnic and ethnic women's critics demand that multicultural literature be read and understood on its own terms. The debate over multiculturalism has extended far beyond the revisionist/traditionalist conflict that Graff's approach addressed and incorporated. The “conflicts occasioned by new interests, ideas, and constituencies,” now within the revisionist group, include the affinities of multicultural criticism with feminist criticism and the resulting tendency to understand and evaluate ethnic texts according to traditional paradigms and categories, the question of essentializing something we call “multicultural” literature, and racial divisions within the field. Once we recognize these conflicts and make them part of pedagogy, we will move in the direction of teaching these texts responsibly and sensitively. Teaching these conflicts means approaching an ethnic text as part of numerous and diverse literary and nonliterary traditions, and, as the example of China Men illustrates, providing multiple, varied, and interconnected perspectives.

MULTICULTURAL CRITICISM, MULTICULTURAL PEDAGOGY: CONSENSUS

Despite the conflicts within multicultural criticism, scholars do agree that we need innovative teaching approaches because multiethnic literature requires new critical categories. Few scholars of multicultural literature believe traditional categories of understanding, evaluating, and/or teaching literature are sufficient. As Anne Stavney notes, pedagogical changes must recognize that previously excluded texts often violate traditional categories of discourse and evaluation (153). We must revise these categories and create new ones. Can we value, for example, simplicity rather than complexity of language and meaning? Must a text be dense and ambiguous to be canonized? John Maitino and David Peck call for new criteria that emphasize the uniqueness of American ethnic literature and the strength of its cultural and historical context, as they urge instructors to bring these contexts into the classroom. However, little information exists about exactly what those strategies should be and how to break out of our patterns of analysis and evaluation. Multicultural criticism has tended to focus on reading, understanding, and evaluating works within the same conventions used for canonical literature: genres such as historical narrative and autobiography, literary forms such as the Bildungsroman or Kuntslerroman, and formalistic qualities such as innovation in language or narration and ambiguity of meaning.

Multicultural scholars also tend to agree on classroom methodology, arguing for the decentering of teacherly authority, even though, as Alberti reminds us, “the traditional classroom is, if nothing else, a centralized place, typically involving a single instructor, a single syllabus, and a single lecture” (xvii). Even as innovative teaching strategies like collaborative learning, integrated courses, and team teaching make their way into classrooms, traditional methods remain dominant. By decentering authority in multicultural classrooms, teachers underscore the notion that knowledge is socially constructed, that the canon, too, is a cultural and political construct, and that a particular curriculum or syllabus is highly political and personal. Drawing on Barbara Herrnstein Smith's ideas about the contingency of literary value, Alberti argues that New Criticism's stringent set of formalist aesthetic standards as well as its failure to account for a literary work's political, historical, cultural, or social contexts led to canon-formation and traditional classroom methodology. Identified by Paulo Freire as the “banking concept” of education, this methodology—lecture-oriented, with students memorizing and regurgitating information—assumes that learning is “the accumulation of correct interpretations or of the correct grounds for arguing about interpretations, be those interpretations traditional or on the cutting edge of theory” (Savage 287).

Taking their cue from both composition studies and feminist literary studies, instructors of multicultural literature tend to view education as a “dialogic process of cultural analysis rather than the static transmission of information” that involves students in the process of their own knowledge-making (Alberti xix). When teachers decenter their authority in multicultural classrooms, they give students greater responsibility for their own learning. Students enter into the specific conventions of the academic discourse community, thereby recognizing that knowledge is socially constructed. In such a pedagogy, teacher and student together create meaning and value.

However, a decentered, process-oriented approach also presents new challenges for instructors. First, how much power should students have in controlling the direction of the class? Should students construct the syllabus, as they do in Anne Bower's classes? Moreover, how do we reconcile Savage's claim that classroom discussion is successful only to the extent that we “find ways to empower students to set the agenda, to lead the class towards their own interests” (294) with the necessity for contextual knowledge in the reading of multicultural literatures? Without contextual, cultural, and historical knowledge, will an ethnic text be coopted, appropriated, and distorted? Decentered methodology compels us to be creative in finding ways for students to obtain knowledge of cultural and literary traditions without simply lecturing at them, perhaps through individual or collaborative student class presentations, a wide range of secondary readings, or guest speakers. Most instructors of multicultural literature agree in principle with the decentered classroom but struggle nonetheless with its practice.

Furthermore, in our efforts to broaden both the canon and our students' minds, how do we encourage students to be active thinkers rather than passive recipients of the multicultural mission? How do we avoid turning our classrooms into indoctrination sessions, given our commitments to the values of multiculturalism? Decentering does not wipe away teachers' authority and influence over students' views, and thus scholar-teachers nationwide are wrestling with such questions (see Friend, Olson).

MULTICULTURAL CRITICISM, MULTICULTURAL PEDAGOGY: CONFLICTS

Apart from agreement over decentered, process-oriented methodologies, there is little coherent multicultural pedagogy or coherent body of multicultural criticism to guide us. Indeed, important multicultural critical projects that attempt to provide guides for teaching ethnic literature, even as they approach the literature from varied perspectives, emphasize the need to construct critical and pedagogical frameworks. Alberti, for example, writes in his introduction to The Canon in the Classroom (1995) that the move away from New Critical methods for literary evaluation and interpretation provides an opportunity for a multiculturalism that will be a “truly radical critique” that he hopes his edited collection will initiate (xii). Asserting that conventional literary criticism is insufficient for ethnic texts, Maitino and Peck claim that the essays in Teaching American Ethnic Literatures (1996) will forge a “new criticism” that incorporates issues related to ethnicity, race, gender, and class (4). Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd view their edited collection, The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse (1990), as part of a large effort to create and define a “minority discourse,” identifying the elements that link various minority cultures with one another, particularly as they share marginalization by the dominant culture (ix). In The Ethnic Canon: Histories, Institutions, and Interventions (1995), David Palumbo-Liu calls for a “critical multiculturalism” (14) that resists the appropriation of ethnic texts by the liberal establishment by “reinstat[ing] the cultural politics of reading and interpreting ethnic literatures” (18-19). Bonnie TuSmith and Gerald Bergevin, editors of Colorizing Literary Theory, a special issue of Modern Language Studies (1996), note the urgency to remedy the dearth of multiethnic theory (1). Bruce Goebel and James Hall, editors of Teaching a “New Canon”? (1995), reflect on their recognition of the “need for systematic exploration about the relationship between classroom practice and the institutionalization of cultural democratic ideals” (xiv). In turn, their collection helps teachers serve their students and the idea of a “new canon” (xiv). Finally, Lil Brannon and Brenda M. Greene assert that Rethinking American Literature (1997) reflects the “larger conversation” over multiculturalism and American literature: “the theoretical orientations that cause teachers of literature to question their ideas of ‘American,’ of ‘literature,’ and of who they are as teachers and what they do in the classroom” (vii). While these major multicultural projects vary in the perspectives they bring to ethnic literature, they all address the inadequacy of current multicultural criticism and pedagogy.

My answer to these inadequacies resides in identifying and including in the classroom the conflicts that now divide the field. Such a pedagogy recognizes the broad range of perspectives through which we can interpret multicultural texts.

One current conflict in multicultural studies is the tendency to view minority works in relationship to traditional categories and paradigms, which resulted from multiculturalism's early affinity with feminist literary criticism. Feminist criticism's challenge to the literary canon opened the canon to minority writers and, following feminist criticism's groundbreaking work, multicultural criticism also challenges the canon, critical categories and paradigms, and criteria for literary excellence. Both concern themselves with the oppressive and exclusionary nature of the Western and American critical and literary canon, the reevaluation and reinterpretation of such texts to reveal gender and/or racist biases and stereotypes, and the recovery of long-excluded voices and texts.

Well-known scholars such as Paul Lauter, Gregory Jay, Jane Tompkins, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, and Harold Kolb, among many others, were at the forefront of this multicultural movement, arguing for a broadening of the literary canon and questioning, with feminist critics, criteria for literary value. Despite the fact that these ground-breaking multicultural scholars desire new critical categories to define, understand, and evaluate ethnic literature, the pedagogy that derives from multicultural criticism's challenge to the traditional canon still tends to understand minority texts within or against problematic paradigms and critical categories. We can see the limitations of this view in Alan Purves' remark that in such a paradigm, “literary texts from the ‘minority’ cultures play against the ‘majority’ culture” (511), for as Barbara Roche Rico and Sandra Mano assert, such revisionist approaches can “privilege the more established, more canonical work—making [it] the central subtext” and the noncanonical works “other versions of that story” (103). As a result, these approaches deemphasize diversity, tension, and cultural difference (Rico and Mano 103). By valuing noncanonical works insofar as they set off the more canonical ones, ignoring elements present in the noncanonical texts if they are not present in the others, such approaches lead to charges of appropriation by some ethnic scholars (see Palumbo-Liu). The problem is evident in China Men where strictly Western approaches ignore culture-specific concerns. It is also apparent, for example, in a text like Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street if studied solely in the Western Bildungsroman tradition or Leslie Marmon Silko's Storyteller if limited to autobiography.

Jacqueline Bacon's and Martha Cutter's classroom approaches demonstrate the inherent limitations of pedagogy steeped in conventional paradigms. In her “dialogical approach” (a reference to Bakhtin's The Dialogic Imagination), which “place[s] canonical texts into ‘conversation’ with noncanonical works in the classroom” and enables students to interrogate cultural constructions and conceptions of race and ethnicity, Bacon argues that viewing a text such as Toni Morrison's Beloved against traditional renderings of American slavery enhances students' understanding (511). But what about more culturally-based readings, such as against the backdrop of the African folklore tradition, the African American jazz tradition, or the slave narrative tradition? Similarly, Cutter's “canon, anticanon” approach, based on the interconnectedness of canonical and noncanonical texts, begins with a text that supports the dominant ideology of the period and then presents for contrast “anticanon” works that challenge dominant aesthetic and ideological structures while moving toward alternative models (122). Although Cutter stresses that the term “anticanon” is not intended to be derogatory, her assumption that “noncanonical texts are also dependent on canonical works because they critique the dominant ideologies that enfranchised voices (often) inscribe” (122) is problematic. By emphasizing the “anticanon” work in its relationship to canonical texts, this approach potentially fails to account for the richness and difference of literary and cultural traditions.

Multicultural criticism's affinity with feminist criticism may also be problematic as a way of defining, understanding, and evaluating ethnic women's literature because many scholars have recognized the limitations of feminist criticism in dealing with the concerns of women of multicultural backgrounds. These scholars argue that mainstream feminist criticism fails to wholly account for the concerns of ethnic women who are doubly (or more) marginalized by factors of gender, race, class, and even language.¹ Some ethnic women's literature scholars accuse mainstream feminists critics of ignoring issues unrelated to patriarchal structures, institutions, or language (see Allen). They also claim that the effort to identify and define a women's tradition in literature excluded ethnic women's writing and that mainstream feminist critics have more in common with white males than with ethnic women. Certainly, these concerns are valid; while I do not agree with extremist claims that mainstream and ethnic women's criticism are wholly incompatible, I do believe their differences compel scholar-teachers to consider ethnic women's texts from multiple perspectives, for mainstream feminist criticism cannot alone lead to meaningful understanding.

The second conflict I identify in multicultural discourses arises from responses to the charge that multicultural criticism remains embedded within the white literary establishment. Some scholars advocate a criticism that defines, understands, and evaluates ethnic writing within a generalized ethnic tradition, but others believe that such a generalized ethnic tradition reduces difference. JanMohamed and Lloyd posit a “minority discourse” they define as the “theoretical articulation of the political and cultural structures that connect different minority cultures in their subjugation and opposition to the dominant culture” (ix). Minority status itself links members of various ethnic groups. Rather than homogenizing ethnics, a minority discourse provides a sense of solidarity among marginalized people from a variety of oppressed groups. Ironically, though, by steeping minority discourse within the common thread “subjugation and opposition to the dominant culture,” JanMohamed and Lloyd may inadvertently lead us back to the trap of familiar paradigms and revisionary writing by ignoring culture-specific contexts. Moreover, such a focus on subjugation and oppression largely ignores the enormously important cultural celebrations and contributions in multicultural literature.

Many scholars disagree with the idea of grouping ethnic writing together into one category due to the possibilities for ghettoizing, essentializing, tokenism, and stereotyping. By treating ethnic writers as part of the larger term, “minority,” instead of in terms of particular cultures and ethnicities, instructors promulgate what Barbara Hiura calls a “patriarchal assimilationist view” that “‘erase[s]’” difference (qtd. in Kafka 181). Instead, these scholars call for a contextual criticism and pedagogy. By providing students with cultural understanding beyond one writer's vision, instructors can avoid leading students to believe one writer speaks for all ethnic groups or individuals. Such scholars as Maitino and Peck, Rico and Mano, Arlene Elder, and TuSmith (“Cultural”) emphasize the importance of culture-specific knowledge for understanding and teaching ethnic texts.

Again, the either/or position limits meaningful understanding of these texts. We can reasonably assume that ethnic Americans and, even more specifically, ethnic American women share certain sociological, historical, and political realities that influence their lives and their writing. But like the complex relationship of ethnic writers to the dominant culture, these cross-relationships do not exclude culture-specific realities that also influence ethnic texts. We can avoid reducing difference when we seek to identify patterns common to ethnic and ethnic women writers if we simultaneously pay attention to those cultural differences.

Finally, racial conflicts also divide our field. As Arnold Krupat regretfully acknowledges, the “critical world today … has changed; it is very much a place of ‘us’ and ‘them’” (Turn 2). While debates over theory are the lifeblood of English studies, racialized debates are divisive rather than productive. Within multicultural studies today, European-derived theories currently dominating English studies are seen by many, both white and non-white, as reserved for white European American intellectuals.² Like questions over literary value and canonical status, the debate over theory involves questions of authority, of what is authorized—and by whom—as “theoretical enough,” and whether only one kind of theory is acceptable. TuSmith, for example, has felt compelled to defend the theoretical integrity of her work against charges that her scholarship is void of theory. In response, she criticizes theorists who subscribe to “the Big-T” (“Opening” 60), a “narrowly specialized discourse” that TuSmith assails as “unintelligible” (60), “overspecialized” (64), “elitist” (64), and “mostly irrelevant” (64).

Clearly, this division over theory will not serve the multicultural mission in literary studies. Those of us of all races who have taught canonical and noncanonical texts can attest that the “Big-T” is not the only way to read ethnic texts, a necessary way to read ethnic texts, nor the exclusive domain of whites. As Trudy Palmer rightfully asserts, we must break free of the mistaken assumption that life experience is necessary for ethnic texts, an assumption premised on a misunderstanding of these texts as “sociology rather than art,” demanding “lived experience” rather than scholarly tools applicable to canonical texts (221). At the same time, though, we should not summarily dismiss Eurocentric theories and other traditional ways of reading, understanding, and evaluating multiethnic texts because these writers must negotiate within the numerous cultures intersecting the dominant one. These theories can unlock multicultural texts in meaningful ways.

Many practitioners of ethnically-derived theory believe they are devalued by colleagues in literary studies and by the realities of the rewards system in higher education, yet some of these same scholars decry white scholars and instructors for practicing and teaching ethnic literature. “Identity politics,” which comes down to who can appropriately interpret, evaluate, and teach multicultural literature, poses a substantial threat to multicultural literary studies.³ When, for example, JanMohamed and Lloyd urge ethnic scholars of minority discourse to “theoretically scrutinize our critical tools and methods and the very categories of our epistemology, aesthetics, and politics” (“Introduction” 9, emphasis added), their language falls into the same subjective trap that excluded minorities and women from the canon in the first place. In their articulation of a minority discourse, JanMohamed and Lloyd appear to exclude white scholars of multicultural literature. Their reference to the “minority intellectual” includes only “those who, despite their marginalization, actually constitute the majority” and who “should be able collectively to examine the nature and content of their collective marginalization and to develop strategies for their reempowerment” (2), a clear rejection of white scholars of multicultural literature. They claim that most minority intellectuals speak in Western languages that are not their own and that Western humanism today still thrives on marginalization of the Other, indeed has as its goal the continued oppression of minority cultures. Citing the National Endowment for the Humanities' rejection of funding for the 1986 conference “The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse” as evidence for these broad claims, JanMohamed and Lloyd assert that Western humanists consider minority discourse to be “babble” (4), believe ethnic groups have nothing relevant to say to one another, and fear letting minority groups get “close” to one another (5).⁴

These are dangerous and misguided generalizations. This rhetoric excludes the non-minority instructor/critic, undermining the most important lessons we wish to impart to our students: fairness, inclusiveness, and equality. The call for greater attention to theoretical issues in an effort to resist appropriation by the literary establishment, particularly in terms of multiculturalism's tendency to fall in line with and reinforce dominant assumptions, would be more forceful if it were not steeped in divisive rhetoric.

The identity politics argument is simply untenable, for it would be utterly counterproductive to limit one's teaching to texts representative of one's culture(s). Multicultural literature has a particular power to affect multicultural understanding, for these texts provide opportunities for students to experience unfamiliar worlds. The answer is not to dictate who can (and cannot) teach what, but to teach multicultural texts in the most meaningful, informed ways. Linda Alcoff provides a basic guide for determining when we might appropriately speak for/about others, acknowledging the potential dangers of keeping silent about multicultural issues in our classrooms: “will it enable the empowerment of oppressed peoples?” (24). We cannot keep silent if our silence reverses the inroads we have made through opening the canon.

This “us versus them” mentality is not only unproductive and antithetical to the larger purpose of teaching multicultural literature, but it also adds fuel to conservative claims that multiculturalism in education will lead to balkanization and further hostility among America's racial and ethnic groups. It is time to move toward fruitful debate and dialogue. As Nancy Peterson suggests, “by joining together across race and other boundaries as critical pedagogues, by using diverse strategies to accomplish similar goals in our classrooms, we can help bring into being a multicultural America where critical debate and dialogue thrive” (40). We should encourage all teachers to include ethnic texts on their syllabi and help them teach these texts responsibly and sensitively. Teacher-scholars should also model cross-cultural and cross-racial understanding and communication for our students, despite our discipline's disagreements.

MULTICULTURAL CRITICISM, MULTICULTURAL PEDAGOGY: “LITERARY AND NONLITERARY TRADITIONS”

We can move in this more productive direction by considering an ethnic text within and against various traditions, literary and nonliterary. Rather than choosing one method of interpretation over another, this approach recognizes the complexity of an ethnic writer's positioning within a wide range of cultures and subcultures. Joining literary traditions with their cultural, social, and political contexts, this pedagogy broadens the traditional notion of “literary tradition” in terms of a work's formal and aesthetic relationship with preceding and succeeding ones.

Responding to Michael Worton and Judith Still's assertion that “the theory of intertextuality insists that a text … cannot exist as a hermetic or self-sufficient whole, and so does not function as a closed system” (1), I view an “intertext” to be a literary text, literary tradition, historical moment, or any cultural practice. An ethnic text exists within a complex network of literary, social, political, economic, and cultural systems. Intertextualists often cite T. S. Eliot's seminal essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” to convey the power of literary interactions: “not only the best, but the most individual parts of [a poet's] work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their mortality most vigorously” (43). But Eliot conceived of the tradition as a white male, Western one. An ethnic writer's “historical sense” (49), to use Eliot's term, is more encompassing, drawing from a vast array of literary and cultural traditions.

As Maitino and Peck assert, minority literature is “fundamentally unique” because the “cultural and historical context is so strong” (6). But we cannot ignore that part of its uniqueness results from cultural structures that subjugate minorities. Consequently, nonliterary traditions are as significant as literary ones because literature and politics are not always separable categories. According to Donald Keesey, the intertextual critic favors “studying the monuments themselves” as the best way to learn the conventions, dismissing literary study based on other disciplines (263). But such an approach is based on a narrow conception of “the monuments” and their relationship to culture. When Western tradition was considered the tradition (subsuming Greek, English, American, etc. under the umbrella, “Western”), as if no others existed, cultural factors seemed unimportant, presumed to be shared by everyone who writes or reads the texts. But once we acknowledge a number of traditions, cultural and literary, we cannot assume this shared basis. Louis Renza remarks that even in current criticism a focus on the ways literary works “comprise revision or updating of their textual antecedents … perform[s] a conservative cultural function,” enforcing the “homogeneity and continuity of the Western ‘literary’ tradition” (186), but that a broadened conception of influence allows for “other voices—other texts—even to those other disciplines themselves supposedly influencing the study of literature” (201). By employing this broadened perspective on intertextuality, instructors become part of the process that allows other voices to be heard.

Among these other voices are ethnic texts. When TuSmith comments that the effort involved in understanding (and teaching) ethnic texts is akin to “reinvent[ing] the wheel” (“Cultural” 20), I am reminded of Eliot's remark in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” that literary tradition “cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour” (43). It is difficult to break from familiar patterns, and it is humbling to venture into areas outside one's own expertise. But we must try.⁵ As Elder suggests, ethnic writers “reflect a multiplicity of cultural influences on their artistry” (5), so we must exert tremendous effort to teach these texts competently and compassionately. As instructors, we have a duty to take on the writer's multiplicity as we teach the literary and nonliterary traditions of multicultural texts.

CONCLUSION: TEACHING THE NEWER CONFLICTS

Juan Bruce-Novoa rightfully asserts that “criticism must accept, and should acknowledge, its incompleteness” (159). However, this acknowledgment should not preclude striving for completeness, particularly when we transform criticism into pedagogy. Scholars and instructors committed to competent, balanced teaching can avert the continued dominance of traditional paradigms and categories as they embrace new literatures. When we allow and encourage our students to consider a text in its many literary and nonliterary traditions, we bring students into the debates of multiculturalism. To choose only one among the positions within multiculturalism ignores the valid “other” perspective and undermines the theoretical, moral, and intellectual basis of this field. When we admit to students our discipline's conflicts, we teach them that multiple perspectives exist and aid in broadening their visions.

Notes

1. For a more detailed analysis of these issues, as well as what ethnic women's pedagogists might learn from mainstream pedagogy, see Grobman.

2. This split also exists within specific ethnic critical communities, including Native American, African American, and Chicano/a. The literature in this area is extensive, but interested readers can begin with Krupat (For Those), Gates, and Saldivar.

3. Mayberry defines identity politics as the “negotiation of and for power derived from minority group affiliation” (2).

4. I agree that the NEH reviewer's comment that “it is not clear” that specialists in particular minority literatures “will have much to say” to specialists in others is naive; however, we cannot forget these comments were made in 1985, and we have come a long way in our discipline since then. Unfortunately, however, identity politics has become more divisive.

5. Kolodny recognized a similar challenge as the canon opened to women writers, asserting that “radical breaks” from what we choose to read, teach, or “canonize” are “tiring, demanding, uncomfortable, and sometimes wholly beyond our comprehension” (“Dancing” 282).

Works Cited

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